Willoughby Britton, whose research revealed some of meditation’s risks. Full article and photo: Brown Alumni Magazine.
Meditation apps promise they will help users achieve a calm state of mind. But a psychologist who has practiced, taught and studied it says some of the claims should be treated with caution.
Trained in neuroscience, Willoughby Britton threw herself into Buddhist practice as a college student, after a close friend’s suicide left her unable to stop thinking about death.
A well-worn paperback – Jack Kornfield’s A Path with Heart – became her way through it, and meditation became, in her words, a lifeline. She went on to devote her career to it.
By her own estimate she’s logged close to 20,000 hours of practice. She’s also trained as a meditation teacher, and designed a university research programme to put the benefits of meditation on a firmer scientific footing.
The first crack came from a study she never published. She’d expected to find that regular meditators slept better.
Instead, she found more disrupted sleep and more nighttime waking – and, worried the result would damage a field she believed in, she shelved it rather than write it up.
Then, working at a psychiatric hospital during her residency, she started noticing a pattern in who was coming through the door: people arriving mid-breakdown, straight from a meditation retreat.
Willoughby Britton on what her research actually found – and why meditation isn’t for everyone.
Over the next decade, Britton and colleagues interviewed more than a hundred meditators and teachers about what happens when the practice goes wrong. Here’s some of what they found:
- Around one in ten people who try meditation report some negative effect. That’s the prevalence rate Britton’s research – and later studies – converged on.
- The most common effect is a rise in fear, anxiety or paranoia – the opposite of what the practice is generally sold on.
- Some people lose the drive to do anything at all. Not sadness exactly – more a total absence of impulse, in Britton’s own case lasting close to two years.
- A smaller number experience dissociation, delusions or hallucinations – most often after an intensive retreat rather than everyday practice.
- In the rarest, most serious cases, meditation has been linked to psychosis and suicidal thinking – almost always in people with no prior history of either.
A Path with Heart – the book that started Britton’s own meditation journey, decades before she began documenting its risks.
What was happening to her
Britton experienced some of this herself. For stretches of time she felt detached in her own life – looking at a photo of herself with friends and registering three strangers, not two people and her. She had trouble driving, unsure where her body began and ended.
One theory is that sustained meditation quiets the prefrontal cortex – the part of the brain that narrates who you are, what you did yesterday, what you want for lunch.
Take that narration away for long enough, and the sense of being a continuous person can start to slip. A related theory points at meditation’s own central instruction: stay in the present.
Useful in small doses – but a life built entirely around the present has no story running through it, and a self without a story is harder to hold onto than it sounds.
A field that didn’t want to hear it
In 2017, Britton and her Brown colleagues published The Varieties of Contemplative Experience – still the most comprehensive study of meditation’s adverse effects to date.
Parts of the response were hostile. Jack Kornfield, the author whose book had started her on this path, dismissed her work in print as fear-mongering.
Funding got harder to find. At one conference, a fellow researcher stood up and accused her of lying about her own data. She eventually left both the research and the practice behind.
Not because she thinks meditation is harmful for everyone – she doesn’t. But staying inside a community that didn’t want the finding had become its own kind of cost.
Her advice now is plain: keep meditation under thirty minutes a day, since most of the trouble she documented showed up well beyond that point.
For anyone experiencing disrupted sleep or everyday functioning, NHS Talking Therapies is a good place to start. If it feels more urgent, the Support directory has crisis contacts.