Lean on sleep, food, routine and people
Treat regular sleep, proper meals, a simple daily rhythm and time with people you trust as part of what steadies you.
Why it works
In the Lindahl study, health behaviours were described as risk factors when absent or out of balance and as remedies when present: lack of sleep, inadequate diet and lack of exercise tended to precede destabilising experiences, and increasing sleep or changing diet were described as correcting them. The same study found that stable, supportive relationships outside the meditation community could act as a remedy. Ordinary structure — meals at regular times, getting up and going to bed at similar times, seeing people — gives the nervous system predictable cues at a moment when experience feels unpredictable.
How to do it
- Eat regular, substantial meals, even if your appetite is low, and make up for any sleep or food you went short of while practising intensively.
- Keep regular times for getting up and going to bed, and protect sleep over any wish to practise in the early hours.
- Give each day a simple shape: one or two fixed points such as a walk, a meal with someone, or a task at a set time.
- Spend time with people you trust and tell at least one of them, in plain words, that you are having a hard time after meditation.
- If you cannot sleep for two nights running, or you cannot eat, tell a doctor.
Evidence
Lindahl et al. (2017) found that lack of sleep, inadequate diet and lack of exercise tended to be associated with, or to precede, destabilising experiences, and could be corrected as remedies by increasing sleep, making dietary changes or getting exercise. Relationships beyond the meditation community ranged from risk factor to remedy depending on whether they were stable or supportive. (observational)
The study describes factors practitioners and teachers reported; it does not show that any one change will resolve a particular difficulty, and it was not designed to measure how common these patterns are.
Sources
- Lindahl, J. R., Fisher, N. E., Cooper, D. J., Rosen, R. K., & Britton, W. B. (2017). The varieties of contemplative experience: A mixed-methods study of meditation-related challenges in Western Buddhists. PLOS ONE, 12(5), e0176239. About this work
Common mistake
Withdrawing from people and routine because the experience feels impossible to explain — isolation tends to leave the difficulty with nothing ordinary around it.
Practice this with IX Coach
More practices for Meditation-Related Challenges: When Practice Makes You Feel Worse
- Step back from formal sitting for now
Pause or sharply shorten formal meditation while things are unsettled — easing off is a legitimate response, not a failure.
- Ground through the senses, with your eyes open
Bring attention outward to the room, your feet on the floor and the weight of your body — not further inward.
- Move your body and do ordinary things
Swap stillness for ordinary movement and everyday tasks — a brisk walk, cooking, tidying — at a normal pace.
- Talk to a teacher who knows these experiences
Tell an experienced meditation teacher what is happening — ideally one who has helped students through difficulty before.
- Find a clinician who understands meditation-related difficulties
When it lingers or gets in the way of daily life, see a doctor or therapist — ideally one familiar with meditation — and know where urgent help is.
- Stop noting when things start dissolving and fear takes over
If close noting has turned into everything falling apart and terror, set the technique down and steady yourself first — the map can wait.
- Come back to solid ground when awareness practice makes things feel unreal
If looking for the mind or resting in open awareness leaves the world flat, dreamlike or far away, stop the inquiry and anchor in concrete, outward things first.
- Hold off on deciding what it means
Let the experience be unexplained for now, rather than forcing it into a story of spiritual breakthrough or of breakdown.
- Return to practice gradually, with guidance
If and when you feel steady, come back slowly — short, gentle sessions, agreed with a teacher, with a plan for stopping.
Related concepts
- Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness, Made Practical
Adapting mindfulness so it regulates rather than reactivates
- Grounding Techniques for Acute Distress
Fast sensory skills to come back to the present when distress spikes
- The Progress of Insight: The Stages of Insight in Vipassana
The Burmese insight map of what meditators say they pass through — read as a map, not a ladder
- The Dark Night of the Soul: John of the Cross
John of the Cross’s map of spiritual desolation and the practices that navigate it
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