Comment by janeerie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by janeerie | Hacker News Reader

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A couple of years ago, I started a light meditation practice (10-20 minutes) and did it for about a month with good results. At that point, I read this article (on Hacker News) and spent the next two years terrified this would happen to me.

I had struggled with panic disorder in the past, but CBT pretty much fixed it for me. This article triggered my first panic attacks in years and led to a constant sense of dread and anxiety. It was so terrifying to think that a simple mental process could potentially trigger a breakdown (and like you, I had a family to take care of).

Fast-forward a couple of years, and I'm moving towards the view that these breakdowns are simple anxiety disorders that just happen to be triggered by meditation, in the same way that a panic attack triggered my anxiety disorder when I was young. I don't think there's anything particularly special or mystical about it - it's just our stupid brains activating the fear response, and it appears that the same methods for dealing with anxiety disorders work here.

I feel like in a way I was the control group for an experiment - can a fear of meditation provoke the same response as meditation itself?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6612475/ is a review of Britton's research discussed in the article. It presents several points of evidence with a coherent argument for why meditation brings benefits while an excessive level of meditation may cause adverse effects.

It's interesting that anyone even had to specify that excessive meditation could cause harm. Isn't the whole point of Buddhism to follow the "middle way"?

The problem with "excessive X causes harm" is that it is tautologically true. The real question is the quantitative level where it starts doing more harm than good. Nobody knows, but it's easy to say after the fact that something is "excessive".

Yea, but I think 10 days in a row of 12 hours a day meditation might fall on the "excessive" side, right? I mean, I live in a place where Buddhists are pretty common, and none that I know do anything like that. They might go to a retreat in the mountains, but they aren't just sitting there for hours trying to feel their body parts mentally, they do other things, like copy religious texts by hand or take nature walks to appreciate life.

Yes, but even a traditional retreat in the mountains like you described could be "excessive" to some.

> This article triggered my first panic attacks in years and led to a constant sense of dread and anxiety.

Perhaps you should think of your dread and anxiety as a symptom of craving. But if you think your family obligations get in the way, there's nothing wrong with avoiding deep insight practices for now. You can do light meditation and even take an intellectual interest in the deeper teachings without seriously triggering anything.

> You can do light meditation and even take an intellectual interest in the deeper teachings without seriously triggering anything.

Our fears can dominate our reality, and you are tritely recommending a possibly harmful path without knowing anything about them . . . like recommending eating a peanut to someone who knows they have a dangerous allergic reaction to peanuts. In the context of the article, your advice is especially egregious.

Please tread carefully in the world, effortless advice can cause long term harm.

Sometimes it is good to listen to our fears, sometimes not. Hard to judge others across the vast distance of a few sentences.

Of course. There is a world of difference between understanding something on an intellectual level and engaging in serious insight practice. Unlike insight meditation itself, there isn't really any evidence that the path I suggested is "possibly harmful".

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