I’ve read a few pieces recently that focus on the negative effects of activities that were believed to be universally helpful to mental health. One, an article by Bryce D. Fuemmeler in Mere Orthodoxy, explores the era of self-focus.
Not all of this can be blamed on Oxford—or, in fact, any other university whose students deal with these problems—but it is no secret that universities have intensified The Era of Self-Focus by centering campus life around self-care and grievance-based ideas. For example, while I was at Oxford during the coronavirus epidemic, we were inundated with self-care messages from the university administration asking about our well-being. Though well-intentioned, I found this mildly baffling. I was fantastic! I was at Oxford having an intellectual adventure! Yet even in my optimism, I noticed that the more messages I received to this effect, the more I began to question my own well-being. Put another way, I became more focused on myself, and less focused on ideas bigger than myself. A more realistic version of the administration’s messages might have been: Are you thinking about yourself enough today?
The practice of constant introspection seems to have brought about negative mental health effects in some people, rather than alleviating them, as has long been assumed. The evidence of this sort of outcome has been more and more prominent recently in the wake of so many institutional initiatives to bring about positive mental health changes. When my son went to college a few years ago at the same school I went to, I noticed how the focus on self-care and counseling support had exploded since I was there. They even had mental health days without classes.
Olga Khazan writes for The Atlantic about a psychologist and researcher, Willoughby Britton, who was a strong advocate for meditation and ended up telling a different story than she intended through her experiences.
Initially, Britton found that subjects in an experiment she was conducting who meditated had more problems sleeping. So dedicated was Britton to the practice that she didn’t publish her findings, but when she mentioned them to experts in the meditation community, they were not surprised by the results.
Britton herself became so attached to meditation and practiced it so often that she began to experience negative side effects. Most alarmingly, she began to dissociate from herself and her surroundings.
What Britton was experiencing is called dissociation, a state that can occasionally be evolutionarily useful—it can help people push through a task when faced with overwhelming terrors. But according to Britton and other researchers, it can happen to extreme meditators too. Britton told me that extensive meditation can prompt the prefrontal cortex to essentially shut off the brain’s emotional centers, causing feelings to seem blunted. And without the typical emotions that we project onto objects, familiar things—our hands, our homes—can start to look foreign. Heleen Slagter, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam who studies meditation, says that part of the way the brain gives rise to our sense of self is by predicting how we will interact with the world in the future. If you spend enough time zeroing in on the present moment, as one aims to do during meditation, Slagter says, your sense of the future can start to recede—and with it your sense of self. This can produce dissociation.
Britton eventually founded an organization that helps people manage problems brought on by meditation.
It’s interesting to hear some of the common prescriptions for mental health distress can have unpleasant or even destructive side effects, just like a medication. I have had positive experiences with both talk therapy and meditation and have recommended the practices to others in the past. I increasingly think we perhaps should treat these practices like pharmaceuticals, though — not right for everyone in every situation.
