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:
Thank you so much for sharing your findings @Syler ! This is exactly the kind of research I’ve been hoping to find. I’m amazed at how detailed and thorough your experiments were. It’s really eye-opening to see how meditation, which is often praised for its calming effects, can actually have the opposite effect for some people. It makes me wonder how many people might be experiencing similar things but don’t realize it until they take a deep dive into their data. Have you thought about trying a different approach to your meditation routine, maybe altering the environment or the technique? Or do you think this pattern is more about the duration?
I also find this extremely interesting. I’ve been meditating (and not meditating) for quite a long time, and have casually noticed a pretty broad range of effects, including some of the asocial and distancing effects you mention. Can you describe how you tracked the emotional and social elements. I didn’t see this in the blog post.
@therb2 after sharing some of my results online, I actually had several people comment sharing their experiences of meditation increasing negative emotions, so it doesn’t seem that uncommon.
I’m currently running an experiment where I alternate cycles of 2 weeks of no meditation and 2 weeks of a once-daily 15 minute session to tease out of a couple things:
to do a more systematic comparison of meditating and not meditating and see if any changes are repeatable (for the historical periods I examined, I only looked at periods when I started or stopped meditating)
to see if I reliably experience negative effects even from a short meditation duration, compared to none
to see if the timing of the intervention (alternating weeks instead of random daily assignment) impacts any of the data more significantly; I could imagine some of the effects of meditation are somewhat cumulative and don’t just disappear if you meditate every other day
As far as trying out other meditation approaches goes, I haven’t dug deeply into this, but I imagine different meditation styles may have significantly different effects (this might, for example, explain part of why my initial attempts at meditation seemed to decrease my depression, while the later ones increased it).
Sure! I track a variety of mood metrics with Reflect in a once-daily form, defined as ratings on a 0-4 scale. I subjectively assign each according to the following heuristic, for how much I experienced a given emotion:
0: not at all
1: a little
2: moderately
3: quite a bit
4: extremely
I then created a custom formula that calculates the average multiple metrics that are in a given mood category. For example:
I want to see a QS Show&Tell Talk about this. Did you develop this measurement approach yourself or did you use a clinical instrument? I haven’t seen one like this. In my own experience the effects of meditation are intertwined with the overall context. When there is a good and easy routine at home meditation sort of underlines and structures the positive atmosphere of the house; where there is a period of more unstructured and sometimes quite difficult things that we’re trying to do, a discipline of a solitary activity at the start of the day has more negative effects.
My mood tracking slowly evolved out of the Profile of Mood States (POMS) questionnaire which computes a score along the dimensions of Tension/Anxiety, Anger/Hostility, Vigor/Activity, Fatigue/Inertia, Depression/Dejection, Confusion/Bewilderment. Here’s what the POMS questionnaire looks like and the scoring, which I posted on my short-lived blog in high school. Over time, I’ve removed many of the metrics from the original POMS list, and added several to cover areas I felt were important but lacking in the original list. I still think the original dimensions the POMS presents are very useful; I just chose to add some, like the Happiness/Joy and Social axis.
The original POMS would score according to the sum of individual responses, but I used a mean of individual 0-4 scores instead. This allows me to have some level of equivalence in the scores over time if I add or remove metrics in each category.
This sounds intriguing, I would be open to that! Is that something that only happens at in-person QS events?
