You are mistaking focus for meditation. As in, to "meditate on something." Certainly, meditation training involves focusing on something, but that is not the go

You are mistaking focus for meditation. As in, to "meditate on something." Certainly, meditation training involves focusing on something, but that is not the goal. (See "barking at the finger"). The first goal is to use attention to notice why attention fails to stay focused. You realize you involuntarily experience thoughts arising and pulling you from what you are focusing on. Eventually, you become aware of the ceaseless, rootless, seemingly causeless stream of thoughts that you've been calling your "inner self" this whole time. At this point you are experiencing the "Movie theater effect" described in other replies. So, stage one is "So what". Stage two is "Holy shit I'm always distracted". At stage two you start to feel relaxation as you detach from the feelings that those thoughts cause. Because those thoughts don't feel like really "yours" anymore. You can stop here and read "waking up" a few times to get a better diagnosis of the problem with this pathway to enlightenment. I'll try to summarize: Stage 3 is ... Nothing, really. There is no "you" there is only these stream of thoughts, and the thoughts about those thoughts, and etc etc. You could have seen this without all this focus-on-breath business. Or so I'm told. I'm at stage 2, and stage 3 makes sense to me in terms of physics, but it is difficult to push back the fog of self-delusion.