New Research Tests Whether Meditation Apps Really Cause Bad Experiences

Meditation apps promise calm, and for millions they deliver. But sit quietly with your own mind for long enough and the experience is not always peaceful. A pair of trials took an honest look at the uncomfortable moments people sometimes report during app-based meditation, and asked a pointed question: is the practice itself to blame?

What the researchers wanted to know

Digital meditation-based interventions now "reach vast global audiences with millions of active users." That scale has raised a persistent concern: how often do people have adverse experiences during meditation training, and what are those experiences like?

There are two competing views. Some researchers argue these adverse experiences are substantially underdetected and represent genuine harm caused by meditation itself. Others counter that many of these moments are simply the ordinary stressors of life, things people would have run into whether or not they were meditating.

The researchers set out to weigh these perspectives in the setting that matters most for everyday users: digital programs. Specifically, they wanted to measure how common adverse experiences are, find out who is more likely to report them, learn how people themselves judged those experiences, and test whether meditation practice actually caused them.

How they studied it

The team drew on data from two trials of the Healthy Minds Program, a digital meditation intervention, and added a qualitative piece.

The first study was exploratory, with 315 distressed US undergraduate students. Its job was to estimate how often adverse experiences occurred and to identify baseline characteristics that predicted them.

The second study was larger and preregistered, meaning the researchers committed to their plan and predictions in advance, which strengthens confidence in the results. It included 594 distressed US adults from all 50 states. This confirmatory study aimed to replicate the first study's findings and to dig into how participants personally evaluated any difficult experiences.

Crucially, it also compared adverse-experience rates between participants who completed the guided meditations and those who did not. That comparison is the heart of the causal question: if meditation itself were driving these experiences, you would expect them to show up more among the people actually doing the meditating.

A third, qualitative study of 87 participants analyzed open-ended responses from the first study, examining the strategies people used to cope with difficult moments.

What they found

Adverse experiences turned out to be real but far from universal. 1% did. 7% and 3% respectively, said the experience interfered with daily functioning.

Measuring prevalence in two separate samples let the researchers see how often these experiences were reported and whether the rate held up from one group to the next.

The single most important design choice was the comparison between people who did and did not complete the guided meditations, and here the result was reassuring: rates of adverse experiences "did not significantly differ between participants who did and did not complete guided meditations," suggesting "these experiences were not caused by meditation practice."

That head-to-head is what separates meditation caused this from life caused this. The people most likely to report difficult moments were those who started with higher depression, anxiety, and loneliness. The qualitative arm added a human layer, cataloguing the real coping strategies people reached for when the practice got hard.

What this means for you

If you meditate with an app, or you have been meaning to try, the honest takeaway is reassuring in its balance. Difficult moments during meditation are real and worth naming, not dismissed as doing it wrong. At the same time, an uncomfortable experience while meditating is not automatic proof that the practice harmed you; sometimes quiet simply makes room for stress that was already there.

Knowing that can lower the stakes. If you sit down to meditate and feel restless, sad, or unsettled, it may help to treat it as information rather than failure. The study's qualitative side is a quiet reminder that people do find ways to cope, and that having a strategy ready, pausing, opening your eyes, coming back gently, or stepping away, is a normal part of the practice, not a sign it is not for you.

The honest caveats

Several limits deserve a spotlight. Both trials recruited distressed participants, undergraduates in one case, adults in the other, so the experiences reported here may not match those of people who come to meditation feeling steady and well. All of the data on adverse experiences were self-reported, which captures how people felt but can differ from an outside clinical assessment.

This write-up still simplifies a detailed study, so not every number or subgroup is captured here. And while comparing meditators to non-meditators is a strong way to probe causation, a single program, the Healthy Minds Program, was studied, so the findings may not transfer to every app or style of practice.

If meditation ever leaves you feeling worse rather than better, especially in a lasting way, it is reasonable to slow down and check in with a qualified professional.