Why Meditation Can Make You Feel Worse (And When to Stop)

You sit down to meditate expecting to feel calmer. Instead you get restless, low, irritable, or hit by something you had not thought about in years.

For most people that is normal and it passes. For some people it is not, and being told to push through is the worst advice they could get.

Here is how to tell which one you are dealing with.

Is Feeling Worse Normal? Mostly, Yes

If you have started meditating and feel worse rather than better, you are not doing it wrong and you are not unusual.

The common ones look like this. Restlessness that makes ten minutes feel like an hour. Irritability afterwards. A low mood that arrives out of nowhere. Old memories turning up uninvited. Sometimes crying without a clear reason.

None of that means the practice has gone wrong. Most of it means it has started.

The apps tend to skip this bit, which is why so many people conclude meditation is not for them in week two. If somebody had told me at the start that the first month often feels worse, I would have stuck with it far more easily.

Why It Happens: You Removed the Noise

Think about what a normal day actually contains.

A phone. A job to think about. Plans, podcasts, conversations, something on in the background. Most of that is not filling your life. It is covering something.

Sitting still with your eyes closed removes all of it at once. Nothing is left to look at except what was already there.

So it is not that meditation created the low mood or the restlessness. It made it audible. The volume did not go up, the background music went off.

That is genuinely uncomfortable, and it is also the only way anything gets dealt with. You cannot work on something you have never let yourself look at.

What the Research Actually Found

This part surprised me, and I think it deserves saying plainly rather than being left out because it is inconvenient.

Researchers at Brown University, led by Willoughby Britton, set out to measure side effects properly in people going through standard mindfulness programmes. Not extreme retreats. Ordinary courses.

They found that 83 per cent reported at least one meditation-related side effect. Around 58 per cent had at least one that felt negative. And roughly 37 per cent reported effects that had a negative impact on how they were functioning day to day.

The most common were anxiety, at about a third of people, and depression, at about a quarter. The wider literature also documents rarer and more serious effects, including feeling detached from yourself or your surroundings, and reliving traumatic memories.

Two honest conclusions come out of that, and most articles only print the first one.

The first is that feeling worse is common, so you are in good company and you probably do not need to worry.

The second is that for a meaningful minority of people, this is not just a passing rough patch, and telling them to sit with it is the wrong call. Meditation is an active practice with real effects, and anything strong enough to help you is strong enough to affect you the other way.

The Researcher Behind the Findings

If you want this straight from the person who ran the studies, this interview covers the findings and what she thinks people should do about them.

Normal Discomfort Versus Something Else

This is the part I most wanted to get right, because the line matters.

Usually normal, and worth staying with. Boredom and restlessness. Irritability for an hour afterwards. Sadness that arrives and then passes. Old memories surfacing. Crying. Feeling tired. Noticing tension in your body you had not registered before.

The pattern with all of these is that they move. They come up, they are uncomfortable, and they settle within the day.

Not just a rough patch. Panic that does not settle after the session ends. Feeling detached from yourself, or like the world around you is not quite real. Reliving a traumatic memory rather than remembering it. Sleep getting badly disrupted. Feeling emotionally flat or switched off for days. Not being able to function at work or at home. Any thoughts of harming yourself.

Those are not a deeper stage of the practice and they are not something to breathe through. They are a signal to stop and get proper support.

I want to be clear about my own position here. I am not a trained coach, counsellor or clinician. I can tell you what my own practice has been like and what the research says. I cannot tell you which side of that line you are on, and anyone who would, from a blog post, is guessing.

When to Stop, and Where to Get Help

Stopping is allowed. It is not failure and it is not weakness, and the practice will still be there later.

If anything from that second list is happening, stop meditating for now and speak to your GP or a qualified therapist. Say clearly that it started or worsened alongside a meditation practice, because that detail matters and is easy to leave out.

There is also a nonprofit set up specifically for this. Cheetah House provides evidence-based information and support for people who have had negative effects from meditation, including consultations and support groups. It came out of the same research at Brown.

If you are in the UK and things feel urgent, you can call Samaritans free on 116 123, at any hour, any day. If you or someone else is in immediate danger, call 999.

None of that is me being dramatic about a breathing exercise. It is that this article will be read by people at very different points, and the ones who need that paragraph should not have to go looking for it.

How to Make the Practice Gentler

For ordinary discomfort, the answer is almost never to push harder. Go smaller instead.

Cut the time. Drop to five minutes, or three. A short sit you actually finish beats a long one you endure. There is more on shrinking the habit rather than abandoning it in when your 20 minutes feels like too much.

Open your eyes. A soft gaze at the floor a metre or so in front of you keeps you anchored in the room. For a lot of people this alone settles it.

Get more grounded, not less. Feet flat on the floor, sit in a chair rather than on a cushion, notice the contact points. Anything that keeps you in your body.

Give the mind a job. Counting breaths gives attention something concrete to hold, which is far easier than open awareness when things feel raw. That is the method I use and it is written out in how to meditate when you cannot concentrate.

Move instead of sitting. Walking slowly and deliberately, or gentle yoga, does much of the same work with far less intensity.

Change the time of day. Last thing at night is the hardest slot for most people, because you are tired and there is nothing after it to steady you.

Leave long retreats alone for now. Hours of silent practice is where most of the serious cases in the research come from. It is not a beginner move.

If what keeps surfacing is emotional rather than restless, the release practice in how I let go of negative thoughts and feelings every day gives you something to actually do with it instead of just sitting underneath it.

How Long the Rough Patch Lasts

For ordinary discomfort, most people find it eases over a few weeks of short, regular practice.

Judge it on the trend, not on individual sessions. Sessions are noisy. One awful sit means nothing, and so does one blissful one.

The question worth asking every couple of weeks is simple. Across the last fortnight, is this getting easier, staying the same, or getting harder?

Easier means carry on. The same means go shorter and gentler. Harder, over weeks, means stop and get some support rather than waiting it out.

That last one is worth writing down somewhere, because in the middle of it you will be inclined to assume you just need to try harder.

What It Was Like For Me

Mine was the ordinary kind, and it still knocked me about.

This was years ago, before I had kids. I was meditating a lot and questioning who I actually was, and what came up first was not calm. It was feeling completely lost, for about a year.

Nothing surfaced that needed a professional. It was just the noise going off and me finding out what had been sitting underneath it the whole time. I have written that whole stretch out in losing your sense of self.

What I would tell myself at the start is that the discomfort was not a detour. It was the thing working. But I would also want to know that this is not true for everyone, and that carrying on regardless is not a virtue if it is genuinely making you worse.

Both of those can be true. Most confidence and meditation writing only wants to tell you the first.

Common Questions About Feeling Worse After Meditating