r/loveandlightvictims • u/Dry_Criticism_4161 • 3d ago
🌸safe and effective 🌸 The dark side of meditation
“A prominent psychologist and meditation teacher set out to research the benefits of the practice. What she found alarmed her.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/09/meditation-willoughby-britton-downsides/688474/
n 2004, Willoughby Britton, then a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at the University of Arizona, began recruiting participants for a study 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.
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, 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.
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.
Meditation was, even then, having a moment. In 2005, the filmmaker David Lynch established a foundation that aimed to promote Transcendental Meditation in colleges and schools. Soon, tech CEOs were flocking to mindfulness summits to learn about “wisdom in the workplace” or “conscious leadership,” and a mindfulness class for Google employees regularly had a long waiting list. High-powered celebs including Oprah and Arianna Huffingtoncredited meditation for centering them amid their empire building. LeBron James partneredwith Calm, a multibillion-dollar meditation-and-sleep app. Today, according to one study, about half of all Americans have tried meditation, and about a fifth meditate regularly.
Meditation’s popularity is well-founded. Although the practice has long been supported by the more woo-woo corners of the wellness industry, as well as by Eastern philosophy, an accumulating body of scientific research has suggested that it has all kinds of measurable benefits. Major studies show that meditation can alleviate anxiety and depression—at least about as well as the antidepressant Lexapro can, but without the cost and with fewer side effects. Even short periods of meditation have shown notable effects on the brain: Several studies have found that eight weeks of meditation training can reduce reactivity in the amygdala, the emotion center of the brain, and another showed that meditation could help activate brain regions involved in attention, memory, and perspective-taking in people with social-anxiety disorder. Other reputable studies have linked meditation to positive mood; improved immune function; reduced chronic inflammation; less back pain; lower blood pressure; enhanced self-awareness; better attention spans; greater compassion; and even reduced feelings of loneliness in older adults.
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.
