I ran three experiments with the Reflect app over the past year where I varied the duration of meditation according to a random schedule. In addition to that, I included a few historical periods of time where I switched between meditating and not meditating regularly. I intentionally restricted this to narrow windows around my starts/stops of meditation, to avoid introducing a confounding effect of other life changes unrelated to meditation. I excluded periods of time where my meditation time was highly variable in a non-random fashion, to avoid e.g. meditating more in response to stress biasing the results.
With the pooled data, I found the following significant effects of increased meditation time:
- Increased tension/anxiety
- Decreased how social I felt
- Decreased happiness/joy
- Increased depression
Though these showed up as statistically significant, my baseline level of these emotions is quite low, so a small increase wasn’t significant enough for me to notice that this was happening until I reviewed the results of my recent experiments. I was surprised to find some of these same patterns also appeared in my earlier meditation data.
Oura metrics (all measured on the night after):
- Decreased respiratory rate
- Increased sleep score and deep sleep duration
The following were lower confidence changes:
- Decreased average heart rate during sleep
- Slightly higher HRV
I wrote about this in more detail in a series on my blog:
- Meditating More Made me Sleep Better and Feel Worse: Findings from a year’s worth of N=1 experiments on meditation
- 6 Years of Meditation Data Reveals a Depressing Picture: A mini meta-analysis showing meditation made me more anxious, frustrated, depressed, and less social
