Meditation: the negative aspects of mindfulness
Mindfulness exercises are designed to calm the mind and relieve stress. A new study shows how often meditators experience negative effects.
Mindfulness meditation has become increasingly popular in recent years. Studies suggest that consciously staying in the here and now relieves stress and even helps against certain mental illnesses (article in German) such as depression or anxiety disorders. But can the exercises have negative effects? Investigating this has been difficult so far, as participants in mindfulness courses are often reluctant to report difficulties in meditating or to admit negative experiences to the teacher.
A team led by Willoughby Britton of Brown University has therefore now taken a closer look at the advantages and disadvantages of meditating in the therapeutic context. For their experiment, the research group recruited 96 subjects who completed eight weeks of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. This combines elements of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR, from «Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction») according to Jon Kabat-Zinn with those of cognitive behavioural therapy. Participants in the study were predominantly middle-aged women who were looking for ways to relieve mild to moderate symptoms of stress, anxiety, or depression. They roughly corresponded to the audience that usually enrols in mindfulness courses.
Britton and his team then interviewed the subjects in detail about their experiences with the meditation programme. Among them, slightly more than half of the participants (58 per cent) reported at least one negative effect that the meditation exercises had had on them. The complaints ranged from persistent hypersensitivity to nightmares and traumatic events that were recalled by the subjects through the exercises. Other participants felt anxious or emotionally fatigued after meditating. About 37 per cent of subjects reported negative effects that interfered with their daily lives, and about 6 per cent experienced persistent symptoms that lasted longer than one month.
Overall, this suggests that negative effects in mindfulness meditation occur with similar frequency as in other psychological treatment procedures, the authors write. In many cases, they seem to go hand in hand with the positive effects. For example, many participants reported that their symptoms improved as a result of meditation, even despite negative experiences. In the end, as with drugs and other interventions, the important thing is to put both sides in relation to each other, the researchers conclude.
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