Meditation is often presented as a simple path to calm and better mental health. But emerging research suggests the practice doesn’t work the same way for everyone β and, in some circumstances, it can produce serious psychological effects.
Meditation has moved far beyond temples and spiritual communities. Today it’s offered through smartphone apps, corporate wellness programs, medical settings, schools, and thousands of private classes, and millions of people use it to manage stress, sharpen concentration, sleep better, or cope with anxiety. There’s good reason for its popularity β mindfulness-based practices have been linked in research to real improvements in anxiety, depression, attention, and emotional regulation.
But a question that’s gotten far less attention is finally getting real scientific scrutiny: what happens when meditation doesn’t help? A growing body of research β led in large part by one Brown University lab β suggests some people experience genuinely unwanted effects, ranging from temporary anxiety and insomnia to dissociation, altered perceptions, and, in rarer cases, severe psychiatric symptoms. The emerging lesson isn’t that meditation is dangerous. It’s that meditation isn’t automatically harmless just because it’s non-pharmaceutical.
The Problem With Treating Meditation as a Universal Solution
Part of why meditation is hard to evaluate honestly is how it’s marketed: as a broadly applicable tool, something almost anyone can pick up without professional supervision to become calmer, healthier, and more focused. That framing creates a lopsided expectation. If someone develops anxiety after starting a new medication, a side effect is the first thing anyone considers. If someone develops anxiety after meditating, they’re more often told they’re doing it wrong, or that the discomfort is simply part of the process. Researchers who study meditation-related adverse effects argue this attitude makes real problems harder to identify and take seriously.
The clearest research effort behind this shift is the “Varieties of Contemplative Experience” study, led by clinical psychologist Willoughby Britton and religious studies scholar Jared Lindahl at Brown University. Their work β interviewing more than 100 meditators, teachers, and clinicians about difficult meditation-related experiences β became the foundation for a wider field now taking these effects seriously. Britton later founded Cheetah House, a nonprofit that provides support specifically for meditators in crisis and trains providers to recognize when a meditation practice has gone wrong. A separate large-scale survey of more than 1,200 regular meditators, published by Marco Schlosser and colleagues in 2019, found that roughly a quarter reported at least one unpleasant meditation-related experience they associated with their practice at some point. A broader meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials led by Miguel Farias found a smaller but still meaningful share β around 8 percent β of participants reporting adverse effects, with researchers widely suspecting underreporting given how rarely trials are designed to look for harm in the first place.
None of this means most people are harmed by meditation. It means potential harm deserves to be measured with the same rigor as potential benefit β something the field has historically been slow to do.
The Intensity of the Practice May Matter
Not all meditation looks the same. Someone spending ten minutes following their breath through an app is doing something meaningfully different from someone sitting in silence for hours a day during a weeklong retreat, which can involve extended silence, limited food, early mornings, and long stretches of concentrated sitting. For some practitioners, that intensity is genuinely meaningful. For others, according to Britton’s research, it can become overwhelming β her interviews documented cases involving insomnia, anxiety, dissociation, and other disturbing perceptual shifts following intensive practice.
Crucially, unpleasant experiences aren’t confined to retreats. Some of Britton’s subjects and other survey respondents reported real difficulties arising from ordinary, everyday meditation practice as well β which challenges the more comfortable assumption that only people pushing extreme intensity need to worry.
When Paying Attention to Yourself Becomes Too Much
One of meditation’s central techniques is turning closer attention toward thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations β usually exactly what practitioners are seeking. But that heightened awareness can itself become uncomfortable. People may find themselves intensely focused on physical sensations, frightening thoughts, or memories they’d normally let pass without sustained attention. Researchers studying these adverse experiences have documented symptoms including anxiety, panic, traumatic re-experiencing, and disturbances in a person’s sense of time, space, or self.
For someone already struggling with anxiety, that heightened internal focus doesn’t necessarily feel calming β it can amplify the very sensations they were hoping to escape. This doesn’t mean mindfulness causes anxiety universally. It means the same mechanism that produces greater self-awareness for one person can produce genuine distress in another.
The Strange Experience of Losing a Sense of Self
Among the more unusual experiences documented in this research is dissociation β feeling detached from one’s body, emotions, or surroundings, where familiar places can suddenly feel strange or a person feels as though they’re watching themselves from outside. Britton’s interview subjects reported exactly these kinds of altered senses of self, sometimes lasting well beyond the meditation session itself. For someone expecting meditation to leave them feeling more grounded, an experience like this can be genuinely frightening.
That points to a broader principle: a meditation practice shouldn’t automatically continue just because discomfort shows up. Sometimes discomfort is a normal part of learning something new. Sometimes it’s a signal to scale back intensity, change the technique entirely, or stop.
The Research Has a Real Limitation
There’s an important caveat behind nearly every statistic quoted about meditation’s risks: researchers still don’t have a fully reliable way to determine how often meditation causes serious harm across the general population. Some studies, including much of Britton and Lindahl’s foundational interview work, specifically recruited people who had already experienced problems β useful for cataloging what kinds of adverse experiences occur, but not for estimating how common they are among all meditators broadly. Other research, like Schlosser’s larger survey and Farias’s meta-analysis, has produced meaningfully different rate estimates precisely because they define “adverse effects” differently, sample different populations, and cover different intensities and styles of practice.
The more useful scientific question, then, isn’t simply “does meditation cause harm?” It’s: for whom, under what circumstances, with which practices, at what intensity, and for how long?
Some People May Need More Caution
The emerging evidence suggests individual differences matter a great deal. People with existing psychiatric vulnerabilities may need particular caution around intensive practice or retreats specifically β several researchers in this field, including Britton, have argued that people with serious psychiatric disorders shouldn’t begin intensive meditation without appropriate professional guidance and monitoring in place. That’s not an argument that people with mental-health conditions can never meditate. It’s an argument against treating meditation as an automatic substitute for appropriate clinical care. A meditation app has no way to assess someone’s psychiatric history, and a retreat instructor may not have the clinical training to recognize an emerging psychiatric crisis when one begins to unfold. That gap between wellness instruction and clinical expertise matters more as meditation moves deeper into mainstream healthcare and workplace wellness programs.
The “More Is Better” Assumption May Be Wrong
Modern wellness culture tends to reward intensity by default β more exercise, more optimization, more discipline is treated as inherently better β and the same instinct often shows up around meditation. But the evidence increasingly suggests meditation doesn’t follow a simple dose-response curve where more practice reliably means more benefit. In one striking example from Britton’s research, MBCT (mindfulness-based cognitive therapy) practice around 30 minutes a day was associated with decreasing sleep quality, even as lower amounts of daily practice improved it β a genuine optimal-dosing effect, not just diminishing returns. The implication is straightforward: longer meditation sessions aren’t automatically better meditation.
Meditation’s Benefits Should Not Be Forgotten
A discussion focused on risk can easily leave the misleading impression that meditation is broadly harmful. That’s not what the evidence shows. Mindfulness-based interventions have been extensively studied and linked to real benefits across several psychological and physical outcomes, and even researchers who study adverse effects closely β Britton included β still consider meditation genuinely useful for many people. The more sophisticated conclusion is that benefit and risk can coexist in the same practice: someone can have an overwhelmingly positive experience with meditation while occasionally hitting an uncomfortable patch, another person can find it transformative, and a third might find that a specific technique actively worsens their symptoms. None of those outcomes is necessarily a failure of the practice or the person. It may simply mean meditation isn’t a universal intervention that works identically for everyone.
The Missing Piece: Better Safety Standards
Perhaps the most important development here isn’t that scientists discovered meditation can sometimes be difficult β it’s that researchers, led by Britton’s lab and others building on it, are now systematically asking how those difficulties can be identified and prevented in advance. Structured tools for measuring meditation-related adverse effects are starting to replace the older, blunter question of whether participants simply “liked” a program. That shift could eventually reshape how mindfulness programs are actually designed: teachers may need better training in recognizing psychological distress, participants may need clearer upfront warnings about possible adverse experiences, clinical programs may need real screening and monitoring protocols, and retreat organizers may need concrete procedures for responding when a participant develops serious symptoms mid-retreat. None of this is an argument against meditation. It’s an argument for treating it with the same intellectual seriousness applied to any other intervention that affects the brain.
A More Mature View of Mindfulness
The meditation debate has often split into two camps β one treating mindfulness as an almost universally beneficial tool, the other emphasizing its potential dangers. Neither extreme is especially useful. The more interesting position sits in between: meditation can be genuinely valuable, and it can also be genuinely uncomfortable. For some people that discomfort is temporary and manageable; for others, it may be a real signal that a particular technique, intensity, or setting isn’t right for them; and in rarer situations, serious symptoms warrant real professional medical or psychiatric attention rather than persistence through the discomfort.
The scientific goal here shouldn’t be protecting meditation’s reputation. It should be understanding the practice well enough to know when it helps, when it doesn’t, and when it may be doing something entirely different from what the practitioner intended.
The Future of Meditation Research Is About Safety
For decades, the central question driving meditation research was essentially: does it work? That produced a genuinely large scientific literature. The next question, increasingly driven by researchers like Britton and Lindahl, is more complicated: how does it work, and for whom can it fail? That shift could make meditation research more credible, not less β a practice doesn’t become worthless because it has documented limitations. Understanding those limitations is precisely how a popular wellness practice matures into a more responsible part of modern healthcare.
Meditation doesn’t need to be either a miracle cure or a hidden danger. The evidence increasingly points to something more precise: a genuinely powerful psychological practice whose effects depend heavily on the person, the method, the intensity, and the context surrounding it. That may be the most important lesson of all.
If you’re experiencing distressing psychological symptoms related to meditation β including anxiety, dissociation, or disturbing changes in perception β organizations like Cheetah House (cheetahhouse.org) offer resources specifically for meditators in difficulty, and a mental health professional can help assess what’s happening and what kind of support may help.
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