Lost on the road to enlightenment

So many of us have been told that meditation can make us less stressed, more productive, and happier. But for a small group of people, it has a dark side. What’s going on? Guests: Willoughby Britton, associate professor at Brown University; Richard Davidson, professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; Pierce Salguero, professor at the Abington College of Pennsylvania State University This episode was made in partnership with Vox’s ⁠Future Perfect⁠ team. For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:21Speaker 00

  I want you to find a comfortable seat, maybe sitting in a chair or cross-legged on the floor. You can lie down if you want for this meditation, and I want you to just focus on your breath.

• 1:36Speaker 00

  Breathing in

• 1:41Speaker 00

  and out.

• 1:48Speaker 00

  In.

• 1:54Speaker 00

  And out.

• 2:01Speaker 00

  How did you first get into meditation?

• 2:04Speaker 02

  My dad sent me a book by Jack Kornfield called A Path With Heart. And so that was my gateway drug.

• 2:15Speaker 00

  Willoughby Britton is a scientist and a meditation expert. But back then, she was in college. And all she knew was her childhood friend had just died. And she was spiraling.

• 2:29Speaker 02

  It was sort of opened up the whole issue of mortality, which now I'm 50. And you're like, oh, yeah, it's kind of obvious. But when you're young and it's the first person to have died who's also young, it just suddenly made me realize how vulnerable we are. And I just became terrified. I just saw danger everywhere. And just basically had an anxiety disorder. Now, I would call it that.

• 2:58Speaker 00

  Willoughby did not want to take anxiety meds. But she did like this book.

• 3:04Speaker 03

  A Path With Heart. A guide through the perils and promises of spiritual life. With author, meditation instructor, and clinical psychologist, Jack Kornfield.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  I was like, OK, this guy knows what he's talking about because he's describing my experiences of anxiety with, you know, extreme precision and detail. And it made me trust him to have a solution.

• 3:32Speaker 00

  Did you start meditating a lot?

• 3:34Speaker 02

  I did, yeah. I carried that book with me everywhere for probably a decade. And I had cassette tapes.

• 3:44Speaker 04

  You may notice the feeling of each breath.

• 3:47Speaker 02

  Remember cassette tapes?

• 3:48Speaker 04

  Of each half breath.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  I had boxes and boxes of cassette tapes.

• 3:53Speaker 04

  You can trust the body. It knows how to breathe by itself.

• 3:58Speaker 02

  Different, you know, meditation teachers, teaching different things.

• 4:03Speaker 04

  Set aside the usual mode in which we operate, that of more or less constant doing, and switch to a mode of non-doing, a mode of simply being.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  Your interest, your enthusiasm is going. There's my friend. There's the breath. There's the breath.

• 4:29Speaker 00

  Willoughby became a meditator. She also just got interested in the mind and how to heal it. She ended up going to graduate school in clinical psychology and studying meditation as an academic.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  Pretty much every paper I wrote was about meditation and all of my instructors were like, can you write about something else, please?

• 4:50Speaker 00

  Willoughby's like, mm, nope. When it was dissertation time, she decided to study whether meditation could improve sleep. Her guess was that it probably would, but she's a scientist. She designed a test. She had two groups of subjects and one of them went through a standard eight-week mindfulness meditation course. The other group did nothing, just lived their normal lives. Then they all came into the lab and Willoughby and her team recorded their brainwaves while they slept.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  And when the data came in, it was like the complete opposite of what I expected. The meditation group had less deep sleep, faster brainwaves.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  Pretty much every measure you could have of cortical arousal, so like being more awake, the meditation group had more. And even worse, or even more convincing that that was the meditation, was that the more you meditated, the more each of those markers of arousal went up.

• 5:56Speaker 02

  There was really no way around it. It was a very clear finding, but because it was sort of the wrong answer, I just, I didn't publish it. I just sat on the data. So that's my first confession.

• 6:13Speaker 00

  Willoughby was not ready to open that door. But eventually, she would. In fact, she would become one of the main voices in a growing counter narrative within mental health that says meditation is not good for everyone. For some small group of people, it can get very, very bad. This is Unexplainable. I'm Sally Helm. Today, when science tries to take on an ancient religious practice, it's not always an easy fit. What can psychology make of the adverse effects of meditation? And how do you tell the difference between a mental health crisis and a spiritual one?

• 7:14Speaker 00

  Scientists are not supposed to suppress data that doesn't line up with their worldview. Willoughby knows this. She believes in science. So the fact that she didn't publish that paper, it shows how deep she was inside the meditation is great bubble.

• 7:31Speaker 02

  You know, I was an evangelist. I wanted to promote this thing. And, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't promoting it. It was actually saying that it was causing insomnia, which is not what I wanted to have out there. And, I mean, I, it wasn't just me in a vacuum. I also now had lots of friends who were into meditation and Buddhism. And we were all evangelists. And so it- It didn't seem as unethical and problematic as it does now, but yeah, I didn't publish it.

• 8:03Speaker 00

  I mean, I think I also can imagine you would be like, I'm a young scientist and can this be right? Like, the findings seem so clear, but it seems wrong. Were you also just kind of like, maybe I messed this up somehow?

• 8:15Speaker 02

  Yep, definitely. It was my second study. So yeah, it was really different than anything else that was out there. You know, it's in the ether, it's in the water, everybody's saying it's good for sleep.

• 8:26Speaker 00

  Well, not everyone.

• 8:29Speaker 02

  I remember going to a meditation retreat and it was the kind of thing where you're asking questions of the teacher, like after a day of practice. And I think somebody asked about, they're like, I am not sleeping, or I'm, you know, having trouble, something about sleep. And then I like raised my hand and was like, oh, I just did a study on this and I found da, da, da, da. And that's when I got chastised.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  I remember a teacher saying, you know, I don't know why all you psychologists are trying to make meditation into a relaxation technique. Everyone knows if you meditate enough, you stop sleeping. And I was like, completely blown away by that comment.

• 9:20Speaker 00

  This teacher was kind of being like, meditation is not just about wellness. It's also about spiritual awakening. So if it's about awakening, maybe it's not surprising that it's not good for sleep.

• 9:34Speaker 02

  And so that was a kind of slap in the face and also a wake up call to be like, what kind of assumptions do we have as mental health professionals or even just people? We think that meditation is a kind of therapy. And like this teacher was like, it's, that's not at all what it's for.

• 9:52Speaker 00

  By this point, Willoughby herself had trained as a meditation teacher. She'd studied with the legendary John Cabot Zen, who created something called mindfulness-based stress reduction, which has been enormously influential. Scientists tend to study it because it's standardized and secular, and it's also reached the masses. But it's just one particular version of a practice that's been around forever.

• 10:21Speaker 02

  What I realized was that there were other meditation worlds that thought that the one that I was in was short-sighted, or naive, or uninformed, or just kind of like JV.

• 10:39Speaker 00

  Whether it was JV or not, Willoughby was all in on this, still studying clinical psychology. And near the end of her PhD, she did a residency at Brown University.

• 10:49Speaker 02

  I was working in an inpatient psychiatric hospital. And that one year, there were two people who came, had come off retreat, and they were both completely psychotic. And so I went back to that same-

• 11:03Speaker 00

  So people who had seen on meditation retreats, who show up in the emergency room?

• 11:07Speaker 02

  Well, at the psych hospital, yes.

• 11:08Speaker 00

  At the psych hospital, okay.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  And they're like, they, yeah, so they were there like for many days or weeks, like not just, not just an emergency room visit, but like an, you know, inpatient hospital.

• 11:20Speaker 00

  Two psychotic meditators in one year seemed like a lot. So Willoughby started asking around, kind of casually bringing it up at conferences or retreats.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  And then people would come up to me and be like, that thing you said, that happened to me. There were people like everywhere. It was impossible not to find people.

• 11:40Speaker 00

  They told her about all kinds of experiences that didn't seem to line up with a story about meditation as this great therapeutic practice. Experiences that were painful, or distressing, or just weird.

• 11:56Speaker 00

  Willoughby was fascinated. So alongside her research on the benefits of meditation, she starts kind of like a secret little side gig.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  Basically, just going to meditation teachers, really well-known teachers that ran their own centers, that had been doing it for decades, and just asked them, you know, what types of meditation-related challenges have you seen? And what do you do about it?

• 12:25Speaker 02

  From there, a lot of the teachers would tell these stories about kind of like their worst-case scenarios. And, you know, they'd be like, well, let me see if that person will talk to you.

• 12:38Speaker 00

  Willoughby ended up formalizing these conversations into a study, a way to start to map this part of the meditation terrain that psychologists seem to have barely charted. She and her team interviewed about 100 serious meditators and meditation teachers. All of them identified as Buddhist, or at least doing Buddhist practices. But they were largely practicing in a Western context, largely white. And Western meditators, that's who this study was about and really who it's for. The point was to formally interview these people about their self-reported meditation challenges, symptoms that they had after meditating that often went away if they stopped.

• 13:24Speaker 00

  A qualitative study like this, interview-based, it doesn't tell us anything about how frequent these problems are in the real world. It doesn't untangle all the possible confounding factors here. But it does begin to bring these unusual meditation experiences into the realm of science, where they can be looked at more closely.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  There are so many different kinds of experiences. Sometimes people would just feel like they were having, almost like convulsions, where they're just having kind of all-over-body tics.

• 14:00Speaker 00

  People reported visual symptoms.

• 14:02Speaker 02

  You can start seeing lights that can look kind of like Christmas lights.

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  Some people re-experienced past traumas.

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  Or got intensely emotional, like panicking.

• 14:16Speaker 02

  But we also see the opposite, where people lose all emotion.

• 14:21Speaker 00

  There were cognitive symptoms, like someone forgot what numbers were.

• 14:25Speaker 02

  There was a number five on their, on their house, like a address number. And they were like, what is that shape? What is that? Is that some kind of Sanskrit or something? Like, they just didn't remember that it was a five anymore.

• 14:44Speaker 00

  It took years for Willoughby and her team to document and categorize these experiences. And the entire process, it highlights how tricky it can be for scientists to study a religious practice. For one thing, it wasn't easy to call all of these experiences adverse effects. Many of these people had struggled with the question of whether these symptoms were actually an important part of the spiritual path. Like, if you stop being so goal-oriented, maybe that looks like losing motivation to live your life could be negative. Or maybe it's the whole point of your practice: get out of the productivity rat race.

• 15:26Speaker 00

  But some people in the study reported becoming suicidal, which these experienced Buddhist meditation teachers pretty universally said was not a good sign. Also worrying: symptoms that lined up with psychosis. Teachers described getting psychological intervention in those cases. And even some of the more ambiguous effects could be things that people just didn't want.

• 15:52Speaker 00

  This time, Willoughby publishes the study. She is ready to put something out there that is very different from the standard meditation story within psychology, and that certainly goes against all the hype.

• 16:05Speaker 05

  I would say that more than any other factor of having any effect on my success, it's been meditation.

• 16:12Speaker 02

  Man, it's so hard to crystallize into one thing how great meditation is. If pharmaceutical companies could bottle up even a quarter of those benefits, it would be the best drug in the world. No, look.

• 16:25Speaker 00

  There is, of course, still a lot of evidence that meditation can be good for you. I talked to another researcher who has published a ton on the benefits of meditation. His name is Richie Davidson. And he was like, I gotta remind you, for the vast majority of people, meditation is, in fact, safe. I would say for the average person, the risk for psychosis of meditation is not greater than the risk of walking down the street and producing psychosis. As for why this happens to some people, scientifically, it's not clear. Willoughby has some ideas. She thinks some of the symptoms might be best described as side effects of concentration.

• 17:10Speaker 00

  You focus in so much on your breath that you almost put yourself in a sensory deprivation situation. But the brain likes a certain level of stimulation, so it ends up creating some of these strange symptoms. Richie was like, maybe, but there could be other things going on. We just don't have good evidence either way. I think the kind of evidence you would need is hard to come by. And that would be having a sufficient number of cases where you can actually get recordings from them during these periods of decompensation. It's very challenging to do that kind of research. By that, do you mean someone would have to be in an MRI machine while they're becoming psychotic after meditating? Something like that?

• 17:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, something like that. So like, difficult. But Richie is pretty convinced that the danger here is limited to a small group of people, those with some kind of psychological risk factor, like a mental health disorder, and those involved in super intensive meditation practices. Obviously, there are many different kinds of meditation, and maybe you're more at risk if you're like going on long, silent meditation retreats. Willoughby agrees that those are risk factors, but she is adamant that they don't explain the entire phenomenon. She says there were people in the study who had like a squeaky clean psych history. And she has only gotten more convinced over

• 18:37Speaker 00

  time that the mental health world and the meditation world just really need to take all this more seriously.

• 18:44Speaker 02

  I'm hearing the victim saying, like, people didn't believe me. Like, the teacher didn't believe me. The therapist, like, laughed in my face.

• 18:51Speaker 00

  After she published the study, she started hearing from a lot of struggling meditators who felt like, finally, maybe this researcher can give me some answers.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  The lab phone rang and rang and rang, to the point where we were collecting data for another study. We had to actually turn it off because it was, like, disrupting data collection.

• 19:13Speaker 00

  Literally, you had to unplug the phone.

• 19:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, you know, we're, a university lab is not a hotline. That's not what we do. And so we basically had to create a hotline.

• 19:29Speaker 00

  The people calling in are like, okay, science can argue about who exactly this happens to and why, but it's happening to me or to my kid. I need to figure out what to do. Like, do I get therapy, take medication, read a thousand-year-old text about this? Uh, maybe? That is after the break.

• 19:56Speaker 00

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• 23:38Speaker 00

  So after Willoughby publishes her study, her lab phone starts ringing off the hook with meditators in distress, who are feeling confused, blindsided. But another person hears about Willoughby's research and is not surprised at all.

• 23:54Speaker 04

  The kinds of symptoms that they have been describing, to me, were immediately recognizable as having analogues in historical texts. Now, I thought to myself, isn't this interesting?

• 24:08Speaker 00

  Pierce Salguero, professor of Asian history and health humanities at Penn State.

• 24:13Speaker 04

  Of course, the language is completely different. They had their own medical paradigms that have to do with, you know, qi, or with prana, or with the four elements, or with demons. But as a historian of medicine who specializes in looking at how ideas are transmitted and translated across cultures, that's what I do. Without sacrificing our appreciation for the nuance, I still think we can say, there's a thing here that people are pointing at and describing in different ways.

• 24:47Speaker 00

  Pierce started a whole project with like 25 colleagues to translate accounts about meditation difficulties, from ancient scriptural sources and medieval historical sources, from India, China, Tibet. He said, descriptions of negative meditation side effects go all the way back to the beginning of Buddhism. There are even descriptions of meditation problems from the Buddha himself.

• 25:10Speaker 04

  He describes kinds of headaches and other sorts of symptoms that he had from doing meditation, you know, either too much, or incorrectly, or too intensely. And essentially, you know, this idea that meditation can cause harm in some cases...

• 25:28Speaker 00

  I don't want to overstate it, but it seems like it could be found pretty much in all places and all times within the Asian Buddhist tradition. It's also really well-known just in society more generally. So I don't think it would be surprising at all if you grew up in one of these Buddhist, historically Buddhist cultures. You might sort of have the understanding that meditation, when you pick up meditation, you're playing with fire.

• 25:53Speaker 00

  That is part of the point. The original purpose of this practice was to radically destabilize your sense of self in order to produce what in Buddhism is being sought after, which is a transformation in your consciousness, a loss of your sense of separate self-hood. You know, powerful mystical experiences that are going to transform your life permanently. And that these were being had in, you know, by people in social contexts where they had left behind the world, right? And gone off into monasteries or caves in order to do these practices. So if you're doing this practice because you expect to have a little stress reduction

• 26:34Speaker 00

  and what happens is yourself gets destabilized and you start having, you know, weird mystical experiences, the practice is actually doing what it was intended to do.

• 26:50Speaker 00

  Obviously, many people who meditate today are not monks. I'm from Los Angeles and it's like you can barely order a coffee without being offered a side of meditation. So I wanted to talk to people who had had these radically destabilizing meditation experiences in our modern context. And I found someone who first got into meditation through a very secular source. I think it was a Four Dummies book, like that series. Really? Yeah. And the first time I practiced meditation, it was quite a radical experience.

• 27:27Speaker 04

  Experience, I would say, and not everyone has that, you know, sometimes it happens later or, um, but I felt my mind become very still and very peaceful. I felt my body also deeply relaxed.

• 27:43Speaker 00

  Scott Lippett started meditating when he was 15. And I really want to give him his due here. Like, he may have started with meditation for dummies, but after that, he got really into Buddhist teachings. He studied the spiritual side of the practice for years. He meditated regularly, 20 minutes in the morning, 20 minutes at night. And one evening, about five years in, he meditated in his college dorm on his special orange cushion.

• 28:08Speaker 04

  I sat up and went to just do my bedtime routine, brushing my teeth. But when I looked in the mirror, I did not recognize myself necessarily. Like, it felt as though it was a photo of me or, um, I logically knew it was me, but it didn't have the felt sense of, oh, that's me.

• 28:34Speaker 04

  I almost felt like my thoughts and my ability to perceive the nuances and detail of them was that dial was turning up. And I've often described it as if anyone has, um, experienced marijuana, maybe too much marijuana, and they've felt, um, almost like life is looking cartoony or almost started to feel like I was experiencing life frame by frame.

• 29:04Speaker 00

  Even when you weren't meditating?

• 29:06Speaker 04

  Yes, definitely towards the back end of those 10 years. That meditative state became my reality day to day.

• 29:17Speaker 00

  He'd be in a work meeting at his environmental protection job and feel like, am I even really here?

• 29:24Speaker 04

  I actually felt out of my body at that point, like, almost as though I was a foot behind myself, just watching everything happen. And there was a lot of anxiety with that because I knew that I had to be participating in this. Meeting, but I was having a borderline psychedelic experience at the same time.

• 29:46Speaker 00

  Not in a fun way?

• 29:47Speaker 04

  No, yeah, not in a fun or not in an insightful way, just in a difficult and terrifying way.

• 29:59Speaker 00

  Now, Scott, he may not have been a monk, but he was also not unprepared for the idea that meditation could be radically destabilizing.

• 30:08Speaker 04

  So much of my goal meditation at that time was to free myself from the illusion of self. For some people, that might lead to a liberation and like deep peace and all of that. But for me, it led to a really cold and empty reality where not only was I feeling terrible, but I have no agency either. And what's the point? I think that's where that those kinds of suicidal ideations came to play.

• 30:43Speaker 00

  Through all this, Scott just kept meditating harder. That's kind of the message he got when he asked spiritual teachers what to do.

• 30:52Speaker 04

  They're just like, oh, yes, you're in the dark night of the soul. You need to do X, Y, and Z. But if I look at the data, it's been five years of like immense and confusing suffering that was just leading me to be disconnected from family.

• 31:08Speaker 00

  Scott eventually got treatment for depression, which helped. But he said a key thing that he had to do to get his life back was to stop meditating. And eventually, the symptoms lifted.

• 31:22Speaker 04

  I now view them as induced states. It'd be like someone taking a strong psychedelic every day and complaining about not feeling themselves or struggling with work and but Saying like, yeah, but I'm gonna like see the truth and then everything will work. It's like, ah, or you could stop taking a strong psychedelic every day, you know?

• 31:45Speaker 00

  I talked to about five meditators who'd gotten into some kind of trouble, ranging from I had bouts of anxiety and maniacal laughing, to my experience of time got extremely weird, to I went to a meditation retreat, then landed in the hospital with psychosis. And several of them did what Scott did. When the going got weird, they meditated more. I asked Pierce what the historical texts would say about that.

• 32:14Speaker 04

  So I think one of the ways that people get into trouble is this kind of like hardcore practicing, you know, having challenges and then meeting those challenges with even more intensive meditation because it must be working. So these texts do warn explicitly against that kind of logic. And, and there's one of the kind of common refrains within these texts too is about not taking too seriously any particular spiritual experience that happens. And particularly not taking it as an indication of your attainment of some high level of enlightenment.

• 32:59Speaker 00

  If we've lost the cultural sense that meditation can be radically destabilizing, maybe we've also lost the sense for when that goes too far. Pierce told me, different cultures draw the line in different places. But consistently, there is a line.

• 33:16Speaker 04

  They say, you know, these are kind of like the normal, expected kinds of challenges. And here's how to deal with them. And then here's something that's beyond the line, where we can really classify this as a medical condition that needs specific medical interventions.

• 33:35Speaker 00

  Some texts call it meditation sickness. Symptoms can line up with things will be found.

• 33:41Speaker 04

  Things like depersonalization, depression, anxiety, psychosis. You know, these would be the labels that psychiatrists and contemporary medical practitioners would put on these conditions. I think it's important to

• 34:00Speaker 04

  Underscore though, that the Buddhist texts are suggesting that these kinds of symptoms may come and go within a meditation practice that can be managed in a certain way. You can pivot in your practice and the symptoms can be resolved. So it has more to do with, you know, your relationship to meditation, maybe not having proper balance in that relationship, rather than any inherent characteristic of you, yourself, or of meditation itself. It has more to do with the relationship between the two.

• 34:28Speaker 00

  So yeah, maybe our cultural relationship to meditation has gotten a little shallow. We think of it as relaxing, when actually, it can be quite grueling. And for a practice that's often happening alone, in silence, we do really talk about it a lot. But recently, I've also found myself thinking about this whole other phenomenon. It's called the zeal of the convert. The idea is that people who convert to a new faith, or discover a new practice, they tend to be way more fervent, way more intense than people who grew up in it. Which makes sense. You see it all the time.

• 35:09Speaker 00

  That person telling everyone about the cute new little diner they discovered, they probably don't live next door. I think a lot of people who discover meditation today, practice it with a sense of zeal. Sometimes they become evangelists. They go all in. But when it comes to meditation, that fervor can lead to trouble. If you have some intense experience and then double down. The advice from the historical texts seems to be something more like, "Oh yeah, that, that's a thing. Don't get caught up in it. Just shift your focus. Do some other kind of practice for a while. Take a breath."

• 36:11Speaker 00

  This episode was reported and produced by me, Sally Helm. Editing from Jorge Just with help from Joanna Solotaroff. Mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala. Music from Noam Hassenfeld and fact checking from Melissa Hirsch. Meredith Hadnot runs the show. Amy Padula is determined not to catch a cold. Julia Longoria is our editorial director. And Bird Pinkerton turned toward the octopus, who was barely conscious. And the octopus let out a whisper. There's no time. You need to find the platypus, the one they call Plati Smith.

• 36:52Speaker 00

  Thanks, as always, to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show, along with Bird and Noam. And if you have any thoughts about the show, please send us an email. We are at [email protected]. You can also leave us a review or a rating wherever you listen. That really helps us out. And if you are into supporting the show and all of Vox in general, join our membership program. You can go to vox.com/members to sign up. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll see you next time.

• 37:40Speaker 02

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