Here's the myth, stated plainly: meditation is always calming, it's safe for everyone, and if sitting with your breath made you feel worse, you were doing it wrong.
And here's what a decade of research actually says: meditation is a real psychological intervention, and like every real intervention it has side effects. A UCL-led study found that about a quarter of regular meditators report having had particularly unpleasant meditation-related experiences. Not boredom. Not a wandering mind. Fear, distorted emotions, an altered sense of self or the world. If meditation ever left you feeling worse than when you sat down, you weren't failing at the one practice that's supposedly impossible to fail. You were having a documented experience that researchers have been quietly cataloguing for years.
I want to be careful here, because this isn't an anti-meditation piece. It's an anti-myth piece. The myth isn't "meditation works." The myth is "meditation is risk-free," and that second claim is the one the apps and the corporate wellness decks keep making on science's behalf without asking science first.
You probably know the scene this myth creates. You download the app because your therapist suggested it, and then your manager did too. You sit down for your ten minutes of calm. And instead of calm you get a rising tide of dread, or a memory you'd filed away for a reason, or a creepy floaty detachment where your own hands stop feeling like yours. The app chimes sweetly and asks how that felt. There's no button for "like the inside of my head got louder." So you conclude you're uniquely broken at relaxing, which is a special kind of demoralizing, and you quietly stop.
The research says the quiet stopping is the real tragedy, because the problem was never you.
Where the myth came from
Partly it came from marketing, obviously. Meditation got rebranded from a demanding contemplative discipline into a hygiene habit, something you do like flossing, and nobody warns you about side effects of flossing.
But the more interesting answer is that the myth came partly from science itself. In 2018, a group of researchers led by Nicholas Van Dam published "Mind the Hype", a long, pointed self-audit of the mindfulness field. Their argument, compressed: the enthusiasm had run ahead of the evidence. Studies were small, control groups were weak, "mindfulness" meant something different in every paper, and the resulting excitement got communicated to the public as settled fact. Harms, meanwhile, were barely measured at all. Not because they didn't exist. Because almost nobody was asking.
When clinical trials don't ask about negative effects, they don't find negative effects. That absence then gets read as safety, and the safety claim gets printed on the box.
It's an old pattern, and it took researchers deliberately going looking to break it.
What they found when they looked
The looking started in earnest with a 2017 study by Jared Lindahl, Willoughby Britton and colleagues, who interviewed Western Buddhist meditators and teachers about challenging experiences. What they catalogued was striking in its range: the difficulties weren't just emotional. People reported perceptual changes, cognitive disruptions, bodily effects, shifts in their sense of self. Some experiences were brief; some followed people home from retreats and stayed.
Then came the prevalence question: fine, these experiences exist, but how common are they? Marco Schlosser and colleagues surveyed regular meditators and found that roughly 25% reported having had particularly unpleasant meditation-related experiences, the kind involving fear or distorted emotions, not mere restlessness. One in four. For a practice marketed as universally soothing, that's a remarkable number to have gone mostly unmentioned.
The easy objection is that this only happens to intense practitioners, the silent-retreat crowd, people meditating eight hours a day. The evidence doesn't cooperate. Britton's 2021 work looked specifically at the gold-standard, clinically supervised programs, the mindfulness-based courses your doctor might actually refer you to, and found that even there, adverse effects occur often enough that researchers had to build formal tools just to define and measure them. As Brown University put it when announcing that work: making meditation more helpful starts with understanding how it can be harmful. And a 2025 study by Van Dam's team using a representative sample of US meditators found that unusual experiences and adverse effects show up at the population level, among ordinary app-and-ten-minutes people, not just retreatants.
Meanwhile a systematic review led by Miguel Farias in Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica confirmed that adverse events occur across meditation practices and meditation-based therapies alike. Farias has been blunter elsewhere: meditation can be harmful and can make existing mental health problems worse. That last part matters, because the people most aggressively prescribed meditation are often the ones carrying anxiety or old trauma, the ones for whom sitting silently with an unfiltered feed of their own mind is the most volatile assignment.
Which, if you think about it for even a second, makes sense. Meditation isn't nothing. It's sustained, deliberate attention turned inward, often toward exactly the material you've spent years managing by not staring directly at it. Sometimes what surfaces is insight. Sometimes it's an intrusive thought you then spend the afternoon interrogating, even though an intrusive thought isn't a confession. A practice strong enough to change your relationship with your own mind is, necessarily, strong enough to change it in directions you didn't order.
So should you stop meditating?
No. Or: it depends, and I can be specific about what it depends on.
Most people who meditate don't experience serious harm, and plenty genuinely benefit; nothing in this research erases that. What the research kills is the universality claim. The honest position, the one Farias, Britton, and Van Dam have all landed on in their own ways, is that meditation should be treated like any other intervention that actually does something: helpful for many, neutral for some, destabilizing for a few, with the odds shifting based on your history, your current state, the intensity of the practice, and whether anyone qualified is around when things get strange.
Practically, that means a few unfashionable things. If meditation reliably leaves you more raw or more frightened, that's data, not a character flaw, and "push through it" is advice nobody has earned the evidence to give you. If you're in the middle of something heavy, a silent retreat is probably not the move. And if ten minutes of enforced stillness feels less like a refuge and more like a pressure cooker, you're allowed to pick a different door into self-awareness entirely.
Because there are other doors. The benefit everyone's chasing, noticing what's going on inside you before it runs your whole day, doesn't require silence. Some people get there by writing. Some get there by talking out loud, which counts as journaling too, and for a lot of us it's the gentler route: narrating your mind to a listener is a very different experience from sitting alone inside it with the lights off. That difference is a big part of why we built Joice as a conversation rather than a blank timer. Saying "I don't know why today felt so heavy" to something that asks a gentle question back is self-observation too. It just doesn't require you to free-solo your own subconscious.
The wellness industry sold us a practice with one possible outcome. The researchers found a practice with several. That's not a scandal; that's just what it looks like when something is real.
Keep meditating if it serves you. Just retire the idea that feeling worse afterward means you did it wrong. One in four regular meditators could tell you from the inside: the practice did something. Whether that something is for you is a question only you get to answer.