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Meditation can harm you, and it isn't for everyone. Strip the branding and it's just trained attention—half of what you already do—so the only real variable is what you point it at.
Meditation is the one practice everyone agrees on. It’s on the NHS, in schools, in every influencer’s guide to life, and the pitch is always the same: good for you, good for everyone, can’t hurt. Two of those three are false. It can hurt, it isn’t for everyone—and once you see what it actually is underneath the cushion, you realise you’re probably already doing it.
A brain scientist talking about (better) patterns of thought, of feeling, and of action. One pattern, one podcast—you see if it works for you. The btrmt. lectures, with Dr Dorian Minors. (btrmt.—said "betterment.")
Welcome to the Betterment Lectures. My name is Dr.
Dorian Minors, and if there's one thing I've learnt in my time as a
brain scientist, it's that there's no instruction manual for this
device in our head. But there are patterns---patterns of thought,
patterns of feeling, patterns of action---because that's what brains
do: create patterns that gracefully handle the predictable shapes of
everyday life.
So let me teach you about them. One pattern, one podcast, and you see
if it works for you.
A thing that works, for once
Now, the last couple of episodes I've been pulling things apart.
Tearing down science, talking about how science becomes a sort of
ritualistic practice
and the failings that delivers to us as a result. Or talking about
our strangely quixotic relationship to doctors,
and why fake news about medicine is so popular in our media---because
we trust doctors in the same way that people trust other kinds of
gurus, like astrologers or yogis. And I don't think we realise this
as a culture, so it causes us problems sometimes.
Takedowns of various wellbeing programs---polyvagal theory and
positive intelligence---a
lot of takedowns. And I do takedowns because, frankly, they make my
podcast more popular, but also because it annoys me. However, I can't
just take everything down all the time. I do have to sometimes talk
about what works.
So that's what I want to do today. I want to talk about a thing that
works. In particular, I want to talk about meditation.
I've had a lot of clients over the years who've wanted me to help
them get into meditation. And here at the military academy, I have
cadets who ask me whether they should be getting into meditation. I
can only conclude from that that it's still very trendy---although I
honestly would have thought the trend would have died off a little bit
by now.
The thing about meditation that's different from other health trends
is that it works. Most of the time, it does a pretty good job at
reducing people's stress, helping people feel calmer throughout the
day, helping people be more focused. It works most of the time. But
not all of the time.
And you might have experienced this yourself, if you've meditated.
Times where, after meditating, you got up worse than when you sat
down. Your head louder, not quieter. You were more wound up, or
anxious. And you came away from it thinking that you're bad at
meditation---because it's not supposed to do that to you. The reality
is, probably you weren't bad at it. Because for a fair few people,
sitting down to meditate is actually the problem, not the fix to
their anxiety. And I don't think this is very well talked about.
Before I came to Sandhurst---before I did any kind of consulting or
coaching work---in the clinical work that I did, I would find myself
often sitting across from people who'd been told over and over again
that they should be meditating, and finding out that that was actually
the thing making them worse. The thing hurting them was the thing
prescribed to fix them.
So, meditation. That's what I want to talk about. Let's get into it.
You can't take a breath without it
You honestly can't take a breath without coming across meditation, it
seems like. And maybe this is just an artefact of me researching for
this lecture, but 30 seconds into anybody's guide to a better life,
you'll find some exhortation to get into meditation. It's on the
NHS---that kind of level of infrastructure. It's in schools, it's in
universities. I myself have put it into corporate wellness decks.
Whatever's wrong with you, someone's first answer is going to be: have
you tried meditating?
And the pitch is always the same. I wish I'd gotten into it sooner.
Nothing does for me quite what meditation does. It's good for
everyone, and it can be done in five minutes before you head out to
work. And the worst case is that you've just sat for five minutes and
nothing bad happened. All upside, no downside.
And to be fair---for a large proportion of people, it works. I guess
the point of this lecture is to say that I think it could work for
all people, if we were a little bit clearer about what meditation
is. And for that, we probably have to go back a little, to where the
current trend of meditation got injected into our cultural milieu.
Where it came from: Kabat-Zinn and MBSR
So you have this molecular biologist, Jon Kabat-Zinn,
who was working at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in
the late '70s. And like many molecular biologists---one of my own
mentors included---he was interested in medicine. In particular, he
was interested in chronic illness and chronic pain.
Realising that treatment wasn't really helping people with these
chronic illnesses or chronic painful experiences move forward, he
wanted to help them change the nature of their relationship to the
pain, to the chronic illness. And so, as something of a yogi himself,
he took this hodgepodge of imported Asian contemplative practices and
turned it into a fairly rigorous program called Mindfulness-Based
Stress Reduction.
Its final form looks like eight weeks of learning how to do a
meditative process called body scanning---where you pay attention to
the body, top to bottom---sitting meditations, and a bit of mindful
movement. The end result is that people come away more effective at
managing their stress and improving their quality of life.
Now, Kabat-Zinn's program got so popular within clinical circles for
reducing people's negative psychological outcomes that it ended up
populating a lot of clinical programming. A lot of people wanted to
adopt mindfulness and mindfulness-based meditative practices---helped
by the fact that we were at the peak of what's known as the cognitive
revolution in
psychology, where we were moving away from concentrating on people's
behaviours and trying to concentrate on the thinking that might have
led to the behaviours in the first place. Which might sound a little
trivial to you---of course there's thinking and behaviour, and we
need to concentrate on both. But really, up until the 60s we were
only concentrating on behaviours
in the main. So this new emphasis on thinking, and Kabat-Zinn's
program of mindfulness meditation---where you're working directly with
what's going on in the mind---went together quite well.
The two families: mindfulness and concentrative
The end result of this marriage and proliferation is two sort of
corpuses of meditative practice that people use a lot, in clinical
contexts and outside of them.
One is called mindfulness---the classic one. You let the thoughts go
by without trying to grab them. You think of those meditations where
you imagine your thoughts as leaves floating down a river, or clouds
in a sky. You notice them, you just don't let yourself get carried off
by them. You're sort of sitting outside, watching.
And then there's concentrative meditation, which is trying to achieve
the same effect, but from the other direction. Rather than zooming out
and letting your thoughts pass by uninterrupted, you focus your
concentration on one thing---a breath, a mantra, the flame of a
candle---and in doing so you begin to shut everything else out.
Two different roads, very similar place. The idea is that you're not
getting yanked around by your own mind anymore. In the mindfulness
tradition, by becoming more aware of our thoughts and emotions and
letting them flow past us without getting swept up in them, we're less
influenced by them. Or in the concentrative tradition, by learning to
exclude these things more intentionally, we're similarly less likely
to be influenced by them. Either way, we get more of a chance to
manage them. And the upshot, on average, is better emotional
regulation. And anything emotional regulation touches---stress, focus,
your work, your relationships with the people around you---all of it
seems to pick up, because your emotional regulation is better.
So that's the good side of meditation, and the reason it's so popular.
It came up in clinical circles, everybody noticed it seemed to be a
pretty good thing, and it spread from there.
The bad side nobody talks about
The bad side of meditation, though, is not as talked about. So let's
spend a bit of time on that.
Following the huge wave of trendiness around mindfulness-based stress
reduction and its peers---really penetrating the clinical surface of
psychology, certainly by the late 90s and early 2000s---a few people
started to voice concerns about the widespread nature and incautious
prescription of meditation. I think these concerns are best described
in a book called The Buddha Pill by Miguel Farias and Catherine
Wikholm, but they really are a reflection of some of the stirrings in
the clinical world at the time.
They make this observation: that meditation was being sold as a way
for people to get calmer and to become happier. But what they noticed
was that meditation wasn't really built for that purpose. I'll quote
them:
The fact that meditation was primarily designed not to make us
happier, but to destroy our sense of individual self---who we feel
and think we are most of the time---is often overlooked.
So that's the quote. What they're saying is that what's now
stock-standard as a recommendation for how to become less stressed
makes you less stressed by making you less yourself---by taking
yourself apart. And obviously the people practising it aren't using it
in that truly self-destructive way. But it's kind of like getting a
sledgehammer and using it to hammer in a tiny nail. The tool just
wasn't built quite to do the job you're using it for, and there are
going to be some downstream consequences of that.
Again, in the book there's a nice quote:
Its primary purpose was much more radical---to rupture your idea of
who you are, to shake to the core your sense of self, so that you
realise that there is "nothing there".
What they're referring to is this idea---at least in some Buddhist
traditions, which were inherited as part of Kabat-Zinn's agglomeration
of Eastern methods---that there's no core concept of self. That we're
an accumulation of experiences that feels like a self, but
underneath, there's nothing. Kind of like a candle: you can light one
candle with another, and the flame remains the same, but the candle
changes. That's one of the classic ways this view on consciousness and
the self gets described.
So meditation, in the form that it was injected into our culture, was
designed to do something a bit more substantive than reduce our
stress. And I'd suspect that Kabat-Zinn knew this, because his program
was designed for people with chronic pain and chronic illness---people
who had no other solution to the problem they were facing, and needed
something radical and substantive to change their relationship with
this chronic problem of theirs. But I equally suspect that the people
recommending it as part of their guide to the well-lived life don't
acknowledge or deal with the more powerful end states this tradition
is centred around achieving.
Myth one: meditation can't hurt you
So I want to give you a couple of examples of what can go wrong when
you have this misalignment---between what those practices, the
meditation traditions we've adopted from, are trying to achieve, and
what we're trying to achieve with them.
The first is the idea that meditation cannot do you harm. That it can
only ever be beneficial, or neutral. The worst thing you can do is sit
in silence for five minutes---that's part of the sales pitch for many
of these courses. But sitting in silence with nothing but your own
mind to keep you company is not a neutral act.
Think about how many of us cope when life is unpleasant. We try and
make ourselves busy. We try and fill the day. And there's a reason for
that: because if you took all of that distraction away, you'd have to
sit with the unpleasantness. And sitting with unpleasantness doesn't
necessarily make you calm. In many cases, it's the busyness itself
that's keeping us together.
You can make this really tangible if you think about people who suffer
from, for example, post-traumatic stress. If your primary problem is
involuntarily reliving some terrible event in your mind and your body,
then sitting and reflecting on your mind and your body seems like it
might induce some problems. And indeed, there's research that
indicates it's a problem for exactly this kind of population. Sitting
with only ourselves provides all sorts of opportunities for
disturbing, intrusive thoughts to arise. And telling yourself you're
going to let them float down the river or scuttle off into the sky is
all well and good---but if you can't manage to drown these thoughts
out, or let them pass, then you might actually end up with harmful
outcomes from meditating.
And since I wrote the article that informed this podcast,
there's been more literature on this. One 2025 paper found that around
six in ten meditators reported at least one bad effect, about a third
reported something that actually distressed them, and about 10%
reported that these things actually got in the way of their day. And
this is a kind of standard pattern: about a quarter of meditators
report unpleasant experiences in the course of meditating. And
importantly, these are regular meditators, not beginners. These are
people who know how to do the practice, and still have distressing
content come up. So it's not just about learning to do it properly.
And that's sharpened again if you think about clinical populations.
There's an entire literature describing adverse events that hit
clinical criteria---anxiety as a result of meditation,
depersonalisation, mania, and in the worst case, psychosis. I'll link
to some of the articles that talk about this in the show notes. But it
makes sense: if sitting quietly with your mind is the problem you're
trying to solve, then sitting quietly with your mind might induce that
very problem.
Myth two: it's for everyone
So meditation isn't for everyone---not in the lazy way it's normally
marketed. It's not going to be a cure-all. You're not going to get the
same outcomes across different people if you don't consider what kinds
of things might be affecting, and therefore effective for, those
people.
It absolutely does seem to reduce stress and distress in a lot of
circumstances. But there's a reason it was introduced as something to
help people maintain themselves in the face of something that was
untreatable---and not as something that was a treatment in and of
itself. Meditation is, at its core, a tool we can use to explore
ourselves. To have a look inside ourselves. It's not necessarily a
tool for changing ourselves. In isolation, it doesn't give us any
guidance for what to do once we've noticed all this stuff going on in
our mind. And if we don't know what to do with all this stuff, then
there's every chance it might go in a worse direction rather than a
better one. Well---not every chance. A one-in-four chance, something
like that.
Exploration, not treatment
And I guess that's the main point I want to make: meditation isn't a
solution to a problem. Meditation is a way of exploring yourself in
order to discover that solution. It's not a treatment---it's a tool
for getting to know our mind, so that we can change our relationship
with it.
A better way to think about meditation comes if we zoom out from the
classic interpretation---this tradition that traces back to
Kabat-Zinn's mindfulness-based stress reduction course for people with
chronic illness---and just think about what sits at the core of
meditation as a practice. So let's talk about that, and how I think it
can help us use meditation a little more effectively. And then I'll
let you go.
I mentioned before that you end up with these two categories of
meditation. Concentrative meditation, where your goal is to exclude
the thoughts from your mind, to curtail the impact of the environment
on your thoughts---using a mantra you repeat, or concentrating on an
image, a flame, a sound, your breath, your heartbeat---crowding out
the thoughts. And then you have mindfulness meditation, which is
letting our thoughts and memories pass through our mind without a
response from us. Again, leaves in the river, clouds in the sky---
observing them, trying not to get attached, trying not to judge, just
becoming more aware of what's floating through our minds at any given
time. You're not being driven by these thoughts, you're just aware of
them.
Now, one of the benefits of concentrative meditation over mindfulness
meditation is in that exclusive property: crowding out the thoughts
might be the solution to having distressing thoughts crop up and not
knowing what to do with them. Now, there is some debate around these
things. But concentrating on a mantra or your breath sits in the same
category as letting the leaves of your thoughts float down the river,
which sits in the same category as focusing on a metronome or a candle
flame.
What meditation actually is
It makes you wonder what meditation is, other than just focusing on
something. A sort of relaxed attentiveness. Training your attention.
Putting your awareness somewhere on purpose, so that you're not being
run by the noise, the chatter in your mind. You've made a decision
about where that mind is going to sit, relative to the noise.
And a good example of this is something that's actually in Kabat-Zinn's
original program: movement. This is now called movement meditation, or
dynamic meditation---practices that intertwine physical activity and
mindfulness. You might think of yoga or tai chi, which emphasise
concentrating on the position and movement of the body. Classic
dynamic meditative styles. But also---if you've started to approach
the age of 30, or found yourself on the other side of it---you might
have discovered just how many people around you are running. Going for
half-marathons, marathons, ultra-marathons. This is another form of
dynamic or movement meditation. Walking and running, just like yoga
and tai chi, give the restless mind a job to do: to concentrate on the
physical activity you're doing. And for people who can't sit still
with themselves---people who'd struggle to pay attention to their
heartbeat, or to the content of the thoughts floating down the
river---these things can be very effective at achieving that same end.
Placing your attention, your awareness, somewhere deliberately,
relative to all the noise that normally drives you.
And there's a reason so many people describe cleaning as one of the
activities they do that de-stresses them. These things all seem to me
like acts of meditation.
Sadly, there's less evidence about these more movement-oriented
practices. As you'd expect, the literature is still well grounded in,
and revolving around, that original mindfulness-based stress reduction
program. So one of the things I can't really offer you here is
somewhere to go and learn more about this kind of meditation---a
specific program, a specific technique.
The one thing that matters: intention
But what I can do is point out one of the important cores that gets
missed when people try to move from an internal meditative practice to
an external one. And that's something about intention.
Remember that meditation is about learning more about how our mind and
body work, in order to change our relationship with it. In
mindfulness-based stress reduction, this comes almost for free,
because you're paying attention to the content of your thoughts as
part of the practice---either because you're watching them float down
the river, or you're working to actively exclude them. If you're going
to do something like clean the house or go for a run to achieve the
same effect, that'll work---but you need to not just concentrate on
what your body's doing, but concentrate on what the rest of your mind
and body are doing too.
The difference between cleaning the house and meditating is the
intention you go into the process holding. Because once you're done
cleaning the house, you've actually got to get up and do something
with the way your mind and body responded to the cleaning---with
whatever you noticed in that process. If you do that, I suspect you'll
be more or less as well off as you would be if you took any
influencer's advice to just incorporate meditation into your life.
So if you're feeling the pressure from your media streams to add
meditation to your pile---you can do whatever it is that works to
concentrate your mind and exclude the thoughts, or to help you
identify them and let them pass non-judgementally, with whatever
physical activity you'd like to inject in to help you become more
robust to the distressing features of it. But in all of these cases,
it's a technique for paying attention to what's going on in your mind
and body. It's not a treatment in and of itself. Whether you're
sitting down for a session of mindfulness meditation or going to a
salsa class, the intention is the thing you've got to pay attention
to---and what you do with that information when you walk out.
So that's it. Meditation. I'll leave it there.