Mindfulness and meditation can worsen depression and anxiety

Great comment, although Judy Collins’ recording (which came first) is far better than Joni Mitchell’s :)

Yea... you know, surgery is extremely painful. It can sometimes be worse than whatever is the reason you're getting cut open. The recovery period is a nightmare too sometimes.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.

Non-religious meditation is sort of the same for your psyche. You bring things to light that have been plaguing you in the background. Once in the light, you have to painfully deal with it. Make peace with it, make amends, or corrective course of action. Over time, such actions become less painful and future issues affect you less because you have the experience and maturity to deal with them swiftly.

This article just spins it all towards negativity. That last cop-out paragraph was a joke. A guided meditation app? I am all for a pro therapist to help people talk through their problems and help better explain their own thoughts and actions... but an app? Seriously? The whole point to meditation is for you to have better understanding of yourself. Not for someone else to dictate your own thoughts. A good therapist doesn't guide you to a pre determined path. They push you to walk your own path.

Damn, these things piss me off so much. This whole article feels like the opening pitch to some asshole's self help app that they're going to charge a monthly subscription for.

Your ire is misplaced. This article is talking about the minority of people for whom meditation does the opposite of what it's supposed to do.

This reminds me of study done where, again, a small percentage of people who were exposed to sounds that are typically used to reduce anxiety had the opposite effect to. I am trying to dig up this study but it was posted to HN close to a decade ago, so who knows what happened to it. I think a number of HNers expressed the issues they faced listening to these samples as well.

There was no pulling up. And there was no ground beneath my feet. Just an endless ocean with no points of reference by which to orient oneself.

So the only course of action was not to search for rocks to cling to, but of learning how to swim, and dive in. As backwards as it may read, I only felt secure after having let go of myself.

As odd as this description may sound to someone who has not experienced this, it is instantly recognizable to those who have -- which helped discover others who traversed this before. It so happens that Buddhists have a rich tradition for navigating these waters, which helped satisfy my intellectual curiosity of what was happening. To know that I was not 'defective' but merely in an initial stage of 'unlearning' was a big jolt of positively to my psychology.

The free 10 day vipassana retreats are really quite dangerous IMO. They're often attended by complete beginners with no prior knowledge, since they're free and sort of marketed as a boot camp. The actual instruction is given on decades old tapes and videos. The "instructors" there are given explicit instruction not to advise anyone and just get them to listen to the tapes (which are very much steeped in religious Buddhism). So anyone who's struggling, in a weird mindstate, and unsure what's happening to them, and goes to a course leader for advice, won't get any advice other than to buckle down and listen to the tapes, and that often results in misapplying the technique, buckling down too hard, and not relaxing enough, which can cause the mind to... snap, I guess.

Goenka's method is very inflexible and quite divergent from his lineage and peers. The method of insight meditation outlined by Ledi Sayadaw, Mahasi Sayadaw, etc, is really quite simple, but there's a lot of misinformation, marketing, and fraudsters out there trying to convince people it's more than it is.

> In a mindfulness course, meditation refers to the formal practice of catching your inner auto-pilot. This is usually complemented by applying mindfulness to every-day situations as well as some form of psycho-education.

This is true and about as far as most people will get or want to get with it, and it really does have that benefit. You're right, these longer retreats are designed to essentially deconstruct your self-world boundary, and that isn't usually disclosed to people, there isn't much informed consent. The people who are seeking that usually know what they're getting into.