Meditation is dangerous
55David Gross
7Kaj_Sotala
53romeostevensit
16lsusr
4Chris_Leong
31Jonas Hallgren
5Michael Roe
3Michael Roe
2Jonas Hallgren
4Michael Roe
2Algon
26Taylor G. Lunt
1[anonymous]
1Taylor G. Lunt
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2joseph@mblrk.com
9jenn
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8lsusr
10Tomás B.
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10Kaj_Sotala
1[anonymous]
3lsusr
7Gordon Seidoh Worley
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6avturchin
4Kaj_Sotala
3skybluecat
3Michael Roe
2Phaedrus
2Chris Lakin
2ChristianKl
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1caotica
1Nicolas Macé
1[anonymous]
1Shankar Sivarajan
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5Karl Krueger
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Things I'd like to know:
- What is the baseline things-going-tits-up-mentally rate for people similarly situated to those who take on meditation, and how does that compare to the rate for people who begin to meditate? There's a smell of "the plural of anecdote is data" about this post. People at high risk for mental illness can go around the bend while meditating? Well, they can go around the bend watching TV or chatting with Claude too. How much more dangerous is meditation than the typical range of alternative activities?
- There's bad, and then there's Bad. Ask a reformed alcoholic whether there were any negative side effects of giving up alcohol, and they'll tell you it was a bit like an anal probe of the soul with the devil's pitchfork for a month or two at least. Is that a cautionary tale that should steer you away from sobriety, or just par for that otherwise worthy course? Some of the practitioners of meditation (esp. in the Buddhist tradition) think we're most of us addicts to the chimerical delights of the senses, and that of course it'll be a struggle to overcome that. FWIW.
- Is this like psychedelics, where if you take them in the context of a long-standing ritual practice with lots of baked-in wisdom, things will probably go okay or at least they'll know how to give you a soft pillow to land on if you get too far out there; but if you take them in some arbitrary context there's no telling how it'll turn out? How do outcomes look for people who meditate in an institutional context with feedback from a seasoned veteran vs. those who meditate based on e.g. enthusiastic blog posts?
Not saying you're wrong, but answers to things like this would help me know what to do with your observations.
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1How do outcomes look for people who meditate in an institutional context with feedback from a seasoned veteran vs. those who meditate based on e.g. enthusiastic blog posts?
I seem to recall hearing one meditation teacher mention that an ironclad rule for his retreats is that every participant must talk to a teacher every two days, so that the teachers can check in on whether anything concerning might be happening before it gets out of control. That would suggest that regular feedback helps keep things safe, but of course it doesn't tell us what the relative outcomes are like.
Another issue is that anyone can claim to be competent at teaching meditation, and beginners can't really evaluate how true those claims are. And I've heard claims that, e.g., the staff at Goenka vipassana retreats isn't very well trained at dealing with emergencies, despite what you'd hope. (I've never been to a Goenka retreat so can't evaluate this personally.)
Something I don't always see mentioned: one of the effects of meditation, like psychedelics, can be getting crystal clear feedback about your life situation. If you're in a bad situation that you have a limited ability to do anything about, kicking out the supports for some of your coping strategies can go very badly. I've witnessed this first hand. An intensive practice is best undertaken when life conditions are good, with plenty of slack.
First and foremost, yes changing your brain in major ways is dangerous and you should be careful with what you're doing. I do think that there are safe ways of doing it and that it is dependent on the teachings that you follow and I go into more depth below. The main takeaway is basically that doing loving kindness and cultivating positive mindstates is a prerequisite to doing concentration practice if you're in a bad state of mind.
I'm basically repeating the takes of my teacher who's a thai forest tradition monk for like 30 years with some degrees in the background. He's been a bit of a rogue and tried out a bunch of different meditation practices and the thing that he recommends to people who might be at risk for negative experiences is awareness practice and loving kindness practice and I think this makes a lot of mechanistic sense. (Do take this with a grain of salt but this is my current best theory and I've not seen anyone go astray with this advice.)
The basic problem of general meditation is that it is focused on concentration. This is so that your mind can stabilise yet higher concentration states can generally lead to an amplification of existing emotions which can be a large problem if you have lots of negative emotions. This isn't necessarily the case for awareness practices and loving kindness practice as they induce different mental states for you. They're not about intensifying experience and only letting a small amount through, they're about expanding and seeing more. (see more on this model here)
So the advice is, if you're worried about the downside you can most likely safely do things like: Yoga Nidra, Loving Kindness practice or awareness practice as it is unlikely that you will be absorbed into negative states of mind even though you're coming from a worse state (since it's not absorption based!). It is generally the most direct path to healing and acceptance (imo) and it is what has helped my mother for example the most as she's a lot more calm and accepting of her current illnesses. My guess is that you could probably do up towards an hour or two a day of this practice without any problems at all. (especially yoga nidra and loving kindness practices)
A bit more detailed on sub points:
1. On the feasibility of there being different types of practice:
I did some research on this before and there's a bunch of interesting contemplative neuroscience out on the differences in activation in brain areas for meditation. Different brain areas are activated and this is something that is also mentioned in altered traits which is a pop science book on the science of meditation. (I did a quick report for a course a while back on this here which might have some interesting references in the end, the writing is kinda bad though (report) (here are the links that are most relevant in the underlying papers: paper 1, paper 2)
2. One of the main concerns later on in the practice is "The Dark Night of the Soul". According to my teacher this is more of a concept within practices that are based on the burmese tradition and through retreats that are focused on "dry" (meaning non-joyful) concentration like goenka vipassyana retreats and daniel ingram's books. One of the underlying things he has said is that there's a philosophical divide between the non-dual and theravadan styles of practicing about whether you "die" or whether your experience transforms into something that it already was (returning to the unborn) which can be quite important for changing your frame of self.
Also final recommendation is to do it alongside therapy for example something like ACT as it will then also tie you to reality more and it will allow both western and eastern healing to work on you in tandem!
Hopefully this might help somewhat? The basic idea is just to cultivate joy and acceptance before training your amplification abilities as positive emotions would be what is amplified instead.
1Data is scarce here, but I think yoga nidra is one of the practises under suspicion, so I would not be hasty to assure people it’s safe.
I have done yoga nidra myself, and it seemed fine.
On the other hand: it feels adjacent to lucid dreaming, which, probably, has a risk of precipitating psychosis in people who are vulnerable to it.
1To explicate the connection between yoga nidra and lucid dreaming …
Yoga nidra feels like doing a wake induced lucid dream, except you don’t quite cross the threshold into the sleep state.
I think it's a fair suggestion that is adjacent, I do think the mechanisms are different enough that it's wrong though. Some of what we know of the mechanisms of dreaming and emotional regulation through sleep are gone through here (Dreams, Emotional regulation) and one of the questions there is to what extent yogic sleep is similar to REM sleep.
For your lucid dreaming angle, I would say the main dangerous thing is the inhibition of bodily action that leads to this spiral of anxiety when you can't move? (Sleep paralysis)
I'm like ~70% (50-90%) certain that this does not occur during yoga nidra and that yoga nidra is a technique that actually helps you if you've had these problems before.
I also read this book to get the vibe of it, it doesn't have the best epistemic rigour but the person writing it has a psychiatry practice specifically focused on yoga nidra and one of the main things that this person claims it helps with is PTSD and sleep related problems. I think it has a specific activation pattern that can be very healing if done correctly, if you're worried you can probably find a ACT psychologist or similar to do the practice with but I do think it is one of the safer practices you can do.
I am not personally worried about it; I don’t think I’m in the at risk group.
From the people I know in the lucid dreaming community, I have just a couple of reports of people with diagnosed schizophrenia who tried lucid dreaming and it made their symptoms worse. To which the general view seems to be: if it makes your symptoms worse, don’t do it. I don’t have adequate evidence on whether yoga nidra is safe or not; I think a reasonable approach would be to use caution and stop if you start getting bad symptoms.
Also personally, I don’t find sleep paralysis to be a big deal. I know some people are really freaked out by it. But sleep paralysis isn’t the actually risky thing that’s the concern here (the actually risky thing is psychotic symptoms that persist)
1This is helpful. Details about specific traditions and their relative dangers is what I hoped to see. Hard for me to verify, of course, but that's just what it's like when you're out of your depth.
For every person who goes crazy from meditation, there must be 100 people like me, who tried it for a while, had a somewhat unsettling experience, and decided to stop. Took me a week or two to feel normal again. I suspect the effect size of what I experienced was "very small" with regard to the kinds of unusual experiences you can have meditating. There are definitely risks to meditation. I have decided it's not for me for now, but may return to it in the future (with guidance from a teacher/temple).
Have you done any research on the prevalence of meditation-related mental problems in countries where it is a tradition? Like Thailand or Myanmar.
That seems like it should be instructive in disentangling
- Meditation is not dangerous at all and its just crazy people going crazy for normal reasons while meditating at around the % baserates would suggest
- Meditation is dangerous if done incorrectly, or without the right context and cultural support
- Meditation is just always dangerous, at least if you are at high risk for mental problems.
I've done a fair bit of sutta-reading, and I can't remember reading that much about mental problems coming with meditation (or phenomena described in a way where it seems like they'd be describing something we'd refer to as mental problems). But they are obviously a biased source.
Anecdotally, I've done a fair bit of serious meditation, and know many others, and haven't had any experiences with people going crazy. I've had crazy experiences and know many people who've had crazy experiences, but no-one who permanently lowered their functioning, or even lowered their functioning for more than a day. I've had one experience with a guy who meditated a lot and kind of lost motivation to do anything career wise. This seems like it could be quite bad. But he seems super happy. It's hard to say whether this is actually bad or not. I feel the cases I see/hear of where this happens, often the person in question was pursuing eg their career for dumb reasons. Eg they weren't doing it for authentic reasons and they didn't really enjoy it, but they were trying to appease their parents, or they had some complex where they think their life is worthless if they can't become a multimillionaire, and like they're currently not a multimillionaire and they feel extreme anguish about it.
I think this is an interesting take. People who base their identity on constructs ripe for demolition will self-destruct more rapidly when they really get down to business. This collapse into craziness scenario seems like a model-of-self coming to terms with reality-of-self, which like many brave acts can be considered dangerous, but this isn't really about meditation.
I can imagine the same breakdown might occur if this structurally compromised person entered a profound relationship that required a great deal of self-actualisation, embarked on a high pressure role that visibly overextended their capability, or otherwise took their ego out of its comfortable Platonic cave and exposed it to the cold light of the universe.
Depending on the situation, disassembly and reassembly of the compromised model while unpleasant for all involved should be preferable to living the remainder of days avoiding reality. I continue to opt into this and think it is more dangerous not to. Think of the scars as kintsugi.
scott citing gupta:
Living in the condition of having no internal dialogue, no flow of thoughts, no flow of images, just Smack, into the present is quite an abrupt thing. For the first couple of weeks I thought I’d gone completely mad. Oh my god I’ve totally broken myself. I’m fucked. And I discovered that I could still go to work, and I could still socialise with people and I could cook and get through all the basic things of life. Nobody outside of me seemed to notice any particular change in my behaviour, even though I was lost in this rapturous state of total absorption with the world. Wow, this is amazing, woah! And then life continued.
I’d run right off the edge of every reality map that I had because if you go to a psychologist or a psychiatrist and say, by the way I did really a lot of meditation and my internal dialogue has totally stopped. Any ideas what I do now? Nobody ever winds up there in the West because nobody does enough meditation, at least they don’t do it right.
scott's response:
Actually, sometimes people do come to psychiatrists with these kinds of complaints. I usually try to explain what’s going on, and they usually tell me they were just meditating because someone said it relieved stress, and nobody warned them they could actually have mystical experiences, and this was not what they signed up for. Symptomatic treatment and a hard ban on further meditation successfully de-mysticize most of these people, and they are able to go back to their regular lives. I assume if there’s an afterlife some sort of cosmic wisdom deity is going to be very angry at me – but hey, I’m just doing my job.
Funny how different people react so differently to the same experience.
There is also a third option: I can stop my internal dialogue for a few minutes, but to keep it stopped I need to stay vigilant because it tries to restart at random moments. The first time this happened, I was happy that I have succeeded at an experiment, but I didn't feel anything ecstatic or mystical or scary. It was like doing my first successful pull-up after a few months of exercising: cool, goal accomplished, check, let's find something else to do. I don't see any harm in doing so, but I also don't see any benefit in trying to stop it permanently (and maybe it's actually useful for something, who knows). It is an interesting experience to see that you don't need the internal dialog (thoughts apparently can spontaneously pop up in your consciousness fully formed, no need to sculpt them verbally), but it's not that shocking for someone already familiar with the theories of Julian Jaynes or Peter Watts.
(I guess the normies are simply freaked out whenever they have a weird experience, unless they are accompanied by a high-status person who assures them that it is weird in a good, i.e. high-status way. Gupta had that kind of high-status guru, and a culture that supported him, Scott's patients did not.)
If meditation is producing some negative effect, stopping the meditating usually stops the problem.
The "usually" is really imortant. If the problem you're dealing with is altered states of consciousness, then yeah, stopping the meditation ought to solve the problem. But if you're dealing with the fruits of significant insight then too bad; there is no going back.
I have had the experience of having what felt to me like very good conceptual ideas and then just forgetting them and mourning the loss. Assuming they were actually good, why are insights into the self so impossible to forget? Could one not gain access to the part of the brain that associates and do some violence to those parts of yourself that bring particular pathological truths to mind?
Insight doesn't act on the conceptual level, it acts on the perceptual level. It's like noticing that you've got a rock in your shoe. Doing violence to the part of your brain that notices the rock in your shoe is just going to draw more attention to that area of neural activity.
Maybe another analogy would be something like learning to identify sounds and words in your native language. Once you learn that, everything you hear in your language will be automatically parsed into its components. Sure, there are conditions in which that might get disrupted or in which it doesn't work perfectly (like mishearing an unfamiliar word), but overall, it's not going to go away.
2But if you're dealing with the fruits of significant insight then too bad; there is no going back.
What do you mean by "significant insight"?
"Insight" in this context is a technical jargon referring to what happens when you get direct perception into the process of your mind constructing what seems to be reality, but is actually just conscious simulation of it.
By "significant insight", I mean enough insight that [1] you're passed a point of no return and [2] the insight affects your regular day-to-day experience of life in a significant way.
Yes. This is something I frequently try to emphasize when someone is meditation curious but not already committed to doing it. I say that for most people it's great, but some people have trouble, and if you're in the category of people who might have trouble (especially people with high risk of schizophrenia), then you should avoid doing it.
Of course it's dangerous. If it wasn't, then it couldn't be helpful. Meditation allows you to break things, and the effects will be felt as positive if you break something unwanted, and harmful if you break something wanted. It's not that there's good and bad consequences which are opposites, there's merely consequences which are perceived as positive or negative.
I might end up depressed if I break a core belief which is currently protecting me. I might also feel like a weight has been taken off my shoulders if I break a self-imposed limitation which has overstayed its welcome, or if I manage to accept something which is bothering me (collapsing an internal conflict to either side).
If I meditate too hard, I might break an aspect of my perception. My sense of self, my desires, some perceived duality, or the ability to differentiate living and dead objects. Meditation is a blunt tool, you can't get specific outcomes unless you know what you're doing.
I'd like to say more, but I can't. Everything I read about meditation is ambiguous or contradictory. Even reading many different sources, I cannot synthesize it into anything useful or specific. I'd love to know if somebody else knew anything certain (does meditation make one more sensitive, more numb, more grounded, more distant?)
Edit: Wait, some kinds of meditation (which?) can quiet the mind. But even this effect could manifest in different ways which I can't tell apart.
We can create a list of simple obvious advises which are actually sometimes bad:
Be vegeterian – damage to B12 level etc
Run – damage to knees and risk of falls
Lose weight – possible lose of muscle
Be altruistic - damaging addiction of doing good and neglect of personal interests.
The r/streamentry wiki page on Health & Balance in Meditation also has some advice and resources.
Disclaimer: I may not be fully objective but have been personally harmed by meditation and heard of very credible cases of people being harmed.
Some objections to some traditional advice:
What if the tradition or teacher you got into was abusive/manipulative and you didn't know it, and it turns out you don't have the strength or skills to navigate it? (too many to list here)
Alternatively, what if you want to practice alone and cannot accept fully traditional teachings because of fear of abuse/ideological differences (like if you don't want to lose rationality, don't want to see mundane life as meaningless without religion, etc)?
What if you are/will be at risk of mental illnesses and didn't know it before getting into a habit of meditation? (Maybe you came from a background where mental diagnosis and therapy were uncommon, stigmatized or inaccessible, some unfamiliar or estranged extended family member had some undiagnosed issues before some modern diagnosis was a thing, or you or a relative has always been kind of weird but appears normal enough and you never though too much about it, or you had a change in life circumstances or health that increases stress, maybe your career/circumstances would require higher standards of functioning which is incompatible with some meditation effects like lack of motivation that might have been fine in a typical person, or you had a new condition - long covid anyone? - or decided/needed to take some medication or substances that affect the brain in some ways that could interact with meditation... )
What if, even if you were not at particularly high risk, you had some concerning/risky experiences, and were too accustomed/addicted to meditation to stop it in time? Or your teacher/peers didn't recognize your symptoms as concerning because of their past experiences of successfully navigating it with more/different meditation, given individual differences? Or they were just being intentionally or unconsciously manipulative due to selection bias, as more devoted students make them look more successful and more credible to you in the first place (would you seek out/have sought out as a beginner, an unknown teacher with little fame and influence, whose students are all seemingly normal mundane people who don't devote lots of time to meditation/their spiritual tradition)? Or the issues that came up were too personal/vulnerable/traumatic, and you didn't dare to share it honestly with any teacher figure, because you were not that personally close to them/afraid of abuse/feel the group was somewhat culty or high-demand and don't want it to be used against you in some way? Or your teacher wasn't sure what to do about your issues, as you (as a possibly rationalist kind of person) are not like their typical student, or your issue was idiosyncratic enough that they misjudged? What if instead of/in addition to recommending that you stop meditation immediately, the teacher recommends that you change something about your beliefs/values/lifestyle (or less charitably, blame your negative experience on your not being spiritually mature enough/not fully devoted to their religion or guru), and you (as a possibly rationalist kind of person or someone with beliefs and values not typical in a certain spiritual meditation community) cannot understand/accept/internalize/execute their advice? Or your teacher didn't have time for you, or you didn't think to mention it or didn't insist on emergency exit before it's too late, because of fear of losing community support or some spiritual/ritual goals were on the line?
What if, even though you or your teacher immediately stopped your potentially harmful meditation practice, the harm didn't stop? Maybe you had some serious acute symptoms that simply happened too quickly with little signs beforehand. Maybe you had some physical/psychosomatic symptoms that don't disappear on its own after you stop the offending meditation and turned out hard to treat. Maybe you would have been fine if you had let yourself stabilize and recover on your own, but you couldn't (because you were institutionalized and/or misdiagnosed - in some anecdotes, spiritual or meditation psychosis may react atypically and negatively to psychiatric medications like certain antipsychotics - and given medications that didn't help and had confusing side effects and actively made it harder for you to stabilize and think through what had happened; or because you had financial/personal/relational/familial difficulties as a result and lost your support and safety net and reality check etc). Maybe you eventually stabilized and were as competent as before and maybe even became stronger as a person, but a critical opportunity in relationships/family/health/finance/career etc had already been missed permanently.
What if, you are lucky to never have these issues above, but you simply enjoy meditation so much (or find a mundane career much less attractive in comparison, or just lose ambition and motivation) and decided to devote your life or most of your free time to it, neglecting your job/relationships/financial security etc in ways you would not endorse or would regret? What if, like someone else commented, it turned out you had some hidden internal conflict or suppressed desire to have a different life/career (that you wouldn't have known was there without intensive therapy/self-analysis - and you might not have had access to that), one that is infeasible, less likely to succeed, or less able to contribute to your life goals, your loved ones or society? (It's suspicious how many intensive meditators end up wanting to have a meditation or spirituality/religion-related career. Also, the human environment has changed so quickly that any built-in instincts about career or lifestyle motivations that end up surfacing has a chance of being mismatched or even self-destructive in the modern world.)
Re. Some of the comments… I don’t think I would be distressed if my internal dialog stopped. It’s intermittent anyway, and can switch between auditory and visual. If it just went quiet for an extended while, that would not seem bad. [as a test, just after I wrote that I did 30 seconds with no internal monologue]
I kind of need the internal monolog to write code, for example, so it would be a problem if I could no longer write code in my head.
As someone who's done a fair amount of meditation and read a couple dozen books on the topic, I'd just like to flag the fact that this is pretty well examined in the community, and while meditation as a whole is quite pre-paradigmatic, there seems to be an emerging consensus on some of the ways that meditation harm can manifest.
First off, it's obviously true that if you have a pre-existing tendency towards schizophrenia or any general mental instability, then in a very similar way to psychedelics, meditation can cause a psychotic break or similar episode of mental instability.
Secondly, and to me more interestingly, there's an emerging consensus that one of the things meditation does is relieve subconscious mental tension accumulated by either large-scale or small-scale traumas in the course of one's life. It's very in vogue to use the term karma to refer to this accumulation of mental pathology that one can analogize to stuck priors or misfiring circuits in the synaptic map. This is also, of course, pre-paradigmatic, so it's not great to take anything on this front super seriously, but it's a very useful frame.
Now, when it comes to meditation harm, one of the things you see is that going very deep, very fast in meditation without processing this kind of mental tension or trauma can result in the trauma coming up in overwhelming or counterproductive ways. Often, people don't talk about this in explicit terms, but I personally think it's very obvious that the fastest and most straightforward ways of "making progress" on the meditative path are the Burmese Mahasi Sayadaw method, which also has by far the highest rate of negative side effects in meditation. To me, this indicates strongly that the Sayadaw method, because it is focused on blowing through to meditative insight without a lot of emotional hippie processing along the way, involves getting hit with all this kind of accumulated tension all at once in a very intensive fashion.
If you don't buy that "meditation → root access", then it is not nearly as obvious that meditation is dangerous.
The phrase "root access" would suggest that you can in principle fix all the problem that you cause the same way you can just install new software on a computer to which you have root access.
I think a better analogy is you as a local LLM having root access to the computer it's running on. If you brick it, you've also broken the substrate that facilitates the process by which you'd naively unbrick - the terminal commands you'd use no longer work!
Meditation is as dangerous as many other “life-changing experiences”. Pregnancy, labor, parenthood; giving up unhealthy addictions; extreme sports; starting a company; quitting a job… and so on.
Yes, meditation is not a healthy breakfast type of thing. But it is not more dangerous than other important things worth trying. Of course, people with some mental conditions should do it with caution or skip.
For people who've been harmed by meditation, the Cheetah house resources might be helpful.
(Disclaimer: Haven't checked them out myself, just saw it recommended in Holly Elmore's blogpost)
I don't agree with "root access" btw. I do agree you can't have it both ways: if you think it's more powerful than a replacement-level healthy habit, then you should also consider that it could be dangerous.
I can try the "access" metaphor. I think of meditation as lowering thoughts from write access to append-only access. Mid-meditation, thoughts can say their thing but then they have to drift off instead of pick up debates with other thoughts.
Vulnerable people may be prone to picking up meditation. Like those with intense mental suffering -- think bipolar-level conditions that require psychiatry.
A person with "depression, chronic pain, ennui or some other cognitive flaw" taking up some new religious ritual seems to me like a symptom of psychotic break, not the cause.
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