Ep.71 Racing Thoughts Taking Over? Why Meditation Feels Impossible

If you've googled "why meditation doesn't work for me" or "why can't I quiet my mind," this episode is for you. You're not doing it wrong. Your brain is just running on autopilot in a survival state — and once you know that, everything changes.

EPISODE SUMMARY

You've heard you should meditate. Maybe you've even tried. And maybe it felt like a total failure with racing thoughts, a body that won't sit still, a mind convinced this isn't for you. 

In this episode, Sari breaks down the brainwave states (the states in which your mind is in) behind anxiety, meditation, and hypnosis, and why "high beta" — the survival, overfunctioning, racing-thoughts state, might be the only gear you know how to live in. She gets honest about falling off her own meditation practice for three weeks, what happened to her nervous system because of it, and what it felt like to come back. 

You'll learn why closing your eyes is one of the most powerful things you can do for your nervous system, why affirmations don't work when you're stressed, and why real change happens in the quiet, suggestible states most of us never learn to access. This is the science behind why meditation and hypnosis actually work — not just theory, but what it feels like in the body.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

• Why meditation doesn't work for anxiety the way most people are taught to do it, and what actually needs to happen first
• Why anxiety and overthinking might just mean your nervous system is stuck in "high beta," not that something's wrong with you
• The difference between beta, alpha, theta, and delta brainwave states, and why it matters
• Why closing your eyes is one of the most powerful tools for your nervous system
• Why affirmations don't work when you're stressed (and when they actually do)
• What happens in the body when you stop meditating — Sari's own three-week story
• How to tell if you've been in survival mode so long it just feels like your personality
• A simple 5-minute practice to start downshifting your nervous system today

REFLECTION

• Have you been in survival mode so long that it just feels like your personality?
• When was the last time you gave yourself five minutes of intentional stillness — no phone, no to-do list, just breath?
• What would it feel like to zoom out from the grain of rice you've been staring at?

Work With Sari

If you've tried meditating and it hasn't felt like it's working, you don't need more information — you need to feel the shift in your body. Grab the free 5-Minute Nervous System Reset to start training your nervous system to downshift. Link in the show notes.

And if you're ready to go deeper and actually work with your subconscious directly, book a free Freedom Roadmap call. We'll map out exactly what's keeping your nervous system stuck. Link in the show notes.

You're not broken. You're not behind. And you're not alone. If you made it here, that means something.

TIMESTAMPS

00:01 — Intro: why this episode is for you if meditation feels confusing or like it's "not working" 

01:42 — Meeting the version of you that's always "on" — restlessness as your normal 

04:05 — Why Sari loves hypnosis alongside meditation, and her own journey 

06:16 — Meditation as medicine — the thyroid medication analogy 

08:18 — Falling off her routine for three weeks, becoming the "pool filter," and the dark cloud that followed 

10:42 — Brainwave states explained: beta, alpha, theta, delta 

11:51 — High beta explained — survival mode, and what it felt like living there for three weeks 

13:38 — "Have you been in survival mode so long it's begun to feel like your personality?" 

15:37 —  the "magnifying binoculars" of high beta 

17:25 — Neuroplasticity and neural pathways — how alpha and theta reopen the door to change 

18:41 — Closing your eyes as a portal to imagination and a higher intelligence

 20:31 — Zooming out from the grain of rice — why meditation is non-negotiable medicine 

22:05 — Why five minutes of stillness matters more than a "perfect" routine 

24:22 — Guided visualization begins — the first deep breath and downshift 

27:54 — What this practice builds over time, and how Sari works with clients in theta states 

5 minute nervous system reset ad for midroll

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Fuck anxiety. It's a bottle cry to all the women out there who are so tired of continuing to let anxiety keep them imprisoned in their own lives. If you wake up already exhausted, even after falling asleep. I'm your host, Sari Calcert, and today's episode is for you. If you heard that you should meditate, but you have no idea why meditating even works for you. Or maybe you're the person who's tried meditating, but you feel like your brain never shuts off and your body is always on edge. And maybe you think that I'm doing this wrong and you can't quiet your mind. And so in this episode, I'm going to break down a few things. One is brainwave states. This really matters when we talk about meditation or hypnosis, because the state in which your brain and your body is in could be the thing that is keeping you stuck and not allowing you to actually have the experience be beneficial to you. Another thing that we're going to talk about is why when we close our eyes, it is one of the most powerful things that you can do for your nervous system. And I'm going to share a little bit about my own personal experience. The past few weeks, I've kind of fell off my own meditation practice. And I'm going to share about what happened to my body because of it. So this one is really going to change what you think about meditation, what you think about hypnosis, what you think about any sort of tools and what's happening in your body in the process. So let's go. So I want to first and foremost just meet the version of you that might be present. And I know that because I've been her, right? The moment that we wake up in the morning, we're on. We're thinking about all the things that we need to do. We need to, we're, we're hitting the checklist. Our mind is running before our feet even hit the floor. My husband actually even told me this the other morning. He has a big canoe race that he's helping some friends with this weekend, and he's the captain. And he was like, I tried to meditate this morning, and all I could think about was the race. And, you know, there is a time and a place for that. But in meditation, it's really important to allow that time, whether it's five minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, you know, maybe you're somebody who meditates for an hour. Um, I guess is if you're listening to this podcast, probably not. But um, you know, are we running through the to-do list when we're trying to sit down and meditate when we're trying to close our eyes, when we're in hypnosis? Or are we actually being present with the process? So restlessness, it's your normal. And maybe you don't even realize that you're tense because tense is just a typical Tuesday. And that's where nervous system regulation really comes in and where meditation comes in because it was the first time that I actually really realized what my body was experiencing on a typical Tuesday instead of it being regulated. And then I knew that there was a difference. But if we don't know that there's a difference, how are we gonna know that the tense version of us is actually the unregulated version of us until we actually get to a regulated version of us? And usually a lot of that happens in meditation, and this is why I love to talk about it and why I think it's so important. And I don't want you to hear the word meditation and run because that's not what it's about. And if you feel like meditation is not for you, you know, we that doesn't mean sitting like a monk and being in silence. It's a way that's also why I love hypnosis because we get to calm your nervous system, we get to regulate it in a fun imagery journey that I'm guiding you on. That like you don't have to just be in this quiet solitude the entire time. So I want to share that yes, meditation is absolutely one of the major tools that has supported me on my journey. And in the beginning, it was simply that. I was listening to guided meditations, um, specifically by Joe Dispenza. And I had done the meditations that come at the end of his book, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself. They're amazing. If you read that book and get to the end of that book, most people actually don't even do the journaling and the meditations that come with that book. But to me, that's the real work. That's when change really started to happen for me. And I implement a lot of that work in my one-on-one sessions. So if you don't want to go read the book, you can have your hand held by someone like me and take you through the process. So meditation is so important because I say meditation is medicine for any of us that have to take a pill every day for something. Like, for instance, when I was hypothyroid, I had to take a thyroid medication every single day. And that was my medication. Now I choose to use meditation as medication because I personally don't love to be, I didn't like the idea of being on a medication my entire life. And I wanted to be able to be back to like a normal state of being. And obviously, I'd gotten myself to not normal anymore to the point to where I now need to take a medication. I just didn't, that didn't sit well with me. And and you know, there's plenty of people out there that that's fine with them, that works for them. But I wanted to be more in control of my body and more in control of my life. And so this is where meditation really worked for me. So the past few weeks, I have been off my game. It was the end of the school year, we're starting summer. Life is already really busy for the summer. My kids are in and out of the house. I'm trying to work from home while they're here, and that's a little bit of like an invasion of my working space because right now I don't have a targeted office. So um, and because I felt like I needed to entertain my children and also work at the same time, like I wasn't really creating time for myself, and I wasn't creating space for meditation to really sit and be with me. So I want to talk about what happens when you get out of the routine. So, number one, meditation for me create it created a again, that sort of base layer of like, I know what my normal is. And when I stop meditating daily or or weekly or whatever it might be, that's when I start to feel off. That's when I start to feel more reactive, that's when I start to feel more anxious, less grounded. And that is absolutely what happened these past few weeks. And, you know, the past few days, I got back on my routine and I want to just touch on like what shifted and what I noticed in my body. Now, first and foremost, when I sat down, there there was just like a heaviness within me. And I um I want to say like I'm a pool filter. I feel like I take everybody's energy around me and I absorb it. And meditation is also a place that like I can really cleanse and let that go. And there's a lot of great practices that I also give my clients, people who are what's the word, empathetic. Is that right? And having empathy, they're they're like highly sensitive people, they also absorb a lot. And so it's really a lot of times, like the the feelings that we're feeling maybe aren't even our own. They're other people's that we absorb. And if we don't know how to cleanse our body and how to get rid of that, it can really start piling up. And then that doesn't feel good either. So that's also something that I was taking on. So when I first sat down, to me, like what I was experiencing in meditation was just this kind of like dark cloud hanging over me. And it didn't feel good. Like, I'm like, I don't want to feel like this. This isn't me, this isn't who I am. I I want to let this go. And what what really happened was like our ability to zoom out. I talk a lot about the grain of rice on this podcast. That what is the grain of rice that you're super zoomed in on? That like it's it's holding it in the palm of your hand, and you're like holding that up to your face, like that's the only thing that you can see. And I think what meditation gives us is an opportunity to really zoom out. So that's really what happened for me. I'll talk a little bit more about this, but what I want to talk about why this is why meditation is so important, is because our brain has states, and anxiety specifically has a favorite one. So our brainwave states matter. So our typical waking state is beta, and then from that we have alpha, and alpha tends to be a little bit slower of a brainwave state. That's kind of our creative state of mind where we tend to be in flow. Now, this is one foot in the conscious and one foot in the subconscious. So, have you ever been doing something where like you could just be doing it for hours and you lose track of time? You're usually in an alpha state. Now, you can also be in an alpha state when you're meditating or in hypnosis. Then the next one is theta, and theta is a deeper state, it's a slower state. We're getting closer to sleep, but we're not quite asleep. It's kind of when the body is almost asleep, but like the mind is awake, and then we get into delta, which delta is sleep. Now there's another state that I want to talk about, and that's high beta. And high beta is survival mode, it is overfunctioning, high beta is anxious, it's reactive, it's racing thoughts. And I was kind of living there the past few weeks, to be honest, and I now know what it feels like to be in that high beta state in my body. I can recognize it. And when you can recognize it, then again, you now have a choice. Do I want to stay in this? Do I want to stay in this dysregulation in this state that like I know is not loving to my body? What can I do in this moment to change my nervous system, to get out of high beta? We talk a lot about breath, that's really important, and it's a tool that can help you get out of high beta. But meditation is a beautiful one, okay? Beta, which is our normal waking state, it's functional, it's present, it's thinking clearly. It's something that you might be in when you're taking a test or listening to an online class or lecture. So again, alpha is the creative state. It's relaxed, but it's aware. That moment in the shower when an idea drops in, that's alpha. When you're taking a walk and maybe you're listening to a podcast and it's really inspiring you, and then all of a sudden you get a download, that's alpha. Okay. Theta, this is the deeper one. This is a subconscious state, this is where we're really suggestible. This is the place between awake and asleep. This is where hypnosis works, and this is where meditation works, and this is where real change begins to happen. So if you've been at the top of that list at high beta your whole life, and you sit in meditation, it's uncomfortable. It doesn't maybe feel amazing, but what meditation, excuse me, what meditation can do for you is it starts moving you down that ladder and it starts getting you to a place that feels better and it feels different. But until we even allow ourselves to experience that, how do we even know there's something different? So my question is have you been in survival mode so long that it's just now begun to feel like your personality? And I have a friend who says this all the time. She's like, I'm just a type A person, and I just want to be like, No, you're just in survival mode. And maybe that's true. Maybe other people have different opinions. That's my opinion. But that's like when I just used to identify with the fact that I'm just an anxious person. No, I was just a person whose nervous system got stuck in very high beta and never got shown how to downshift into beta, alpha, and theta. And the more time that you spend in high beta, the more that your brain, your mind is gonna look for threats. And it's gonna look for everything that's wrong. I talk a lot about this with my oldest daughter, who's now 14. Her sister drives her crazy, which as siblings do, right? But I tell her all the time, you're looking to be frustrated. You're looking to be annoyed by her. Your brain is literally like has on the magnify, the binoculars, and it's like, where is she frustrating me? Where is she annoying me? And this is where it starts. You know, if we if you have teenagers or you have young daughters, even boys, men, whatever that might look like, that are at this age where they really get to hone in on their personality and who they're becoming, their behaviorisms. Are we someone who's constantly looking for the threat, who's looking to be frustrated, who's looking to be annoyed? My oldest daughter, she's about to go to cheer camp this week, and she got assigned a roommate, and she was not happy with the roommate. And what was the first thing that she did? She went to her friends to complain more. And I was like, what is that doing for you? You're literally now predicting your experience that you're gonna have at cheer camp instead of you deciding that you're the creator of your life and you can have a different experience. But you and all your little friends are so conditioned now to look for the drama, to look for the threat, to look for the frustration, to look for the annoyance, to look for the judgment, to look for all the things. It's not broken, it's just stuck. And it's stuck because you've created a subconscious program that wants to look for it. And it can be unstuck. It can happen. Alpha and theta, this is where the subconscious becomes more accessible, you're more suggestible, you're more open, and the old wiring begins to loosen. It's really cool if you ever look up um neural circuitry of how the I just totally lost my throat, my train of thought. Okay. If you look at the neural pathways and they're like these little clusters, the videos, and you'll see themselves either like growing fingers and attaching to other little clusters, or you'll see them breaking up and dissolving. This literally is loosening the wires. This is neuroplasticity in its work. And this is why affirmations said out loud while you're stressed at work don't work because you're not in a suggestible state in high beta. You can't reprogram yourself in high beta. The door is not open, it's shut. It says, I'm stuck being this personality, and that's it. But in alpha theta or theta states, the door is open. New information gets to come in, old patterns start shifting. And this is the science behind why meditation and why hypnosis works, and why it is the gateway to the next version of yourself. So, another thing I want to talk about is how closing your eyes is a portal. It literally allows you to use your imagination. I was listening to a podcast not that long ago where there was a doctor and she was talking about how images are actually your way of receiving from a higher power, from God, from the universe, from spirit. And so when your mind is running the show and your eyes are open, it's hard to imagine, right? Like the reason why kids can have this amazing imagination is because from the ages of zero to eight, they're still in alpha theta states. They are the door is open for them. And as we get older and we get more into beta, that door closes. And the only way that we can really get into that imaginative state is through alpha-theta brainwave states. And now that can happen with your eyes open in alpha when you're in a flow state. But a lot of us, we don't even know how to get there. And so closing our eyes is really important so that we're not processing, so that we're not analyzing, so that we're not planning or reacting. When we close our eyes, something different happens. We open up to God's eyes, to the universe's eyes, to spirit's eyes, to this higher power of imagination. We stop seeing through the mind's lens that is stuck in that beta, and we start seeing through something bigger. Call it whatever word that fits for you. But that quiet space, when your eyes are closed, that's where that zoom out begins to happen. And we're no longer looking at that grain of rice. We get to see the whole table. So this is why meditation for me is non-negotiable. It's not a luxury, it's not a nice to have it. It is medicine. Meditation is medicine. And when I stopped those three weeks when I wasn't meditating, my system became dysregulated. I became reactive, I became anxious. And just in three days of coming back, I already feel that dark cloud has lifted. And I feel more connected. And we allow ourselves to zoom out that we're part of something so much bigger than that grain of rice. This is not about being perfect. This is not like I have to meditate every day at 6 a.m. No. Do it when it works for your schedule. A lot of times, if you're a mom, sometimes that is before the kids wake up. And can you give yourself 15 minutes? You don't need an hour. You just need a quiet room. And you need, let's just even start with five minutes of intentional stillness, being consistent. That's it. That could be the thing that changes everything. You give yourself five minutes every day to close your eyes, to shut the outer world off, and to open yourself to the imagination of your subconscious, to inviting in this higher intelligence, this loving presence into your mind and open up a pathway that you didn't even know existed. And you know, this isn't about opening the calm app. Okay. Now, if that truly works for you, go for it. But it didn't really work for me. So whether it's you set a timer for five minutes, and even I can remember my oldest sister at one point, she was studying Buddhism and she said, just turn on a timer on your phone and pay attention to your breath. The inhale and the exhale for five minutes. Now, for some, that's not enjoyable, and that feels really hard. Now, if you're gonna try that, I'm gonna tell you right now that your mind's gonna wander. But and that's okay. The win is realizing that you've wandered and coming back to your breath until that alarm bell on your phone goes off for five minutes. Don't fight it, just come back to focusing on your breath. That's the practice. You are literally training your brain to downshift from high beta into alpha with every single breath. And if that doesn't work and you need a guided starting point, that's why I have the free five-minute nervous system reset. It is literally made for this. It's in my show notes. Go click on the link and get it now. So, one last thing. Let me just take you through a little visualization. Close your eyes if you can. You're not driving, you're not on a walk. And I want you to just take in one slow deep breath. And as you breathe in, fully expanding your diaphragm all the way up to your lungs, and slowly breathe out the same way. Let your jaw soften, notice if there's any tension. Maybe you're furrowing your brows, relax your eyebrows, everything in your face. Let your shoulders drop a little. And just notice how different that already feels from just forty-five seconds ago. You just downshifted. Now just for a second, take another breath in, slow and deep, from the diaphragm up to the chest and the lungs. Expanding as much as you can and slowly exhale. And for a second, just imagine what it would feel like to live more of your life here in this state. Notice your shoulders beginning to relax even more. And notice that you're not running, you're not scanning for the threat. You're not planning or prepping what needs to happen. And you're not waiting for the other shoe to fall, for something to go wrong. You're just here. You're present. You're safe in your body. And that this is available to you. Not just in this moment, but every single day. Five minutes of your time, closing your eyes, breathing slow. This is the bridge from high beta down into alpha. And to place your awareness on your body in this moment and to just recognize the feeling. Maybe it doesn't feel good at all. Maybe your body is screaming at you to go do something. And can you recognize that that is the old program of high beta? And it doesn't like this new version. But you're gonna train it to. And just like a little toddler throws a fit, your body may be throwing a fit right now. But take in another slow deep breath and let it know that it's okay, that it's safe. And that this is the version of you who finally gets to rest in it. And when you're ready, come back. And so this little piece that you just got, this is just a piece. But the more that you do this, the more that you train your body to be regulated, to be in these non-survival states, the more that you change, the more that you open up new possibilities in your life, that you're no longer stuck, you're no longer running on fumes, just teaching your body how to downshift into these brainwave states. In sessions with me, I actively guide you into these theta states and purpose. We go into the subconscious where the real unwiring lives of those neural pathways, and we start working with them directly, not talking about it, actually rewiring them. And if you're curious what that could look like for you specifically, book with me a free freedom roadmap call. The link is in the show notes, and we can map out exactly what's keeping your nervous system stuck and what it would actually look like to shift it. So I hope that this episode inspired you that meditation isn't just for calm people, it's for everyone, and it's to downshift from those high anxious survival states down into the suggestible states to get the answers that you actually want. The the door is right there, but you have to be willing to sit in it, to change, to not be in, you know, the left lane of the highway driving bad out of hell fast, but to slow down. What would it feel like to actually get in the right lane and to drive like the old lady, like driving this daisy? And I'm telling you, I don't like that stress in my body that I was experiencing for a few weeks. It feels so much better to be present, to be having a conversation with my husband or my girls, or even my clients, and to really be with it. This is when I get the downloads from God, from spirit, from the universe. And the answers that I've been wanting are right there available to me. When I slow down those brainwave states and I slow down my nervous system, that is opening the door to everything you dreamed of. So if you're ready for that, hit me up and leave a comment, like, subscribe. The more that I can get this out to people that really need this, this is why I'm here. This I don't I don't show up to this podcast to listen to myself talk. I I share this so that it helps someone out there who needs it. So if you know someone who needs this episode, share it with them. We'll see you guys next time. If this episode felt like it was speaking directly to you, share it with another woman who might need to hear this too. And please leave a rating and a review. This helps boost the podcast so women just like you can find it and find real-time support.