Schlosser 2019: How Common Are Unpleasant Meditation Experiences?
The largest survey to date of unpleasant meditation-related experiences: roughly one in four regular meditators reports having had one — and the study's predictors map the conditions that make them likelier.
Direct answer: About one in four regular meditators — 315 of 1,232 (25.6%, 95% CI 23.1–28.0) — reported having had a particularly unpleasant meditation-related experience they thought may have been caused by their practice. The finding comes from the largest cross-sectional survey of the topic to date (Schlosser et al., PLoS ONE 2019), and it is the quantitative companion to this site’s Lindahl 2017 page (the qualitative phenomenology of the same events) and Farias 2020 (the trial-literature review).
What the study did
- Sample: 1,232 regular meditators, online survey, at least two months of practice (mean age 44.8 ± 13.8; 53.6% female).
- Question asked: one item about particularly unpleasant meditation-related experiences — anxiety, fear, distorted emotions or thoughts, altered sense of self or of the world.
- Prevalence: 315 (25.6%) answered yes, attributing the experience to practice.
What predicted the experiences
The logistic models give the study its practical value — the conditions that make unpleasant experiences more likely:
- Less likely in women, and in religious participants.
- More likely with higher repetitive negative thinking (the trait, not the practice).
- More likely for practitioners who engaged only in deconstructive types of meditation (the family that includes open-monitoring, self-inquiry, and the dropping-practices — the tradition this site documents sits close to that family’s edge).
- More likely when practicing alone rather than in a group.
- Positively associated with longer session length.
Reading the finding with the right boundaries
- Prevalence is not incidence. A single retrospective question about “ever having had” an experience is not a rate of harm — the 25.6% measures reporting, in a self-selected online sample, and says nothing about duration, severity, or how many would call the experience damaging.
- The site’s own archive agrees on direction. The practitioner reports behind the problems pages and the Lindahl taxonomy describe the same territory: real, occasionally distressing, mostly transitory events. Schlosser 2019 is the evidence that this territory is not rare.
- What this site does with it: the sitting protocol and every problems page carry the same practical translations of these predictors — moderate session length, group or teacher contact where possible, and attention to pre-existing anxiety-style rumination.
Uncertainty preserved: cross-sectional self-report; no clinical assessment of the experiences; the deconstructive-family association is an observed pattern, not a tested mechanism; the study population is experienced Western meditators, not the Chinese sitting traditions this site documents — the page reports the findings as modern research on meditation generally, and does not claim them as measurements of Daoist practice.
Sources
- 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