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[content warning: exercise]
I hate mindfulness. Hate it, hate it, hate it. The ten minutes I spend meditating is easily the least pleasant ten minutes of my day.
Unfortunately, I am also a borderline, and mindfulness meditation is the one consistent element in every successful treatment for borderline personality disorder. So here we are.
Over the past few months, I have learned two useful things about meditation that make it a horrible and helpful experience instead of a horrible and pointless experience.
First: meditation is not relaxing. Well, evidently it is relaxing for some people, because every time I read about meditation there’s some asshole being like “I love meditation! I’m so relaxed afterward! It really gives me some time to myself! It’s so important to take some time away from your busy schedule and just be.” This always fills me with seething hatred. I don’t support this seething hatred, mind you. I hope that people who feel relaxed from meditation find their bliss and reach all their goals in life, those fucking douchebags.
For me, meditation is like weightlifting. While exercise can be fun, when you are on your last rep of squatting The Heaviest Thing, you are probably not relaxed and thinking about all the awesome time you’re taking for yourself. You are probably like “oh god, oh FUCK, why am I DOING this, I am ACTUALLY CLINICALLY INSANE, I am NEVER GOING TO EXERCISE AGAIN.” But then throughout the rest of your day you are smarter and more energetic, you can carry in all the groceries by yourself, and you feel happier– if only because, no matter what happens for the rest of your day, you are never going to squat anything again.
(Unfortunately, unlike weightlifting, meditation does not give me a sense of accomplishment at beating my previous successes, a surge of endorphins kicking my anxiety in the ass for hours afterwards, or sick biceps. If this state of affairs changes, I will write a new blog post.)
Meditation is like weightlifting for your brain. It feels absolutely miserable in the moment, but that doesn’t mean it’s not working. Just like when you lift weights you’re training your ability to pick up heavy things and put them down, when you meditate (at least for the kind of meditating I do for my BPD) you’re training metacognition. Metacognition is the ability to think about and control your own thinking. Which is skills like:
- recognizing that just because you think everyone in the world hates you doesn’t mean that everyone in the world actually hates you
- realizing that worrying about whether your train is going to be late will not actually cause your train to be on time, and then actually not worrying about it instead of making yourself miserable for no reason
- focusing on the movie you’re watching or the stupidly expensive cheese you’re eating, instead of your to-do list or the dumb thing that someone said on the Internet
- noticing when you are compulsively refreshing Facebook and not doing that
- noticing when you feel the urge to go to and then compulsively refresh Facebook, and then not doing that
So, useful shit, especially if you are a person like me whose brain is naturally like a toddler with a kazoo who has eaten nothing but sugar in the past 24 hours and who has just been taken to a grocery store.
Training metacognition does not have to be fun or relaxing! In fact, it might be wildly unpleasant, especially if you are on Team Emotionally Dysregulated People With Monkey Minds. It’s okay. All those people who enjoy meditation are a great object of loving-kindness meditation.
Second: if the specific reason that your meditation is wildly unpleasant is that you normally block out all your emotions because you feel super-terrible all the time and then once you meditate you are aware of how super-terrible you feel all the time and you try to return your mind to the object of meditation but that just makes you feel worse and worse and then it starts building on itself and then you start crying and have a panic attack–
Well, that happened to me a lot, until I tried a technique from Tara Brach’s book Radical Acceptance.
When you start noticing you feel like shit, but before you get to the part where you start crying and have a panic attack, just refocus your attention on the fact that you feel like shit. Make that your object of meditation. Try to notice as many details as you can about it. Where is it located in your body? What physical sensations are associated with it? Observe your thoughts about it.
You want to approach this with an attitude of acceptance and compassion. That means that instead of being all like “ugh, why am I feeling miserable, I’m supposed to be relaxing, this is the worst, I’m so unhappy, I never want to do this again” you want to think “welp, this is what’s happening in my brain right now, I guess. I feel terrible. I hurt all over. That is what’s happening in this moment.” That’s the acceptance bit. And you also want to try to feel a sense of care and concern about yourself: like you’re a little wounded bird that’s in a lot of pain. It’s not a good thing that you’re hurting. It’s actually really bad. You are in pain, and that totally sucks, and you wish that you weren’t.
If your pain gets worse, keep observing it. If it gets better, you can refocus on your breath or your mantra or sending lovingkindness to beings everywhere or whatever your object of meditation is, and then once again when your unhappiness starts distracting you from your object of meditation return to paying attention to your unhappiness.
This is training the skills of self-compassion and actually feeling your pain instead of numbing yourself out. If you’re having this problem, those are probably pretty important metacognitive skills for you to have! (I know it seems like “feeling pain” is a terrible skill, but (a) you are still miserable if you are miserable and constantly distracting yourself from your misery (b) knowing that you’re in pain is necessary to be able to make plans to fix your pain. You can still distract yourself if you need to, but having this skill just means you distract yourself when you think it’s a good idea instead of all the time.) So you shouldn’t be upset at yourself if this is happening; it’s a great opportunity to practice.
(I had the worst time Googling for solutions for this problem, by the way. So I hope this manages to get in the top ten Google results for “adverse effect” “meditation” in case it helps someone else.)
Thing of Things 
I like this a lot and it sounds like meditation might be unpleasant-but-helpful for me for similar reasons. I have no idea where to start, though – are there any meditation basics instructions you could recommend?
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My short and abstract version (inspired by Zen, which I like because it’s very no-nonsense):
1) Find a very, very simple task. Breathing is the classic, but walking works just as well, and if you have a bit of experience with it, it could even be doing the dishes.
2) Focus completely on every single step of the task. How you do it, how it feels, what you perceive. Only ever concentrate on the step you are doing this very moment (as opposed to planning ahead, remembering what you did before, why you do it or how you like it).
3) This will not work. It never does. If you manage to do it just for a few seconds, that’s already good (at least at the beginning). Thoughts will come up all the time. Notice that you’re having this thought, but don’t judge or feel like you failed. Simply acknowledge it, like “I seem to be thinking a lot about X.” Then, focus back on your task, preferably without getting lost in that thought. Which will also often fail at the beginning. Don’t beat yourself up over it. Just try to notice and acknowledge it (you know the drill). It may help to have an image or metaphor for when you do it, or to repeat a mantra. E.g. imagine that your thoughts are like clouds drifting over the sky. You are not the clouds, you are the sky. Or imagine a fat, old bureaucrat sitting behind a desk, the thought floats on it as a letter, and the bureaucrat slowly takes a big, red rubber stamp, and stamps RECEIVED on it.
4) Continue until your task is done, or the timer is up (if it isn’t actually a task with a clear end, like breathing). In the latter case, I find that setting an alarm works best – otherwise, I’ll always try to peek at the clock.
Once you’re used to doing that, you can also just use the image, metaphor or mantra to quickly refocus yourself when your thoughts are drifting off while not meditating. Which may be even more useful than the effects of regular meditation themselves.
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Addendum: Let me stress that “screwing up” step 2 and getting to step 3 is important. The whole point of the exercise is having thoughts crop up, and learning how to accept them without repressing them or getting distracted. If that never happens, you didn’t learn anything, and could’ve just as well taken a nap.
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Thanks!
Hmm, how does that fit with Ozy’s advice to refocus on the feeling-like-shit if it keeps coming up? You seem to be saying that the point is to NOT change focus.
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IMHO, following Ozy’s method is the second best thing you can do, if refocusing on the original object of your meditation isn’t an option. I never had to try that, so I can’t comment on how well it works, but it should still get you some useful exercise as long as you then try to stick with the new object. I’d be afraid that I might easily cross the line from meditating to ruminating, but Ozy tried it and I didn’t, so if it works for Ozy, it might work for others.
My main caveat would be that if you find yourself switching multiple times, you’re very probably not meditating by any sensible definition. Which is not to say that it can’t help you for a different reason.
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You’re not ruminating because you’re not getting into the emotion– you’re separating yourself from and observing the emotion.
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AFAIK that’s pretty much standard advice: for every X, if X is persistently distracting you during meditation, make it temporarily your object of meditation. For example, X could be a thought or a physical sensation such as an itch.
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ooh, troubleshooting etc! *appreciates post*
Speaking of meta things – do you know any advice for how to distinguish between ‘this is unpleasant but ultimately positive’ vs ‘the tradeoffs here aren’t worth it’ vs ‘this is unpleasant and this is an indicator that it is harmful and I shouldn’t do it’?
(To go with the weightlifting example, if you weightlift in the wrong position or have various joint/muscle/etc conditions you can in fact injure yourself, including badly, and ‘keep going when it’s unpleasant’ is in fact terrible advice in that case).
For medication this seems like the kind of thing psychiatrists are supposed to help with, assuming they’re actually decent and competent. But for other things I’m kind of entirely not sure, even though they still very much *can* be harmful or just risky. (In extreme examples, I know someone who did… basically get a dissociative disorder through meditation, but there are many less extreme ones too).
Having a named issue with widely recommended treatment, as you mention for yourself, seems like it could sometimes be guidance, but even that’s not going to be universally accurate – ‘condition X is treated with medication Y’ is a thing that can be true pretty often, and yet it’s also possible to have condition X *and* be allergic to medication Y.
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My thought in general is to avoid doing things that hurt unless you have a specific reason to think this is a good idea. I personally quit meditation for ~six months because of the problem I describe in the post, and only started again once I had a strategy that I thought would work to fix it.
Also, noticing consequences: if you don’t notice your metacognition improving after a few weeks of meditation, maybe try something else.
With weightlifting, “this is not a way you are supposed to be using your muscles” feels *very* different from “your muscles would very much appreciate a rest now”, at least to me. Unfortunately I’m not sure that all forms of painful-thing-with-good-consequences have this property.
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My best guess (and this is total guesswork) is that if meditation tends to send your mind spiraling out of control in a way you *don’t* come back from during the session, then your sessions need to be shorter or more guided. This is something like keeping “good form.”
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I should try meditating again. The issue is the only time I get reliabiy to myself is late at night or on the train. Is late night meditating useful? Everyone seems to talk about it as a morning thing. But the kids keep waking up in the morning at varying times.
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Main downside is that some of your late night meditation may just be sleep.
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This is a good post, but “when you are on the last rep of a set while weightlifting…” is the kind of metaphor that will remain elusive to a certain set of masochists who enjoy it in the moment as well as after the fact.
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One thing I liked a lot about my own experience at a Vipassana Center retreat (and again to a lesser extent at a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program) was how much they validated the *work* I was doing meditating. They didn’t talk about how blissful I should feel – they told me that I was working hard, and if I kept working diligently, I would learn the technique and realize some benefits. This got me through ten mentally taxing days of a silent meditation retreat.
Eventually, a few months later, I *did* get to the point where I could affirmatively enjoy meditation, because I figured out how to not-engage with mental motions well enough that I could, for brief moments, avoid being pulled off balance, and simply *rest*, aware but not compelled. But this wasn’t the point of meditating – in fact, I started meditating a lot less shortly after I figured out how to do this. The point was to develop that sort of capacity, so that I can be aware but not compelled in my ordinary life.
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I pretty much agree with this. If the process of meditation feels easy and relaxing to you, you either don’t need it, or you are doing it wrong.
It’s a bit like cleaning your house and noticing that the water in the bucket is still perfectly clear afterwards.
The whole point of it is cleaning nasty, repressed (or, in the best case, annoying and distracting) stuff out of your mind, and dealing with that is never pleasant (I have yet to encounter anyone who represses happy thoughts).
I mostly do it because it helps me stay focused afterwards, and increases my chance to get into flow. Five minutes of meditation and 55 minutes productive work is better than an hour of unproductive work. And if I have to do really boring tasks, I meditate while I do them. It increases the quality of the work a lot, reduces the chance of mistakes and accidents, and it feels like I accomplished something useful afterwards.
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>The whole point of it is cleaning nasty, repressed (or, in the best case, annoying and distracting) stuff out of your mind
I wanna complicate this a bit. That’s one totally valid frame, but another is that it’s about cultivating the *ability* to choose what mental loops to engage with. If you repeatedly starve a mental process of engagement, it’ll sometimes eventually wither and become less salient and frequent.
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Using myself as an example, it’s definitely not the case that there’s no nasty, annoying, or distracting stuff left in my mind. It didn’t take *total purity* to find meditative bliss – it just took some amount of *balance*, of being able to decline to engage with something without forcefully reacting against it.
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I have done this.
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Kind of a sidetrack, but you say you’ve been to a Vipassana retreat. I think I might like to go to one, so naturally I’ve got a few questions 🙂 How much did it improve your meditation skills? Did you become noticeably better at not avoiding difficult things in your life? (this would be my goal with it) And how did you find a good one?
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I wrote about my experience here.
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Thank you for writing this. Whenever I try meditation or mindfulness I have panic attacks, and the only advice I’d been able to find online before now was “don’t do it then” so it’s good to uave another perspective. Several meditation professionals actually said that people with severe mental health issues shouldn’t meditate at all which I found interesting given how heavily mindfulness is pushed here in the UK as a panacea (probably because it’s low cost?)
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Why assume that meditation is helpful or that all this trouble is actually improving you in some way (other than merely making you better at the skill you are practicing…sitting around ‘mindfully’).
Yes, there are some pretty decent studies connecting certain *specific* meditative traditions/practices to real benefits. However, the studies I’m aware of about increased happiness/calm all relate to compassion/love meditation (don’t remember real name) practiced by some Buddhists. Even with that there are issues.
More generally, data on any supposed benefits of meditation are pretty tough gather. Any study of long term effect is plagued with confounding effects (being the sort of person who is willing/able to meditate is probably correlated with all sorts of good properties) and acute interventions (go meditate for x minutes now) are just fancy placebo tests.
—
Look, I’m open to the idea of meditation being helpful. I do so occasionally myself because I find it kinda fun and I keep meaning to give the whole love/compassion meditation thing a serious try. However, if it is that tough for you that suggests you shouldn’t bother with it unless you have pretty good reason to believe it offers a benefit.
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As I said in the second paragraph of my post, the treatments that work for my mental illness (MBT and DBT) both have a mindfulness component, which is seems to me to be pretty good reason to believe it offers a benefit to me.
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I mean if you believe it offers a benefit to you it (as a result of that belief) probably does and if you actually have the phenomological experience of feeling positive/good/whatever after meditation I don’t mean to argue with that.
Even if we take the fact that DBT (not really sure what MBT is) is a more effective treatment of your condition than alternatives for granted that still wouldn’t give much evidence. These therapies (DBT, CBT etc..) are basically a bunch of techniques picked based on some therapists gut instinct in an attempt to develop a useful treatment. It would be startling if that kind of procedure didn’t end up tossing in some exercises/techniques that weren’t efficacious and doing experiments to figure out what works and what doesn’t is difficult and expensive so if therapists think they have a working treatment they aren’t going to try taking out mindfulness and see if it still works.
Heck, even if you knew that mindfulness training improved outcomes for people with your diagnosis it wouldn’t be good evidence it would help you. It seems quite plausible that different people respond to different parts of the treatment.
Finally, the claim that DBT is particularly suited to your condition is itself not very well supported. After (an admittedly brief) search of the literature I’m distinctly underwhelmed by the evidentiary support for DBT as superior to other treatment forms. One study will find it is better than TAU for some condition or some other treatment and another will find it worse and none of these studies is particularly large or well designed.
Indeed, if I had to make a guess it would be that the apparent differences in outcome among the CBT derivatives are entirely an artifact of patient/therapist belief in the therapy’s effectiveness (not quite placebo…they might work harder at the therapy because of said belief). Thus as a practical matter it might make sense to go to a therapist who strongly believes in DBT as a treatment for some condition but it doesn’t actually give a reason to believe components of it actually help one.
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“[content warning: exercise] ”
I like that everyone is using those sarcastically now.
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That is not sarcastic. Exercise and diet culture are relatively common triggers for people with eating disorders.
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That explains so much about the “fat acceptance” thing.
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Thanks for writing this. I think that a lot of people would actually like to try meditation at some point in life, but it kinda has an image of “happy-go-lucky” placebo which will make you immune to the hardships of the real world. This, compounded with the enormous amount of antiscientific woo, that surrounds the most loudly spoken groups of practitioners, scares off reasonable people.
One of the things that make meditation so difficult, it seems to me, is that people who need it most are the ones who are having the most trouble when they actually try and do this the proper way. And understanding which way is the proper one is far from clear as well (I had this problem a lot when I was practicing with myself. And if I don’t know which way is the right way, why am I even trying?)
I’d like to share some of my experience. Rest assured, opinion expressed is mine and mine only.
Firstly, and I think a lot of meditation guides underestimate this – our psyche is very intimately connected to the state of our body. When you’re not feeling well, your meditation won’t go well, because on top of all the mental hurdles are the physical pains that complicate the experience.
What can be done about it: a lot of things. Exercise. Healthy food. Tending to yourself. Yoga. The last one should be in spades, in my opinion meditation and yoga are parts of a single entity, which for some reason are now separated. A lot of, if not all of the meditative practices have roots or are directly borrowed from yoga. Furthermore, in the classical Indian tradition, the “physical” yoga was considered a preliminary stage, a set of exercises to prepare the body and mind for the meditation, which lessens the stress and reduces the risk of worsening the state.
Secondly, I’d like to touch upon the subject that have already been mentioned in this thread: meditation courses, particularly Vipassana courses, taught in the tradition of Goenka. I think this is one of the best things available now if you would like to take a “deep dive” into the meditation practice. It is also somewhat of a shock therapy, and a lot of people don’t last until the end of the course. But it can also lead to a breakthrough. It is also a tightly knit community of mediators that has it’s adepts in a lot of places, and they regularly meet to meditate together, which is a nice for building consistency with one’s practice.
Good luck with the practice, you all.
I apologize beforehand if I have, by chance, offended someone. Rest assured, this is not intentional.
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yes , meditation (sadhna) is not just relaxing the mind but it is exercise for body,mind and spirit through controlling the flow of breath.
great post
peace and love ❤
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I am so so so glad this blog post exists. It rings so true for me. This was hilarious to read and quite exhilarating.
I am a highly sensitive person who feels intensely. Not too long ago I struggled with bpd traits too and have experienced emotional dysregulation too.
So I know what it’s like. Even though I have healed the bpd, I still feel intensely and because of it I don’t enjoy meditation either.
Though I always feel so relieved afterwards. Sometimes it takes a day to set in, but it works nonetheless.
Thanks for sharing this.
Love to you and all the best.
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Great that you found a way to “polish the turd,” but I still hate, hate, hate meditation. I’ve tried it — many, many, many times, over the past 25 years — and I’ve still hate it. It’s still a f***ing waste of time. I’m angrier every time says I should do it (don’t tell me what to do! You don’t know what’s best for *me*), and it’s just frustrating every. single. time.
I get that it helps you in some way, and that’s good. But I cannot bring myself to meditate (I can’t even stand the word), no matter what. I imagine I’m not the only one who feels this way, having tried it and found it miserable.
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Thank you. Thank you. Thank you!!! God, I want to break things just thinking about meditation. I hate it! My therapist keeps insisting it will help me. I keep trying the Opra/Depok Chopra bullshit and I want to puke! I’m so glad I found this site. I know now that I’m not alone.
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I know this is a year old, but I seriously just googled “I hate meditation” in hopes I could find something to motivate me to keep it up (yay New Year’s Intentions, haha) and this was it. Read through this and Did The Thing and was glad I did. The bit about acceptance was also super useful. I’m not at that point yet, but its what has made me quit meditation (of any sort) every time, so seeing written by someone who also struggles and gets it was helpful.
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I stumbled across one of your DBT posts following a Tumblr link and read the whole series. Thank you so much for writing them, and this one especially. I’ve recently discovered that mindfulness meditation is incredibly helpful for some of my brainthings but even though I feel better afterwards the process is so miserable that I was sure I must be doing something wrong. I found this post both very helpful and very validating, especially the part at the end about how “letting yourself feel pain” is actually a really necessary and important skill if you want to find a way to *deal* with that pain instead of trying to cover it up. Thank you.
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