When Meditation Makes You More Anxious and What to Try Instead

For about three months, my bedtime body scan made my nights worse. The recording would ask me to notice my chest, and I would notice my heartbeat instead, then notice that it seemed fast, then lie there checking it for the next forty minutes. I kept going because everyone said the first weeks are hard. It did not get easier. It got predictable.

If a meditation practice leaves you more tense than when you started, you are not doing it wrong and you are not unusually broken. It is a known reaction with a name, and it has a fairly clear cause. Once I understood the cause, I could change the practice instead of quitting it, and that is what this piece is about.

It has a name, and it is not rare

Psychologists have described relaxation-induced anxiety since the early 1980s. In a 1983 study, Frederick Heide and Thomas Borkovec found that a sizeable share of people with chronic anxiety felt more tense, not less, during relaxation training. The numbers were striking: roughly 31 percent during progressive muscle relaxation, and close to 54 percent during a meditation exercise. Those were people already prone to anxiety, so the figures will be lower in the general population, but they show this is not a quirk of a few sensitive people.

More recent work has gone further. A 2017 study led by Jared Lindahl and Willoughby Britton at Brown University interviewed around 60 experienced meditators about difficult experiences during practice. Anxiety, fear and heightened awareness of the body came up again and again, including among people who had practised for years.

I find that reassuring. It means the problem is in the fit between a technique and a person, which is something you can adjust.

Why turning inward can backfire

Most beginner meditations ask you to pay close attention to sensations inside the body: the breath at the nostrils, the rise of the belly, tension in the jaw. For many people that is calming. For someone whose anxiety already shows up as body sensations, it can be the opposite.

Think about what an anxious nervous system does with a racing heart. It treats the sensation as a warning. Now ask that same person to sit still, close their eyes and study their heartbeat for ten minutes. You have removed every distraction and pointed their attention straight at the thing it already reads as danger. The more closely they look, the more there is to notice, and the more there is to notice, the more alarming it feels.

There is a second piece. Letting go of control is part of most relaxation practices, and for some people the feeling of loosening their grip is itself frightening. That was true for me at night. Lying in the dark, being told to release, felt less like rest and more like dropping my guard in a place I was not sure was safe. I have written before about why trying to empty your mind backfires, and this is a close cousin of that problem: the harder you aim at calm, the further it moves.

Push through it, or change the practice?

The usual advice is to stay with discomfort, because discomfort is part of the work. Sometimes that is right. A restless itch, a wandering mind, mild boredom: those pass, and staying with them teaches something.

Rising panic is different. If a practice reliably leaves you with a faster pulse, tight chest or dread that lasts after you finish, pushing harder is more likely to teach your body that meditation is a threat. I would rather you change the method and keep practising than force the original one and quit by February.

Discomfort that fades during a sit is information. Fear that builds across sits is a signal to change the method.

One honest limit: I am not a clinician. If meditation brings up panic attacks, flashbacks or memories you cannot put down afterwards, that deserves a conversation with a therapist who knows about trauma-sensitive practice. Several of the adjustments below are drawn from that approach, but they are not a substitute for it.

Adjustments that worked for me

None of these require a new app or a course. They are small changes to how you already sit.

Look outward first

Switch the anchor from the inside of your body to something outside it. Sounds in the room work well: the fridge, a car passing, birds, the hum of a laptop. So does the feeling of your feet on the floor or your hands on your thighs, which sits at the edge of the body rather than deep in the chest. On bad nights I counted the separate sounds I could hear, and stopped at whatever number I reached. It was rarely more than seven.

Keep your eyes open

Closing your eyes takes away the information that tells your nervous system you are safe. Try a soft, downward gaze at a spot on the floor about a metre in front of you. It feels less like meditation and more like resting, which is closer to the point anyway.

Make it shorter than you think

Ten or twenty minutes is standard in most apps. Three minutes that end before anxiety builds teach more than fifteen minutes that end in it. I set a timer for 180 seconds and stopped there for most of a month, even when I felt fine, so that the practice kept finishing on a calm note. If you want a model for that length, there is more on a five minute morning pause.

Move, then sit

Slow walking, where you pay attention to the feeling of each step, gives anxious attention somewhere to go. I walked the length of my hallway, which is eleven steps, back and forth for five minutes before trying to sit at all. On some evenings I never sat, and that was fine.

Move the practice out of bed

This was the change that mattered most for my sleep. Bedtime was the worst time to practise because the dark, the stillness and my worry about sleep all arrived together. I moved my practice to early evening, in a chair, with a lamp on. Bed went back to being for sleep, and on the nights my mind still raced I used a notebook instead, which I describe in why journaling before bed quiets a racing mind.

Try this for the next seven days

Pick one change from the list above, not all of them. My suggestion is the simplest: for seven days, keep your eyes open and anchor on sounds for three minutes, at a time that is not bedtime. Write one line afterwards about how you feel, on a scale from one to ten. By the end of the week you will know whether the practice is starting to help, and you will have done it without forcing yourself through the part that was making things worse.