In order to solve the problem of severe borehole instability while drilling in the S oilfield, technical research on drilling fluids has been carried out. Firstly, the paper analyzes the mechanism and technical difficulties of borehole instability in depth. Aiming at the reasons of borehole instability, the reasonable drilling fluid flowrate was defined by considering hydraulic erosion, drilling fluid plugging property, inhibition, etc, and the anti-sloughing drilling fluid system was optimized by way of strengthening the plugging and inhibiting properties of drilling fluid system. This technology has been applied in more than 40 wells in the S oilfield, the problem of borehole instability in the fractured formation was solved successfully, and the drilling speed was increased by 25.3%, which greatly reduced the downhole complexity and achieved remarkable application effect.