Meditation sickness is a common phenomenon when people start meditating. Within a week (or a month, or a couple of months) of serious, consistent daily meditation, they start getting feelings of sickness like nausea, tiredness, or fatigue. The only change in their life is that they’ve added meditation into their daily routine.
It’s not surprising to wonder, “Is meditation making me sick?”
If you are not physically ill, you could be experiencing meditation sickness. In this article, we explain what meditation sickness is, the steps you can take to overcome it, and why it happens.
Key takeaways
- Before labeling your symptoms as those of meditation sickness, seek professional help from a medical doctor to determine why you may be feeling ill.
- Symptoms of meditation sickness can be as mild as unpleasant thoughts or feelings, or as serious as anxiety or depression.
- The intensity and length of your meditation can influence if you feel meditation sickness, although psychological stressors and your psychiatric history can also be factors.
- Experiencing uncomfortable feelings is often a beneficial part of meditation, so in some cases, you may want to try to embrace temporary discomfort.
- To help overcome meditation sickness, choose shorter or less intense meditations.
What is meditation sickness?
While meditation sickness may be new to you, it’s not a new human experience. Research shows that accounts of meditation sickness go back as far as 454 C.E. in China, although the feeling wasn’t labeled then like it is now in the Western world.
Meditation sickness is a broad term encompassing a wide range of experiences people can have while practicing mindfulness. These include:
- Unpleasant thoughts
- New or stronger emotions
- Sensations of pain
- Unease or illness
- Even psychosis
However, it’s often unclear if these feelings are a direct result of meditation — and sometimes they may not be.
For example, one study of meditation from Global Advances in Health and Medicine discovered that while participants had unpleasant experiences during meditation, their symptoms didn’t worsen because of their mindfulness session. They also didn’t blame their symptoms on meditation.
Also, unpleasant thoughts and feelings are expected when we begin practicing mindfulness meditation, as it is meant to increase our awareness of our body or emotional state. However, there is a clear difference between milder symptoms like uncomfortable thoughts, and serious adverse meditation experiences that can lead to hospitalization.
If you notice any signs of sickness while meditating, it’s always a good idea to seek support from a qualified medical professional.
Symptoms of meditation sickness
How can you tell if you’re experiencing meditation sickness? As we’ve mentioned, the symptoms can range from mild to serious. One study found that the most commonly reported side effects of meditation were anxiety and depression, but here is a non-exhaustive list of what folks with meditation sickness may encounter:
- Unpleasant thoughts
- Uncomfortable sensations
- Difficult emotions
- Crying while meditating
- Low self-esteem
- Disorientation
- Alienation
- Anxiety
- Depression
- Physical pain
- Psychosis
- Mania
Experiencing low self-esteem? This self-esteem meditation helps you cultivate a positive self-image and treat yourself with compassion.
How can I overcome meditation sickness?
While meditating may not make any existing conditions worse, it’s still no fun to experience sickness. So if this is happening to you, here are a few tips to help you out.
Meditate at your own pace
Everyone has different needs, stressors, and psychological histories — so feel free to tailor your meditation practice to accommodate yours. If you’re a beginner, start with more conventional types of meditation, such as mindfulness or loving-kindness practices, which foster calmness, awareness, and love.
Find experienced, supportive meditation teachers
Just like with any psychological treatment, it’s important to find teachers or clinicians who are skilled and properly trained. Insight Timer has over 17,000 teachers and musicians, so you can find the right one for you.
If you’re not sure where to start, try meditations from psychologist and meditation teacher Tara Brach, Ph.D. or certified hypnotherapist Cory Cochiolo.
Choose shorter or less intense meditations
It’s completely possible to ease into meditation slowly and still experience its benefits. There is no need to dive in with hour-long sessions, or even 15-minute sessions!
To get started, try some of our recommended short meditations. All you need is five minutes to complete this meditation from mindfulness author Hugh Byrne, and this short session from Sadhguru teaches you how to live blissfully and consciously in just four minutes.
How can I overcome meditation-induced nausea or discomfort?
If you experience meditation nausea or other adverse effects from mindfulness meditation, first seek professional help. But if your symptoms don’t require medical interventions, try embracing temporary discomfort in your practice.
Often there is a misconception that meditation always equals relaxation or positive thinking. Re-adjust your expectations to realize that you can experience pain, unpleasant thoughts, and uncomfortable emotions, and still be okay afterward.
In fact, anxiety from mindfulness can be a sign that it’s working. In general, unwanted thoughts or emotions are inevitable during meditation. If you need a little assistance getting through discomfort, try this meditation for working through discomfort from Heather Waxman.
Even within your practice, you can adapt your session to suit your needs. For example, if you feel uncomfortable honing in on a certain body part during a body scan meditation, skip it for the time being. Or if you feel uneasy focusing on your breath, focus on an object instead.
How can I overcome illness triggered by meditation practice?
If you are experiencing illness from meditating, seek professional medical help — don’t try to use meditation to replace medical healthcare.
So, what actually causes meditation sickness?
There are quite a few reasons you may be experiencing meditation sickness, which can impact what type of symptoms you feel. Let’s take a look at some of the most common ones.
Increased awareness
One of the most common reasons for meditation sickness is that many mindfulness practices are designed to increase your awareness, which can bring uncomfortable sensations to the surface. When we consider the mind-body connection and how emotions store tension in the body, it becomes understandable how clearing away the distraction and clutter with mindfulness may force us to address residual emotions, trauma, and pain.
These symptoms may feel unpleasant at the moment, but they are a sign that your practice is working. Facing and studying our (mild) physical and emotional pain leads to a positive outcome for our mental health.
Experiencing persistent pain during meditation? It could be your pose or another common issue. Learn more about pain during meditation on our blog.
The fight or flight response
When you get into a proper guided meditation practice, you’re causing the parasympathetic nervous system (the “rest-and-digest” system) to trigger. This arm of the nervous system calms you down after excitement or stress.
Traditionally, if an animal is chasing you or you are in a fight, your sympathetic nervous system triggers and a whole variety of things happen within your body to get it ready to fight or flight — as in, run away or deal with the conflict as it’s occurring.
Once the problem has been dealt with, the parasympathetic nervous system is supposed to trigger, causing you to return to a state of homeostasis. Your body will start recovering itself. The fight-or-flight hormones balance out.
Unfortunately, particularly in our society, there’s this continuous level of minor stress. Chronic stress causes the sympathetic nervous system to never quite regulate you back to homeostasis.
When you start meditating and sitting in silence for prolonged periods, you’re letting your body rest and recover. Your parasympathetic nervous system gets triggered and your body says, “Okay, I’m going to recover. I’m going to heal. I’m going to calm down. I’m going to deal with the stuff that I’ve been putting off.”
But in modern life, it could feasibly have been months — or years — before you’ve let your body recover to such an extent. The sympathetic nervous system may not want to relax completely, and that causes the fatigue or sickness that you’re now feeling. It’s like when you take a break from work or school and get sick because you’re finally allowing your body to rest, recover, and just deal with whatever it’s been putting off.
If you don’t deal with your distress intermittently, if you don’t give yourself the chance to rest and recover, you may break. If you just push and push and push your muscles and never give them a chance to rest, eventually they may snap. The ligaments might break. There may be tears. This is the same with your mind.
Psychological stressors and psychiatric history
Sometimes the adverse effects of practicing mindfulness can occur because of psychological stressors that existed before beginning meditation, or because of your psychological history of mental illness.
If you already were dealing with anxiety before meditating, for example, you may experience more anxiety symptoms during or after your practice due to an increased awareness of your state of mind. Or, if you had chronic pain beforehand, you may become more aware of it (and feel it more) while meditating.
Other factors that may cause more serious symptoms include sleep deprivation and social stressors, along with the length and intensity of your practice. Research shows that hours and hours of meditating with minimal breaks in between, or thousands of hours of long-term meditation, tend to align with more serious effects.
Is meditation sickness a common side effect of meditation?
Meditation sickness isn’t necessarily a common side effect of meditation, but it’s an expected one.
A review reported by the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health demonstrated that only 8% of participants experienced negative effects from meditating, which is a similar percentage to other types of psychotherapy. The same analysis reported that the mindfulness sessions studied didn’t do any more harm than if the meditators didn’t receive any interventions at all.
Another study from Clinical Psychology Review found that 63% of participants who were practicing long-term meditation had at least one uncomfortable experience, including a negative emotion, confusion, or alienation. However, most of these subjects noted more positive than negative mental health effects, with more than 80% of them reporting outcomes like joy, confidence, and acceptance.
In general, the chances that meditation will make any mental illness conditions worse are small. And overall, mindfulness practices are thought to have minimal risks.
Find the right meditation for you
It’s important to find the right meditation to fit your unique needs, stressors, history, and experience level with mindfulness-based practices. Our platform offers 200,000 different meditations from psychologists, mindfulness teachers, and spiritual leaders across the world. And if you need a little extra support, you can browse our 12,000 community groups to find individuals who are on the same path as you or our abundant free resources to get extra guidance and information.
FAQs about meditation sickness
Can meditation cause depersonalization?
Yes, and a review from Psychiatry found that in some cases, depersonalization during meditation can lead to anxiety during your practice. If you are experiencing depersonalization and anxiety, seek help from medical clinicians.
What is Zen sickness?
Zen sickness is a type of sickness rooted in Buddhist meditation, which The Oxford Handbook of Meditation revealed was originally related to ideas from Buddhist texts about becoming overly attached to insight or emptiness. Some Buddhist studies and Buddhist teachers list several symptoms of Western meditation sickness as the goals of meditation.
What are the side effects of intense meditation?
In some cases, negative side effects of intense meditation can include threats to your sense of reality (such as feeling unreal or disoriented), or even psychotic symptoms. In this specific research, these negative side effects were reported when beginners were attempting advanced meditations.
What is Zen meditation?
Zen meditation comes from Zen Buddhism, which became the main school of Chinese Buddhism toward the end of the Tang Dynasty. Research has found that some forms of meditation today are related to Zen Buddhism, and many sitting meditations have been adapted into English from ancient Buddhist traditions and Eastern dharma centers to meet our needs in modern times.
Curious about Asian meditation practices? Try this exercise in mindful breathing for an introduction to short meditations based on Buddhist traditions.
Disclaimer: This article is for information only and should not be considered as medical advice. If you have concerns about anxiety or any other conditions mentioned in this article, please seek a medical professional for help.
References
Interns, H. (2021, October 27). Meditation Sickness: Bridging a Gap Between Medicine and Buddhism — Division of Humanities and Fine Arts. Division of Humanities and Fine Arts. https://www.hfa.ucsb.edu/news-entries/2021/10/25/meditation-sickness-bridging-the-gap-between-medicine-and-buddhism
Binda, D. D., Greco, C. M., & Morone, N. E. (2022). What Are Adverse Events in Mindfulness Meditation?. Global advances in health and medicine, 11, 2164957X221096640. https://doi.org/10.1177/2164957X221096640
Meditation and mindfulness: What you need to know. (n.d.). NCCIH. https://www.nccih.nih.gov/health/meditation-and-mindfulness-what-you-need-to-know
Baer, R. A., Crane, C., Miller, E. D., & Kuyken, W. (2019). Doing no harm in mindfulness-based programs: Conceptual issues and empirical findings. Clinical Psychology Review, 71, 101–114. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2019.01.001
Castillo, R. J. (1990). Depersonalizatipn and meditation. Psychiatry MMC, 53(2), 158–168. https://doi.org/10.1080/00332747.1990.11024497
Ahn, J. Y. (2020). Meditation sickness. In Miguel Farias, David Brazier, & Mansur Lalljee (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Meditation [Journal-article]. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198808640.013.45
Du, L. J. (2022). Zen and the psychological significance of meditation as related to believing. Frontiers in psychology, 13, 1033021. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1033021
