The darker side of mindfulness: being overwhelmed, side effects and the difficulty of finding a good teacher

It was my pleasure to speak to Dr Chris Walsh, an Australian mindfulness pioneer since the 1980’s and a respected psychiatrist. Dr Walsh has trained with leading Western mindfulness figures such as Jon Kabatt Zinn, Mark Williams, Kristin Neff and Daniel Siegal. Dr Walsh and I spoke about the darker side of mindfulness.

As with any area experiencing such strong growth, mindfulness is surrounded by myths and misconceptions. What is one that you feel particularly strongly about?

It’s used by business to make people work harder. It’s not so much a myth, it’s just the way it is being used.

People think it’s a relaxation technique. This is tricky to address. Mindfulness does help people to relax, but that’s not the main game. It’s about training your awareness.

You cannot count on mindfulness to make you relax.

If occasionally mindfulness doesn’t help you relax, you will feel that it’s not working and are missing out on an opportunity to learn to hold an unpleasant feeling. This can be destructive.

Chris Walsh mindfulness expert tips

Mindfulness can bring out negative emotions, especially during the initial stages. How would you recommend that a person deals with that?

The first thing is to have a good teacher. It’s a delicate balance and it can be hard to know when to lean into the negative emotion and when to stand back from it.

The basic principle is that it is ok to feel challenged, but it’s not okay to feel overwhelmed.

With any kind of learning, including learning to be mindful, it is normal to oscillate between feeling comfortable and feeling challenged. If you’re never challenged, especially with something experiential like mindfulness or a sport, the learning isn’t in its optimal state. Getting overwhelmed in mindfulness is the equivalent of getting injured when training, and this sets back the progress.

I have a few tricks on how to deal with being overwhelmed during mindfulness.

  • The feeling of being overwhelmed is most likely to occur when doing a body scan, especially when focusing on the chest and abdomen as this is where we tend to feel anxiety. I encourage people to find “safe places” where they are less likely to feel this anxiety: such as the resting one’s attention on the sensation of breath in their nose. Even this can be too much for some people.
  • Awareness of sounds can also help, as the attention is then focused on something outside the body.
  • Allowing oneself to move can also help to deal with the sense of being overwhelmed. In the Tibetan mindfulness tradition you can move; in the Zen tradition you are meant to be still no matter how much one’s knees hurt. This stillness doesn’t work for people with a lot of agitation. Doing walking mindfulness or exercising before doing mindfulness can help greatly. Some people think that this is an avoidance behaviour. I believe, it is taking a distance, while still still remaining present to the difficult experience.
  • Sometimes it is okay to let one’s mind wander off. When I run classes with inpatients, I tell them that it’s okay to daydream if it gets too much. The important thing is: come back because this way you can learn what has changed. This is very empowering: we don’t always have to do something to change things. They change by themselves.

These tips work for patients with mental health issues, e.g. PTSD, as well as people with no mental health issues.

the darker side of mindfulness chris walsh

Have you ever had any experiences when mindfulness had side effects? The “decentering” in mindfulness may impact an individual’s concept of the “self”. There are anecdotal reports of some vulnerable individuals developing dissociation and psychosis after reading self-help books or attending seminars – and more recently after practicing mindfulness. Do you see any risks in “trying it at home” when it comes to mindfulness?

It is damaging when people use mindfulness to dissociate or disconnect in some way. Two patients I encountered were attached to ecstatic states.

The first was a man with a background of heroin and alcohol addiction. He was able to stay away from drugs and alcohol for 10 years and then relapsed – which is when he came to me. He told me he was using mindfulness to stay away from his addictions and meditated for 8 hours a day! Just before the relapse he got a job: this stopped him from meditating for 8 hours a day, and so he relapsed.

When I questioned him about his mindfulness practice, he told me that he would just got into a blissful state for 8 hours, never experiencing any negative emotions.

I asked him to deliberately call to mind some unpleasant experiences while practicing mindfulness and pay attention to how it felt in his body rather than holding on to these blissful states. The lesson here is to get comfortable with feeling uncomfortable. In Tibetan Buddhism, they talk about samadhi. It is a blissful state – and sometimes people get addicted to this state. Some people this is enlightenment, but the Buddhist teachers say that that’s a delusion, an unhealthy attachement to something.

The second case that comes to mind was of a man with schizophrenia. Many of my patients with schizophrenia derived a great benefit from mindfulness. This man was having a Kundalini experience, where energy was going up and down his spine. They talk about it in the Hindu tradition. He would go through this experience for many hours a day and it made him more delusional and psychotic. It was very hard to persuade him to do less meditation!

I wouldn’t’ call either of these experiences mindfulness, as they weren’t this open, non-judgemental states. This is why having a teacher is important: so that you can reflect on your experience and receive some guidance.

how to choose mindfulness teacher

How should one go about choosing their mindfulness teacher?

There are no absolute guarantees. I am aware of some highly trained psychiatrists who teach mindfulness, but don’t practice it. They say they do, but by talking to them, you quickly realise they don’t: they have a kind of striving attitude.

For people with psychiatric conditions, it is better to have someone who understands both the Western and the Eastern traditions. If you have a teacher, a psychologist or psychiatrist, who comes from the Western tradition only, it is important that they practice mindfulness themselves. It’s important for a teacher to be able to tune into the problems that arise for people as they go through their mindfulness journey rather than sticking to a rigid program.

does mindfulness have side effects

There is a one size fits all approach to mindfulness among the public at the moment. Do you feel that that it’s appropriate for someone to use an app or should they find a teacher?

In my classes, I have a handout that reviews the apps and advises my patients to beware of any apps that tell them what to feel or that they should relax. People can play with apps – it gives them experiential information that allows them to commit to go to a class. Some people learn a lot from the apps. I haven’t seen the good apps causing any harm. Headspace is quite good. Buddhify is great for getting past the idea that mindfulness only happens on a cushion and has lots of shorter meditations that people like. Insight timer has nice mindfulness bells and nice soundtracks. Some are a bit New Age-y, so people need guidance in choosing the right ones. iTunes U UCLA meditations are quite good too. I send people to my website as I have some soundtracks there.

how to deal with feeling overwhelmed during mindfulness

What are your thoughts on transcendental meditation? It became commercialised quite quickly once it reached the West. Do you worry that mindfulness is headed in that same direction?

I did TM for a few years and found it helpful. I studied Buddhist meditation before that and it gave me the impression that the mind has to be completely quiet – which caused a lot of agitation. TM helped me to get past that as it involved returning to the mantra without trying to eliminate thoughts. TM also taught me about preliminary practices such as exercise.

In the East, mindfulness is used to investigate the mind as well as everything else. A lot of the insights of Buddhist psychology are now being confirmed using Western methods, such as fMRI. I believe this aspect of the Eastern tradition doesn’t get enough attention. However, we need to separate the psychology, philosophy and the religion. Those who say that Buddhism isn’t a religion are lying: it is a religion, but as well as that there are psychological and a philosophical components. These can be separated out, just like has happened in the West.

The tradition in the East is 2,500 years old, so we run into a lot of interpretation and translation problems. The Eastern languages have changed in meaning and nuance in that time just as much as Western languages have. Jus think how much trouble we have interpreting Shakespeare and his writing was only 500 years ago. Furthermore, Buddhist psychology is based on  human investigation that has evolved over time, so it’s not like the Bible that has been “handed down” and and passed on as some kind of unchanging truth. The Eastern mindfulness tradition, in fact, has a lot in common with the Western scientific tradition. This tradition has evolved from the Socratic tradition which is based on debate and questioning. rather than prescriptive rote learning. I believe that if we start paying more attention to what is already known in the East our progress in understanding the mind will be accelerated and our meditation practices will become even more effective.

Dr Walsh’s own website contains a lot of case studies and blog articles on mindfulness that I would highly recommend: mindfulness.org.au

Best guided meditations for beginners

I don’t really use guided meditations anymore. They get  little “interrupty” after a while. I am at that point now that in any troubling situation, my mind goes straight to mindfulness. Tired? Mindfulness. Don’t know what to do next? Mindfulness. Want to check email for the 25th time today? Mindfulness. I don’t mean a full on session with all the (unnecessary) bells and whistles – I mean taking a few minutes to ground myself in the situation through conventional mindfulness techniques – breathing is a good one for me. I’m not giving up this habit any time soon.

best app for mindfulness review

Having said all this, I would consider guided meditations the best starting point to get into mindfulness. Most of these are free or have a free trial. Here are some recommendations:

1. Relaxing visualisation

This relaxing visualisation to bring stress levels down is narrated by a very talented practicing clinical psychologist from Trinity College Dublin Angie McLoughlin. It’s free and a good place to start. It get you to visualise a place you like. Angie speaks in a, I don’t know, Scottish or maybe Northern Irish accent? Showing my ignorance here. She trained in San Francisco, and so

I am primed to always think of the San Fran Pacific coast and sitting under a pine tree in Presidio when I listed to it.

This grounding exercise for anxiety is also narrated by Angie. More suitable for acute stress.

2. Headspace

Headspace: there’s a free trial that then leads into a subscription at about 70 euro per year. This app sends push notifications to practice for 10 minutes a day. It has some animations. The meditations are a little bit too preachy for my liking: it is almost like the narrator is trying to sell the concept. “You will feel the benefit of x, y, z…”

I found the animation about taming one’s mind like a horse by tying it to a stake using a long rope and shortening the rope every day disturbing.

I think their analogies are a little too crude, but to be fair they probably have been able to reach more people that way. It’s narrated by a man in a British accent.

3. Calm

Calm. Calm and Headspace are direct competitors. Calm is marginally cheaper. The difference is that Calm has no animations and is more psychology-driven. For example,

the narrator would deconstruct the beliefs that often underlie stress and anxiety – or goes through the cognitive processes behind judgement and self-esteem.

It’s more intelligent and less preachy than Headspace. It’s narrated by a woman in an American accent. The exact intonations are a little bit overemphatic at times – but that’s probably just an American thing. There are also a ton of “soothing ocean sound” type settings that can be nice on occasion as a kind of white noise that somehow automatically leads to more present moment awareness. I found it easier to stick with Calm than Headspace because it goes into the reasons behind feelings, allowing for relevant questions and insights.

4. Tara Brach

Tara Brach is a bit of a meditation-guru. She brings the whole Buddhist vibe in – if you’re into that. I once heard her story – it is very interesting. A few dodgy things happened to her at the hands of yogis, but she didn’t run away.  For me, Buddhism is endlessly interesting but not something I want to commit to. If you are different, Tara will be great for you.

She has a very gentle manner and doesn’t take herself very seriously, which is so endearing.

I’ve never met her, but I imagine that if I did, it would completely change how I felt for the day. She kind of radiates this feminine loving-kindness-acceptance vibe. She speaks in a very non-grating American accent.

5. UCLA

UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center meditations are free and complete.

UCLA probably cover the lion’s share of what Calm and Headspace cover – but they are less personable.

They are more clinical, kind of like the safety instruction on a plane. They are narrated by a woman in an American accent. They are also available in Spanish.

There a lot of meditations on YouTube. I’ve bumped into a few too many dodgy ones, so I would recommend sticking with the tried and tested above.

6. Simple Habit

Simple Habit is much like Calm. However, it is 5 minutes every time. There are a variety of speakers and styles, so it’s a great starting point.

For the sake of balance, I include this FT article that reflects the limitations of mindfulness apps. Apps and internet resources are a great starting point. However, really, it’s not just a ritual. It’s about being in the moment in our daily lives.

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