Related Issue
January–March 2025
Medicine & Health
Omm, No.
Professor Willoughby Britton on the perils of meditation.
By Erik Ness / January–March 2025
January 16th, 2025
Britton’s research into side effects like heart problems and psychosis has made her a target.PHOTO: JARED LINDAHL
In 2008, during the first year of her psychiatric residency at Warren Alpert Medical School, Willoughby Britton noticed a curious coincidence in two patient histories. Both individuals were admitted to Butler Hospital coming off of meditation retreats. And both were completely psychotic.
One case didn’t mean a thing. Two might also be a coincidence, but it was interesting to Britton, now an associate professor in Brown’s Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior. She had a much larger cache of meditation-related data she’d collected during hundreds of nights in a sleep lab in pursuit of her PhD. She’d set out to prove that meditation aids sleep. Her data disagreed.
“I thought I just did something wrong,” says Britton, who didn’t publish at first. But then, on a meditation retreat of her own, she casually mentioned her findings. “I don’t know why you are all trying to make meditation into a relaxation technique,” responded her teacher. “Everyone knows if you meditate enough you stop sleeping.”
Two very important things came out of that conversation. As a tradition thousands of years old, meditation was created and refined in very different cultural systems, with its own history and religious context. But we forgot about the side effects. And it’s rare that anything is good for everybody, all of the time. So what other assumptions was she—was the healthcare
system—making about meditation? And what else did instructors know that researchers weren’t asking?
When she later went back to the same teacher, the psychosis didn’t surprise him either. “Clearly somebody needs to dig a little deeper here,” Britton realized. That sparked the Varieties of Contemplative Experience study. Britton and her team visited meditation centers and interviewed teachers who had been running retreats for decades. What kinds of challenges had they observed in their students when they meditated? How did they interpret them? And how did they manage them?
It took ten years to answer those three questions, generating 3,000 pages of interviews. Fifteen papers have been published, including one of the most downloaded meditation studies ever. More are coming.
Losing balance
Even as Britton’s team was compiling a lengthy list of meditation side effects, the business of meditation surged, driven by the widespread use of mindfulness meditation in health care. News stories over the last five years vary widely on the value of the business, ranging from $1 to $4 billion. But last year the company behind the Calm meditation app was valued at more than $2 billion. In 2022 the National Institutes of Health allocated $45 million to meditation research.
Mindfulness is also a centerpiece in Brown’s wellness toolkit for students and staff. The Mindfulness Center at Brown University was established in 2017, a collaboration among the School of Public Health, Contemplative Studies Initiative, and med school. Twelve primary faculty members research mindfulness outcomes, mechanisms, and delivery systems. More associates work in adjacent fields, fueling collaboration. Since 2017 the research arm has received $38 million of NIH funding.
At first Britton believed in meditation because it had rescued her. While in college she lost a childhood friend to suicide and fought the resulting tide of her anxiety with meditation. Always interested in essential questions like “What are we doing here?” she became a self-described meditation evangelist.
But her research assembled a daunting list of pitfalls—59 categories of meditation-related experiences that are either distressing or impair function. Beyond sleep impairment and psychosis, meditation can cause changes in executive functioning. It can cause hypersensitivity, trigger rage, and lead to irregularities in heart function. Some people don’t recover for years.
A particularly eerie concern is emotional blunting: as you learn to contain your negative emotions, it can also rein in the positive emotions. Britton likens it to going to the gym and only doing one exercise. “You’re going to have gigantic arms and tiny legs and you’re going to be really unbalanced,” she says. “I think mindfulness is only one of many, many, many different practices. But it’s being marketed as if it could do everything.”
“I think mindfulness is only one of many, many, many different practices. But it’s being marketed as if it could do everything.”
Side effects are no surprise. “There’s nothing out there that doesn’t have adverse events,” emphasizes Eric Loucks, director of Brown’s Mindfulness Center. “It’s not easy work to look specifically at the adverse events, and I’m really glad Willoughby has the courage and the desire to do that. It allows us all to understand the full picture of what’s going on.”
Meditating safely
As word of Britton’s findings spread, the phone began to ring in her lab. Distressed meditators needed help. She responded by creating Cheetah House, a nonprofit support nexus for those recovering from meditation side effects.
Cheetah House was once her actual home, a sprawling Victorian that she opened to Brown students who went abroad, became ordained Buddhist monks, and returned to a campus life that clashed with their new reality.
In 2017, after years of collaboration, Britton married her primary coauthor, religious studies scholar Jared Lindahl. Cheetah House moved into the virtual realm as a clearinghouse for information and treatment ideas.
People come to meditation seeking methods to help soothe their nervous systems, and they still need that. Some of them have been so traumatized by meditation that even sitting with their eyes closed is triggering. “We help people find what works for them,” says Britton. “They need something else.”
Work continues within mindfulness. With Lindahl and visiting scholar David Treleaven, author of Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness: Practices for Safe and Transformative Healing, Britton has created a 20-hour meditation safety program. They’ve taken it on tour, running trainings at major mindfulness centers all over the world.
Britton is exhausted from the fierce pushback on her work. Funding is harder now and the review process sharper. It gets personal, too. She’s been called antichrist, Debbie Downer, hysterical, fearmonger, and a false prophet. She gets threats.
“Where I’ve ended up, after taking a really deep dive into meditation, is that a lot of these consciousness-changing, cultivating methods are also a method of social control,” she says. And unfortunately there’s not enough discussion around that in either the health and neuroscience fields, she adds.
A standard part of mindfulness training, often delivered on the first day, is the instruction to note any questions and then come back to the practice. “You basically are instructed to let that go. And in Buddhism, doubt is considered one of the five hindrances,” she says. “Built into the cake are methods of discouraging critical thinking. That’s a little scary.”
Watch Professor Willoughby Britton discuss the risks of meditation on The Tim Ferriss Show:
