Why Mindfulness Doesn’t Always Feel Calming
Why mindfulness doesn’t always feel calming — and why that doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong
Reviewed and updated September 2026 by Iris Hogan, MSW, LICSW.
Who hasn’t heard that meditation or deep breathing is the antidote to anxiety, stress, overwhelm, burnout, heartbreak, insomnia, and — if you believe TikTok — possibly world peace?
Most of us have downloaded at least one meditation app, subscribed to a mindfulness newsletter, or tried a TikTok-approved “life-changing” 4-7-8 breathing sequence at 11 p.m., hoping it would magically reset our entire nervous system.
And yet… nothing happens.
Or worse, something happens, but it’s not calm.
It’s irritation. Restlessness. Your brain replaying every awkward moment you’ve had since age nine.
So many people quietly assume:
“If meditation doesn’t work for me, I must be the problem.”
But meditation isn’t supposed to magically turn anxiety off.
And focusing on your breath is not the only way to practice mindfulness.
The Problem With “Just Focus on Your Breath”
A lot of people imagine meditation should feel peaceful right away. You sit down, take a few deep breaths, your mind becomes quiet, and there you are: calm.
For an anxious person, it may go quite differently.
You sit down and within ten seconds remember the email you forgot to send. While you’re thinking about that, your grocery list makes an appearance, followed by an awkward conversation from 2017 and the thing you’ve been trying very hard not to think about.
Then you notice your breathing.
Am I breathing correctly?
Your leg feels twitchy. Sitting still suddenly feels irritating. And now, on top of everything else, you’re annoyed because meditation apparently isn’t working either.
Instead of feeling calmer, you have become much more aware of everything happening inside you.
If you spend much of your day scanning, planning, anticipating, problem-solving, and keeping track of everything, suddenly sitting still with nothing to do but notice what is happening can feel surprisingly uncomfortable.
Asking that mind to immediately become quiet can feel a little like asking a hummingbird to calmly hover in one spot.
If that constant mental activity feels familiar, you may also recognize some of the patterns I describe in Why Rest Feels Hard Even When You’re Bone-Deep Exhausted.
When Stillness Pulls Back the Curtain
For some people, meditation feels peaceful.
For others, it feels a little like pulling back the curtain in The Wizard of Oz and discovering a wildly over-caffeinated stage crew running in circles behind the scenes of your mind.
There are thoughts you hadn’t noticed, emotions you were too busy to pay much attention to, and random memories that apparently decided now would be an excellent time to make an appearance.
Meditation didn’t necessarily create any of them.
You may simply be noticing what was already there.
When there is less external distraction, thoughts, feelings, memories, and physical sensations can become much more noticeable. And if some of what you notice is uncomfortable, sitting quietly with it may not feel relaxing at all.
That doesn’t necessarily mean meditation is harming you, but it also doesn’t mean you have to sit there and suffer to prove you’re doing it correctly.
When Focusing on Your Breath Makes You More Anxious
For some people, the breath is a wonderful anchor.
For others, it becomes one more thing to monitor.
The moment you deliberately focus on breathing, something that usually happens automatically suddenly has your full attention. You notice that one breath felt shallow. Then you try to take a better one. That one doesn’t feel quite right either.
Before long you’re wondering whether you’re breathing into your chest or your stomach, whether you’re doing the exercise correctly, and why something you have successfully managed to do your entire life has suddenly become so complicated.
And the harder you try to breathe “correctly,” the stranger breathing can begin to feel.
This can be especially uncomfortable for someone who already pays close attention to physical sensations associated with anxiety.
The research on breathing exercises is more nuanced than social media sometimes makes it sound. Breathing practices can reduce anxiety for some people, but studies of brief breathing-only interventions have produced inconsistent results.
So the answer isn’t quite as simple as “breathing exercises work.” The kind of breathing practice matters, and so does the person trying it.
If focusing intensely on your breathing makes you more anxious, you don’t have to make the breath your anchor. You might notice your feet on the floor, listen to sounds around you, look at something in front of you, or feel the chair supporting your body. You can also keep your eyes open and take in the room.
The breath is an option. It isn’t a requirement.
If anxiety itself has begun taking up more space in your life, you can learn more about my approach to Anxiety Therapy for Women.
What If Difficult Memories or Feelings Show Up?
Sometimes stillness brings up something you weren’t expecting. It might be a memory, sadness, fear, anger, or simply a physical sensation you hadn’t noticed before.
That doesn’t necessarily tell us why it appeared, and I would be cautious about assuming that every difficult memory that surfaces during meditation is your body revealing something that has been buried.
Sometimes reducing distraction simply makes internal experiences easier to notice.
For someone with a trauma history, some of those experiences can be intense.
That doesn’t mean people with trauma shouldn’t practice mindfulness. Research suggests that mindfulness-based interventions may help reduce trauma-related symptoms for some people.
But mindfulness isn’t one single exercise, and trauma-informed mindfulness doesn’t have to mean closing your eyes, focusing intensely on your body, and staying there no matter how distressed you become.
We can start smaller, keep our eyes open, focus outward rather than inward, or use movement instead of stillness.
Stopping is an option too. Mindfulness doesn’t require you to prove how much discomfort you can tolerate.
If difficult memories or trauma responses are part of what comes up for you, you can read more about my approach to Trauma Therapy for Women.
Meditation Is Not the Same Thing as Relaxation
This may be the most important distinction in this entire article.
Meditation does not have to make you calm to be meditation.
Mindfulness meditation is, at its simplest, a practice of intentionally paying attention to what is happening in the present moment and noticing when your attention has wandered.
And it will wander.
You may start thinking about work, get bored, notice an emotion, or suddenly remember that you forgot to buy toilet paper. None of that means the meditation failed.
The practice is noticing where your mind went and bringing your attention back. Then, when it wanders again — which it will — you notice that too.
Many anxious, high-functioning women approach meditation the same way they approach everything else: with effort, expectations, perfectionism, and a quiet belief that there must be a correct way to do it.
Then meditation becomes one more thing to fail at.
Which is quite a lot of pressure to put on sitting in a chair for ten minutes.
It doesn’t have to be.
If you tend to turn even rest into something you should be doing correctly, you may also recognize yourself in High-Functioning Anxiety in Women: Calm Outside, Chaos Inside.
Meditation Can Help Anxiety — Without Being an Instant Anxiety Treatment
I don’t want to swing too far in the other direction here.
There is good reason mindfulness has become part of many psychological treatments.
Research on mindfulness-based interventions has found benefits for anxiety, and recent reviews suggest that mindfulness-based approaches may also reduce trauma-related symptoms for some people.
But that is very different from saying:
Take three deep breaths and your anxiety will disappear.
Or:
If meditation makes you uncomfortable, you’re doing it wrong.
A structured mindfulness-based treatment practiced over time is not the same thing as opening an app in the middle of a panic attack and expecting ten minutes of breathing to make the anxiety disappear.
Both can get called “mindfulness,” but they are asking very different things of us.
If Sitting Meditation Isn’t the Right Starting Place
You don’t have to choose between forcing yourself to meditate and giving up on mindfulness entirely.
And not everything that helps you feel grounded needs to be called meditation.
Sometimes movement is a much easier place to begin. You might take a walk, stretch, rock gently in a chair, or try a walking meditation where the movement itself becomes what you pay attention to. Some people find it much easier to practice attention while their body is doing something than while sitting completely still.
You can also give your attention somewhere outside your body to land. Listen to the sounds around you, watch light moving across the wall, feel the warmth of a mug in your hands, or pet your dog and actually notice the texture of the fur instead of thinking about the next six things you need to do.
Repetitive or absorbing activities can work well too. Knitting, doodling, watercolor painting, humming, or listening to steady music aren’t automatically forms of meditation. But they can give an anxious mind something concrete to engage with, and you may find it easier to settle when your attention has somewhere to go.
And sometimes being alone with your thoughts simply isn’t what you need at that moment. Sitting near someone you trust, calling a friend, working quietly beside another person, or going somewhere familiar where other people are around may be much more helpful.
Connection isn’t meditation either.
But meditation doesn’t have to be the answer to every uncomfortable internal state.
Start Much Smaller Than You Think You Should
You also don’t have to begin with ten or twenty minutes.
Try one minute.
Seriously.
Spend one minute noticing the sounds around you, walking slowly and paying attention to your feet touching the ground, or simply noticing when your mind wanders and bringing your attention back.
If that goes reasonably well, perhaps tomorrow you try two.
There is no prize for white-knuckling your way through twenty minutes because an app told you that was today’s goal.
What If Meditation Consistently Makes You Feel Worse?
Pay attention to that.
Unpleasant experiences during meditation have been reported in research, including increased anxiety and other forms of psychological distress. It is difficult to say exactly how common these experiences are because studies have measured and reported adverse effects very differently.
You don’t need to interpret increased anxiety, panic, dissociation, or overwhelming emotional distress as proof that you need to push harder.
Instead, change the practice. Make it shorter. Keep your eyes open or move your attention outward. Try walking rather than sitting still.
And if meditation repeatedly brings up overwhelming trauma-related symptoms, panic, or dissociation, that may be something worth exploring with a therapist rather than repeatedly trying to push through on your own.
Maybe You’re Not Bad at Meditation
Maybe the problem isn’t that you’re bad at meditation. Maybe you expected it to do something it was never designed to do.
You expected your thoughts to stop, and they didn’t. You expected your body to relax right away, and apparently your body had other plans. You focused on your breath because everyone said it would be soothing and instead spent five minutes wondering whether you had somehow forgotten how to breathe.
None of that tells me you’re incapable of mindfulness.
If you sit there and notice that you’re restless, planning dinner, irritated, or really quite ready to get out of the chair, that is still noticing.
And noticing is the practice.
You noticed what was happening.
That’s where mindfulness begins.
If sitting quietly with your breath isn’t the right doorway for you, there are other ways in.
No enlightenment on a Tuesday required.
Until we meet again — breathe gently, walk slowly, and treat yourself with kindness.
— Iris
If you’re considering therapy and would like to see whether working together might be a good fit, you’re welcome to schedule a free 15-minute consultation. I provide online therapy for women throughout Washington State.
Research & Sources
Chin, P., Gorman, F., Beck, F., Russell, B. R., Stephan, K. E., & Harrison, O. K. (2024). A systematic review of brief respiratory, embodiment, cognitive, and mindfulness interventions to reduce state anxiety. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1412928.
This prospectively registered systematic review found inconsistent results for breathing-only interventions, with outcomes differing according to the technique used. PubMed: Chin et al. (2024)
Jovanovic, B., & Garfin, D. R. (2024). Can mindfulness-based interventions reduce PTSD symptoms? An umbrella review. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 104, 102859.
The review found an overall moderate association with reduced PTSD symptoms while also identifying substantial methodological weaknesses in much of the underlying systematic-review literature. PubMed: Jovanovic & Garfin (2024)
Molteni, L., Gosling, C. J., Fagan, H. A., et al. (2024). Effects of mindfulness-based interventions on symptoms and interoception in trauma-related disorders and exposure to traumatic events: Systematic review and meta-analysis. Psychiatry Research, 336, 115897.
This review of randomized controlled trials found small-to-moderate positive effects on trauma-related symptoms and interoception, with substantial heterogeneity among studies. PubMed: Molteni et al. (2024)
Farias, M., Maraldi, E., Wallenkampf, K. C., & Lucchetti, G. (2020). Adverse events in meditation practices and meditation-based therapies: A systematic review. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 142(5), 374–393.
This systematic review documented adverse experiences associated with meditation, including anxiety, while finding substantial variation in prevalence depending on study design and important limitations in how adverse events were measured and reported. PubMed: Farias et al. (2020)