How Dark is the Dark Side of Mindfulness?

The Atlantic has an article entitled The Dark Side of Mindfulness. I don’t disagree with the points it makes but I would like to contextualize them. The article is focused on the work of the scientist Willoughby Britton, whose career I’ve followed. I think she is a good scientist and worth taking seriously.

Even though the article is behind a paywall, there is enough visible before it fades out to note that it does not necessarily help with sleep. In fact, meditation may have a negative impact on sleep. I’ll start there. I attended a mindfulness research conference some years ago during which Britton presented some of her findings. At the conference, she said the only meditation she’d found that helped with sleep with a “body scan” meditation in which one progresses through the body relaxing various body parts. The body scan meditation is, in fact, very similar to the Progressive Relaxation method created many years ago by Dr. Edmund Jacobson, who wrote about how relaxing the muscles can help with sleep. Other types of meditation, not so much. Personally, I find that the meditation to a certain extent substitutes for sleep. Probably that’s because, even without snoring or my head nodding, I may be having microsleeps during a meditation that are somewhat refreshing. I’ve taken to limiting meditations in the evening because I find it interferes with me from feeling drowsy at my target bedtime. But even if meditation impacts sleep metrics negatively, it’s not clear that these worse metrics lead to negative life outcomes. That would be very difficult to determine, but one conclusion might be that if you’re not sleeping well, consider cutting back on meditation, especially in the latter part of the day.

Although the article does describe benefits of meditation, it also describes a more serious negative side effect called disassociation that Britton experienced.

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.

—

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.

I’ve never experienced disassociation, but returning from a seven-day silent retreat, listening to a music CD in the car, I did find myself connecting to the emotions in the songs in a much stronger way that usual and in fact, tearing up. I also watched a movie later that night and started bawling, which was very unusual. So the retreat did do something to my emotional centers, though I experienced it as a curious phenomenon rather than a negative one, and it disappeared after a night’s sleep.

I’ve long been suspicious of the Buddhist concept of Anattā, or non-self. It’s often describes as meaning the self is in illusion—an illusion that can be seen through after extensive meditation. It seems quite clear that extensive meditation messes with the sense of self, but whether that’s actually a positive is questionable. The experience of us having a body is also an illusion, in some sense, because our felt sense of the body is a construction of the brain. But without being able to sense our body, we would not survive.

These negative side effects mostly impact meditators who do hours of meditation a day. But not in all cases. A study by Britton which was not a random sample found problems even among people who were not intense meditators (because of the sampling method, the percentages shouldn’t be taken too seriously, but the fact that they are not zero percent is food for thought).

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.

I lead meditations for the Spiritual Naturalists and have been leading meditations there and elsewhere for over fifteen years. Our meditations run for twenty minutes, and are followed by a discussion. In that time, I haven’t had people report negative side effects of the meditations other than, in some cases, anxious or self-critical thoughts. It’s possible that people might have had a more serious reaction and just not shared it with the group, but more likely, twenty minutes, or thirty minutes, which is the length of meditations I lead with another group, is not that challenging, if done once a day.

The article itself suggests that 30 minutes may be the sweet spot, at least for avoiding problems. Per Britton, “Meditating for longer than about 30 minutes a day tends to be associated with more negative side effects.” Meditation can be powerful. Be careful not to overdo it. If it’s causing problems, you can stop, rather than trying to power through them.

If you are interested in joining the Spiritual Naturalist Community for a meditation, announcements can be found on our meetup page or our member newsletter. Sign up for a free membership here. And if you have had negative side effects from meditation, I’d be interested if you were to describe them in the comments below.

__________
Our November Online Conference

The Spiritual Naturalist Society warmly invites you to Convergence, a free two-day online gathering dedicated to exploring the many ways people find meaning, wonder and ethical inspiration within a naturalistic understanding of the world. Our aim is to converge some of the most promising visions for the future of secular meaning-making in one place. This event is designed for the widest possible spectrum of participants — from longtime practitioners to curious newcomers — who share an interest in forms of spirituality grounded in nature, human experience and the realities revealed by science. For more information and to register, visit our conference page.

__________