Below is a lightly edited transcript. For the article that inspired this one, see Meditating for fun and for profit. For the previous lectures this one picks up from, see The Scientific Ritual and In Praise of the Sage.
Welcome to the btrmt. Lectures. My name is Dr. Dorian Minors, and if there’s one thing I’ve learnt in my time as a brain scientist, it’s that there’s no instruction manual for this device in our head. But there are patterns—patterns of thought, patterns of feeling, patterns of action—because that’s what brains do: create patterns that gracefully handle the predictable shapes of everyday life.
So let me teach you about them. One pattern, one podcast, and you see if it works for you.
A thing that works, for once
Now, the last couple of episodes I’ve been pulling things apart. Tearing down science, talking about how science becomes a sort of ritualistic practice and the failings that delivers to us as a result. Or talking about our strangely quixotic relationship to doctors, and why fake news about medicine is so popular in our media—because we trust doctors in the same way that people trust other kinds of gurus, like astrologers or yogis. And I don’t think we realise this as a culture, so it causes us problems sometimes.
Takedowns of various wellbeing programs—polyvagal theory and positive intelligence—a lot of takedowns. And I do takedowns because, frankly, they make my podcast more popular, but also because it annoys me. However, I can’t just take everything down all the time. I do have to sometimes talk about what works.
So that’s what I want to do today. I want to talk about a thing that works. In particular, I want to talk about meditation.
I’ve had a lot of clients over the years who’ve wanted me to help them get into meditation. And here at the military academy, I have cadets who ask me whether they should be getting into meditation. I can only conclude from that that it’s still very trendy—although I honestly would have thought the trend would have died off a little bit by now.
The thing about meditation that’s different from other health trends is that it works. Most of the time, it does a pretty good job at reducing people’s stress, helping people feel calmer throughout the day, helping people be more focused. It works most of the time. But not all of the time.
And you might have experienced this yourself, if you’ve meditated. Times where, after meditating, you got up worse than when you sat down. Your head louder, not quieter. You were more wound up, or anxious. And you came away from it thinking that you’re bad at meditation—because it’s not supposed to do that to you. The reality is, probably you weren’t bad at it. Because for a fair few people, sitting down to meditate is actually the problem, not the fix to their anxiety. And I don’t think this is very well talked about.
Before I came to Sandhurst—before I did any kind of consulting or coaching work—in the clinical work that I did, I would find myself often sitting across from people who’d been told over and over again that they should be meditating, and finding out that that was actually the thing making them worse. The thing hurting them was the thing prescribed to fix them.
So, meditation. That’s what I want to talk about. Let’s get into it.
You can’t take a breath without it
You honestly can’t take a breath without coming across meditation, it seems like. And maybe this is just an artefact of me researching for this lecture, but 30 seconds into anybody’s guide to a better life, you’ll find some exhortation to get into meditation. It’s on the NHS—that kind of level of infrastructure. It’s in schools, it’s in universities. I myself have put it into corporate wellness decks. Whatever’s wrong with you, someone’s first answer is going to be: have you tried meditating?
And the pitch is always the same. I wish I’d gotten into it sooner. Nothing does for me quite what meditation does. It’s good for everyone, and it can be done in five minutes before you head out to work. And the worst case is that you’ve just sat for five minutes and nothing bad happened. All upside, no downside.
And to be fair—for a large proportion of people, it works. I guess the point of this lecture is to say that I think it could work for all people, if we were a little bit clearer about what meditation is. And for that, we probably have to go back a little, to where the current trend of meditation got injected into our cultural milieu.
Where it came from: Kabat-Zinn and MBSR
So you have this molecular biologist, Jon Kabat-Zinn, who was working at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in the late ’70s. And like many molecular biologists—one of my own mentors included—he was interested in medicine. In particular, he was interested in chronic illness and chronic pain.
Realising that treatment wasn’t really helping people with these chronic illnesses or chronic painful experiences move forward, he wanted to help them change the nature of their relationship to the pain, to the chronic illness. And so, as something of a yogi himself, he took this hodgepodge of imported Asian contemplative practices and turned it into a fairly rigorous program called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. Its final form looks like eight weeks of learning how to do a meditative process called body scanning—where you pay attention to the body, top to bottom—sitting meditations, and a bit of mindful movement. The end result is that people come away more effective at managing their stress and improving their quality of life.
Now, Kabat-Zinn’s program got so popular within clinical circles for reducing people’s negative psychological outcomes that it ended up populating a lot of clinical programming. A lot of people wanted to adopt mindfulness and mindfulness-based meditative practices—helped by the fact that we were at the peak of what’s known as the cognitive revolution in psychology, where we were moving away from concentrating on people’s behaviours and trying to concentrate on the thinking that might have led to the behaviours in the first place. Which might sound a little trivial to you—of course there’s thinking and behaviour, and we need to concentrate on both. But really, up until the 60s we were only concentrating on behaviours in the main. So this new emphasis on thinking, and Kabat-Zinn’s program of mindfulness meditation—where you’re working directly with what’s going on in the mind—went together quite well.
The two families: mindfulness and concentrative
The end result of this marriage and proliferation is two sort of corpuses of meditative practice that people use a lot, in clinical contexts and outside of them.
One is called mindfulness—the classic one. You let the thoughts go by without trying to grab them. You think of those meditations where you imagine your thoughts as leaves floating down a river, or clouds in a sky. You notice them, you just don’t let yourself get carried off by them. You’re sort of sitting outside, watching.
And then there’s concentrative meditation, which is trying to achieve the same effect, but from the other direction. Rather than zooming out and letting your thoughts pass by uninterrupted, you focus your concentration on one thing—a breath, a mantra, the flame of a candle—and in doing so you begin to shut everything else out.
Two different roads, very similar place. The idea is that you’re not getting yanked around by your own mind anymore. In the mindfulness tradition, by becoming more aware of our thoughts and emotions and letting them flow past us without getting swept up in them, we’re less influenced by them. Or in the concentrative tradition, by learning to exclude these things more intentionally, we’re similarly less likely to be influenced by them. Either way, we get more of a chance to manage them. And the upshot, on average, is better emotional regulation. And anything emotional regulation touches—stress, focus, your work, your relationships with the people around you—all of it seems to pick up, because your emotional regulation is better.
So that’s the good side of meditation, and the reason it’s so popular. It came up in clinical circles, everybody noticed it seemed to be a pretty good thing, and it spread from there.
The bad side nobody talks about
The bad side of meditation, though, is not as talked about. So let’s spend a bit of time on that.
Following the huge wave of trendiness around mindfulness-based stress reduction and its peers—really penetrating the clinical surface of psychology, certainly by the late 90s and early 2000s—a few people started to voice concerns about the widespread nature and incautious prescription of meditation. I think these concerns are best described in a book called The Buddha Pill by Miguel Farias and Catherine Wikholm, but they really are a reflection of some of the stirrings in the clinical world at the time.
They make this observation: that meditation was being sold as a way for people to get calmer and to become happier. But what they noticed was that meditation wasn’t really built for that purpose. I’ll quote them:
The fact that meditation was primarily designed not to make us happier, but to destroy our sense of individual self—who we feel and think we are most of the time—is often overlooked.
So that’s the quote. What they’re saying is that what’s now stock-standard as a recommendation for how to become less stressed makes you less stressed by making you less yourself—by taking yourself apart. And obviously the people practising it aren’t using it in that truly self-destructive way. But it’s kind of like getting a sledgehammer and using it to hammer in a tiny nail. The tool just wasn’t built quite to do the job you’re using it for, and there are going to be some downstream consequences of that.
Again, in the book there’s a nice quote:
Its primary purpose was much more radical—to rupture your idea of who you are, to shake to the core your sense of self, so that you realise that there is “nothing there”.
What they’re referring to is this idea—at least in some Buddhist traditions, which were inherited as part of Kabat-Zinn’s agglomeration of Eastern methods—that there’s no core concept of self. That we’re an accumulation of experiences that feels like a self, but underneath, there’s nothing. Kind of like a candle: you can light one candle with another, and the flame remains the same, but the candle changes. That’s one of the classic ways this view on consciousness and the self gets described.
So meditation, in the form that it was injected into our culture, was designed to do something a bit more substantive than reduce our stress. And I’d suspect that Kabat-Zinn knew this, because his program was designed for people with chronic pain and chronic illness—people who had no other solution to the problem they were facing, and needed something radical and substantive to change their relationship with this chronic problem of theirs. But I equally suspect that the people recommending it as part of their guide to the well-lived life don’t acknowledge or deal with the more powerful end states this tradition is centred around achieving.
Myth one: meditation can’t hurt you
So I want to give you a couple of examples of what can go wrong when you have this misalignment—between what those practices, the meditation traditions we’ve adopted from, are trying to achieve, and what we’re trying to achieve with them.
The first is the idea that meditation cannot do you harm. That it can only ever be beneficial, or neutral. The worst thing you can do is sit in silence for five minutes—that’s part of the sales pitch for many of these courses. But sitting in silence with nothing but your own mind to keep you company is not a neutral act.
Think about how many of us cope when life is unpleasant. We try and make ourselves busy. We try and fill the day. And there’s a reason for that: because if you took all of that distraction away, you’d have to sit with the unpleasantness. And sitting with unpleasantness doesn’t necessarily make you calm. In many cases, it’s the busyness itself that’s keeping us together.
You can make this really tangible if you think about people who suffer from, for example, post-traumatic stress. If your primary problem is involuntarily reliving some terrible event in your mind and your body, then sitting and reflecting on your mind and your body seems like it might induce some problems. And indeed, there’s research that indicates it’s a problem for exactly this kind of population. Sitting with only ourselves provides all sorts of opportunities for disturbing, intrusive thoughts to arise. And telling yourself you’re going to let them float down the river or scuttle off into the sky is all well and good—but if you can’t manage to drown these thoughts out, or let them pass, then you might actually end up with harmful outcomes from meditating.
And since I wrote the article that informed this podcast, there’s been more literature on this. One 2025 paper found that around six in ten meditators reported at least one bad effect, about a third reported something that actually distressed them, and about 10% reported that these things actually got in the way of their day. And this is a kind of standard pattern: about a quarter of meditators report unpleasant experiences in the course of meditating. And importantly, these are regular meditators, not beginners. These are people who know how to do the practice, and still have distressing content come up. So it’s not just about learning to do it properly.
And that’s sharpened again if you think about clinical populations. There’s an entire literature describing adverse events that hit clinical criteria—anxiety as a result of meditation, depersonalisation, mania, and in the worst case, psychosis. I’ll link to some of the articles that talk about this in the show notes. But it makes sense: if sitting quietly with your mind is the problem you’re trying to solve, then sitting quietly with your mind might induce that very problem.
Myth two: it’s for everyone
So meditation isn’t for everyone—not in the lazy way it’s normally marketed. It’s not going to be a cure-all. You’re not going to get the same outcomes across different people if you don’t consider what kinds of things might be affecting, and therefore effective for, those people.
It absolutely does seem to reduce stress and distress in a lot of circumstances. But there’s a reason it was introduced as something to help people maintain themselves in the face of something that was untreatable—and not as something that was a treatment in and of itself. Meditation is, at its core, a tool we can use to explore ourselves. To have a look inside ourselves. It’s not necessarily a tool for changing ourselves. In isolation, it doesn’t give us any guidance for what to do once we’ve noticed all this stuff going on in our mind. And if we don’t know what to do with all this stuff, then there’s every chance it might go in a worse direction rather than a better one. Well—not every chance. A one-in-four chance, something like that.
Exploration, not treatment
And I guess that’s the main point I want to make: meditation isn’t a solution to a problem. Meditation is a way of exploring yourself in order to discover that solution. It’s not a treatment—it’s a tool for getting to know our mind, so that we can change our relationship with it.
A better way to think about meditation comes if we zoom out from the classic interpretation—this tradition that traces back to Kabat-Zinn’s mindfulness-based stress reduction course for people with chronic illness—and just think about what sits at the core of meditation as a practice. So let’s talk about that, and how I think it can help us use meditation a little more effectively. And then I’ll let you go.
I mentioned before that you end up with these two categories of meditation. Concentrative meditation, where your goal is to exclude the thoughts from your mind, to curtail the impact of the environment on your thoughts—using a mantra you repeat, or concentrating on an image, a flame, a sound, your breath, your heartbeat—crowding out the thoughts. And then you have mindfulness meditation, which is letting our thoughts and memories pass through our mind without a response from us. Again, leaves in the river, clouds in the sky— observing them, trying not to get attached, trying not to judge, just becoming more aware of what’s floating through our minds at any given time. You’re not being driven by these thoughts, you’re just aware of them.
Now, one of the benefits of concentrative meditation over mindfulness meditation is in that exclusive property: crowding out the thoughts might be the solution to having distressing thoughts crop up and not knowing what to do with them. Now, there is some debate around these things. But concentrating on a mantra or your breath sits in the same category as letting the leaves of your thoughts float down the river, which sits in the same category as focusing on a metronome or a candle flame.
What meditation actually is
It makes you wonder what meditation is, other than just focusing on something. A sort of relaxed attentiveness. Training your attention. Putting your awareness somewhere on purpose, so that you’re not being run by the noise, the chatter in your mind. You’ve made a decision about where that mind is going to sit, relative to the noise.
And a good example of this is something that’s actually in Kabat-Zinn’s original program: movement. This is now called movement meditation, or dynamic meditation—practices that intertwine physical activity and mindfulness. You might think of yoga or tai chi, which emphasise concentrating on the position and movement of the body. Classic dynamic meditative styles. But also—if you’ve started to approach the age of 30, or found yourself on the other side of it—you might have discovered just how many people around you are running. Going for half-marathons, marathons, ultra-marathons. This is another form of dynamic or movement meditation. Walking and running, just like yoga and tai chi, give the restless mind a job to do: to concentrate on the physical activity you’re doing. And for people who can’t sit still with themselves—people who’d struggle to pay attention to their heartbeat, or to the content of the thoughts floating down the river—these things can be very effective at achieving that same end. Placing your attention, your awareness, somewhere deliberately, relative to all the noise that normally drives you.
And there’s a reason so many people describe cleaning as one of the activities they do that de-stresses them. These things all seem to me like acts of meditation.
Sadly, there’s less evidence about these more movement-oriented practices. As you’d expect, the literature is still well grounded in, and revolving around, that original mindfulness-based stress reduction program. So one of the things I can’t really offer you here is somewhere to go and learn more about this kind of meditation—a specific program, a specific technique.
The one thing that matters: intention
But what I can do is point out one of the important cores that gets missed when people try to move from an internal meditative practice to an external one. And that’s something about intention.
Remember that meditation is about learning more about how our mind and body work, in order to change our relationship with it. In mindfulness-based stress reduction, this comes almost for free, because you’re paying attention to the content of your thoughts as part of the practice—either because you’re watching them float down the river, or you’re working to actively exclude them. If you’re going to do something like clean the house or go for a run to achieve the same effect, that’ll work—but you need to not just concentrate on what your body’s doing, but concentrate on what the rest of your mind and body are doing too.
The difference between cleaning the house and meditating is the intention you go into the process holding. Because once you’re done cleaning the house, you’ve actually got to get up and do something with the way your mind and body responded to the cleaning—with whatever you noticed in that process. If you do that, I suspect you’ll be more or less as well off as you would be if you took any influencer’s advice to just incorporate meditation into your life.
So if you’re feeling the pressure from your media streams to add meditation to your pile—you can do whatever it is that works to concentrate your mind and exclude the thoughts, or to help you identify them and let them pass non-judgementally, with whatever physical activity you’d like to inject in to help you become more robust to the distressing features of it. But in all of these cases, it’s a technique for paying attention to what’s going on in your mind and body. It’s not a treatment in and of itself. Whether you’re sitting down for a session of mindfulness meditation or going to a salsa class, the intention is the thing you’ve got to pay attention to—and what you do with that information when you walk out.
So that’s it. Meditation. I’ll leave it there.
