It's something like what burrows is saying. I don't know if I'm implementing it as intended, but I first heard of "labeling" when reading The Mind Illuminated by John Yates. It seemed silly/trivial at first, but I later started just trying to categorize my thoughts. I found that there were actually surprisingly few buckets that my idle thoughts fell into.

I'd say that when I'm meditating, 90% of my out-of-the-blue thoughts fall into categories like:

- A: seeking out little acquisitions (life/work hacks, low hanging fruit, new tech skills I could tackle today to improve my life) - B: chores I need to do and social debts - C: money, and whether I have enough - D: what will the future be like? - E: food, sex, safety - F: "this is nice, I'm not thinking of much"

I don't feel like these are good or bad thoughts, since they all have their time and place. But I do expect/hope that as the session progresses, more and more time is spent in state F.

I think one benefit of these labels is that instead of trying to re-articulate what you're thinking every time, you just drop it into buckets A-F (or whatever your personal buckets are). Making that task lightweight keeps me from overanalyzing the thought, at the risk of maybe oversimplifying my thought landscape.