When meditation makes you more anxious: what to try

If meditation makes you more anxious instead of calmer, you’re experiencing something well documented, not a personal failure: research finds anxiety is the single most common meditation-related side effect, especially in real-world, unsupervised practice. Bilateral stimulation, the alternating rhythm used in EMDR, offers a different route to calm that doesn’t require sitting still with your thoughts.

You sat down to meditate because everyone says it helps. Instead, your chest tightened, your thoughts sped up, and ten minutes later you felt more wired than when you started. If that’s happened to you more than once, you’re not doing it wrong, and you’re not the only one it happens to.

It’s also not rare. Meditation-related anxiety is one of the most consistently documented reactions to the practice, especially when you’re doing it alone, without a teacher checking in on how it’s landing.

Why does meditation sometimes make anxiety worse instead of better?

A 2020 systematic review in Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica pooled 83 studies and 6,703 participants and found that more than half of those studies reported at least one meditation-related adverse effect, with anxiety the single most common one (Farias et al., 2020). The rate wasn’t even across settings: in tightly controlled trials, only 3.7% of participants reported an adverse effect, but in observational studies of everyday, real-world practice, that jumped to 33.2%. Self-guided meditation, done without a teacher screening for readiness, sits much closer to that second number.

This isn’t a new discovery. In a 1983 study published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, researchers gave 14 chronically tense adults a single session each of progressive muscle relaxation and mantra meditation. 30.8% felt more anxious after the relaxation session, and 53.8%, over half, felt more anxious after the meditation session (Heide & Borkovec, 1983). Deliberately trying to quiet your mind can, for some nervous systems, do the opposite.

What makes it more likely to backfire for you?

A 2019 survey of 1,232 regular meditators published in PLOS ONE found that about one in four had experienced a particularly unpleasant meditation-related experience, including anxiety, fear, or a shaken sense of self (Schlosser et al., 2019). Three things predicted it: attending a meditation retreat, practicing an open, unanchored style like Vipassana or Zen koan work instead of a guided or breath-anchored practice, and already dealing with a lot of repetitive negative thinking, what’s known as rumination.

There’s a simple reason for that last one: meditation removes the usual noise, your phone, a conversation, your task list. What’s left isn’t an empty mind. It’s the volume turned up on whatever was already there, a racing heart, a tight chest, a thought you’d normally distract your way past, feeding straight into your interoception, your sense of what’s happening inside your own body. For someone already anxious, more awareness of those signals isn’t automatically a relief.

What can you try instead of sitting with it?

Bilateral stimulation (BLS), the alternating left-right rhythm at the core of EMDR therapy, works through a different channel than meditation. Instead of asking you to sit still and observe whatever surfaces, unfiltered, it gives your attention something specific and external to track. For a nervous system that flares up in stillness, that’s often a gentler starting point. EMDR vs. meditation has the fuller comparison if you want it.

The simplest version needs no equipment. Cross your arms over your chest, hands resting near your shoulders, and tap left, right, left, right for 30 to 60 seconds while the anxious feeling sits loosely in mind, without trying to push it away. An EMDR clinician developed this butterfly hug as a way to calm frightened groups after a disaster, with no instruction to sit still or empty your head (EMDRIA, 2021). Our butterfly hug guide walks through pacing and a few variations.

Be honest about what the evidence actually covers here too. The strongest research on BLS is specific to memories held in mind: a 2013 meta-analysis of 26 studies found eye movements made a recalled memory feel less vivid and less emotionally loaded, a moderate effect across the pooled studies (Lee & Cuijpers, 2013). If your meditation sessions keep snagging on one specific memory or thought rather than free-floating anxiety, that’s exactly the kind of target this research speaks to. If you’d rather be guided through the rhythm than pace it yourself, EmEase, a self-guided EMDR app, runs the same alternating pattern with an on-screen moving target or alternating tones, at whatever speed you set.

Should you stop meditating, or just change how you do it?

Not necessarily. Shorter sessions, a guided recording instead of open silence, and a style with something to anchor your attention, like a body scan or a breath count, tend to be gentler starting points than unguided, open awareness. If you’ve tried adjusting all of that and meditation still reliably backfires, that’s useful information about your particular nervous system, not proof you’ve failed at it. When deep breathing doesn’t work covers a similar pattern with a different technique, if that one has let you down too.

When is this more than a technique to troubleshoot?

If sitting with your thoughts reliably brings up more than everyday racing thoughts, a flood of distressing memory, dissociation, or anxiety that keeps climbing and won’t settle on its own, that’s worth bringing to a licensed therapist rather than solving through technique-swapping alone. Meditation not working for you was never proof that nothing will. It usually just means your nervous system needs a different door in.