When Meditation Makes You Feel Worse

In 2004, Willoughby Britton, then a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at the University of Arizona, began recruiting participants for a study that, she felt sure, would show meditation improves sleep. Britton, a meditation teacher, was so devoted to the practice that she saw herself as a “double agent,” someone who uses science to promote meditation. Although she had grown up in a nonpracticing Episcopalian home, she’d become deeply invested in Buddhist teachings. She read meditation…