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Gary Stogsdill is an Emeritus Faculty at Prescott College in Arizona.

SEE MORE ESSAYS WRITTEN BY GARY STOGSDILL

Willoughby Britton and the Dark Side of Meditation

Gary Stogsdill

Dr. Willoughby Britton was an undergraduate student when one of her friends since childhood died by suicide, leaving her devastated. Trying to help, Britton's father gave her the meditation/spiritual classic A Path With Heart by Jack Kornfield. In Britton's words, “[That book] became my bible for the next decade” (Ferris, 2023, 3:32). She found great comfort in mindfulness meditation, quickly became a serious practitioner, and was a self-described “evangelist for meditation” (7:47). This made it an obvious choice for Britton to scientifically study mindfulness meditation in her doctoral program of clinical psychology at the University of Arizona.

For her dissertation, Britton created a research project that she was certain would show the value of meditation as an aid to sleep. Having access to a sleep lab at the University of Arizona, she designed an experimental study that monitored regular meditators for brain activity, eye movements, and muscle tension over 200 nights of sleep. The results of this study were not at all what Britton expected. Yes, the subjects who meditated less than 30 minutes a day were indeed sleeping better, but those who meditated 30 or more minutes a day were sleeping progressively worse by every measure of cortical arousal. Britton had discovered a nearly perfect correlation between the length of time someone meditates each day over 30 minutes and the degree of adverse effects on sleep (Hasenkamp, 2021, 9:30).

Willoughby Britton

Like probably countless other meditation enthusiasts doing research, Britton did not publish her sleep study because it showed the “wrong” results [1]. Soon after, while Britton was at Brown University for her residency at a psychiatric hospital, she attended a mindfulness meditation retreat and mentioned to one of the teachers her counter-intuitive results from the sleep study. The teacher chastised Britton with this: “I don't know why you psychologists are always trying to make meditation into a relaxation technique; everyone knows if you meditate enough you stop sleeping” (Hasenkamp, 2021, 11:00). Meanwhile, during Britton's residency that lasted one year, she found herself caring for two “completely psychotic” meditators who were sent to the psychiatric hospital from that nearby meditation retreat (12:19).

By this time Britton realized there may be more going on with meditation than the general public or even meditators themselves are aware of; there could actually be serious risks associated with meditation practice. She wondered what else meditation teachers know that the general public needs to be made aware of for their safety (Ferris, 2023, 8:20). Thus began Britton's 10-year-long Varieties of Contemplative Experience research project in collaboration with Dr. Jared Lindahl and others.

Whereas the vast majority of previous research studies on meditation had been an attempt to document positive wellness benefits, Britton focused her study on the “meditation-related experiences that are typically underreported, particularly experiences that are described as challenging, difficult, distressing, functionally impairing, and/or requiring additional support” (Lindahl et al., 2017). For this reason, one requirement for participation in this study was that the meditation practitioner be able to articulate one or more meditation-related experiences that might be considered adverse. Another requirement was an established meditation practice within one of the three main Buddhist meditation traditions in the US—Zen, Tibetan, and Theravada—which were equally represented among the 60 participants of 34 males and 26 females, spanning an age range of 18-76. These participants were serious meditators, with nearly half reporting more than 10,000 hours of lifetime meditation, and 36 of the 60 participants were respected meditation teachers.

The main outcome of the Varieties of Contemplative Experience study was the identification of 59 categories of conditions or experiences that may result from meditation, many of which are detrimental. See a concise summary of these conditions and experiences at this website, where they are organized under the following seven domains: affective, cognitive, somatic, perceptual, sense of self, conative, and social. Some of the more concerning adverse effects include depression, anxiety, paranoia, rage, suicidality, cardiac irregularities, loss of sense of basic self, delusional beliefs, disintegration of conceptual meaning structures, hallucinations, distortions in time or space, emotional detachment, social impairment, and derealization. Also concerning is the fact that “many of the experiences reported by practitioners in [the Varieties of Contemplative Experience] study resemble to varying degrees phenomena discussed in the vast literature on schizophrenia, schizotypy, [and] psychosis” (Lindahl et al., 2017).

The term derealization, mentioned above, may not be as familiar to the reader as the other conditions described by Britton and Lindahl. It refers to a dissociative disorder recognized by the American Psychological Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition, where it's called depersonalization-derealization. The defining feature is feeling detached from one's self and one's reality to the point where “one's surroundings and other people…may appear as if part of a dream“ (Theravive website).

I was devoted to meditation for 24 years as a young adult, much of that time in close association with a community of other serious meditators within the yoga spiritual tradition, and derealization was present to a greater or lesser extent in all of the meditators that I knew personally [2], as well as in myself. I suspect that everyone with a serious enough and long enough meditation practice experiences derealization, and I'm convinced this is why a foundational teaching of the yoga spiritual tradition is that normal human life is maya or an illusion or a dream or just not really real.

Derealization can become a serious problem when the meditator identifies with that state of consciousness as a sign of spiritual progress, sometimes to the extent of being unwilling or even unable to enter back into normal consciousness that feels appropriate human emotions and maintains appropriate human relationships. One example of many that I could offer occurred in 1995 when I was leading a spiritual study group that happened to meet just a couple of days after the horrific Oklahoma City bombing that claimed 168 lives including 19 infants and preschool children. While others in the study group were expressing shock and grief about this tragedy, the most senior meditator laughed jauntily and said, “Oh, don't you people get it? This is all a dream; it's not real.”

In my experience, those who live in serious derealization don't know this about themselves unless and until they end their excessive meditation practice. It actually took a few years after I ended my own excessive practice before I fully emerged from derealization and understood that I had been living in it for more than two decades. This is an extraordinary shift in consciousness: one moment you are certain of being on the path of ultimate truth that transcends a dreamlike normal reality, and the next moment you realize that your mind had been tricking you. Then it becomes a bitter pill to swallow to accept that you were the one living in a dreamlike reality instead of all the “unenlightened” people living in normal consciousness. This can be a long and painful transition back to sanity, which is why few of my former meditation friends have been able to do it.

My own transition would have been smoothed significantly by something Willoughby Britton created some years later called Cheetah House, described below. During her Varieties of Contemplative Experience research project, Britton had become an associate professor of psychiatry at Brown University Medical School as well as the director of Brown University's neuroscience laboratory. Given that Brown has a thriving contemplative studies program, Britton soon began hearing from student meditators who needed help with problems they were encountering as a result of their meditation practice. Some were experiencing such severe adverse effects that Britton felt the need to take them into her spacious old home to facilitate their recovery. Her home became known as Cheetah House [3], Britton's personal efforts to provide care for those who experience the dark side of meditation. Cheetah House is now entirely online and offers a wide variety of support services to address the detrimental effects of meditation.

Because Britton's research focused on Buddhist meditation, she received an audience with the Dalai Lama in 2012 to present an overview of what was being uncovered at that halfway point in the Varieties of Contemplative Experience research project [4]. The presentation is shown in its entirety in this video. You'll see that Britton clearly explains to the Dalai Lama that her research involved interviewing more than 40 well-known and well-respected Western meditation teachers in the prominent Buddhist traditions, asking them what kinds of difficulties they had encountered from their own practice and what difficulties they had seen in their students (2:17). Then, she tells the Dalai Lama, Britton followed up in further interviews with the meditation teachers and specified students who had experienced such difficulties. The word difficulty, she explains, is defined rigorously to mean “a challenging state of mind or body that is associated with impairment in functioning, which…typically means the inability to work or take care of children for at least one month” (1:22, emphasis added). Britton also reveals the sobering statistic that the average duration of impairment was more than three years, with the range extending to more than 10 years (14:03). And perhaps most eye-opening, several of the participants had been sent to psychiatric hospitals with a common diagnosis of schizophrenia (14:28).

Britton was disappointed with the Dalai Lama's response to her presentation [5], saying that he seemed to not take her findings seriously, to lack compassion for those who suffered the difficulties, and to be dismissive of her research (Ferris, 2023, 1:57:45). I agree with Britton's assessment and want to highlight the following examples. At 7:23, the Dalai Lama states that the difficulties Britton is describing “cannot possibly happen if you are doing mindfulness correctly” (this is the very definition of being dismissive) [6]. Britton then has to convey the obvious: that these difficulties do not necessarily happen during meditation itself, but instead are the result of a regular meditation practice. When Britton reveals that several of the meditators studied were sent to psychiatric hospitals (14:28), the Dalai Lama jovially quips that he might soon end up in a psychiatric hospital (a classic way to not take something seriously). Still seeming to not understand that Britton's research is about what can result from a meditation practice instead of what necessarily happens during meditation itself, the Dalai Lama offers a story (20:40) that conveys the following as stated by his translator: “If you're having difficulty with meditation, who is forcing you to do it?” (another way to not take something seriously). At 23:44, the Dalai Lama decides that these adverse effects are caused by insufficient knowledge of the Buddhist tradition and of meditation itself (this is victim blaming), completely ignoring what Britton told him earlier in the video: that in her study many of the meditators who experienced the adverse effects were well-known and well-respected Western meditation teachers within the prominent Buddhist traditions. Finally, at 25:16, the Dalai Lama concludes that the difficulties experienced by meditators are “their own mistake” (a textbook example of victim blaming). Please view the video and draw your own conclusions.

So far, this essay has mostly focused on serious meditators and their reports of detrimental effects. The reader could easily be thinking, “This doesn't pertain to me because I'm just a casual or occasional meditator with no spiritual agenda.” Willoughby Britton, in collaboration with Dr. Simon Goldberg and others, conducted later research that responds to such thinking (Goldberg et al., 2021). In this first-ever, population-wide study addressing adverse effects of meditation, Britton and her colleagues used a representative sampling procedure [7] to survey 953 random people living in the US, and found that very nearly half, 470, reported having meditated at least once at some point in their lives. Four hundred thirty-four of this 470 completed an indepth follow-up survey responding to questions about their experiences related to meditation. The results of this study should give all of us pause, especially considering that most of these 434 participants had meditated less than 100 total hours in their entire lives. Britton found that “half of participants reported at least one clinically relevant symptom, with anxiety, traumatic re-experiencing, and emotional sensitivity appearing most commonly,” and 10.6% of these 434 participants reported functional impairment [8]. In other words, one out of every two US residents who try meditation at least once will experience some level of distress, and one out of 10 will experience some degree of functional impairment.

Perhaps if we understood more about the history of meditation as a systematic practice, we would naturally approach it with needed caution. Meditation in Ancient India was not an early attempt at self-improvement, and it was not created for psychological well-being or relaxation. Quite the opposite, meditation was primarily developed by extreme ascetics who had renounced the world, to be used as a tool that would increase existential anxiety and cause disgust for human existence so as to propel the practitioner toward moksha, or liberation from the predicament of being human and encountering suffering continuously through the cycles of death and rebirth. As religious studies professor David McMahan put it: Meditation was “part of a way of being in the world that is ultimately aimed at exiting the world, rather than a means to a happier, more fulfilling life within it” (McMahan & Braun, 2017, p. 34).

Even when the Buddha came along and offered his more moderate teachings of the Middle Way between extreme ascetism and sensual indulgence, he still taught meditation that invited the practitioner “to contemplate the body from head to toe, inside and out, not for relaxation and even less for body acceptance, but to bring to full realization its utter repulsiveness….From being grossed out, one is then invited to be existentially freaked out by vivid evocations of human mortality…which elaborate in loving detail the decomposition of the body” (McMahan & Braun, 2017, p. 29) [9]. Most meditation in Ancient India was anything but an attempt to find inner peace and realize our human potential; it was serious existential business aimed at destroying our contentment with human life.

Of course, meditation has evolved toward different purposes over the centuries, and few of us today would practice it with the intention of making ourselves miserable. Some of the more interesting historical developments in meditation have occurred within the yoga spiritual tradition and include powerful techniques combining focus, breathwork, sound, and energy movement in order to experience kundalini awakening that bestows “divine bliss.” This kind of meditation, sometimes categorized as pranayama, was mostly kept secret because of its potency and mostly confined to India, but I learned one such technique when I was in my early 20s, and after 12 years of dedicated practice entered into an intense state of euphoria that lasted every moment for eight months. I describe this experience in greater detail in a previous essay, but here I will just add that I could not sleep at all for the entire eight months, which of course is consistent with Willoughby Britton's research. If Britton were to look into adverse effects of these more potent meditation techniques, the data would likely show a much greater degree of seriousness than the already concerning results with popular forms of meditation.

These more powerful meditation techniques were the reason why the 20th century Iranian-Indian spiritual teacher Meher Baba devoted the last half of his life to searching throughout India for those meditators who were largely unable to function due to experiencing psychosis and/or being blissed out of their minds, which is why Meher Baba called them masts, meaning “those who are divinely intoxicated.” As he located these masts, Meher Baba would bring them home and lovingly nurture them back to wellness. In this regard, he was the Willoughby Britton of the last century with his own version of Cheetah House.

As I was researching Willoughby Britton and the fact that meditation can actually lead to psychosis, I recalled an experience that had puzzled me when I was 23 years old and fairly new to a serious practice of meditation. At that time, I worked in the Business Office of Indiana University at Bloomington, and every day during lunch break walked to a nearby park-like area of campus where I found a secluded tree, sat cross-legged on the ground, and meditated briefly before eating lunch. One day I opened my eyes to discover a young person sitting next to me also meditating. Excited to have a new meditation friend, I spent the rest of lunch hour talking with him, sharing my food, and enjoying the uncanny similarities between the two of us. For examples, we were the same age, had joined the same spiritual path with the same guru a couple of years before, and were both spending long hours in meditation each day, he moreso than I. Imagine my shock when he confided that he had just escaped from the state psychiatric hospital at Indianapolis. Because this was the mid-1970s when a sizable portion of the mainstream American public thought about meditation much the way they thought about devil worship, I assumed at the time that my new friend had been unfairly hospitalized simply because of his devotion to the suspicious practice of meditation. I now realize he was one of the unfortunate meditators who experienced a psychotic break due to the practice itself [10].

Fifty years after this experience, the pendulum of public opinion regarding meditation has swung to the other extreme, from meditation previously being viewed with deep suspicion to now being naively accepted as a practice that makes us better in just about every way imaginable, which is why the mission statement for Cheetah House includes this: “In a world in which claims about meditation are often overhyped, Cheetah House also aims to provide a balanced, realistic and informed perspective about the risks associated with meditation through the dissemination of research-based information.” Is it true that claims about meditation are often overhyped? Just check out the seemingly thousands of books on mindfulness, with subtitles like this, The Wisdom to Transform the World, or this, Transforming Self-Sabotage into Self-Mastery, or this, How to Rewire Your Brain for Leadership and Personal Excellence Without Adding to Your Schedule. Or consider this gem from a 2012 article in the New York Times: Mindfulness “build[s] up neural real estate that is better able to deal with the variegated demands of the endlessly multitasking, infinitely connected modern world” (as cited in McMahan & Braun, 2017, p. 35). Or go to any website promoting meditation and you will find something similar to what I just found at random: “The statistics on the impact of mindfulness practices read like a menu of miracles,” and this:

“Here are 10 science-backed benefits of meditation: stress reduction, anxiety management, depression management, lowers blood pressure, strengthens immune system health, improves memory, regulates mood, increases self-awareness, helps with addiction management, improves sleep.” [11]

Such overhyping actually makes perfect sense from a business perspective; a lot of people are making a lot of money off of meditation. The meditation industry is currently valued at 8 billion USD in 2024, and is projected to reach an astonishing 18 billion USD in just four years by 2028 (The Business Research Company). Mindfulness, one of the main types of meditation that Britton has researched for adverse effects, is the rising star within the overall meditation industry and is projected to command nearly half of the 18 billion USD market share by 2028 (World Metrics). The overhyped claims about meditation are certain to only increase as skilled marketers try to sell more and more meditation products, apps, books, classes, programs, retreats, etc. to more and more consumers.

In addition to the business hyping of meditation, humans tend to be naturally curious about any experience that alters our normal mental state. As Britton put it, we have a “fascination and romanticization of altered states” of consciousness (Ferris, 2023, 43:44). This unfortunately predisposes us to be more gullible and less cautious toward meditation, in ways we would never be toward other experiences that we know can carry serious risks. Add to that the tiresome refrain from gurus that meditation is the ticket to enlightenment, and we can see why meditation has become so popular that at least half of the US population has now tried it (Goldberg et al., 2021). This growing popularity makes it all the more important to open our eyes to the potential dangers of meditation, especially given that mindfulness meditation is increasingly being introduced into schools, clinics, hospitals, and prisons (Lindahl et al., 2017), all locations that include highly vulnerable individuals.

Let me end this essay on a more balanced note. I value meditation and, as previously mentioned, had made it the focus of my life as a young adult. I loved it so much during this time that I did too much [12], which caused me to experience many of the adverse effects described by Britton [13] and to neglect healthy human pursuits that would have enriched my life and allowed me to be more connected and helpful to others. But it's important to keep in mind that meditation can also bestow benefits.

Exactly what meditation does for us depends partly on our individual intentions and expectations, and more broadly on “the surrounding ideas, aims, attitudes, and cultural context of the practitioner” (McMahan & Braun, 2017, p. 36). Meditation is a tool, and any tool can be used for a variety of purposes. The ancient ascetics used meditation to increase disgust for human life, subsequent meditators have used it to experience bliss or to attain whatever the word enlightenment means to them [14], and today we have meditators using it to relieve stress or to have more patience with the kids or to gain a competitive edge in the workplace. I used meditation to cultivate a connection with something deeper than my sense of self, and it has worked well for that purpose. I continue to begin each day with my own style of meditation, but I spend no more than 10 minutes with this practice. What I have learned, and what Willoughby Britton's research suggests, is that we can minimize adverse effects by limiting ourselves to brief periods of meditation.

Just as I have included an acknowledgement of the potential benefits of meditation in this essay on its dark side, so should those who promote meditation include warnings about its now-well-established potential to be dangerous. When we consider that meditation works directly on our mind, the very source of our identity and functioning, it should be obvious that we need to exercise caution. Anyone with a history of mental unwellness would be wise to only practice meditation under the supervision of a medical professional, the rest of us can mitigate the adverse effects by observing moderation in the practice of meditation [15], and we will all be safer by avoiding meditation retreats entirely, because moderation does not exist in meditation retreats. Finally, beware of those spiritual teachers and meditators who claim to have attained a superior level of consciousness and love to tell the rest of us that we need to do more meditation practice in order to open our “eye of Spirit” or wake up from the delusion of normal consciousness. These people are likely living in a state of serious derealization and don't know it.

It's time for meditation to come with a warning label. Thanks to the courage and integrity of Dr. Willoughby Britton, we should begin to see responsible teachers and other promoters of meditation openly warning of its potential for serious adverse effects. We will then be able to make an informed decision about whether or not we want to buy the product.

NOTES

[1] Britton did eventually publish her sleep study several years later. And, of course, her study showed the correct results, just not the results she was hoping for at that time. I'm reminded of a graduate student I advised at Prescott College many years ago. She had previously earned a PhD and entered our master's program for the purpose of showing through research that her spiritual path would create significant psychological well-being for anyone who wanted to join and follow the guru. Her well-designed research project ended up showing exactly the opposite: by every measure of psychological well-being addressed in the study, the longer someone was dedicated to her spiritual path and the more they meditated, the lower their well-being. And, of course, she decided not to publish the results of this study. What intrigued me most was the way this student interpreted these results in her thesis; she said that the closer we get to God, the greater our tests become. Well maybe, but why would anyone want to “get close to God” if it just causes more suffering? Imagine wanting to enter into relationship with a person or a practice knowing that things will just get harder and your well-being will deteriorate. Such is the lure of enlightenment that serious meditators will tolerate these difficulties.

[2] It's hard to pinpoint an exact number, but it seemed to me that the entire community of 200 people lived in varying degrees of derealization. I knew at least two dozen of them well enough personally to say this for sure about them.

[3] Cheetah is a play on the Sanskrit word chitta, which loosely means mind.

[4] Because this was about halfway into the project, several details that Britton conveyed to the Dalai Lama were different from the final publications about the project. For one example, Britton reports that research participants were from the Theravada and Tibetan traditions, whereas the final study included equal representation from Zen, Tibetan, and Theravada. For another example, Britton tells the Dalai Lama that more than 40 of the participants were meditation teachers, whereas in the final publications that number is 36 out of 60. As the study progressed, the researchers were careful to exclude those participants whose adverse symptoms could possibly be explained by any other factor than meditation.

[5] Respect for the Dalai Lama suffered a blow with the recent episode where the Dalai Lama kissed a young boy on the lips and asked the boy to suck his tongue. This episode suggests that it's never a good idea to take a young child away from his family and treat him as an exalted being.

[6] Remember from the Varieties of Contemplative Experience study that many of those who reported adverse effects were highly experienced meditation teachers. They are the very definition of practicing correctly.

[7] This means that participants in the study were recruited “in proportion with their representation in the United States (US) population based on age, gender, and race” (Goldberg et al., 2021). In other words, this study is representative of the US population as a whole.

[8] I didn't find a definition of functional impairment in this study, but Britton has previously described it as “difficulty engaging in one's usual activities, whether social, occupational, or leisure, that lasts for at least one month.”

[9] McMahan is paraphrasing translations of the Sutta on the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, one of the Pali suttas, the earliest Buddhist texts. This specific sutta is “the most important and comprehensive meditation text in the Pali suttas” (p. 28).

[10] I never saw this person again after our initial meeting. He said he was on a spiritual pilgrimage and needed to continue his travels, so I gave him the money I had with me and wished him well.

[11] Of course, this website provided no citations to research studies so that the reader might be able to evaluate the validity of the claims. Even when research citations are provided on websites and in books or articles in support of meditation benefits, it's important to keep the following in mind: “Much of the research on meditation has had design problems and has used sample sizes too small to reach firm conclusions” (McMahan & Braun, 2017, p. 14). Or as cognitive researcher Evan Thompson put it: “Scientific evidence that mindfulness practices induce long-lasting, beneficial changes remains scanty and tentative” (p. 49). This doesn't mean that meditation doesn't have positive effects for at least some practitioners—I'm convinced it does—rather, this only means that claiming scientific evidence in support of these positive effects may be misleading.

[12] During my 24-year practice, I spent well over 25,000 hours meditating. To put that amount of time into perspective, it's three entire years of sitting in meditation.

[13] I've already mentioned that I experienced a significant degree of derealization for many years. During those same years, I also lived with substantial perceptual hypersensitivity, emotional detachment, and social impairment, as well as a lesser degree of several other categories identified in the Varieties of Contemplative Experience study.

[14] I'm starting to suspect that when spiritual teachers or meditators claim they have attained enlightenment, they really mean they are living in a state of extreme derealization.

[15] I would define moderation in the practice of meditation as no more than 10 to 20 minutes at a time, and less than 30 total minutes in one day.

REFERENCES

Britton, Willoughby. Dalai Lama Presentation. Mind and Life Podcasts, 2012.

The Business Research Company. Meditation Global Market Report, 2024.

Cheetah House website

Ferris, Tim. The Hidden Risks of Meditation with Dr. Willoughby Britton. The Time Ferris Show, 2023.

Goldberg SB, Lam SU, Britton WB, Davidson RJ (2021). Prevalence of meditation-related adverse effects in a population-based sample in the United States. Psychotherapy Research 32(3): https://doi.org/10.1080/10503307.2021.1933646

Hasenkamp, Wendy. When Meditation Causes Harm with Willoughby Britton, Mind and Life Podcasts, 2021.

Lindahl JR, Fisher NE, Cooper DJ, Rosen RK, Britton WB (2017). The varieties of contemplative experience: A mixed-methods study of meditation-related challenges in Western Buddhists. PLOS ONE 12(5): e0176239. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0176239

McMahan DL & Braun E (Eds.). Meditation, Buddhism, and Science. Oxford University Press, 2017.

Theravive website

World Metrics. Global Mindfulness Industry Statistics, 2024.