By Mo Edjlali, Founder of Mindful Leader; Author, Open MBSR
The Atlantic recently published a profile of psychologist and meditation researcher Willoughby Britton under the headline “The Dark Side of Mindfulness.”
Before I get into it, let me be upfront about where I’m coming from. I run Mindful Leader, wrote Open MBSR, and we train and certify people who teach mindfulness. I have both a professional and financial interest in the idea that mindfulness can be taught safely and responsibly.
I also write Wackfulness, where I spend a perhaps unhealthy amount of time criticizing the contemporary mindfulness field. So I came to this article with some excitement. Here was a serious critique of mindfulness in The Atlantic. I also came with some concern about what might get lost once something as complicated as meditation-related harm gets packaged under a headline like, “The Dark Side of Mindfulness.”
The article centers on Willoughby Britton, and I want to start by giving her a lot of credit. Britton was not an outsider looking for reasons to attack meditation. She practiced seriously, taught meditation, trained in MBSR, and became deeply immersed in Buddhism. She entered research expecting science to demonstrate meditation’s benefits. What she found, both in her research and in her own life, turned out to be much more complicated.
While meditating around three hours a day, Britton began experiencing severe dissociation. At times she had trouble driving because she couldn’t clearly sense the boundaries of her body. When she brought these experiences to meditation teachers, she says they interpreted them through Buddhist teachings about “no-self” and encouraged her to keep practicing. She did, and things got worse. Eventually, in 2017, she stopped meditating altogether.
I actually spoke with Willoughby about ten years ago, exploring having her speak at one of our conferences. I remember how open-minded she was when I asked a provocative question (Can the benefits of mindfulness all be attributed to the placebo effect?, if I remember right).
That stood out because I had encountered plenty of the opposite.
My criticisms have focused on somewhat different problems: teacher authority, stealth Buddhism, institutional gatekeeping, and one-dimensional thinking. Britton ran into a much harsher version of that resistance. The Atlantic describes accusations of fearmongering, a threatening letter from a Buddhist organization, and conference invitations drying up. Even Jack Kornfield, whose books helped lead her into Buddhism, publicly described parts of her work as “over-the-top fearmongering.”
My experience is not Britton’s, but I recognize the pattern. It can be surprisingly difficult in the mindfulness world to criticize an institution, teacher, or cherished idea without the criticism being treated as an attack on mindfulness itself.
Britton kept asking the uncomfortable questions anyway. I’m glad she did.
What the research actually tells us
The basic point should be clear by now: meditation can sometimes cause problems. Britton and others have documented prolonged insomnia, severe anxiety, dissociation, depression, loss of functioning, mania, psychosis, and other adverse experiences. The mindfulness field spent far too long talking almost exclusively about benefits.
Britton's 2017 Varieties of Contemplative Experience study is often cited in these discussions, but it is important to understand the sample. The researchers deliberately recruited people who had already experienced meditation-related difficulties. At the time those difficulties began:
- 25% were practicing 30–60 minutes a day.
- 34% were practicing one to nine hours a day.
- 41% were practicing ten hours or more a day.
- 72% experienced the problem during or immediately after a retreat, while 28% experienced it in daily practice.
That study tells us a great deal about what can go wrong. It was not designed to tell us how often it goes wrong.
Later studies give us a better sense of prevalence. In a 2021 study of an eight-week mindfulness-based cognitive therapy program, 83% reported at least one meditation-related side effect, 58% reported something negatively experienced, 37% reported some negative impact on functioning, and 6% to 14% reported lasting bad effects, depending on the threshold used. The authors also concluded that transient distress and negative impacts occurred at rates similar to other psychological treatments.
A population study found that 50% reported at least one specific adverse meditation-related experience, 10.4% reported one lasting a month or more, 10.6% reported some functional impairment, and 1.2% reported impairment lasting a month or longer.
Those numbers require some care. Feeling anxious or emotionally raw during meditation is quite different from being unable to work, sleep, or function for weeks. One of Britton’s contributions has been pushing researchers to make those distinctions more carefully.
Intensity matters, but it isn’t everything
The word meditation covers an enormous amount of territory. Ten or twenty minutes before a meeting, forty-five minutes every morning, three hours a day, and a week of silence spent meditating all fall under the same label.
Britton herself told The Atlantic that meditating for longer than about 30 minutes a day tends to be associated with more negative side effects. She also estimates that between half and three-quarters of the clients she works with first developed symptoms in connection with a retreat.
That matters. We should not use severe retreat cases to characterize the risk of a voluntary, twenty-minute mindfulness practice.
But I also don’t want to make intensity do more explanatory work than it can. The person matters. Psychological history matters. The setting matters. So do the teacher, the framework being used to interpret the experience, and what happens after someone says something is going wrong.
Britton’s own experience makes this concrete. Whatever caused the original dissociation, the response from her teachers became part of the problem. She told them something was wrong. They interpreted it as spiritual progress and encouraged her to keep doing what she felt was making her worse.
The meditation may have started the experience. The teachings, authority structure, and response around it helped shape what happened next.
Why people meditate is different from what teachers are qualified to do
I recently wrote about three broad reasons people come to meditation: restorative, fitness, and contemplative. Someone may want relief from stress, greater mental capacity, spiritual exploration, or some combination of all three. I don’t think we need to police those motivations.
The responsibility changes when you are the person teaching.
Meditation is now offered in clinical settings where it is used to address depression or trauma; in spiritual settings concerned with awakening, liberation, and no-self; and in secular educational settings focused on attention and awareness in everyday life. Those settings inevitably overlap, but a teacher needs to know which role they are occupying.
If you are treating psychiatric problems, that is clinical work and requires the appropriate competence. If you are guiding people through intensive spiritual practice, people should know what they are signing up for, and there should be meaningful safeguards around the work.
With Open MBSR, we deliberately stay in the educational lane. The teacher is not the source of wisdom, and participants maintain agency over their own practice. They can change what they are doing, question it, stop it, or decide it simply isn’t useful.
That approach does not guarantee that nobody will ever have a difficult reaction. What it does is limit the authority of the person teaching. A mindfulness facilitator should recognize when something has moved outside their competence rather than interpreting psychiatric symptoms, improvising psychotherapy, or assuming the solution is another meditation.
For me, this is where Britton’s work and my own criticism of mindfulness intersect most clearly. The problem is not simply what meditation can do to someone. It is also what teachers and institutions do when the experience does not fit the story they expected.
What do we owe people?
Britton’s work leaves some fairly practical questions for anyone teaching mindfulness. What exactly are we offering? How intense is it? What do participants know about the risks? What authority does the teacher actually have? What happens if someone begins deteriorating? When do we stop teaching and point them somewhere else?
I don’t agree with every conclusion people have drawn from Britton’s research. I think the distinction between brief public mindfulness and intensive contemplative practice gets blurred too easily. I also think we still know much less about causation than some of the headlines suggest.
But Britton forced a field that had become very good at documenting meditation’s benefits to take its harms seriously. She did that while receiving resistance from many of the same communities that should have been most interested in what she was finding.
If we want mindfulness to serve the public good, defending our institutions matters much less than being clear about what we are teaching, what we know, what we don’t know, and where our competence ends.
This is part of our Wackfulness Series: a thoughtful critique of the mindfulness field.
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