Mindfulness meditation is promoted as though it’s good for everyone and everything, and there’s evidence that it isn’t—going to sleep is the opposite of being mindful, and a mindfulness practice can make sleep more difficult. Also, mindfulness meditation can make psychological problems more apparent to the conscious mind, and more painful.
The difficulties which meditation can cause are known to Buddhists, but have not yet known by researchers or the general public. The commercialization of meditation is part of the problem.
there’s evidence that it isn’t—going to sleep is the opposite of being mindful, and a mindfulness practice can make sleep more difficult.
It’s opposite in some regards but not all of them. Both sleep and mindfulness meditation usually lead to very little beta wave activity in the brain.
I don’t have a Zeo myself but it wouldn’t surprise me if I could reach a state in meditation where I’m mindful but the Zeo labels me as sleeping.
As far as researching whether meditation improves how well you feel, I think that’s hard. 5 years ago, if you asked me how I’m feeling than a real answer might be good or bad. Maybe even 7 different stages of a Likert scale. Today a full answer might take 5 minutes because I have awareness of a lot of stuff that goes on inside myself. If you simply compare the values towards those 5 years ago I don’t think that would tell you very much. There was a while when I tried to keep numbers about my daily happiness level but after a while I simply gave up because it didn’t seem to provide useful insight because they reference points aren’t stable.
After I started meditating mindfully, my anxiety got worse, a lot worse. I talked about this on meditation forums and they said it means that “I’m working on my problems” and I should just keep doing it more and more and I would somehow overcome it. Well, I tried to, but my anxiety only got worse. Currently I have a small break from meditating.
How do you know that you are meditating mindfully? If you ask that question on a meditation forum they have no way to know whether you are doing things right.
If you want help in this venue it would help if you describe exactly what you think you are doing when you are “meditating mindfully”. It would also help to know what you exactly observed that makes you conclude that your anxiety got worse.
After I made that post I thought I should have put “tried” before “meditating mindfully”, but then I forgot about it. You’re right, I’m probably not doing it correctly.
I focus on my breath, but it’s of course really hard for me and I don’t know if I’m doing it properly. More specifically I focus on the feeling when air goes in and out of my nose. The problem is that I can either focus on my breath and breath forcefully, or I daydream and breath naturally. This process feels like a cat chasing its tail. In the “mindfulness in simple English” they said that I shouldn’t control my breathing, but I don’t know how to do that. It’s really hard for me to focus on my breath without trying to control it.
What exactly I observed? Usually I feel more tense and focus on myself more after I’ve meditated. I’m not sure if I can give more specific examples because I haven’t kept a diary about this.
I focus on my breath, but it’s of course really hard for me and I don’t know if I’m doing it properly. More specifically I focus on the feeling when air goes in and out of my nose.
As far as I understand some traditional Buddhist do advocate to feel the air going in and out of your nose.
I think that practice might make sense for people who aren’t present in their head. For Western intellectuals who already spent a lot of time in their head I think it makes more sense to feel the breath in the belly.
Here on LW we also don’t meditate with the main purpose of speaking spiritual experiences. Opening the third eye isn’t the point of the exercise for us but it might be for some Buddhists who like focusing on the breath and if do that I feel that part of my attention is on the chakra generally called third eye.
To speak in a bit more New Age language focusing on your belly instead of your nose will make you more grounded.
From a more Western perspective good German physiotherapy says that it’s beneficial to breath with the belly instead of breathing higher in the body.
My first meditation book was from Aikido master Koichi Tohei. Tohei advocates a type of meditation where one is focused on the tan-diem as the locus of attention while meditating. The tan-diem is a chakra around an two finger breadth under the belly button. Tohei also calls it the center of the body and the one-point.
After googling a bit around the solar plexus might also be a good point but you don’t need to focus on a single point. The belly is good enough as an area.
If you are completely unable to be in a state where you don’t control your breath and don’t day dream start by focusing on deep long breathes will being focused on the belly and go for maximum length of breaths.
It’s unfortunate that I have to use words like chakra while speaking on LW but those words have some use. You don’t need to believe that chakras really exist. Just take them as crude approximations that the kind of people with experience of meditation use. Unfortunately I also don’t have good scientific evidence to back up what I said.
Usually I feel more tense and focus on myself more after I’ve meditated.
Meditation increases self awareness. That’s the point. The interesting thing would be whether you are also more tense by objective measures such as increased pulse or blood pressure. If you live together with other people you might also have them rate the level of your tension.
I’m not sure if I can give more specific examples because I haven’t kept a diary about this.
The Feeling Good handbook get’s frequently referenced on LW. In it Burns advocates that people who want to self treat anxiety spent 5 minutes every week to fill out a questionnaire that measures their anxiety levels.
If I would struggle with anxiety that I wanted to go away I would make myself a Google form with Burns anxiety list and answer it every sunday to see whether I’m improving as time goes on.
I tried what you suggested. I sat in one position for 50 minutes and tried to focus on the feeling of breathing in my belly (see how I tabooed my earlier use of “meditating mindfully”?) Here’s what I observed:
At first it was a bit hard to find the breathing, it’s more subtle than the feeling in my nostrils. But I was able to occasionally focus and my focus gravitated towards that region close to the belly button. It feels better to focus on my belly than on my nostrils. Focusing on nostrils feels heavy and shallow, while focusing on belly feels a bit more light and deep.
What surprised me most was that I felt like I was actually able to focus on the feeling in my stomach without trying to control my breathing as much. At least I was able to more easily convince that this was the case. It feels like nostrils are so close to where the act of breathing happens, while my belly is more distanced from this thing that does the breathing. It feels more like focusing on an external object.
It was mostly fantasizing and daydreaming and I was able to focus only for short periods of time, maybe a few seconds and just occasionally. I got obsessive-compulsive thoughts like “focus on your nostrils”, but I tried to be mindful about those and mostly succeeded. I was a bit tense and at least at one point I noticed my heartbeat was quite fast, which made me more anxious. Part of this tenseness was due to the fact that I decided a poor posture when I started. I decided not to change this posture along the way.
I feel more relaxed than when I started and I don’t usually feel like that when I’ve meditated. So overall, a positive experience, placebo or not.
Great. Thank you for sharing your experience.
It sounds like you are moving in the right direction.
The fact that your heartbeat gets fast and an emotion comes up that makes you anxious is no bad sign.
If you stay present and your body processes the emotion it’s dealt with. After processing strong emotions
my body usually feels more relaxed than before. In meditation tension can rise to uncomfortable levels. Then the body recognizes the tension as unnecessary and
the tension falls off.
I think 50 minutes are probably too much for you at your stage.
Staying focused for 50 minutes is very hard and you are likely to lose your focus.
In your situation I would rather go for 10 or 15 minutes for meditating alone. Set an alarm clock.
Once you reach the point where you feel like you can focus for longer periods of time you can increase the time you meditate.
If you want to spent more time writing down what you experienced like you just did is very useful.
It allows you to make sense of the experience. That’s what diary writing is about.
(I’m also embarrassed if someone notices I’m keeping a diary which is of course really stupid and something I should work on).
I personally keep information like that in my own Evernote account and don’t have a physical diary that could lie around that someone could notice. You don’t need to talk with the kind of people who would look down on you for having a diary about the fact that you have a diary.
The point of writing things done in a diary is to refine your thinking. You force yourself to bring clarity into your thought. For me writing a post on LW like the one above about why I recommend focusing on the belly instead of the nose, refines my own thinking about meditation. Using you and LW as an audience instead of simply writing down my thoughts in a private journal has advantages or disadvantages.
When writing for an LW audience I have to be more careful with terms like chakra then when I’m just writing for myself. Writing emails to friends can also be useful to refine your thoughts. You probably have a bunch of different friends with different perspectives on life and different level of trust when it comes to sharing personal experiences.
All my writing still goes into my Evernote account. Meditation can lead to perceiving a bunch of new things that you never experienced before. If you don’t want to become a mystic, putting cognitive labels on experience is important to keep your orientation and be able to navigate the world.
I’m not sure if I got anything else out of your post, but I will try to focus on my belly the next time I meditate.
It was the main point of my first half. At this point in time understanding the “why” isn’t that important.
It [my belly] feels more like focusing on an external object.
That’s an interesting way of putting it. With time your belly won’t feel like an external object anymore
but will feel internal. At that point a lot of your anxiety issues will likely solve themselves.
I’m not sure if I got anything else out of your post, but I will try to focus on my belly the next time I meditate. The chakra and third eye stuff didn’t bother me, just maybe confused a little, but I have a vague feeling of what they might describe. I’ve actually downloaded the Feeling Good handbook, but reading the whole book is currently a pretty daunting task. That questionare seems easy so it might just be something I could do. Diary is also something I’ve tried to do, but akrasia has prevented me from doing it frequently (I’m also embarrassed if someone notices I’m keeping a diary which is of course really stupid and something I should work on).
Thanks for being kind, I expected a more hostile reply.
One piece of advice, sort of a shot in the dark but aimed at addressing a common failure mode. If you were trying to force yourself to meditate while sitting in an uncomfortable position or for excessive lengths of time, don’t do that. All you’re doing is training yourself to be pissed off and tense about meditating. Try just sitting comfortably in a chair and focusing on your breath for ten minutes, or even just five minutes at first if it’s really that arduous.
I agree. Just be sure that you sit in a stable position.
I personally can sit comfortably in lotus. It’s a learned skill but it’s not something you need to learn to be able to meditate and if you focus on it at the beginning you focus on the wrong thing.
Thanks, this is one of the very few meditation papers that seem to be worth reading, since as they observe:
The important thing to understand about the report is that they were looking for active control groups, and they found that only 47 out of over 18,000 studies had them, which is pretty telling
Research on mindfulness meditation
Mindfulness meditation is promoted as though it’s good for everyone and everything, and there’s evidence that it isn’t—going to sleep is the opposite of being mindful, and a mindfulness practice can make sleep more difficult. Also, mindfulness meditation can make psychological problems more apparent to the conscious mind, and more painful.
The difficulties which meditation can cause are known to Buddhists, but have not yet known by researchers or the general public. The commercialization of meditation is part of the problem.
It’s opposite in some regards but not all of them. Both sleep and mindfulness meditation usually lead to very little beta wave activity in the brain.
I don’t have a Zeo myself but it wouldn’t surprise me if I could reach a state in meditation where I’m mindful but the Zeo labels me as sleeping.
As far as researching whether meditation improves how well you feel, I think that’s hard. 5 years ago, if you asked me how I’m feeling than a real answer might be good or bad. Maybe even 7 different stages of a Likert scale. Today a full answer might take 5 minutes because I have awareness of a lot of stuff that goes on inside myself. If you simply compare the values towards those 5 years ago I don’t think that would tell you very much. There was a while when I tried to keep numbers about my daily happiness level but after a while I simply gave up because it didn’t seem to provide useful insight because they reference points aren’t stable.
After I started meditating mindfully, my anxiety got worse, a lot worse. I talked about this on meditation forums and they said it means that “I’m working on my problems” and I should just keep doing it more and more and I would somehow overcome it. Well, I tried to, but my anxiety only got worse. Currently I have a small break from meditating.
How do you know that you are meditating mindfully? If you ask that question on a meditation forum they have no way to know whether you are doing things right.
If you want help in this venue it would help if you describe exactly what you think you are doing when you are “meditating mindfully”. It would also help to know what you exactly observed that makes you conclude that your anxiety got worse.
After I made that post I thought I should have put “tried” before “meditating mindfully”, but then I forgot about it. You’re right, I’m probably not doing it correctly.
I focus on my breath, but it’s of course really hard for me and I don’t know if I’m doing it properly. More specifically I focus on the feeling when air goes in and out of my nose. The problem is that I can either focus on my breath and breath forcefully, or I daydream and breath naturally. This process feels like a cat chasing its tail. In the “mindfulness in simple English” they said that I shouldn’t control my breathing, but I don’t know how to do that. It’s really hard for me to focus on my breath without trying to control it.
What exactly I observed? Usually I feel more tense and focus on myself more after I’ve meditated. I’m not sure if I can give more specific examples because I haven’t kept a diary about this.
As far as I understand some traditional Buddhist do advocate to feel the air going in and out of your nose. I think that practice might make sense for people who aren’t present in their head. For Western intellectuals who already spent a lot of time in their head I think it makes more sense to feel the breath in the belly.
Here on LW we also don’t meditate with the main purpose of speaking spiritual experiences. Opening the third eye isn’t the point of the exercise for us but it might be for some Buddhists who like focusing on the breath and if do that I feel that part of my attention is on the chakra generally called third eye.
To speak in a bit more New Age language focusing on your belly instead of your nose will make you more grounded.
From a more Western perspective good German physiotherapy says that it’s beneficial to breath with the belly instead of breathing higher in the body.
My first meditation book was from Aikido master Koichi Tohei. Tohei advocates a type of meditation where one is focused on the tan-diem as the locus of attention while meditating. The tan-diem is a chakra around an two finger breadth under the belly button. Tohei also calls it the center of the body and the one-point.
After googling a bit around the solar plexus might also be a good point but you don’t need to focus on a single point. The belly is good enough as an area.
If you are completely unable to be in a state where you don’t control your breath and don’t day dream start by focusing on deep long breathes will being focused on the belly and go for maximum length of breaths.
It’s unfortunate that I have to use words like chakra while speaking on LW but those words have some use. You don’t need to believe that chakras really exist. Just take them as crude approximations that the kind of people with experience of meditation use. Unfortunately I also don’t have good scientific evidence to back up what I said.
Meditation increases self awareness. That’s the point. The interesting thing would be whether you are also more tense by objective measures such as increased pulse or blood pressure. If you live together with other people you might also have them rate the level of your tension.
The Feeling Good handbook get’s frequently referenced on LW. In it Burns advocates that people who want to self treat anxiety spent 5 minutes every week to fill out a questionnaire that measures their anxiety levels.
If I would struggle with anxiety that I wanted to go away I would make myself a Google form with Burns anxiety list and answer it every sunday to see whether I’m improving as time goes on.
Having a free text diary is also valuable.
I tried what you suggested. I sat in one position for 50 minutes and tried to focus on the feeling of breathing in my belly (see how I tabooed my earlier use of “meditating mindfully”?) Here’s what I observed:
At first it was a bit hard to find the breathing, it’s more subtle than the feeling in my nostrils. But I was able to occasionally focus and my focus gravitated towards that region close to the belly button. It feels better to focus on my belly than on my nostrils. Focusing on nostrils feels heavy and shallow, while focusing on belly feels a bit more light and deep.
What surprised me most was that I felt like I was actually able to focus on the feeling in my stomach without trying to control my breathing as much. At least I was able to more easily convince that this was the case. It feels like nostrils are so close to where the act of breathing happens, while my belly is more distanced from this thing that does the breathing. It feels more like focusing on an external object.
It was mostly fantasizing and daydreaming and I was able to focus only for short periods of time, maybe a few seconds and just occasionally. I got obsessive-compulsive thoughts like “focus on your nostrils”, but I tried to be mindful about those and mostly succeeded. I was a bit tense and at least at one point I noticed my heartbeat was quite fast, which made me more anxious. Part of this tenseness was due to the fact that I decided a poor posture when I started. I decided not to change this posture along the way.
I feel more relaxed than when I started and I don’t usually feel like that when I’ve meditated. So overall, a positive experience, placebo or not.
Great. Thank you for sharing your experience. It sounds like you are moving in the right direction.
The fact that your heartbeat gets fast and an emotion comes up that makes you anxious is no bad sign. If you stay present and your body processes the emotion it’s dealt with. After processing strong emotions my body usually feels more relaxed than before. In meditation tension can rise to uncomfortable levels. Then the body recognizes the tension as unnecessary and the tension falls off.
I think 50 minutes are probably too much for you at your stage. Staying focused for 50 minutes is very hard and you are likely to lose your focus.
In your situation I would rather go for 10 or 15 minutes for meditating alone. Set an alarm clock. Once you reach the point where you feel like you can focus for longer periods of time you can increase the time you meditate.
If you want to spent more time writing down what you experienced like you just did is very useful. It allows you to make sense of the experience. That’s what diary writing is about.
I personally keep information like that in my own Evernote account and don’t have a physical diary that could lie around that someone could notice. You don’t need to talk with the kind of people who would look down on you for having a diary about the fact that you have a diary.
The point of writing things done in a diary is to refine your thinking. You force yourself to bring clarity into your thought. For me writing a post on LW like the one above about why I recommend focusing on the belly instead of the nose, refines my own thinking about meditation. Using you and LW as an audience instead of simply writing down my thoughts in a private journal has advantages or disadvantages. When writing for an LW audience I have to be more careful with terms like chakra then when I’m just writing for myself. Writing emails to friends can also be useful to refine your thoughts. You probably have a bunch of different friends with different perspectives on life and different level of trust when it comes to sharing personal experiences.
All my writing still goes into my Evernote account. Meditation can lead to perceiving a bunch of new things that you never experienced before. If you don’t want to become a mystic, putting cognitive labels on experience is important to keep your orientation and be able to navigate the world.
It was the main point of my first half. At this point in time understanding the “why” isn’t that important.
That’s an interesting way of putting it. With time your belly won’t feel like an external object anymore but will feel internal. At that point a lot of your anxiety issues will likely solve themselves.
I’m not sure if I got anything else out of your post, but I will try to focus on my belly the next time I meditate. The chakra and third eye stuff didn’t bother me, just maybe confused a little, but I have a vague feeling of what they might describe. I’ve actually downloaded the Feeling Good handbook, but reading the whole book is currently a pretty daunting task. That questionare seems easy so it might just be something I could do. Diary is also something I’ve tried to do, but akrasia has prevented me from doing it frequently (I’m also embarrassed if someone notices I’m keeping a diary which is of course really stupid and something I should work on).
Thanks for being kind, I expected a more hostile reply.
One piece of advice, sort of a shot in the dark but aimed at addressing a common failure mode. If you were trying to force yourself to meditate while sitting in an uncomfortable position or for excessive lengths of time, don’t do that. All you’re doing is training yourself to be pissed off and tense about meditating. Try just sitting comfortably in a chair and focusing on your breath for ten minutes, or even just five minutes at first if it’s really that arduous.
I agree. Just be sure that you sit in a stable position.
I personally can sit comfortably in lotus. It’s a learned skill but it’s not something you need to learn to be able to meditate and if you focus on it at the beginning you focus on the wrong thing.
Thanks, this is one of the very few meditation papers that seem to be worth reading, since as they observe: