Waking up reviewed

Sam Harris is a well-known American writer and broadcaster and one of the so-called “New Atheists” – a loose grouping that included Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens – who made his name arguing against organised religion in the 2000s.

Harris launched his Waking Up app in 2018, building on the success of his 2014 book of the same name. He said he built the app he wished he’d had when he started meditating roughly thirty years ago – something that could teach the substance of contemplative practice without asking anyone to sign up to Buddhism, or anything else.

The pitch is unapologetically intellectual. Where most meditation apps sell calm, Waking Up sells a shift in “worldview.” There’s 600 hours of guided practice and philosophical “Theory” content, spanning traditions from Vipassana to Stoicism.

It’s quite expensive at just over £120 a year, although there is a seven-day free trial. The sign-up page does say ‘Waking up is free for anyone who can’t afford it”. But I tried to apply for this ‘scholarship‘ and didn’t get a response.

Here’s some of what’s worth knowing before deciding whether it’s worth the asking price:

1. The App Store rating sits at 4.9 out of 5 from over 43,000 reviews – though subscription-app ratings tend to skew toward people who already paid and are glad they did.
2. Independent reviewers rate the “Theory” content as the app’s strongest feature, praising its intellectual rigour, while flagging the introductory course as too advanced for true beginners.
3. A pre-registered study found only around 1 in 10 people who completed the course met strict criteria for having actually learned the app’s central skill – “nondual mindfulness” – though nearly half of that smaller group called it the most important thing they’d ever learned.
4. Cheetah House, the support organisation run by meditation researcher Willoughby Britton, reports people arriving in genuine distress after specific content on the app – material on the self as illusion, drawing on Douglas Harding’s “Headless Way,” is the most commonly cited trigger.
5. The app now includes a course called “The Dark Side of Meditation,” a direct conversation between Harris, Britton and her research partner Jared Lindahl about the very risks Cheetah House describes. This two-hour conversation is also on YouTube.

An app that argues with itself

That last point is worth exploring. Harris has put the researcher raising the alarm directly in front of his own audience, in his own product. Whether that resolves the underlying tension is a separate question.

Cheetah House’s concern is over Waking Up’s content on the illusory nature of the self – material drawn largely from Douglas Harding’s “Headless Way.” (I’ll produce a post on Harding’s report in the near future.)

One independent critique described the Waking up app as arriving without adequate “health warnings” – even though it sits, unrestricted, inside a thirty-day course aimed at complete beginners. The self-as-illusion material is exactly the territory covered in the Dark side of meditation article.

None of which makes the app worthless, or the claims false – the study above suggests it genuinely teaches something real to a meaningful minority of people who stick with it.

But it’s a useful case study in what “no beliefs, ideology, or spiritual commitments required” can still cost someone, financially or otherwise, and worth going in with eyes open rather than assuming secular automatically means safe.

If any of this – the self dissolving, panic, a persistent sense of detachment from your own life – sounds like more than curiosity, that’s worth taking seriously. NHS Talking Therapies is free, evidence-based, and self-referral in most of England, no GP needed. If it feels more urgent than that, the Support directory has crisis contacts.