In 2004, Willoughby Britton, then a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at the University of Arizona, began recruiting participants for a study (opens in new tab) that, she felt sure, would show meditation improves sleep.
Britton, a meditation teacher, was so devoted to the practice that she saw herself as a “double agent,” someone who uses science to promote meditation. Although she had grown up in a nonpracticing Episcopalian home, she’d become deeply invested in Buddhist teachings. She read meditation books in her spare time and at one point considered becoming a Buddhist nun. She was confident that meditation improved most things, including sleep; it had already improved much about her own life.
For her study, Britton split 26 participants into two groups: one that would go through an eight-week-long meditation class, and one that would serve as a control group. She brought them all into a lab to sleep overnight while sensors measured their brain waves, muscle activity, and eye movements.
But when she reviewed the results, she was dismayed to find they were the opposite of what she had predicted. The participants in the meditation group slept more fitfully, with more frequent awakenings, than those who didn’t meditate. They spent more time in “Stage 1,” the lightest sleep phase, from which people are easily roused. “Graph after graph after graph, no matter how you looked at it—number of awakenings, number of micro arousals, number of Stage 1 minutes,” Britton told me, the amount of meditation that the subjects practiced was directly correlated with worse sleep quality.
Britton wasn’t sure what had happened. Had she done something wrong? Designed the study poorly? Was the result a fluke, a random finding that didn’t mean much? Or perhaps meditators just need less sleep. At the time, promoting meditation was more important to her than scientific ethics, and she worried that publishing the results would mean “harming the dharma”—criticizing the teachings of the Buddha. So she didn’t.
On a meditation retreat not long after this, she was chatting about her study with a meditation teacher when the teacher said, “I don’t know why all you psychologists try to make meditation into a relaxation technique. Everyone knows if you meditate enough, you stop sleeping.”
On some level, Britton must have known this. At that point, she had spent years both meditating and studying the brain. Because most kinds of meditation aim to enhance concentration, the practice can act like a stimulant. And just as chemical stimulants such as caffeine and Adderall can interfere with sleep, so, too, can excessive meditation.
What else, she wondered, did meditation teachers know that they weren’t telling people? Gradually, starting with that sleep study, the tiers of thought propping up Britton’s worldview—that Buddhism is a cure-all, and that meditation was always beneficial, and could never cause harm—would collapse. Over time, she would find that meditation, a multibillion-dollar industry that is promoted as a treatment for anxiety, chronic pain, alcohol abuse (opens in new tab), addiction, and many other ailments, can sometimes, for some people, cause severe and lasting side effects: depression, anxiety, even acute psychosis. Losing the belief system that had been foundational to her life would lead her to produce a trailblazing body of research about the adverse effects of meditation, and then to found a clinical practice geared toward helping the people—a lot of them, as it turns out—who believe that meditation has harmed them.
Britton has straight blond hair, blue eyes, and a muted affect. When you say something to her, she pauses, as if considering whether or not to smile. A colleague once suggested to her that she might be autistic. “And I’m like, ‘Okay,’” she told me one day recently.
She grew up on a farm in Massachusetts with parents who believed that a person should find a problem that isn’t being solved and embrace it as their niche. Her father’s niche was fermenting waste from local businesses and selling it as compost.
Britton was, by her own description, a weird kid who spent a lot of time by herself. She was always asking strange questions like “What is looking out of my eyes?”
One day during the summer break after her junior year at Colgate University, where she was majoring in neuroscience, Britton went over to the house of her best friend, Sarah, a champion athlete at Dartmouth, and discovered her lying lifeless on the bed, a hunting rifle on the floor and a splatter of blood on the wall. Overwhelmed by the pressure of competitive sports, Sarah had taken her own life (opens in new tab).
After Sarah’s death, Britton developed symptoms of PTSD. She grew afraid of crossing the street and of driving. She didn’t like opening doors, because she feared she might find a dead body behind them. At one point, while killing rats at her bench in the National Institutes of Health lab where she worked between college and graduate school, she watched the blood drain from their eyes and wondered aloud to a colleague, “Where does it go?” “In the freezer,” the colleague responded. But Britton wasn’t asking about the rat’s body, but its life force. Where did that go?
She was reluctant to take medication, so her father sent her the book A Path With Heart, by the famous meditation teacher Jack Kornfield. She appreciated Kornfield’s explanation for why humans are so prone to rumination—“over and over we feel the familiar tug of thoughts and reactions that take us away from the present moment,” he writes—and that he offered a way out via meditation. She began meditating for half an hour to an hour each day.
In graduate school, Britton initially focused her research on the neuroscience of near-death experiences, but for her dissertation she pivoted to studying meditation, which had been so steadying for her personally.
Beyond the scientific evidence, Britton believes that meditation became popular because it’s a health hack that people can do independently, without relying on expensive medical care. The practice suggests that “underneath all of your thinking is some beautiful, basic state” just waiting to be discovered, she said. It probably helps, she added, that meditation is “this ancient thing from Asia and therefore seems more legit or real or something.”
In graduate school, Britton became a serious meditator in the Western insight tradition, which includes sitting and focusing on an “anchor,” such as one’s breath, sometimes for hours at a time. Britton describes it as an austere practice intended to “train the mind.” She molded her life around ancient Buddhist principles. When colleagues remarked on her plain appearance, she said, “Why would I adorn myself?”
Soon, Britton immersed herself in Tibetan studies. Instead of reading novels at night, she’d read dharma books. Her belief at this time, she said, was that “getting enlightened is the most helpful thing you could do for the world.” She considered dropping out of academia to move to a monastery in Asia, which would have meant renouncing her former life, taking a vow of celibacy, and living under a new name.
But she stayed in the United States and continued her academic work, while also training to teach mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), a secular meditation program developed in the ’70s by a molecular biologist named Jon Kabat-Zinn, and a related course called mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. These classes promise to help everyday people with their stress, low moods, and chronic pain; alongside daily meditation practice, they typically include some non-Buddhist teachings from psychology and literature.
Britton moved to Rhode Island to begin her clinical residency at Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School. She didn’t know anyone, and, working 12-hour days, she felt intimidated by the cutthroat Ivy League academic life. To fill the time she had to herself, she started meditating for three hours a day.
One night, after meditating on her balcony for an hour, she went back inside and noticed that her house felt like someone else’s home. A picture of her with two friends looked like a picture of three people she happened to know.
Britton decided to take a walk, and as she strolled the streets of Providence, she felt like a bird sitting on her own shoulder, watching herself. She walked into a creperie where she noticed two people arguing. When they both turned and glared at her, she thought, Oh my God, I forgot that I am a person.
What Britton was experiencing is called dissociation, a state that can occasionally be evolutionarily useful—it can help people push through a task when faced with overwhelming terrors. But according to Britton and other researchers, it can happen to extreme meditators too. Britton told me that extensive meditation can prompt the prefrontal cortex to essentially shut off the brain’s emotional centers, causing feelings to seem blunted. And without the typical emotions that we project onto objects, familiar things—our hands, our homes—can start to look foreign. Heleen Slagter, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam who studies meditation, says that part of the way the brain gives rise to our sense of self is by predicting how we will interact with the world in the future. If you spend enough time zeroing in on the present moment, as one aims to do during meditation, Slagter says, your sense of the future can start to recede—and with it your sense of self. This can produce dissociation.
Britton began dissociating a few times a week. She had trouble driving because she couldn’t sense where her body began and ended. She’d watch a sappy commercial and suddenly notice her face was wet, not realizing she had shed tears. She felt porous, like other people’s states of mind were her own, a fact that became especially disturbing when she was treating suicidal patients. The dissociation continued for six or seven years, sometimes happening during meditation, but other times at random.
When she told meditation teachers about the dissociation, she said they told her she had entered a new stage of enlightenment—that she was “riding the ox backward.” She had “seen the truth of no-self,” they said, and this was a good thing. They told her to keep meditating, which made the dissociation worse. Somehow, Britton got through her postdoc, but she wasn’t entirely functional. She didn’t date anyone for a decade.
Lauren Lancaster for The Atlantic Willoughby Britton at home in Vermont. Now retired from Brown University, she runs an organization that counsels people who have had distressing experiences during or after meditation, such as insomnia, anxiety, depression—even psychosis.
Even before she started dissociating, another layer of Britton’s worldview began to crumble after she moved to Rhode Island and was working at an inpatient psychiatric hospital as part of her residency. One day, someone came in from a meditation-retreat center in a state of florid psychosis. Three months later, another psychotic meditator came in, from the same retreat center. That’s weird, Britton thought. Do they know each other? They did not.
It’s well known that psychedelics such as LSD can spark psychotic breaks, but meditation can produce altered states of consciousness almost as powerful as those induced by psychedelics. The brain likes and expects a certain amount of input; go long enough without doing anything and the neurons might start to fire spontaneously, producing, say, flashes of light or made-up memories. Inuit people in the Arctic Circle have been known to experience a type of hysteria known as piblokto, which might be brought on by the sensory deprivation of long winters. No one seems to know why, exactly, psychedelics and meditation can both occasionally prompt psychosis, but it might have to do with the fact that both can have the effect of “rewiring your brain,” which can be a positive thing but can also mean your brain just doesn’t work (opens in new tab) the way it used to. It might become more easily influenced, for example, or impart grave significance on unimportant events.
At this point in her research, Britton’s studies were still mostly focused on the benefits of meditation, such as on how it can be helpful for depressed people (opens in new tab) and substance-abusing teens (opens in new tab). But now, when she spoke about her studies at conferences, she’d sometimes briefly mention some of the potential adverse effects of meditation. Afterward, people would corner her in the halls or in the bathroom and tell her they’d had negative experiences with meditation—everything from increased depression to psychotic breaks.
She started to wonder whether the unintended effects of meditation might extend beyond a few anecdotes and her own experience with dissociation. Centuries ago, meditation was practiced mostly by monks and other spiritual seekers in East Asia and India; it wasn’t something ordinary people did, Pierce Salguero, a historian of Buddhism and medicine at Penn State Abington and the editor of the book Meditation Sickness, told me. The point of meditation was never merely to relax or just “clear your mind” but to wholly rearrange one’s relationship to one’s thoughts. This might make sense for a Buddhist monk pursuing the great unbinding, but not for a random Brooklynite who just wants to be more productive at work. The “no-self” teachings of Buddhism can be at odds with the goals of Westerners, who are generally aiming to be their best selves, not to disconnect from themselves.
Britton began to perceive that the research on mindfulness contained a giant lacuna: its potential risks. Meditation researchers, she felt, tended not to find adverse effects among their study participants because they didn’t ask their participants about them. What’s more, many meditation studies (opens in new tab) are funded by pro-meditation organizations, and some study participants might feel pressured to say that their mental health improved after meditating. There’s no such thing as a placebo for meditation, which complicates studying its effects. When Britton looked for past studies on the risks of meditation, she found mostly isolated case reports (opens in new tab) and small studies (opens in new tab)pdf) —one of which found (opens in new tab) that two of 27 long-term meditators had had “profound adverse effects,” including confusion, depression, and severe shaking.
Britton still believed in many of the potential benefits of meditation, but she began to rethink her role as a booster for it. “It just seemed like the world does not need another meditation researcher who’s going to promote meditation,” Britton told me. “We’re like Starbucks—there’s one on every corner.” Assessing the extent and severity of possible negative effects of meditation, she decided, would be her version of a problem to solve—her niche. In 2007, she began interviewing meditators for what would become the first comprehensive study of meditation’s adverse effects.
In 2010, Britton met a religious-studies scholar named Jared Lindahl at a conference. At that point, Britton had been meditating so much that she saw stars even with her eyes open—usually either one blue star or one white star—a phenomenon that Buddhists call nimitta. Lindahl had written his dissertation (opens in new tab) on visual light experiences of this sort. Meeting him, Britton said, “was having somebody understand a part of my experience that no one else had understood.” They wrote a paper (opens in new tab) about meditation-induced light experiences together, began meditating together, and, eventually, fell in love. The year she met Lindahl, she also finally published the sleep (opens in new tab) study she’d conducted in Arizona—the one showing that too much meditation can keep people awake.
Lindahl joined her on the meditation-challenges project, for which they conducted interviews about various types of adverse effects experienced and witnessed by 60 meditators and 32 meditation teachers—a smallish sample that is nevertheless rather large for qualitative studies such as this one. They finally published their first study (opens in new tab), called “The Varieties of Contemplative Experience,” in 2017, nearly 10 years after they started it.
The most common adverse effects, reported by 82 percent of the meditators (which, importantly, included only people who had experienced an adverse effect of any kind), were “fear, anxiety, panic, or paranoia.” Second-most common were “changes in motivation or goal,” experienced by 78 percent. (Britton later talked with one meditator who sat on her couch for two years, unable to do much of anything, though most of the motivational effects reported were less dramatic.) Smaller numbers reported experiencing delusions, hallucinations, physical pain, rage, and suicidality. The effects lasted for a median duration of one to three years, and the majority of the sample indicated “moderate to severe” impairment in at least one area.
Although the study suggests that what’s most likely to cause problems is intensive meditation—sitting in silence in a retreat hall for hours or days on end—28 percent of the meditators had issues arise from their everyday non-retreat practice, and 25 percent of those in the study were meditating less than an hour each day.
Being an experienced or even expert meditator didn’t necessarily protect people. “I was like, ‘You’ve written a bunch of dharma books. How come you never mentioned this?’” she told me she asked one of the teachers. “And he’s like, ‘Well, it’s not good advertising.’” Notably, much of Britton’s sample of people harmed by meditation had graduate degrees; Britton believes that this is because high achievers tend to try to “ace” meditation, by, say, ignoring any internal sense that something might be wrong. (This struck me as similar to the endurance it takes to earn a Ph.D.: Power through years of pain and tedium for the promise of a big payoff at the end.)
As a study, “The Varieties of Contemplative Experience” had some inherent limitations. Because it recruited people who had had negative experiences, the study could conclude nothing about their prevalence. The study also couldn’t definitively prove causality—for instance, it’s possible that the meditators’ symptoms happened after meditation, but for unrelated reasons. Some Buddhists would also say that experiencing negative emotions or other bad effects is supposed to be part of the practice. But by and large, the study was well received and widely cited in the field. It acknowledged its own limitations and, if anything, respect has grown for it over time.
In part that’s because subsequent studies, some of which Britton was involved with and some not—and some of which were conducted in part by the most well-known academic boosters of meditation—have provided sturdy evidence that some percentage of meditators do experience negative effects from it, ranging from mild to severe. The frequency of bad effects found varies, but most studies, and most experts I talked with, estimate that about 10 percent of all meditators experience them, with the prevalence being considerably higher in certain situations. Richard Sears, a clinical psychologist and Zen master who’s been practicing meditation for some 40 years, has said (opens in new tab) that he thinks Britton’s research is important. “Something is happening” to these meditators who have bad experiences, “and we should be aware of it. This is opening up a conversation.”
Britton and Lindahl went on to publish many other studies on meditation’s dark aspects, including delusion-like ideation (opens in new tab) and feeling bolts of electricity (opens in new tab) traveling through the body. One study subject grew paranoid at a meditation retreat, left, and on the way home believed that street signs were delivering secret messages just to her; another became convinced that she needed to save the world from a “black Tantric plot” contrived by retreat-center staffers, threw water in her meditation teacher’s face and slapped the center’s director; a third began experiencing “messianic visions” about the “need to sacrifice myself in some way for the benefit of saving mankind” and was convinced that meditation teachers were communicating with him in secret code; a fourth reported that meditation awakened an “energy” inside him with “a will of its own” that once almost compelled him to jump from a balcony because it “wanted to lift up and fly.” None of these people had previously experienced any psychosis or been treated for mental illness.
Different types of meditation seem to have different adverse effects on the people who experience them. In one (opens in new tab) of Britton’s studies, a “noting” practice—labeling thoughts or body sensations—was more likely to trigger anxiety, whereas focusing on an anchor such as one’s breath was more likely to prompt a depressive episode. Overall, Britton has found (opens in new tab) that about one in 10 people who have meditated, even once, had an adverse effect that lasted more than a month—a rate that, were meditation a drug, would qualify as “very common” under the standard classification used for adverse drug reactions. More frequent meditation tends to increase negative effects, Britton said.
The body of evidence that Britton and Lindahl have amassed showing that meditation can sometimes cause harm is now bolstered by others’ research. A Clemson University study found that mindfulness (opens in new tab) can paradoxically increase distress. (Cultivating a hopeful outlook was more effective than mindfulness at shoring up workers’ resilience and well-being.) A 2020 study (opens in new tab) found that 3 to 7 percent of schoolteachers and university students in the U.K. who took a mindfulness class reported “unpleasant experiences”—including anxiety, distressing memories, obsessive thoughts, and physical pain; another study (opens in new tab) found that a quarter of meditators experienced “unwanted effects” such as panic attacks, nausea, headaches, dizziness, insomnia, and dissociation, though most of these effects were transitory. A German research group studying more than 1,300 regular meditators around the world found that 13 percent (opens in new tab) experienced adverse effects, including a small number who experienced “very severe effects with lasting consequences” or “extremely severe effects” that were life-threatening or required hospitalization. Yet another (opens in new tab) large survey found that a quarter of meditators, and a higher percentage of nonreligious meditators, had a “particularly unpleasant meditation-related experience.”
To some extent, this is to be expected. It would be odd if a single treatment, billed as the solution for dozens of mental and physical problems, alleviated all of these ailments without any side effects. In medicine, “if it’s not doing any harm, then it’s probably also not helping,” Nicholas Van Dam, a psychologist at the University of Melbourne who has co-authored papers with Britton, told me. Along with a team of researchers in Australia, Van Dam found (opens in new tab) that about 9 percent of meditators in their survey reported a functional impairment arising from a meditation-related problem, including sleep changes and a sense of disconnection from others. Van Dam’s team suggested that people should be warned that meditation is contraindicated for certain groups, just as certain medications should not be given to some people. Miguel Farias, an experimental psychologist at Coventry and Oxford Universities who specializes in the science of meditation, told me that the early literature on cognitive behavioral therapy, from the ’70s and ’80s, recommended against meditating during a depressive episode. “Physical activity is a wonderful antidote to depression,” Farias said. But “meditation makes you physically be more passive.” In a systematic review, Farias and his co-authors found (opens in new tab) that adverse events among all meditators were “not uncommon,” appearing in 65 percent of the studies reviewed; the most prevalent symptoms were anxiety and depression.
Some of the side effects these researchers are finding may be attributable to the fact that, in the years since Eastern traditions of meditation were introduced to the West in the 19th century, this once primarily religious ritual has expanded far beyond its original intent; its more sweeping remit may have consequences that the practice’s original Buddhist context might have prevented. But as Salguero and others pointed out, early Buddhist texts cautioned that “meditation sickness” plagued even the devout contemplatives of earlier eras: In one eighth-century Chinese writing, the Buddha warns of 50 “demonic states” in which meditators could become trapped, including hallucinations, sorrow, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and possession by ghosts.
While working on my most recent book (opens in new tab), about personality change, I wanted desperately to change one thing about myself in particular: to bring down my stratospheric level of neuroticism, the personality trait associated with anxiety and depression. When I Googled how to reduce depression and anxiety, the first drug-free thing that came up was meditation.
So I signed up for an online mindfulness-based-stress-reduction class—the kind of meditation that Britton also once taught, and which now has hundreds of classes and instructors to choose from around the country.
I found some of the class’s Buddhist teachings, though watered down for newbies, very helpful, and by the end of the eight-week class, a test revealed that my neuroticism score had, indeed, ticked down. This surprised me because I’m bad at meditating, so I would spend entire 45-minute sessions reviewing my to-do list, my worries, and other earthly matters.
What annoyed me the most, though, was the way the meditation teachers talked, which tended toward New Age–isms in passive voice. “There’s a subtle striving in what you shared,” one of the teachers responded when I asked a question about how to make “mindful walking” more restorative. “Maybe you want for it to be relaxing and not challenging. But that’s not the reason we practice. We practice for the sake of practicing and to meet with whatever is arising.”
This is what Britton calls a “thought-terminating cliché”: a profound-seeming phrase deployed by people in power to quash debate—or, as Britton put it, a way for teachers to politely convey “Shut the fuck up and do what I say.”
But many Buddhists and meditation teachers would agree with my instructor: Feeling, and observing, discomfort is part of the point. In keeping with this, a good number of the meditators whom Britton has interviewed told her that when they had brought up their symptoms with meditation teachers, the teachers dismissed them, saying things like “It gets worse before it gets better” and “What you resist persists.”Their teachers would suggest that all negative experiences are inherently growth opportunities, or that perhaps the person was meditating incorrectly. The mentality seemed to be “Try our product and if you don’t like it, then you did it wrong,” Britton said.
This attitude tracks with what I heard from a few experienced meditators who suffered acute distress while meditating. One man told me that after a long retreat, when he began experiencing spasms that would seize up half his face, his meditation teacher just told him to relax more. Two other experienced meditators I talked with, Terran Palmer-Angell and Carmen Maria Alvarez, also told me that some fellow meditators at a long retreat they attended, organized by the Center for Contemplative Research, had experienced psychotic breaks or developed tics, including one man who would rotate his head around compulsively. The teacher and one of the center’s co-founders, B. Alan Wallace, they said, told them that it was just “an involuntary movement” and nothing to be concerned about.
Palmer-Angell and Alvarez emphasized that their experiences reflected this specific retreat, and not meditation in general. Eva Natanya, the center’s other co-founder, told me that “no one has been diagnosed with a psychotic break by a psychiatrist” at the retreat since its founding, in 2020. However, she said that some “individuals develop physical tics” because of a “burst of energy” while meditating. She said these tics are sometimes referred to as “involuntary movements,” and that initially, meditators might be encouraged to “let it go and go back to meditating because that energy will work itself out by itself.” She added that she herself worked with the person with the compulsive head rotations by “asking questions and listening.” She said the center has multiple forms of support available, including meetings with herself and Wallace, psychological counseling, appointments with doctors, and physiotherapy.
Britton remembers peddling a version of this logic as an MBSR teacher herself. “I was trying to tell people ‘Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so,’” channeling Hamlet and Stoic philosophy. For a while, this idea seemed radical, and constructively life-changing: The secret to a good life is to just be okay with whatever! But then her own meditation practice started to make her think “like, Okay, but wait; I don’t feel like I exist now.”That didn’t seem like a good thing, no matter how you thought about it.
Lauren Lancaster for The Atlantic Having moved away from Buddhism, Britton now finds her own kind of tranquility in the natural world, taking care of her plants and chopping wood.
After Britton and Lindahl published the “Varieties” study, the phone in their lab started ringing. People experiencing psychosis, dissociation, tics, and other problems after meditating were asking for help. The meditators felt confused and ashamed, like they had damaged themselves. Traditional psychotherapists, they said, didn’t understand what they were going through—and neither did anyone else. How can you hurt yourself meditating?
The surge in outreach prompted Britton to open what she called Cheetah House—a play on citta, the Sanskrit word for “consciousness”—and develop it into a full-fledged nonprofit aimed at helping people who have had difficult meditation experiences. Based at first out of her house in Providence, it now serves 200 people a month, entirely over Zoom.
The Cheetah House program consists mostly of talks with experts, sessions with a “care team” member, and support groups with other meditators who have had distressing experiences. The program is priced on a sliding scale; most people pay $50 a session with a care-team member, and $100 or more for a session with Britton herself.
Many of Cheetah House’s clients have (relatively) manageable problems such as anxiety and insomnia, but Britton told me that, once or twice a month, she gets a call from someone whose family member has had a psychotic break triggered by meditation. Far more rarely, people have killed themselves (opens in new tab) after intensive meditation retreats. “When people say that I’m fearmongering,” Britton told me, “my response is, ‘We haven’t even gotten into the suicides yet.’” She recently decided to start a support group for the parents of meditators who experienced severe psychiatric symptoms after 13 families, four of whose children had already died, expressed interest.
Between half and three-quarters of Cheetah House’s clientele began having symptoms after a meditation retreat, Britton told me. People often go on retreats to try to deepen their practice or to “relax”—but these are generally not relaxing affairs. Many retreats involve waking up at dawn, eating very little, and sitting perfectly still while focusing on one’s breath for hours on end. Several days of this, Britton said, can cause neurons to become more sensitive, such that minor stimuli, like the ticking of a clock or the sound of another person’s breath, can start to feel overwhelming—as can emotions such as rage and grief. Kieran Fox, a psychiatrist at UC San Francisco and an experienced meditator, told me that retreats are “some of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my entire life. And that’s including med school.”
Among the Cheetah House clients I interviewed, retreats were a common trigger for adverse effects. One meditator, Dan Millstein, told me that after a 10-day retreat, he spent years feeling emotionally shut down and disconnected, like he was “living behind a glass wall or a veil.” Another man, Billy, who asked that I not use his last name, had been meditating regularly for a decade when a seven-day silent retreat ratcheted up his physical and mental anxiety: Shivering relentlessly, he started feeling better when he stopped meditating.
About 15 years ago, a woman who asked to remain anonymous was on her second 10-day silent retreat when she began feeling a twitch in her face that developed into an urge to roll her head around. She felt like electricity was shooting through her body. She would shake uncontrollably and at times writhe on the floor. Eventually, she was hospitalized for psychosis. She was later diagnosed with complex PTSD, and although she’s learned how to manage those symptoms, she told me that she still experiences involuntary muscle movements today. Another woman, Rebecca Fischer, told me that, more than 12 years after a retreat she attended, she still has chronic pain in her legs and back.
A good number of Cheetah House’s clients do suffer ill effects outside of retreats. In the days after meditating at home with an app, a client named Susan Small told me she was driving when “my whole sense of myself disappeared,” and she went on to experience “waves of terror” for months. A man named Eoin told me that after eight days of doing 30-minute audio meditations on his own every morning, he started feeling like a “nervous wreck,” on the edge of psychosis, and like he didn’t really know who he was, a phenomenon called depersonalization.
These people and other clients said they appreciated hearing from fellow meditators with similar experiences, and that Cheetah House helped them feel less like a “misfit toy,” as Millstein put it. They’d had a hard time finding support elsewhere, in part because one of the most common recommendations for emotional distress is to try meditating. Many of her clients, Britton said, seem relieved when she tells them it’s okay if they want to stop.
One recent New Year’s Eve, Britton hosted what she jokingly called a “parallel play” party—a kind of get-together for introverts where everyone works on a craft so they don’t have to talk much. She made margaritas, and friends and colleagues brought over magazines to cut up for collages. A few hours in, someone held up an article (opens in new tab) from the magazine Psychotherapy Networker and said, “Hey, is this about you?”
The story was, indeed, about Cheetah House, and Britton waited until everyone left to read it. One quote in particular stopped her cold:
“There should be a trigger warning for the Cheetah House website,” says renowned Buddhist teacher and clinical psychologist Jack Kornfield. “Too much of it is misleading information and over-the-top fearmongering.”
This was the Jack Kornfield, the mindfulness guru who wrote A Path With Heart, the book that had launched Britton’s journey into Buddhism. He was like a father figure and a mentor to her. Jack Kornfield thought she was fearmongering. Now all she could think was “ Thanks, Dad.” She spent a week in bed after that. (Kornfield declined to comment.)
As she continued with her research, Britton gradually started to feel iced out of the Buddhist circles that had once comprised her entire personal and professional networks. She said a Buddhist organization sent her a threatening letter after she interviewed members of their community. One time, after she gave a talk about adverse effects at a conference, Britton said a prominent meditation researcher cornered her outside and yelled, “I don’t believe you!” (The researcher denies saying this.)
Invitations to conferences started to dry up—and when she did receive them, she said, it would turn out to be an invite to debate whether meditation-related challenges even existed—“just an insult to everyone that I’ve interviewed,” she said.
“If you want to build a bridge, you can’t just be like, A bridge is gonna be so cool. You have to think about where could it possibly fail,” Britton told me. “And it’s so unpopular to be that person.” Her former postdoc, Roman Palitsky, told me that Britton suffered for pointing out the problems with the bridge. “Nobody was doing meditation difficulties before her, not seriously anyway,” he said. “And I think large parts of the meditation world kind of turned on her.”
Some of this criticism can be chalked up to differing interpretations of the science, and of how best to treat stubborn afflictions such as anxiety and depression when all of the remedies have potential downsides. “Is it better for an anxious person to be meditating or on Lexapro?” is not an easily answerable question. Fox, the UCSF psychiatrist, told me that some of the neuroscientific effects that Britton attributes to meditation, such as increased activity in the insula, can also be interpreted as a sign of better “autonomic awareness”—basically, being more attuned to the inner workings of your body—rather than a sign of trauma or panic.
But some of the criticism seems to emanate from a reflexive defensiveness on the part of meditation’s promoters, who—perhaps understandably, given the abundant benefits that have shown to be associated with the practice—don’t want to tarnish the reputation of a good thing.
I’ve noticed that people are apt to defend meditation with a zeal I haven’t witnessed since evangelical youth group in my teens. You don’t enjoy meditation? Good, you’re not supposed to enjoy it. You say it doesn’t work for you? Well, you’re just not doing it right. The answer to every problem with meditation seems to be more meditation.
This touchiness can extend to meditation researchers, most of whom are meditators themselves; academic meetings Britton attended would sometimes kick off with a meditation. Nicholas Van Dam, the University of Melbourne psychologist, told me that meditation communities tend to carry a sense that “if you say anything bad, you’re negating the good.” Farias mentioned that after he included a chapter about meditation’s risks in his book The Buddha Pill, some of his friends “were very, very annoyed,” and a couple of them told him that “we could not be publicly seen as associates.”
Some pro-meditation researchers are more evenhanded—recognizing the value of Britton’s findings even if they quibble with aspects of them. Eric Loucks, the director of the Mindfulness Center at Brown, pointed out that a person can have a challenging experience during meditation and still find their overall meditation practice to be beneficial. He also noted that several studies have found mindfulness-based interventions to have fewer side effects than pharmacological treatments, including Lexapro (opens in new tab). Still, he called Britton “innovative” and “courageous,” and said her work influenced not only his own views and scholarship—including updates to the standard MBSR curriculum, which the Mindfulness Center now maintains—but also mindfulness research as a whole. “Just looking for the good stuff,” he said, is not his goal. “We really want to know the truth.”
But several meditation teachers I interviewed did seem protective of the practice. Carol Greco, a psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh and an MBSR teacher, once co-authored a paper that aimed (opens in new tab) to “dispel the notion” that anxiety, pain, and psychosis “are adverse events due to mindfulness meditation.” She seemed chagrined that I was working on this story, writing in an email, “I would rather talk with you about how meditation can be helpful.” When Britton’s studies began coming out, she said, it “brought a heightened awareness of the potential of trauma in a person’s background and how we can create a safe environment.” But her “heart hurt” because “it felt like it was making mindfulness and meditation seem like it’s really dangerous and really bad.” She told me that in her two decades as a meditation teacher she’s never seen a serious adverse event like psychosis or dissociation.
A few of the scholars I interviewed who defended meditation acknowledged some of Britton’s findings, at least implicitly. Richard Davidson, a University of Wisconsin at Madison professor of psychiatry and psychology who is a well-known mindfulness researcher, told me that, as far as relaxation techniques go, meditation is fairly benign. He believes that for most people there’s a greater risk of harm from not meditating than there is from meditating, because the physical and emotional benefits of the practice are so robust, and he’s co-authored studies (opens in new tab) supporting that claim. But, he added, people with serious psychiatric disorders should meditate only under the guidance of a mental-health professional who also happens to be a meditator—advice that would probably come as news to the many thousands of people who meditate by using apps at home.
The Buddhist scholar and teacher Gil Fronsdal told me that although he doesn’t think meditation causes adverse effects, retreats may exacerbate preexisting psychological problems. (Britton said adverse effects can crop up even for people without prior mental-health conditions.) Fronsdal recalled one meditator who gradually lost touch with reality after a monthlong retreat: She stalked Fronsdal’s wife, became homeless, and spent hours in a medical-law library researching how it was that Fronsdal had managed to exchange his wife’s spine for hers. Having schizophrenic people on meditation retreats has been “one of my most challenging situations as a teacher,” he told me. He said that people with psychosis shouldn’t go on meditation retreats, and neither should people who are “hyper-anxious”—a quality that described me when I sat for a daylong MBSR retreat for my book.
The substantial and sometimes hostile pushback against her work has made Britton hypervigilant. Maybe excessively so: To my eye, she sometimes detects criticism where there isn’t any. When I asked her to describe what it was like working at Brown’s largely pro-meditation research group while publishing study after study finding that meditation can be risky, she wouldn’t say much more than that the situation could be “tense.” (Loucks, the Mindfulness Center’s director, denied that there was tension.) “When it comes to somebody choosing their religion or your friendship,” she told me at one point, “they will choose their religion every time.”
Starting in the early 2020s, Britton and Lindahl struggled to find funding to continue studying the downsides of meditation; they said an organization once rejected their proposal for a grant on “transformative experiences” for being too critical of religion. She says that when they submitted papers to academic journals, the peer-review comments for the papers focusing on the risks of meditation were “six times longer” than for those focusing on the benefits.
Equanimity is a cornerstone of Buddhist thought; Britton herself had repeated the words to rooms full of meditation students many times: “Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” But she was starting to think that, actually, some things are good and other things are bad. Sure, you can just accept everything, but sometimes you shouldn’t. She had made a big contribution to the field; it seemed to me like she was feeling done with Brown, with academia, with living in Rhode Island, with all of it.
When Britton first met Lindahl, he persuaded her to start taking one day off a week, something she had not done in two decades. Then it was two days. Then she stopped teaching in the summers. Soon, they were scouting for a plot of land in Vermont they could move to. They now live in an off-the-grid cabin in the woods, where a botanical drawing greets visitors on a wall by the entryway. What is the human soul, the caption reads, but a claw pointing back to the forest?
Britton is consulting on a research project with her former postdoc, Palitsky, who is now at Emory University and running a much larger, longitudinal study of meditation-related challenges. This summer, both she and Lindahl officially left Brown. They’re enjoying exploring “other sections of the bookstore,” as she put it. Running Cheetah House takes up the bulk of her time now.
Britton stopped meditating in 2017, around the time she published the “Varieties” study, and she “began to have a less romantic and more nuanced view of Buddhism.” Now she finds her own kind of tranquility in the natural world, taking care of her plants and chopping wood.
It’s important to emphasize that neither Britton’s research nor her work with Cheetah House clients has turned her against meditation per se; it’s just attuned her to the importance of doing it safely. Meditating for longer than about 30 minutes a day tends to be associated with more negative side effects, she said, and certain types of meditation can be a poor fit for certain people. (For instance, some anxious people shouldn’t do a “body scan” type of meditation, because they are already too focused on their body.) People considering extended meditation retreats should try meditating for a few hours at home first, to be sure they can tolerate long stretches. And those who experience challenges with their meditation practice should consider changing the kind of meditation they’re doing, modifying their practice, or just not meditating. “Treat meditation like any other relationship,” she said. “If you feel like shit with that person, maybe it’s time to break up.”
Spending so much time with Britton made me want to revisit my own adventures in Buddhism and what I had found valuable about it. Mostly, I found old notes about how much I hated meditating: “This is the part of the book where I’m not having a lot of fun”; “I would literally rather give birth than do nothing for 45 minutes”; “I’m just an anxious immigrant who fears you can mindful yourself onto a park bench.”
But I also came across some teachings that I did appreciate, and which I’m going to oversimplify here because I’m not a Buddhist. Among them: The Buddha taught that people should pursue a “middle way” (opens in new tab) between decadent indulgence and rigid austerity—to not live mindlessly, but to not be so ascetic as to immiserate yourself. “Avoiding these two extremes,” one sutta (opens in new tab) reads, “the Realized One understood the middle way of practice.” Maybe he was onto something.
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