There is a kind of advice that says: quiet your mind, then come to God. It is useless to the person whose mind has not been quiet in years. Rumination, craving, panic, and intrusive pictures do not step aside because you have become sincere.
Stillness, for most of us, is not an empty room. It is a decision about authority. The thoughts may continue. They do not get to drive.
A way to sit
Set a short time, five minutes, not a heroic hour. Sit in a chair you do not use for hiding. Feel the weight of your body. When a thought arrives with a plan — drink, scroll, rehearse an old injury, despise yourself — notice that it is a thought. You do not have to refute it. Refutation is how the thought recruits you for another twenty minutes.
Return to the weight of the body, or to a single repeated asking: Keep me here. If the thoughts become commands to harm, end the sit and use help. Stillness is not a place where you take orders from panic. The page When you are suffering is the right door for that.
What prayer is on a loud day
Prayer is not something you earn by achieving silence. Speak into the noise. God is not waiting for a better acoustic. Say the fear in one sentence. Ask for the next right thing. Then stand up and do a small ordinary act so the mind has a body to inhabit: wash a cup, walk to the end of the block, text a person who is safe.
The point is not to become someone who never spins. The point is to stop confusing the spin with the truth, and to keep choosing a life while the spin continues.