In 2004, Willoughby Britton was a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology and a devoted meditation teacher who thought of herself as a “double agent” — using science to promote a practice she believed in. So when her sleep study came back showing that the meditation group slept worse than the control group — more awakenings, more micro-arousals, more time in the lightest sleep stage, with more practice correlated with worse sleep — she didn’t publish it. Promoting meditation mattered more than scientific ethics, and reporting the result would mean “harming the dharma.”
The believer who became the skeptic
Khazan’s profile traces how that suppressed finding unraveled Britton’s worldview. A meditation teacher at a retreat supplied the missing frame: “Everyone knows if you meditate enough, you stop sleeping.” Concentration practice acts like a stimulant — the same mechanism as caffeine or Adderall. Britton began asking what else teachers weren’t telling people.
The thread runs through her own history: PTSD after discovering her best friend’s suicide, steadied by A Path With Heart and daily meditation; a Brown residency where loneliness drove her to meditate three hours a day, followed by six or seven years of dissociation so severe that “I forgot that I am a person.” Meditation teachers called it enlightenment — “riding the ox backward” — and told her to keep going, which made it worse. Then two unrelated people arrived at her inpatient psychiatric hospital in florid psychosis, both from the same retreat center, months apart.
What the research found
Britton’s 2017 study, “The Varieties of Contemplative Experience,” interviewed 60 meditators and 32 teachers. Among those affected: 82 percent reported fear, anxiety, panic, or paranoia; 78 percent changes in motivation or goals; smaller numbers reported delusions, hallucinations, physical pain, rage, and suicidality. Effects lasted a median of one to three years, and most reported moderate-to-severe impairment. Retreats were most implicated, but 28 percent had problems from ordinary daily practice, and a quarter were meditating under an hour a day.
The finding that would be “very common” if meditation were a drug: about one in ten people who meditated even once had an adverse effect lasting more than a month. Independent research lands in the same neighborhood — a German study of 1,300+ regular meditators found 13 percent with adverse effects, a minority severe enough to require hospitalization.
Cheetah House and the backlash
The surge of outreach after “Varieties” became Cheetah House (from citta, Sanskrit for consciousness): a nonprofit, now serving about 200 people a month over Zoom, half to three-quarters of them harmed on retreats. Once or twice a month Britton takes a call about a meditation-triggered psychotic break; rarely, people have died by suicide after intensive retreats — she recently started a support group for parents after 13 families, four of whose children had died, expressed interest.
The backlash came from the world she belonged to. Jack Kornfield — whose book started her meditation journey — called Cheetah House “over-the-top fearmongering.” Buddhist organizations iced her out, a researcher yelled “I don’t believe you!” at a conference, and invitations dried up or became debates over whether meditation-related harm exists at all. Grants followed suit: one proposal was rejected for being “too critical of religion,” and peer-review comments on risk papers ran six times longer than on benefit papers.
The piece is fair to the disagreement: Richard Davidson thinks for most people the greater risk is not meditating, and Brown’s Eric Loucks — who called Britton “innovative” and “courageous” — notes her work shaped updates to the MBSR curriculum. Britton herself isn’t anti-meditation; she stopped practicing in 2017 and now lives off-grid in Vermont, running Cheetah House full-time. Her guidance is practical: more than about 30 minutes a day tracks with more side effects, some practices fit some people poorly (body scans for the already body-focused), and if a practice brings you down, change it, modify it, or stop. “Treat meditation like any other relationship,” she says. “If you feel like shit with that person, maybe it’s time to break up.”