Why the Five Hindrances?
A Framework for Meditation
I’ve always found the Buddha’s five hindrances to be a remarkably useful guide in meditation. Yet when I was recently asked, “Why bother with them? Why not just watch the breath and bring the mind back when it wanders?” I was briefly at a loss, since I had assumed it was obvious how useful they were. This essay is my answer to that question.
Why Not Keep It Simple?
It’s true that simply watching the breath and returning to it whenever the mind wanders can be enough to lead to deep meditation and even Awakening. But the Buddha gave us tools that make practice more effective, and the five hindrances are among the most useful.
While people prefer hearing about uplifting lists like the seven enlightenment factors, it’s also important to know your enemy. The Buddha’s genius was spotting the obstacles to meditation and distilling them so simply. He basically said: if your mind won’t settle, it comes down to one or more of these five moods. Of course, physical factors like fatigue or sickness are a different story, but psychologically it boils down to these five. Calming meditation is really just a matter of eradicating the hindrances. That’s basically what calming the mind is.
This might sound too academic for a spiritual activity like meditation, but I’m not talking about heavy study—just familiarising yourself with these patterns so you can recognise them when they appear. It’s a bit like putting up ‘wanted’ posters. You’re not expected to hunt anyone down; just recognise them if you see them.
And they aren’t obscure psychological concepts. They are moods we already know, and one-word translations capture the meanings almost exactly. The five are desire, ill-will, dullness, restlessness, and doubt.
The Buddha illustrated them with striking similes of freedom. Desire is like being in debt: we have to pay for our overindulgence at some point. Ill-will is like a sickness. Dullness is like being in prison, unable to move freely. Restlessness, he compared to slavery. And doubt is like being lost on a long, uncertain journey through the wilderness.
These images capture the lived feel of the hindrances. We all know the relief of paying off a debt, recovering from illness, or being released from confinement. In the same way, freeing the mind from these moods brings a profound sense of lightness and ease.
So what difference does knowing these five categories actually make in practice?
How Does This Help?
The inner world can feel like a confusing maelstrom without landmarks, especially in the early stages of practice. The hindrances provide a map.
Without that map, all distractions look the same: ‘I lost the breath.’ With it, we can say, ‘I lost the breath because I’m nodding off,’ ‘because I’m restless,’ or ‘because I keep getting pulled into these tempting thought streams." Just knowing why the mind is wandering helps us not get so discouraged. It’s encouraging to at least know what the problem is, even when we can’t yet overcome it.
Recognising which hindrance is at work is actually half the battle. With doubt in particular, simply noticing it is often enough; you can ignore the nagging thoughts and ride out the uncomfortable feeling without getting caught up in it. Knowing “this is just a bad mood” makes it easier to sit through without letting it take over.
But there’s more. The Buddha said they cloud our wisdom; they make us less able to see clearly. Each hindrance tricks us into doing the very thing that strengthens it. When we are angry, we want to brood. It feels good! But it makes our mood worse. When we are restless, we want to do something stimulating. When we’re nodding off, we struggle on: “Must go back to the breath. Must go back to the breath!” But this is the worst thing we can do. Better to try something different. Perhaps focusing on sounds or body sensations instead. Trying to concentrate on your breath is a lot like counting sheep; not very clever if you want to wake up. Recognising the hindrance helps us avoid falling for the trap.
It’s all too easy to slip into meditating on autopilot. You sit down, “Right, time to watch the breath,” and go through the motions. The Buddha compared a meditator who always uses the same approach to a cook who doesn’t pay attention to what his master enjoys. If the cook isn’t watching carefully, his meals never really improve. In the same way, if we don’t notice what works in our meditation, our practice won’t improve either.
Everyone’s different; that’s why the Buddha didn’t teach “meditation by numbers.” So it’s up to each of us to get to know our own minds and see what works best.
The Buddha actually identified this spirit of inquiry as one of the seven enlightenment factors, recognizing that curiosity about how the mind works is essential to awakening. It develops naturally when mindfulness, the first factor, becomes stronger. That in itself is an interesting point, since it highlights a subtle difference between how mindfulness is taught in the Buddha’s system and how it’s often presented today; but that’s a subject I explore elsewhere.
This investigative approach becomes especially valuable when simple breath-watching hits a wall.
When “Back to the Breath” Doesn’t Work
Sometimes the hindrances are so strong you simply can’t stay with the breath, no matter how hard you try. At other times, the hindrance itself undermines your motivation: with aversion, you may not actually want to return; with doubt, it can feel hopeless to even try.
You might manage to force the mind onto the breath for a little while, but it doesn’t last. Compare that with when the meditation is flowing easily, and you actually enjoy watching the breath. The difference is obvious. When a hindrance is running in the background, the mind quickly drifts off again. So you can end up spending a lot of time lost in distraction and very little time truly focused.
This matters because concentration deepens when stretches of steady attention grow longer and periods of distraction shrink. If you keep blindly plugging away, you can waste a lot of time. Working directly with the hindrances makes the whole process more effective.
And here’s the tricky part: you might even be “on the breath,” yet not notice that the quality of mind is off. Without some familiarity with the hindrances, it’s easy to think everything is fine (“I’m still watching the breath”) while in fact one of them is quietly at work in the background.
Knowing the hindrances puts us back in the driving seat. We aren’t just blindly meditating in the hope today will be one of those days we have good meditation. For each hindrance there are classic tricks that help, a kind of antidote. For example, loving-kindness meditation is the classic antidote to aversion. To show just how useful it can be, let me give a couple of examples from my own meditation.
Once on retreat, my practice felt flat. I could still watch my breath, but something was missing. I recognised subtle aversion at work. Switching to loving-kindness meditation for a few minutes brought the joy back, and I was back on course. Without that recognition, I might have spent the whole session struggling.
Another example: I used to have a recurring problem on retreats. The meditation would be going well, and then, quite suddenly, it would all feel flat and uninspired. I kept thinking it was aversion and tried loving-kindness, but that didn’t help. Eventually I realised it was doubt. Once I saw that, I no longer worried about it. The meditation still felt dreary and hopeless, but I knew what the problem was. The worrying was just a form of doubt, and had been feeding the hindrance. By just sitting with that drab feeling without feeding it, the mood soon lifted. That recognition was a turning point in my practice.
The hindrances aren’t just meditation-cushion phenomena, though.
How It Helps Off the Cushion Too
The hindrances aren’t just relevant when we’re meditating; they shape how our minds work in everyday life as well.
A Brahmin once asked the Buddha why sometimes he could remember his chants with ease, even material from years back, while at other times he struggled to recall even what he’d practised the day before. The Buddha explained that the difference was in the presence of the hindrances. In the same way, they affect all of us: when they’re strong, the mind just doesn’t function as well.
I remember a woman who came to the monastery once, upset by something another woman had said to her. So she’d decided to write a letter to this woman - not a rude letter, but spelling out exactly what she thought. She thought she was dealing with the situation skillfully. But to everyone else, it was obvious the letter would only make things worse. Her anger, and the hours or days of brooding on it, had clouded her thinking. This is what the hindrances do. It’s not just a matter of interfering with our meditation: they make fools of us.
They also come in both obvious and subtle forms. It’s easy to spot when you’re angry, or when you’ve nodded off through dullness. But mild irritation or the slight fog of a low mood can easily pass unnoticed in the busyness of daily life. By learning to recognise the hindrances on the cushion, we train ourselves to notice their more subtle versions off it too.
And this recognition really helps. Just knowing you’re in a bad mood makes you less likely to act on it. Seeing it as a hindrance gives you a bit of space. Instead of thinking, “I’m hopeless, I can’t concentrate,” you can see, “Ah, there’s a lot of restlessness today.” Thinking this way helps us take our moods less personally and see them more as passing conditions. Less “me,” more “not-self.”
A Few Final Thoughts
Meditation isn’t just about building concentration by returning to the breath. It’s also about insight: noticing how the mind works and what gets in the way. Returning to the breath develops steadiness; recognising the hindrances helps develop understanding. The two support each other.
The Buddha once compared the mind to gold. When gold contains impurities - iron, copper, tin - it’s brittle and dull, not much use to a jeweller. But when those impurities are removed, the gold becomes pliant and bright, and the jeweller can shape it into whatever they wish.
The mind works the same way. It’s ’naturally bright and luminous’, but the hindrances are like those impurities. They make the mind dull and unwieldy. When they’re removed, even temporarily, the mind becomes bright and workable, and we can direct it to whatever task we wish. Happiness isn’t something we have to manufacture; it’s what’s left when the hindrances fade. We’re not trying to build something from scratch, but learning to recognise and remove what gets in the way.