This has been discussed before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27890790
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27890790 - July 2021 (568 comments)
My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)
311–320 of 419 posts
Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)
#312Even more proof that mindfulness is about deeply analyzing the pressures on your own individual self
Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also just a mind that might be desperate for a core identity after having its last one logically dissolved through introspection. While ego can hijack identity for it's own mad desires, an identity is required for the actuation of relational actions on a basic level. With no "center" from which to make decisions, the functions of your mind tasked with making choices will panic - this is a foundation of brainwash…
"So dissolved identity > Panic attacks when choice-satisfaction plummets > subconscious suggests all kinds of cartoonist extremes for an easy and powerful identity > Conscious mind agrees to play along, uses this character to make decisions about > Choice-satisfaction rises. " I'm sure it's different for most others, but I had the opposite experience. It has introduced a great calm into my life. From where I am now,…
> From where I am now, I see identity as the central problem we face as a species.
Yeah, except that in practice awareness of no-self is very far from an ethical cure-it-all. There's plenty of supposedly "enlightened" folks in a variety of spiritual traditions who routinely engage in morally sub-standard behavior, despite having reached that awareness themselves and teaching it to others. We know for a fact that many spiritual traditions view correct ethics and behavior as paramount, and as the hardest part of their training.
Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)
#314I did an ask HN recently if there's something similar with stoicism [1]. I'd like to put the question into the public limelight again, since stoicism and mindfulness meditation share commonalities. They are also very different, so perhaps my question is silly. Then again, it was also silly with regards to meditation, until it wasn't. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34855673
I think the key is to not surrender yourself to meditation. It's a means to your ambitious ends. A stoic with no ambition is just a push-over.
Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)
#315I’m inclined to think this stuff is more correlation than causation. Meditating is a weird thing to do. Outside of eastern religious practice at least. You get some some semi-normal people who do it, ray dalio comes to mind, but mostly it attracts people who aren’t mentally well to begin with. It’s exactly the group of people you’d expect to have these kinds of problems. The same group that should avoid weed and shro…
You’re saying it’s a selection bias, but the author claims most people with these symptoms had no previous mental issues. Further, meditating is marketed as addressing emotional issues and if it’s not doing that, it’s either a placebo or worse potentially harmful to the people most likely to try it.
Most people who have a psychotic episode have never had a prior psychotic episode.
Meditation being marketed as a solution to emotional (psychological) issues is precisely the point I’m trying to make.
This is the same problem with detecting the link between antidepressants and suicide. The link between Prozac and suicide was noted in the 80s but written off as correlation. Because correlation is just as plausible an explanation as causation is. It’s difficult to not to conflate the two.
In the case of meditation, I don’t see many people acknowledging the possibility that mental health problems could be correlated with, as opposed to caused by, meditation itself.
Most people I know are psychologically healthy and do not meditate. The people I know who have turned to meditation have done it help with their problems (physical or emotional). I wouldn’t argue that it’s a perfect or even strong correlation, merely that the correlation is there and it may be enough to explain these somewhat rare outcomes from meditation practice.
Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)
#316The next four hours were a hellscape of terror, panic and paranoia... Finally, after hours, the attack smoldered and I drifted off. It was the worst night of my life. The next morning, while making coffee...
Caffeine addiction is real.
Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
A couple of years ago, I started a light meditation practice (10-20 minutes) and did it for about a month with good results. At that point, I read this article (on Hacker News) and spent the next two years terrified this would happen to me. I had struggled with panic disorder in the past, but CBT pretty much fixed it for me. This article triggered my first panic attacks in years and led to a constant sense of dread a…
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6612475/ is a review of Britton's research discussed in the article. It presents several points of evidence with a coherent argument for why meditation brings benefits while an excessive level of meditation may cause adverse effects.
It's interesting that anyone even had to specify that excessive meditation could cause harm. Isn't the whole point of Buddhism to follow the "middle way"?
Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
you have a point
It's also just a mind that might be desperate for a core identity after having its last one logically dissolved through introspection. While ego can hijack identity for it's own mad desires, an identity is required for the actuation of relational actions on a basic level. With no "center" from which to make decisions, the functions of your mind tasked with making choices will panic - this is a foundation of brainwash…
Can you elaborate on your comment regarding TBI? I’m, uh, asking for a friend.
Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)
#319Sounds like a bad acid trip.
Re: My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, could this meditation craze actually be making people autistic?
There are pretty strong overlaps in certain areas, but that isn't the case though. Autism is caused by physical neurological changes that have to do with brain development before or near birth and while meditation (to my knowledge at least) can alter overall brain structure it won't alter the more fundamental structural changes which are seen in folks with autism.
Anecdotally, my father is probably autistic and doing heart-focused meditation has made him much better able to handle some of the side effects, particularly sensory overload and social frustration. It might be a question of some meditation being more 'cerebral' versus others that are more 'grounding' interacting differently with a tendency for something like autism.