When Meditation Turns Harmful

The myth of mindfulness as a universal cure—and the quiet rise of its dark side.

It began with silence — or rather, too much of it.
After her third ten-day silent retreat, Emma, a 34-year-old architect from London, started hearing a low hum that no one else could hear. The more she sat in stillness, the louder it grew. At first, she thought it was anxiety, a side effect of city life finally surfacing. But then came the panic, the sleepless nights, and a creeping sense that her body no longer belonged to her. “I was doing everything right,” she said later. “Meditating, breathing, being mindful. But something in me broke open — and not in the way the teachers promised.”

Emma’s experience isn’t unique. It’s part of a quieter story emerging beneath the serene marketing of mindfulness: one in which peace sometimes gives way to panic, and awareness shades into unraveling.

The Promise of Stillness

Mindfulness, that shimmering elixir of the modern wellness world, comes with an irresistible promise: peace, clarity, and a calmer mind — all from the quiet of your own living room, for free. Its appeal lies in its simplicity. No gym, no guru, no gadgets. Just breath, awareness, and you.

What began as a Buddhist practice more than fifteen centuries ago — a disciplined cultivation of awareness, rooted in India and codified in texts like The Dharmatrāta Meditation Scripture — has been refashioned into something sleek, secular, and marketable. Back then, practitioners wrote of mystical insight, yes, but also of unease: of depression and anxiety emerging from prolonged introspection, of moments when the world itself seemed to flicker and lose its solidity.

Fast forward to the twenty-first century, and the story is uncannily similar — only now it comes with data. A 2022 study of nearly a thousand regular meditators in the United States found that more than ten percent reported “adverse effects” severe enough to disrupt daily life for at least a month. These ranged from heightened anxiety and depressive episodes to the unsettling sensations of depersonalization — feeling, as one participant described it, that “reality had lost its texture.”

A 2020 review of forty years of research corroborated this picture: the most common side effects of meditation were not serenity, but anxiety and depression, followed by psychotic or delusional episodes and sheer, unaccountable terror. Even individuals without prior mental health conditions were susceptible. Meditation, it turns out, doesn’t always discriminate between the seeker and the stable.

The Business of Mindfulness

Western psychology has known this for decades. In 1976, Arnold Lazarus, one of the founders of cognitive-behavioral therapy, warned that meditation could trigger “serious psychiatric problems such as depression, agitation, and even schizophrenic decompensation.” The warning went largely unheeded.

Instead, mindfulness has become — as the Buddhist scholar and management professor Ronald Purser acidly observed in his book McMindfulness — a kind of “capitalist spirituality,” a multi-billion-dollar industry selling serenity by subscription. Its apostles preach inner peace with the zeal of revivalists. “Mindfulness,” wrote Jon Kabat-Zinn, the movement’s most famous evangelist, could transform “who we are as human beings… and as a species.”

It is an almost theological claim — salvation through attention. Even atheists, wary of organized religion, have been seduced by its promise of transcendence without dogma, compassion without creed. But like any doctrine that insists it can change humanity, it leaves little room for doubt or dissent.

In 2015, a book I co-authored with psychologist Catherine Wikholm, The Buddha Pill, explored the less luminous side of meditation. The reaction was swift and, at times, defensive. Yet subsequent research has echoed our concerns. The most expensive study in meditation science — an $8 million project funded by the Wellcome Trust — tested mindfulness training on more than 8,000 British schoolchildren. The results were sobering: no measurable improvement in mental wellbeing, and, for some, a deterioration.

The Ethics of Awareness

Which raises a question the wellness industry seems reluctant to confront: if a therapeutic technique has known adverse effects, is it ethical to sell it — or prescribe it — without disclosure?

Too often, the answer is silence. Those who report psychological distress after meditation are told, gently or otherwise, to “keep meditating.” The implication is that the fault lies not in the practice, but in the practitioner’s resistance.

The truth is more complicated. Meditation alters consciousness — sometimes profoundly — and psychology, for all its theories, still struggles to explain what that means. Only recently have researchers begun to ask how to make these practices safer.

For those seeking answers, a small but growing number of resources exist: academic handbooks on meditation-related difficulties, websites run by practitioners who have lived through them, and even a clinical service in the U.S. for those who suffer long-term meditation-related distress.

None of this means mindfulness should be abandoned. It has helped countless people. But perhaps it’s time to retire the notion of mindfulness as an unqualified good — a spiritual panacea for a stressed-out age. Inner peace, it seems, is not always peaceful.

Conclusion

In the months after her breakdown, Emma stopped meditating altogether. The hum eventually faded, replaced by a cautious kind of quiet. “I still believe in awareness,” she says, “but not the kind you download.” She’s learned that mindfulness, like the mind itself, is not a thing to be mastered but a force to be understood — one that can heal, or harm, depending on how deep you’re willing to go.

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