Meditation can be harmful
I tell most of my patients that after physical exercise, meditation is the second-best preventive treatment for migraine headaches.
It turns out that meditation is not an unalloyed good. In a recent podcast, Tim Ferris interviews a psychologist, Dr. Willoughby Britton whose research is devoted to the negative effects of meditation. Tim Ferris describes his experience of going on a week-long silent meditation retreat, while also fasting and taking psychedelic mushrooms. It is not too surprising that Tim Ferris ended up needing professional help. However, even meditation alone, if taken to an extreme can cause psychological problems. In California, the joke is that meditation is a competitive sport.
Dr. Britton and her colleagues identified a staggering 59 different symptoms that can be triggered by meditation. Cheetah House, an organization led by Dr. Britton, is dedicated to assisting individuals who have experienced negative effects from meditation. According to one study, the most common adverse effects are anxiety, traumatic re-experiencing, and heightened emotional sensitivity. Those with a history of adverse childhood experiences are at a higher risk. But surprisingly, even individuals with adverse effects reported being glad they had meditated.
Dr. Britton suggests that meditating for less than 30 minutes is not likely to result in negative effects.
I have been meditating for years, and it was only when I extended my meditation time to 45 minutes about a year ago that my migraines completely stopped. Fortunately, I have not encountered any side effects.
Grateful for extended meditation – cured migraines without side effects. Thanks!
(This comment was originally an email to Dr Mauskop, but he asked me to publish it here as a comment. That’s why it’s such a long comment.)
Dear Dr Mauskop,
I read your blog post about meditation and migraine and how meditation also can cause some side effects: “anxiety, traumatic re-experiencing, and heightened emotional sensitivity”. I also noted that your migraine vanished completely when you extended your meditation to 45 minutes.
It has been very difficult to convince myself that any relaxing exercise could affect my migraine at all. Despite that, I have tried several types of exercises like relaxation, self-hypnosis, meditation, and qigong, without noticing any difference at all in my migraine. I have then thought that “relaxation is obviously not my problem”, and I have compared myself to people who have problems relaxing, which I never really had. Relaxation has always come easy to me.
Since I have tried both scholarly medicine and alternative treatments, I have sometimes met alternative therapeutics that ask about traumatic events in my childhood. An osteopath thought a physical trauma caused my migraines; in other cases, they hope I will answer with a more emotional trauma – but I have never been able to come up with an answer that feels relevant or logical as a cause of my migraine. I just can’t connect the beginning of my migraines with such events. I don’t have such “clean traumas” that can be pinpointed to be when my migraine started. I have lots of emotional experiences, of course, but that’s not what they ask for.
Last year, the app Curable (for people with chronic pain) caught my attention. I saw an ad saying something like, “Sometimes it’s the fear of the pain that’s enough to make the amygdala send out pain”. Now, that was something I could understand. Even if I didn’t feel that I was afraid of my migraines, since they have become a daily habit with more or less pain, I could understand that my amygdala was afraid.
I think of my amygdala as another person, a Mini-Me. She’s, of course, afraid of the pain! It made even more sense when I learned that the amygdala never forgets. She’s programmed to remember everything that might possibly harm me. The theory in Curable is also that at some point, the amygdala becomes so wind up about the migraine that she starts to send out pain almost all the time… The trick is to calm the amygdala.
That I could understand, and it motivated me to use the Curable app, which offers meditations, visualizations, interviews with experts, interviews with users, and the best of them all: Somatic Tracking. I learned a lot. Starting in September and in November and December, I got about 8 triptan free days each month. Wow, I felt so encouraged! I decided to stop injecting Emgality in January.
What then happened was that I got the flu on New Year’s Day, we got several storms and snowfalls from January to April – which is not a good thing since weather changes trigger my migraine, and I got a cold in April. Already with the flu in January, I started to get “cough-migraine”; each cough triggered more migraine, and it was because my neck muscles got tense, and apparently it gave me tension headaches that in turn triggered migraine. Sigh.
So, my results with triptan-free days weren’t repeated. Also, in January, I already felt lost with the Curable app. Their Somatic Tracking is still good, and I learned a lot from the interviews, but the rest of the exercises weren’t really for me. They focused too much on finding that trauma in the childhood or finding the stressful events in my daily life that they meant caused my pain. That’s a dead end for me since I can’t find either of them. Also, since I was supposed to do Somatic Tracking as soon as I got the first pain and I didn’t get the pain during the days so often, instead I often got my migraines during the night, around 03-05, it wasn’t easy to follow that advice. They also said that one should, on one hand, do their exercises, but on the other hand, not overdo it… I felt lost. I didn’t know how to move forward.
About 20 years ago, I learned a technique called EFT, Emotional Freedom Technique. I laughed while a homeopath introduced me to it and made me do the exercise by saying, “Even though I’m afraid of pulling out that tooth, I love and accept myself”, while tapping on specific acupuncture points. It felt so silly, but it cured my fear of pulling out a tooth instantly. It was like magic.
In January, I came to think of EFT again, and I downloaded the app Tapping Solutions. They base their method on the same idea about the amygdala; they don’t explain it as well as Curable does, but they ask their questions in another way. I feel it fits better with me. Even though I don’t have exact traumas, I have, of course, experienced lots of bad things in my life. Tapping gives me a way to neutralize emotional memories, and I believe that everything I do to calm my amygdala will eventually decrease my migraine. So I tap on everything I can think of.
I started with the worst emotional memories. The procedure can often make me cry when they ask me to feel the emotions, but when I end an exercise, those emotions are neutralized, and that stays forever. However, sometimes, working with all aspects of an emotional memory takes more exercises. When I worked with a memory from when my 17 year older sister got cancer for the second time, while I lived with her and had to take on much responsibility for both her, our family, and her friends, I couldn’t sleep in the evening! That’s the only time I got such a reaction from tapping, and I think it was like my subconscious still had to work with these memories, even though I thought I was done with them. So yes, it seems even this method can give a side effect, but it only happened once.
I have continued to tap, and I probably will keep on tapping for the rest of my life because it makes me happy and it makes it easier to handle all kinds of problems in my daily life. There are specific exercises for headaches and migraines, but so far, I haven’t been able to stop pain by using them. Instead, I keep working with emotional stuff, which is where I get results. And I think that by doing so, my migraines will decrease. I think I see the beginning of a tendency not to be so sensitive to weather changes, for example. I also believe I can eat a little piece of onion now without triggering migraines.
When I compare the Facebook groups for Curable and Tapping Solutions, I think there are more posts about getting lost, not understanding the method and so on in the Curable group. Their meditations are too silent, they don’t talk enough, they leave you out there, and your mind starts wandering off… In Tapping Solutions, they are talking to you all the time – like holding your hand and caring about you – and it keeps you more focused, together with the physical part with tapping and the fact that you say things yourself. For me, it’s a more effective way.
Then it’s Curable’s writing exercises. I don’t like them because I am 61 and have written about emotions and experiences since I was 10. I’m fed up with writing by now. Other people panic because they are afraid to stir up old memories. Again, Curable leaves you alone. Tapping Solutions asks about all kinds of stuff in their more than 500 exercises, and sometimes you pick the right exercise for you and sometimes their questions are so spot on your tears will pour instantly, but they don’t leave you; they walk you through the exercise, step by step. In the end, you feel good.
Summary: I do think it’s important to calm the amygdala since she sends out the pain. That’s what your 45 minutes of meditation do. But I think it’s important to understand why you meditate, at least for a person like me. The Curable app is a great way to learn why. A lot of their knowledge can be found in the podcast Like Mind Like Body. Many benefit from using Curable, but I think Tapping Solutions offers a much better way to work with emotional memories and make you feel good. Also, a Tapping exercise takes just 10-15 minutes.
My humble suggestion: If your patients find it a bit difficult to motivate themselves to meditate (like it was for me), suggest they listen to the podcast Like Mind Like Body. If they move on to use the Curable app and after a while find that they get lost (like I did) or maybe even afraid, suggest Tapping Solutions.
I really believe these methods with mediations like you do, Curable or Tapping Solutions, can help people with migraines, but that one method doesn’t fit all for several reasons. So, if my suggestions could help anyone to take a step in this direction, it would make me happy.