Why Do I Feel Worse After Meditating?

You’re not imagining it. Meditation can genuinely make you feel worse, and that experience is far more common than the wellness industry admits. A 2022 population-based survey found that among US adults with meditation experience, over 10% reported adverse effects lasting a month or longer (Goldberg et al., 2022). A systematic review of 83 studies spanning four decades found anxiety and depression to be the most frequently reported adverse events (Farias et al., 2020).

But “feeling worse” is not one problem. It’s three different problems with three different causes and three different solutions. Figuring out which one you’re dealing with changes everything about what you should do next.

It’s not one problem, it’s three different ones

When people say meditation makes them feel worse, they’re usually describing one of three distinct experiences:

1. Temporary surfacing. Emotions, tension, or restlessness bubble up during or right after a session and pass within minutes to hours.
2. Technique mismatch. The wrong method, wrong duration, or wrong expectations for where you are right now, producing consistent negative effects session after session.
3. Genuine adverse reaction. Persistent changes in mood, perception, or functioning that last days or weeks and worsen over time.

Most articles on this topic lump all three together. Shinzen Young is one of few teachers who draws the line explicitly: the discomfort that “almost everyone who gets anywhere with meditation will pass through” is a different animal from what he calls “Enlightenment’s Evil Twin,” where genuine insight into emptiness gets experienced as a terrifying loss of self.

When old feelings come up and hit you in the face

This is the most common version, and usually the least dangerous.

When you sit down and remove every distraction (your phone, your to-do list, background noise), what’s left is whatever you’ve been carrying. Meditation doesn’t create negative emotions. It removes the things that were drowning them out. A common analogy from meditation communities: it’s like shining a light into a dusty room. The dust was always there. You just couldn’t see it before.

There’s a physiological layer to this too. Your nervous system has two modes: sympathetic (fight or flight) and parasympathetic (rest and recover). Many people spend their days in low-grade sympathetic activation, running on stress hormones without realizing it. When meditation shifts you toward parasympathetic activity, sensations and emotions that were overridden by the stress response become noticeable. This isn’t your body “releasing” stored trauma in some mystical sense. It’s the ordinary experience of noticing what was already there once the noise quiets down.

This can feel terrible. You might feel a wave of sadness you can’t explain, a knot of anger in your chest, or a restless buzzing that makes you want to jump off the cushion. Some people experience physical symptoms: jaw clenching, nausea, twitching.

How to tell this is what’s happening: The discomfort comes and goes. It doesn’t get worse from session to session. You feel lighter (even slightly) after it passes.

What to do: Stay with it if it’s tolerable. Shorten your sessions if it’s overwhelming. Don’t add self-judgment on top of the discomfort (“Why am I crying? I should be relaxed by now”). That second layer of resistance is usually what makes temporary surfacing feel unbearable.

You might be meditating wrong (for you)

This is the least-discussed cause and the most fixable.

Not all meditation techniques do the same thing to your brain. Schlosser et al. (2019) surveyed 1,232 regular meditators and found that deconstructive practices (like vipassana and insight meditation, which involve observing and dismantling your sense of self) were significantly more likely to produce unpleasant experiences than constructive ones (like loving-kindness or compassion meditation). If you’re anxiety-prone and jumping straight into a practice that amplifies self-scrutiny, the mismatch between your temperament and your technique may be why you feel worse.

Duration matters. Beginners doing 30 or 60-minute sessions are asking their untrained nervous system to handle more input than it can integrate. That’s not discipline. It’s overload. The MYRIAD trial (Kuyken et al., 2022), the largest school-based mindfulness study ever conducted, tested mindfulness training on 28,000+ adolescents and found no benefit over standard social-emotional education. For children already at risk of mental health problems, the intervention may have caused harm. The lesson generalizes: one-size-fits-all prescription, without regard for the individual’s starting point, is the problem.

Breathing technique matters. Many people unconsciously hold their breath or force exaggerated belly breaths when told to “focus on the breath.” Both can trigger hyperventilation symptoms: chest tightness, dizziness, tingling in the hands. The meditation didn’t cause the anxiety. The breathing pattern did.

Expectations matter. Meditation apps and wellness content sell meditation as easy and pleasant. When your actual experience is restless, scattered, and uncomfortable, the gap between expectation and reality feels like personal failure. It’s not. It’s a predictable consequence of being told that sitting still should feel good. This creates a feedback loop: you meditate to feel calm, you don’t feel calm, you judge yourself for not feeling calm, the judgment creates more tension, the tension confirms you’re bad at this. The way out is to stop treating meditation as a performance.

Sequence matters. Paul Harrison, a meditation teacher writing at The Daily Meditation, recommends a staged approach: grounding techniques first, then breathwork, then deep introspection. Jumping straight to intensive self-observation without grounding skills is like trying to run a marathon on your first day at the gym. Zen master Hakuin Ekaku reached this same conclusion in 1757. After years of intense meditation left him with what he called “Zen sickness” (chest pressure, digestive problems, psychological distress), a Taoist hermit taught him body-focused, grounding techniques: abdominal breathing and visualization centered on the lower abdomen. He recovered completely. Hakuin’s conclusion wasn’t that meditation was dangerous. It was that he’d been doing the wrong kind for where he was.

How to tell this is what’s happening: The bad feeling occurs consistently after sessions, specifically tied to your practice. It doesn’t improve after weeks of trying. Changing the method changes the outcome.

What to do: Try a different technique. Reduce your session length. If you’ve been doing eyes-closed introspective meditation, try an eyes-open, focus-based method like trataka (candle or object gazing). If you’ve been sitting still and fighting restlessness, that restlessness is information, not failure: move first (walk, stretch, anything physical) then sit. If you’re self-taught, consider working with a teacher who can spot problems you can’t see yourself. Short sessions (five or ten minutes) with a concrete focus point produce better results than long sessions spent fighting your own body.

When meditation is genuinely making things worse

Everything above describes problems that can be managed with adjustments. This section is about something different: when meditation itself is causing real harm.

The research on this is clearer than most meditation advocates want to admit. Goldberg et al. (2022) found that 10.4% of meditators experienced adverse effects lasting a month or longer, and 10.6% reported some degree of functional impairment. Farias et al. (2020) identified that about 1 in 12 people who try meditation experience unwanted effects, with anxiety being the most common (appearing in 33% of the studies reviewed), followed by depression (27%) and cognitive anomalies (25%).

These aren’t fringe findings. Jon Kabat-Zinn, the person most responsible for bringing mindfulness into mainstream medicine, told The Guardian in 2017 that “90% of the research [into the positive impacts] is subpar.”

What genuine adverse reactions look like:

• Anxiety or depression that persists between sessions, not just during them
• Depersonalization: feeling detached from yourself, like you’re watching your life from outside
• Emotional numbness: not peace, but the absence of all feeling, positive and negative
• Insomnia, intrusive thoughts, or trauma flashbacks
• A sense that reality has become “unreal”

Arnold Lazarus documented cases like this as early as 1976, warning that meditation “when used indiscriminately, can precipitate serious psychiatric problems such as depression, agitation, and even schizophrenic decompensation.” A meditator identified as David in a Vice profile on researcher Willoughby Britton described his experience after escalating to two 60-minute daily sessions: “My emotional world essentially shut down. I just felt shattered. I had a job, a wife, and two beautiful children, and yet I felt that I would never experience joy again.”

Why this happens: Meditation strengthens prefrontal cortex regulation of the amygdala (Tang, Holzel & Posner, 2015). For most people, this is beneficial: less emotional reactivity, better impulse control. But researchers have noted that with intensive or prolonged practice, this regulatory mechanism may not just reduce negative reactivity but dampen all emotional responsiveness, pleasant feelings included.

There’s also relaxation-induced anxiety (RIA). Heide and Borkovec (1983) coined the term after studying 14 chronically anxious subjects and finding that 31% experienced increased anxiety during progressive muscle relaxation, rising to 54% during mantra meditation. The sample was small, but the phenomenon has been widely replicated. The classic estimate from later reviews puts RIA at about 15% of people with chronic anxiety, though Luberto et al. (2012) argue the true figure is 17-53%. RIA isn’t unique to meditation. It happens with progressive muscle relaxation and even passive relaxation. Some nervous systems interpret the drop in arousal as a threat.

People with childhood adversity face elevated risk. Goldberg et al. (2022) found childhood adversity was a significant predictor of meditation-related adverse effects. Many people with trauma histories turn to meditation specifically for healing, yet they’re statistically more likely to experience adverse reactions.

This is not a modern discovery. An Indian Buddhist text from the 5th century CE, described by researcher Miguel Farias as “over 1,500 years old,” already documented symptoms of depression, anxiety, and psychosis arising from meditation. The Chinese medical tradition has a name for it: zou huo ru mo, literally “fire going astray and entering a demonic state,” listed in the Chinese Classification of Mental Disorders as a recognized syndrome. In Tibetan Buddhism, challenging meditation experiences are called nyams, and the tradition explicitly warns against either clinging to or fleeing from them.

How to tell this is what’s happening: Symptoms persist or worsen between sessions. They last more than a few days. They interfere with your daily life: work, relationships, sleep.

What to do: Stop the practice. This is not failure. This is the appropriate response. Seek professional support, preferably from someone familiar with meditation-related difficulties. Cheetah House, a nonprofit founded by Brown University researcher Willoughby Britton, provides support specifically for people experiencing meditation-related distress. Meditating in Safety is another resource.

What to do right now

Ask yourself which of the three categories matches your experience.

If your discomfort is temporary and passes after sessions: You’re experiencing surfacing. Shorten sessions, use grounding techniques (feel your feet on the floor, open your eyes, name objects in the room), and don’t push through distress because someone told you it builds character.

If you feel bad consistently after every session: You have a technique mismatch. Change something concrete: different method, shorter sessions, eyes-open instead of eyes-closed, movement before sitting, or work with a teacher.

If symptoms persist between sessions and interfere with daily functioning: Stop meditating and get professional support. This is not failure. About 1 in 10 regular meditators experience this, and Buddhist, Chinese, and Japanese traditions have recognized it as a real phenomenon for over 1,500 years.

Meditation is a tool, not a test. Even meditators who experienced lasting adverse effects reported being equally glad they’d practiced (Goldberg et al., 2022). Adjusting your approach, switching methods, or stopping entirely are all legitimate responses. The goal was never to meditate. The goal was to feel better. Keep your eye on that.

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Sources

• Farias M, Maraldi E, Wallenkampf KC, Lucchetti G. (2020). “Adverse events in meditation practices and meditation-based therapies: a systematic review.” Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 142(5):374-393. PMID: 32820538.
• Schlosser M, Sparby T, Vörös S, Jones R, Marchant NL. (2019). “Unpleasant meditation-related experiences in regular meditators: Prevalence, predictors, and conceptual considerations.” PLoS ONE, 14(5):e0216643. PMID: 31071152.
• Goldberg SB, Lam SU, Britton WB, Davidson RJ. (2022). “Prevalence of meditation-related adverse effects in a population-based sample in the United States.” Psychotherapy Research, 32(3):291-305. PMID: 34074221.
• Lindahl JR, Fisher NE, Cooper DJ, Rosen RK, Britton WB. (2017). “The varieties of contemplative experience: A mixed-methods study of meditation-related challenges in Western Buddhists.” PLoS ONE, 12(5):e0176239. PMID: 28542181.
• Kuyken W, Ball S, Crane C, et al. (2022). “Effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of universal school-based mindfulness training compared with normal school provision: the MYRIAD cluster randomised controlled trial.” Evidence-Based Mental Health, 25(3):99-109. PMID: 35820992.
• Tang YY, Holzel BK, Posner MI. (2015). “The neuroscience of mindfulness meditation.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 16:213-225. PMID: 25783612.
• Heide FJ, Borkovec TD. (1983). “Relaxation-induced anxiety: Paradoxical anxiety enhancement due to relaxation training.” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 51(2):171-182. PMID: 6341426.
• Luberto C, Cotton S, McLeish A. (2012). “Relaxation-induced anxiety: predictors and subjective explanations among young adults.” BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine, 12(Suppl 1):O53.
• Lazarus AA. (1976). “Psychiatric problems precipitated by Transcendental Meditation.” Psychological Reports, 39(2):601-602. PMID: 790439.
• Ng BY. (1999). “Qigong-induced mental disorders: a review.” Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 33(2):197-206. PMID: 10336217.
• Kabat-Zinn J. (2017). Interview with The Guardian, October 22, 2017.
• Shinzen Young. (2011). “The Dark Night.” Blog post, shinzen.org, November 13, 2011.
• Hakuin Ekaku. (1757). Yasenkanna (“Idle Talk on a Night Boat”).