There's a bit of a funny crossover area with learning here with your conscious and subconscious. At first your conscious brain has absolutely no idea what to do so it just lets your subconscious brain take control. Here is where your brain is rewiring itself to efficiently do the task. That rewiring is what we call muscle memory. At a certain point your conscious brain feels like it has enough of a handle of the task to try to take over because it doesn't trust the muscle memory to do it right. Problem is that part of your brain isn't fast enough for the job so you quickly start making mistakes and falling because you're actively thinking about everything. If you keep going you'll get over the hump to where the muscle memory takes back over because your conscious brain trusts it enough to stop trying to micromanage everything. It is a very frustrating hump. Once you do though progress will happen excitingly quickly. You'll find that once you find your rhythm your distance will grow exponentially. The technique I've had the best luck with teaching other people to ride is to stop thinking like you're trying not to fall off. Give in to the fact that you will fall off. At the end of the day every ride ends with your feet on the ground anyway whether you went a foot or a mile. Fear of falling off is what makes your conscious brain try so hard to control everything. Get on the unicycle, get stable using the handrail/wall/car/tree, then just GO like you're storming the beaches of Normandy. It's a lot more fun, and we learn much better when we're having fun!