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Twenty years ago, a meditation teacher and doctoral candidate in clinical psychology named Willoughby Britton set out to do a study showing that meditation improves sleep. She divided up the participants, sent them to a sleep lab to monitor their brain activity, and discovered that the results were the opposite of what she had hoped for: The more they meditated, the worse their quality of sleep got. Britton had already experienced benefits of meditation herself, which are well documented in medical literature: It soothes anxiety, chronic pain, and depression, and it lowers blood pressure, alleviates back pain, and has many other benefits, as well.
But as she continued to look into it, Britton kept discovering what seemed, at first, like exceptions: people who actually became more anxious or unmotivated after meditating. Then she began encountering people who experienced more serious mental-health side effects, such as paranoia, hallucinations, and dissociation. Britton became a researcher at Brown University and eventually developed a robust body of work showing that meditation—for certain people and at certain intensities—can be harmful.
On this episode of Radio Atlantic is the staff writer Olga Khazan, who interviewed Britton about her research. We talk about how the meditation community responded, how Britton’s life changed after it was released, and what her recommendations are for the average person interested in meditation.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Hanna Rosin: Just a quick warning: This episode mentions suicide. If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text the U.S. National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988.
[Music]
Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin.
I meditate, now and again. Or, at least, I try. I was once at a yoga retreat where early-morning meditation was one of the things on the schedule. I woke up, sat down, and lasted about 12 minutes, which felt like 90.
I downloaded the Calm app a couple of years ago, and I have used it exactly zero times.
I have a doctor friend who assured me that meditation was one of a handful of nonmedicine treatments that had been thoroughly vetted by peer-reviewed science journals, so I never gave up trying. I just assumed that this was my fault and I needed to get better at it.
I have definitely absorbed the idea that there is a meditation ideal to strive towards, a master of serene who manages to both embody a Western principle of high-stress job and an Eastern principle of no stress at all.
Olga Khazan: So I don’t know exactly how it made the leap over from India to America. I think that happened in the 19th century.
Rosin: This is staff writer Olga Khazan.
Khazan: But this modern moment of meditation that we’re living in started in Silicon Valley tech companies. So probably around 10 or 15 years ago, a lot of tech companies—I was gonna say cling, but you’re not really supposed to cling in meditation—they started glomming onto meditation as this solution for people being burned out and overworked. Arianna Huffington got really into it.
Arianna Huffington: There is a deeper dimension to our lives, and we can tap into it.
Khazan: I think Oprah probably did it at one point.
Oprah Winfrey: 9 o’clock in the morning, 4:30 in the afternoon, no matter what’s going on, we stop. We meditate.
Khazan: LeBron James was meditating.
Announcer 1: Look, LeBron meditating there on the bench.
Announcer 2: He’s in that—
Announcer 1: Becoming present.
Announcer 2: He’s in that Calm app.
Announcer 1: Yep.
Khazan: Google had a meditation session for its employees. People in positions of power and authority and people who everyone thought was cool were kind of pushing this idea that meditation is this very benign sort of thing that you can do for yourself in order to make yourself more relaxed.
And I would say that there was a subtext there of, And it’ll make you more productive because you won’t be so obsessed with, like, dumb bullshit. (Laughs.)
[Music]
Rosin: Today, meditation is a multibillion-dollar industry. According to one study, about half of all Americans have tried meditation. And about a fifth do it regularly.
At some point, Olga was one of them. She tried something called MBSR, or mindfulness-based stress reduction, although reluctantly.
Khazan: This was one of the most annoying things about it for me, is that it was very loosey-goosey. But then whenever I asked if I could modify it in some way, it was like, No, that’s the wrong way to do it. (Laughs.)
Rosin: But Olga says it did help relieve some of her anxiety.
Khazan: So even though I wasn’t very good at meditation, I did buy this idea that it’s basically harmless. It seems like, oh, the worst thing that could happen is it just doesn’t work, because you’re not good at it. Honestly, I’ve taken a whole meditation class, where I meditated for 45 minutes a day, and I don’t think anyone ever said, This could be risky.
Rosin: That’s what I always thought, too, and why I at least liked the idea of meditation. It has a low barrier to entry—no fancy, expensive equipment or services required—and seemingly zero side effects.
But then one day, as Olga was browsing online, she came across a researcher at Brown University named Willoughby Britton.
Khazan: So Willoughby Britton started out as a very avid meditator, pretty much as avid as they get.
Willoughby Britton: It was like a lifeline. It was like, I don’t know what I would do without this.
Khazan: So she is a psychologist. She was trained as a psychologist, but as she’s going on her psychology journey, she’s also becoming a really hard-core meditator.
She does other things to kind of show her commitment to this cause. So she’s constantly reading these dharma books, which are books about the Buddhist teachings. She’s teaching meditation through the same meditation class that I took, called MBSR. And she also meditates herself for hours and hours a day.
Britton: I became a meditation teacher. So I had to count my meditation hours, so I know I’m well above 10,000 hours, and I’m probably close to 20,000 hours.
Rosin: Olga ended up talking and meeting up with Willoughby in person. She learned that Willoughby had grown up on a farm in Massachusetts and spent a lot of time by herself as a kid.
Britton: My parents told me that I asked really strange questions like, What is looking out of my eyes? Or, Is today tomorrow? Or things like that. So I was a very curious, weird child.
[Music]
Rosin: Willoughby had always been interested in consciousness and interiority and big existential questions. So in college, she decided to major in neuroscience at Colgate University.
In 1995, during the summer between her junior and senior year, Willoughby’s best friend, Sarah, died by suicide. She’d been overwhelmed by the pressure of being an elite college athlete. According to a New York Times article about her death, Sarah was an “All-Ivy selection in field hockey, ice hockey and lacrosse.” The article states that she was, quote, “found on Monday afternoon by a friend.”
That friend was Willoughby, who found her at her house next to a hunting rifle. After that, Willoughby could not stop thinking about death.
Khazan: I think ultimately, like, what it was is PTSD, is she would think a lot about death and dwell on death and be worried about stepping into an elevator or something ’cause she thought she would find a dead body.
Rosin: So that’s an experience of maybe losing control of your thoughts. It’s a your-brain-is-running-away-from-you kind of feeling.
Khazan: Yeah. So she’s like, I can’t stop thinking about death. So she’s working in labs and stuff ’cause she’s training to be a scientist. And she talks about—they kill the rats after the experiments are over.
Britton: And rats are white with red eyes. And when they die, their eyes turn gold. The blood runs out of them. And so I put them all under a little blanket of paper towels, and I was watching their eyes and being like, Holy shit, this is it. This is the moment that their spirit is departing or whatever.
And so I’m so fascinated by these rats dying, and I asked my colleague, Where does it go? And she was like, Oh, they go in the freezer in 215. And I was like, Okay, I gotta leave. I cannot do this anymore.
Khazan: She’s just getting overly obsessed with death. And she doesn’t wanna take SSRIs. So her father gives her this book called A Path With Heart, by Jack Kornfield. And that book basically is just a very influential meditation book of that time. Kornfield is aiming to bridge the gap between hard-core meditators, who have studied in Tibet and stuff and meditate all the time, and people who are just going through a hard time. So he’s trying to show everyday people how meditation can be helpful to them. And it was really helpful for her. She loved reading the book. She really took it to heart, and that kind of launched her meditation journey.
Rosin: From then on, Willoughby began to devote her life to ancient Buddhist principles. But she also had her degree in neuroscience. So she wanted to use her scientific background to advance the cause of meditation.
Khazan: She does one study in particular that shows that people who meditate more sleep worse.
Britton: They had more fast-wave brain activity. They had more microarousals, awakenings. It was just like every possible metric of cortical arousal was increased.
Khazan: These are not the results she expected. She wanted it to show that people who meditate more sleep better, but they had a worse quality of sleep. They were waking up more, and they spent more time in this phase of sleep that’s associated with restlessness. It really surprised her.
Britton: I was just like, Ah, this is the wrong answer, and maybe I did something wrong. It was the second study I’d ever done. So I was not sure, and I was gonna ruin everything for the field that I was trying to promote. So I just sat on the data.
Khazan: So she shelved that study. She did not publish it. She thought that publishing it would make Buddhism seem bad or make meditation seem bad. So she just was like, Well, maybe this is a one-off. It’s just one study. Who knows? Maybe I did the data wrong or something, and she didn’t publish it.
Rosin: Now, to be clear, meditation has a robust body of research behind it that shows it can improve lots of things: anxiety, chronic pain, depression. There are reputable studies linking it to lower blood pressure, better attention spans, and greater levels of compassion. It can help alleviate back pain, decrease loneliness in older adults, improve memory—which is why Willoughby was so confused by her own results that showed meditation could have any kind of negative effect.
But that was just the first crack.
Khazan: The next thing that happens is that she moves to Rhode Island for her residency. And she’s working at a psychiatric hospital. And she notices that people are coming into the hospital in a state of psychosis, and they’re coming in from meditation retreats.
[Bell tolling]
Khazan: So the first one, she’s like, What’s up with that person? And they’re like, Oh, they’re coming off a meditation retreat. And she’s like, Oh, that’s weird. It can happen. And then the next one, she was like, Wait, what’s up with that person? And they’re like, They’re also coming off a meditation retreat.
Rosin: Wow.
Britton: They were, like, completely psychotic.
Khazan: Wow.
Britton: And so I was like, That’s kind of a lot. That seemed like a lot for one year. Like, here’s my little snapshot of a residency.
Khazan: And so that made her think, Okay, maybe it’s just something about that retreat. And then meditation started to take kind of a dark turn for herself personally.
[Music]
Khazan: What happened to her is that she started experiencing this thing called dissociation. It kind of sounds good at first. And it can be good in really traumatic moments. Dissociating can be a positive thing because it can help you persevere through if your house is on fire and you just need to grab all your stuff and your kids and get out. It’s okay if you’re not totally in the present moment in that time.
Rosin: Yeah.
Khazan: But basically what dissociation involved for her is feeling like she wasn’t really herself, like she was watching a movie of her life and she was a character in it. And this could be really strange feeling. She would feel like her house is not her own.
Britton: It had a feeling of, Oh, I’m in Willoughby’s house, like this other person.
Khazan: If she saw a picture of herself with several friends, she would feel like it was three people she happened to know instead of herself with two other people.
Britton: I thought I was like a camera that was just taking in information. Like, there was no person behind that. And I was like, Oh, my God. How did I forget that? How did I not know that I was actually a person?
Khazan: She had a hard time driving, because she couldn’t figure out where her body began and ended. This is something other people report, is driving can be really tricky when you’re dissociating. And in general, it was very hard to complete a Ph.D. and to launch an academic career when you’re just randomly leaving your body and floating above it in this weird trance state.
Rosin: Dissociation is hard to describe. And when you talk about it, it seems mild, but it’s actually kind of disturbing for the people going through the experience.
Khazan: Yeah. So one person described it to me—not Willoughby—another person described it to me as looking through a veil at your own life and just having all your feelings be really blunted, not being able to enjoy being around your family in the same way, because they don’t feel like they’re your family.
Any time you’ve been on a really bad drug trip—not to expose myself too much, but it can be very unpleasant and, like, What’s happening to me? Is this my brain now? It’s not, like, a cool journey.
Rosin: One theory of why meditation might lead to dissociation is that meditation prompts the prefrontal cortex to essentially shut off. That’s the part of the brain that controls decision making, high-level thinking, and emotions.
And without those emotions to project things onto—how you feel about your body, what you want for lunch, what happened yesterday—you can start to lose a sense of yourself. Hence the dissociation.
Another kind of related theory is that meditation is all about putting yourself in the present. Which can be good, until it’s bad.
Khazan: We map our lives out by what we’re gonna do in the future. So if you think about a toddler dropping something from their high chair, they’re trying to see how they interact with the world and what happens when they do stuff, and that’s how they learn who they are and what they can do in the world and what they should do. It’s a very rudimentary step.
But if you’re never thinking about the future, because you’ve trained your mind to think for hours only about the present moment, your sense of self kind of starts to fall away. You don’t really have a way to root yourself in the narrative of time. You don’t really know who you are anymore.
[Music]
Khazan: Meditation does have a health halo. And something I especially heard from people who went on meditation retreats—which is where you go somewhere else; you stay in a usually very austere, rustic setting; and you meditate pretty much from sunup to sundown, often with a short break where you don’t really talk to other people—people do these in order to relax or recharge.
But it’s really not like a vacation to Cancun. It’s very difficult to force yourself to think about nothing for that long. And if you’re not used to it, in particular, you can kind of start to spiral. And that happened to a lot of the people that I talked to and a lot of the people that Willoughby has interviewed: Their negative experiences started at a retreat.
Rosin: After the break, the dark side of meditation gets a little darker.
[Break]
Rosin: Willoughby Britton had started meditating so much that she was seeing literal stars, which is actually a phenomenon called nimitta in Buddhism.
Britton: N–I–M–I–T–T–A, where when you get really concentrated, you see a light and it looks like, I don’t know, a star or something. But your eyes are open. It’s obvious when your eyes are closed, but it stays there when your eyes are open. So I was having that.
Rosin: Willoughby was also still dissociating—something she was told was a new stage of enlightenment, called “riding the ox backward.” And she was told to keep meditating.
But that only made things worse. So she started interviewing meditation students and teachers about any negative side effects they might’ve experienced too.
Khazan: So some were mild, and some were pretty serious. The most common thing that happened to the people in that sample was fear, anxiety, panic, or paranoia. The second most common thing was changes in motivation, which that can sound like, Okay, that’s fine. You’re not really supposed to be motivated while you’re meditating anyway. But it’s like something where someone just doesn’t wanna do anything.
Britton: So she basically sat on her couch for two years. And she wasn’t depressed. She wasn’t sad. She just couldn’t—there was no impulse to do anything else. If you talked to her, she could speak, but it was like she needed an impulse in order to react, and if there was no input, there would be no output. And she did that for two years.
Khazan: And then there were smaller numbers, but very real people and incidents that happened, which was having delusions, which is a false belief. So that would be, like, I’m the king of the world, or, People are sending me secret messages through street signs, which I think is a real example; hallucinations, so people seeing things that aren’t really there; physical pain, rage, and suicidal ideation, which would be the most serious one. And there have been a few suicides of people who went on meditation retreats and took their own lives not long after that.
One person felt that she needed to save the world from a black-tantric plot contrived by the retreat-center staffers. Someone else began experiencing messianic visions about the need to sacrifice myself in some way for the benefit of saving mankind.
The more disturbing stories that I personally heard from people that I interviewed who had been on meditation retreats involved involuntary movements, so people who couldn’t stop rolling their heads around, for example, or moving their arms or bodies in other ways. And one person actually developed a tic in his face after meditating for a really long time, where half of his face would spasm and stick that way at random and would eventually go back to normal, but he could never really tell when it was gonna happen. That’s the kind of thing that he didn’t have before he started meditating. So something is happening on these retreats that’s prompting people’s brains into this state.
Rosin: Yeah, that’s what I wanted to ask. So these are cases of people who didn’t have these symptoms before. They weren’t diagnosed with, I don’t know, schizophrenia or a propensity to hallucinate or have delusions or anything like that.
Khazan: No. Yeah. So I think with few exceptions, most of the people that I talked to didn’t have the problems that they developed on the meditation retreat beforehand.
Rosin: Right.
Khazan: So they kind of developed new symptoms there. It can happen that it can just exacerbate whatever is already going on with you. But a lot of people did not have experiences of psychosis or other severe problems before they went on retreat. Is it possible that that was just their first manifestation of psychosis in what would become a lifelong bipolar disorder or something like that? I’m not totally sure. It could be. But they didn’t have the diagnosis before they went in.
Rosin: In 2017, after years of interviewing people about the side effects of meditation, Willoughby finally published the findings in a paper called “The Varieties of Contemplative Experience.”
There had been other papers about this topic, but this was the first modern comprehensive study of its kind.
Khazan: It kinda just was, like, the launching point.
Britton: People from all over the world started calling us and were like, Help me. I have a tic, and I can’t work because my tic is so bad. I’m in the hospital. It was just like suddenly I became known for this even though I do a lot of other things.
Khazan: But then she and other people have done further studies showing that this is indeed a thing. So most of the studies settle on a prevalence rate of about 10 percent. So about 10 percent of people who try meditation will have some sort of negative side effect.
Rosin: 10 percent?
Khazan: Yes.
Rosin: Okay.
Khazan: Yeah. And that doesn’t mean that they’ll all be delusional or dissociating. It could just be an increase in anxiety, an increase in depression, something like that where it didn’t help you. It made you feel worse.
Rosin: And did you get the sense that she was just—when you read the research and you evaluated it, did it seem to you like Yeah, she’s just stating the obvious, and there’s been a commercial reason to try and paper it over, or This has been known forever, or These are new things that are associated with meditation in the modern age? Or how did you contextualize it?
Khazan: So I did not know this at all. This was new information to me. But then when I started talking to historians of Buddhism and people who have studied meditation in a more agnostic way, I guess, they said that this is a thing that happens. And even ancient Buddhist texts warn about different—I think they’re called “wind sicknesses” that can happen when you’re meditating and demonic states that you can enter when you’re lost in meditation. And so Buddhists going back into ancient times have also experienced some of these side effects.
And it’s worth noting that in a lot of cultures, we think about it like Anyone can do it, but in a lot of cultures, it wasn’t really common for everyday people to meditate for prolonged stretches at a time. You know, it was a religious practice. And monks did it and people who were trying to reach these new layers of consciousness. It wasn’t something that you do because you had a bad performance review and you wanna get back on your game. And I think that’s part of how this maybe got lost in translation, is that this became something that is a cure-all for everything with no possible externalities. So why not do it as much as possible?
Rosin: Right. Okay. So she has then, with her research—and it sounds like you found it convincing—shifted our notion about meditation, who it’s for, how intensely people should do it. So did that slight modification or reinterpretation of meditation penetrate? Was it received by the meditation community? Did she go out there and preach it, as it were, and change the broader view?
Khazan: Good question. So my—
Rosin: I’m feeling like it’s gonna be a no. I’m feeling like it’s probably no. ’Cause I haven’t heard about it, so I feel like I’m still getting Calm ads for the Calm app, so probably no.
Khazan: So I’ve talked to a lot of other researchers about her research, trying to ask that question. And they run the gamut from I totally reject this. This is BS. No one can hurt themselves meditating—like, one person said her heart hurt that I was working on this story—to Okay, she makes some good points. Maybe schizophrenic people shouldn’t go on meditation retreats, which is what one kind of famous Buddhist scholar told me.
Rosin: So they’re thinking this applies to the outlier of the outlier. It’s not, like, a common variant. It’s just, like, the most outlier case.
Khazan: Yeah, like, if you have some sort of psychological problem, don’t go on a meditation retreat.
Rosin: Uh-huh.
Khazan: So some of them were receptive. Some of her colleagues at Brown spoke with me and said her research is good, she’s courageous, and they’ve incorporated her research into some of the newer meditation classes and the curricula and things like that.
[Music]
Khazan: But she herself felt also very rejected by a lot of people, including her former mentors.
Britton: As the research progressed and even after we published it, there was a lot of backlash. And a lot of the Buddhist teachers that I had practiced under and read their books and sort of worshiped as human beings, they got really nasty.
Khazan: Jack Kornfield, who is the guy who wrote that book that started her meditation journey, gave this quote to a psychology magazine where he said that Willoughby’s work is misleading information and over-the-top fear-mongering. And I think that was really awful for her to hear, because it is a close-knit community. And I think being rejected by someone who’s a father figure and also who set you on your religious journey can just be unusually searing.
Britton: He was, like, an important mentor to me for a while.
Khazan: Yeah, yeah. That’s upsetting.
Britton: Thanks, dad.
Khazan: Thanks, dad, yeah. (Laughs.) That is hard. That’s hard to see.
Khazan: But also, she talks about logistical issues that she started having, like getting funding for some of these studies on the risks of meditation, and the peer-reviewed comments, she would say, were always much longer than her studies about the benefits of meditation. Getting invited to conferences was tough. And when she was invited, she felt like the whole issue of whether meditation had risks was in doubt and she was there to defend this concept.
Britton: Another researcher—I gave a talk at a conference, and he basically started yelling, I don’t believe you. And I was just like, Do you think I’m lying about my data? I have recordings of people saying this. That’s a crazy thing to say to a researcher.
Khazan: So I think there were—she just started to feel a little iced out despite some of the positive reception that she got.
Rosin: And how did you integrate the new information you found out? And I’m using you as a stand-in for me and everybody else who thinks about meditation or has dabbled in meditation. Like, here we have this new body of research that is somewhat accepted but not universally accepted by the broad meditation community. So where did you land? Did you land on, I, Olga, will never go on a meditation retreat? I, Olga, will disdain my meditation teacher who tells me to just suck it up when I’m having sort of uncomfortable feelings? How did you integrate what you learned?
Khazan: Yeah. So Willoughby, where she kind of ended up, so she doesn’t meditate anymore, and—
Rosin: Oh.
Khazan: —she doesn’t teach at Brown, so she has kind of left it all behind. But that doesn’t mean that she herself is against meditation for everyone. And the rules that she gave me for how to meditate more safely or to minimize the risk of something bad happening are, I think, pretty simple and easy to follow and good.
So she basically says that meditating for more than 30 minutes a day is associated with generally more bad stuff. So people who meditate for less than 30 minutes a day, you don’t really start entering some of these states where you don’t really know who you are anymore or you see visions or things like that. You’re basically just gonna maybe get some of the upsides of meditation without delving into this dark side.
The other thing that she says is that if you are considering going on a meditation retreat, she doesn’t say don’t do it, but just try meditating in your house first. (Laughs.) Don’t go on one of these coming off of an 80-hour workweek, having never meditated, and try to make it through 10 days of silence.
The other thing she says is that different kinds of meditation can affect people differently. So people who are really anxious sometimes don’t do well with a body scan–type meditation, which is this type of meditation where you focus on different parts of your body very slowly one at a time. This didn’t bother me that much, even though I am very anxious. I kinda like the body scan. But some people have a really hard time with it.
[Music]
Khazan: And then she also says that it’s okay if you just wanna stop meditating. If it’s truly not for you and it’s not helping you and it’s making you feel worse, it’s okay to stop. I don’t know. I feel like we’re there with SSRIs. Like, if you’re on Prozac and it’s giving you a ton of side effects and you’re not feeling better, no doctor would be like, That’s part of how the Prozac works. Just keep pushing through it. But with meditation, for some reason, that hasn’t been the narrative around it. It’s more like If you don’t like it, you’re doing it wrong. And she really pushes back against that and says, If you don’t like it, maybe it’s not for you.
Khazan: Is there a particular mindfulness phrase that sets off alarm bells for you?
Britton: The only way forward is through.
Khazan: (Laughs.) Yeah.
Britton: It has to get worse before it gets better. What you resist persists. These are all sort of thought-terminating clichés. These are all ways of basically starting to undermine the ability to call something harm.
Rosin: Why do you think that Willoughby Britton completely stopped rather than adapting?
Khazan: I think there was just—she went too far, and then she had to go completely out. Hers was a true religious deconversion. And mostly people don’t deconvert from extreme zealot to slightly less extreme zealot. You know what I mean?
Rosin: Yeah.
Khazan: They usually just leave the religion entirely, which is literally what she did. I really think that she had a lot of hurt from the meditation community and their response to her research from her meditation experience itself from just this feeling of being the person who’s pointing out that meditation can be bad, which is, nobody wants to hear. I think there was just a lot of hurt that built up over time, and she just didn’t wanna do it anymore.
Rosin: Well, Olga, thank you so much for teaching us about this.
Khazan: Absolutely. Thanks for having me on.
Rosin: This is your dharma, Olga.
Khazan: This is my dharma. (Laughs.)
Rosin: Yeah, exactly.
Khazan: Namaste, y’all.
[Music]
Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West with help from Jacob Smollen. It was edited by Kevin Townsend. Michelle Ciarrocca fact-checked. Rob Smierciak engineered and provided original music. We also had music from Breakmaster Cylinder. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
Listeners, if you enjoy the show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.
I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.
The post When Meditation Has a Dark Side appeared first on The Atlantic.
