The Dark Side of Meditation
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What warning does the episode give about meditation and mental health?
Just a quick warning. This episode mentions suicide. If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text the US National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at nine eight eight.
This is Radio Atlantic. I'm Hunter Rosen. I meditate now and again, or at least I try. I was once at a yoga retreat where early morning meditation was one of the things on the schedule. I woke up, sat down, and lasted about twelve minutes, which felt like ninety. I downloaded the com app a couple of years ago, and I have used it exactly zero times. I have a doctor friend who assured me that meditation was in fact one of a handful of non-medicine treatments that had been thoroughly vetted by peer-reviewed science journals. So I never gave up trying. I just assumed that this was my fault and I needed to get better at it. I have definitely absorbed the idea that there is a meditation ideal to strive towards, a master of serene, who manages to both embody a Western principle of high stress job and an eastern principle of no stress at all.
So I don't know exactly how it made the leap over from India to America. I think that happened in like the nineteenth century. This is staff writer Olga Kazan. But kind of this modern moment of meditation that we're living in started in kind of like Silicon Valley tech companies. So probably around uh 10 or 15 years ago, a lot of tech companies kind of I was gonna say cling, but you're not really supposed to cling in meditation. They started kind of glomming onto meditation as this solution for people being burned out and overworked. You know, Ariana Huffington got really into it. Dimension to our
lives and we can tap into it.
I think like Oprah probably did it at one point. Nine o'clock in the morning, four thirty in the afternoon.
No matter what's going on, we stop, we meditate.
Like LeBron
meditating there on the bench.
He's in that he's in that calm half.
Yep. Google had like a meditation session for its employees. People in positions of power and authority and people who everyone thought was cool, uh were kind of pushing this idea that meditation is this um very benign sort of like thing that you can do for yourself in order to make yourself more relaxed. And I would say that there was a subtext there of like, and it'll make you more productive because you won't be so obsessed with like dumb bullshit.
Today meditation is a multi-billion dollar industry. According to one study, about half of all Americans have tried meditation, and about a fifth do it regularly. At some point, Olga was one of them. She tried something called MBSR or Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, although reluctantly. This was
one
of the most
annoying things about it for me is that it was very loosey-goosey, but then whenever I asked if I could modify it in some way, it was like, no, that's the wrong way to do it.
But Olga says it did help relieve some of her anxiety.
So even though I wasn't very good at meditation, I did buy this idea that it's basically harmless. It seems like the uh the worst thing that could happen is it just doesn't work. Like 'cause you're not good at it. Honestly, I've taken a whole meditation class where I meditated for 45 minutes a day, and I don't think anyone ever said this could be risky.
That's what I always thought too, and why I at least like the idea of meditation. It has a low barrier to entry, no fancy expensive equipment or services required, and seemingly zero side effects. But then one day, as Olga was browsing online. She came across a researcher at Brown University named Willoughby Britton.
So Willoughby Britton started out as a very avid meditator. Pretty much as avid as they get. It was it was like a lifeline. It was like You know, I don't know what I
would do without this.
So she is a psychologist. She was trained as a psychologist, but kind of as she's going on her psychology journey, she's also becoming a really hardcore meditator. She does other things to kind of show her commitment to this cause. So she's constantly reading these Dharma books, which are like books about the Buddhist teachings.
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