Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Dr. Willoughby Britton, clinical psychologist, associate professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University Medical School, and the director of Brown’s Clinical and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory.
Dr. Britton’s clinical neuroscience research investigates the effects of contemplative practices (meditation) on the brain and body in the treatment of mood disorders, trauma, and other conditions. She is especially interested in which practices are best- or worst-suited for which types of people or conditions and why. She is probably best known for her research on adverse effects—why they happen and how to mitigate them.
Dr. Britton is the founder of Cheetah House, a nonprofit organization that provides evidence-based information and support for meditators in distress as well as meditation safety trainings to providers and organizations.
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
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Tim Ferriss: Hello, boys and girls, ladies and gents. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, and it is my pleasure today to have Willoughby Britton, PhD on the podcast. She is a clinical psychologist, and associate professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University Medical School, and the director of Brown’s Clinical and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory, and that is affective with an A. Her clinical and neuroscience research investigates the effects of contemplative practices, i.e., meditation, or certainly one example being meditation on the brain and body in the treatment of mood disorders, trauma, and other conditions.
She’s especially interested in which practices are best or worst suited for which types of people, or conditions, and why. She’s probably best known for her research on adverse effects, why they happen, and how to mitigate them, and we’ll be doing a very deep dive on this, certainly. Dr. Britton is the founder of Cheetah House, as in the large and very fast cat, Cheetah House, a nonprofit organization that provides evidence-based information, and support for meditators in distress, as well as meditation safety trainings to providers, and organizations. You can find Cheetah House on Twitter @CheetahHouseOrg. Facebook, you can find @cheetahhouse.org, and on Instagram, @cheetah.house. Dr. Britton, thank you for making the time today. Nice to see you.
Willoughby Britton: Thank you so much for having me.
Tim Ferriss: There are many reasons that I wanted to have a conversation with you, and one certainly was due to my own experience at a silent retreat, and having a flooding of traumatic memories, and everything that that led to it was overwhelming, to an extent that I could not have imagined, and certainly had not been prepared for. Secondly is a mutual acquaintance, I won’t mention his name, because he’s one of the more private people in the world, so I would always want to double-check. Had suggested that we talk, because there might be some mapping, or some similarities at least between meditation-related adverse events, and how symptoms present some of the dissociation, et cetera, that you can observe in some people, and some of the adverse effects that you can see, some persistent effects after psychedelic use.
So, eventually, we’ll get to that. But let’s start at the beginning, or at least with the genesis story of sorts. How did you first become interested in meditation?
Willoughby Britton: So I think, like many people, I had a life crisis that precipitated the need for something really different in my life. One of my childhood friends committed suicide when I was in college, the summer between my junior and senior year. And it was devastating, and completely dysregulating to see a person just disappear from the world. It wasn’t in my repertoire of possibilities that somebody could just not be there anymore, so I needed some — so, I had probably diagnosable PTSD at that point, and I really didn’t want to take medication. I was only 20. And my dad sent me A Path with Heart by Jack Kornfield, and that became my Bible for the next, probably, decade, and so for those of you who don’t know, Jack Kornfield is a very famous meditation teacher, and he’s written many books. In this particular one, like many of them start off with just what the mind can do, and how to work with it, and it just is very practical, a practical way to manage all of the emotions that were happening.
And it was great, because it was allowing them to be there too, it wasn’t suppressing them. Ironically, that book, that particular book that he wrote, I only got about halfway through it, because the whole second half I just could not relate to, because it was like the spiritual roller coaster, and like Kundalini awakenings. And I was like, “I don’t know what that is, so I’ll just put that down. Just take what you need, whatever.” And then that came back. Fast-forward 15 years, I was like, “Oh, right. That second half of that book, let me go back and read that.”
But I’m getting ahead of myself. So, going into graduate school, I was also very, very interested in consciousness always, and always interested in just, what are we doing here? What’s going on? And what’s looking out of my eyes, and just very curious. And so, that was already happening. And then I had this experience and it culminated in my graduate career looking at altered states of consciousness in a clinical psychology program at the University of Arizona, which happens to be, at the time, the only place in the world that had a consciousness study center. So, I was doing that and actually, my professional life, I actually studied near-death experiences for my master’s thesis.
And my own personal trauma, and meditation practice was something I was doing on my personal time. It was not part of my scholarship. But I think at some point during graduate school, those two lives were so divided that I needed to combine them just to be like an integrated human being.
And so for my dissertation, I did a study on the effects of mindfulness training on sleep, and the reason — I was working in a sleep lab, and sleep is, it’s a legal altered state of consciousness, and it’s linked with every type of possible health issue. And so, if you want to study altered states of consciousness, it’s a good one to study, because it’s, you’re not going to have — it’s not like psychedelics that get banned. Everyone does it. It happens every day.
Tim Ferriss: Hard to ban sleep.
Willoughby Britton: So it was a good one to choose. And at the time, this is around 2000, there really wasn’t great research. A lot of the meditation research was on self-reports. There wasn’t a lot of brain data available, and so I was going to be one of the first people to record overnight sleep polysomnography, so this is brain-based sleep, and prove that meditation was improving sleep because, of course, it was. I mean, it’s relaxing, et cetera. So, that was my dissertation, and I spent like 200 nights watching people sleep. And at the end of the day, the hypothesis was not at all what I expected. So we actually found that no matter how you measured arousal, cortical arousal, brain arousal, meditation was associated with increasing it, not decreasing it, so it was causing insomnia in people. And we looked at percentage of slow-wave sleep that went down.
We went, and looked at how fast the brainwaves were. Those went up, and the correlation was, with the amount of practice was 0.8. So no matter where you went, there it was, and this is my first confession is that I didn’t publish the data. I was like an evangelist for meditation, because this is something that had really helped me, and I really wanted to use my science, and my position as a scientist to promote this thing, and so I didn’t publish the data.
At some point, when I came to Brown to do my residency, a couple of years later, I was on a meditation retreat, and I mentioned the data that I had found, which is basically that it was causing cortical arousal, and insomnia. And the meditation teacher sort of chastised me and said, “I don’t know why all you clinical psychologists are always trying to make meditation into a relaxation technique. Everyone knows that if you meditate enough, you stop sleeping.” And I was like, “What?”
Tim Ferriss: Bulletin!
Willoughby Britton: Yeah. And so that was like a wake-up call, literally. And I thought, “Okay. Well, what other assumptions are we making?” I was definitely pretty emblematic of a lot of people who go into meditation research, or the average meditator, which is like, I didn’t really know my Buddhism, I didn’t really know my history. I just signed up for whatever was around, and believed everything that people said, and the way that it was marketed as a health promotion tonic. I believed all that, and I didn’t do my homework, which is pretty terrible as a meditation researcher. And so I was like, “Okay. It looks like I need to do some history homework, and really look at the background of what kinds of assumptions we’re making as health providers, and really look at the translation process of how these practices, where they came from, what kinds of changes they made, what was the journey like to get here into the West, and really unpack that process.”
And then the second question was, “Well, what other little nuggets of knowledge do these meditation teachers have that they’re not telling us?” And there’s a follow-on part of the story, which is when I came to Brown to do my clinical residency, you have to do a year of internship to see clients, basically to get your license. I worked at an inpatient psychiatric hospital, and during that one year, there were two yogis who came off retreat, completely psychotic. And I thought like, “Wow, two in one year is, it’s a lot.” It seemed like a lot to me. So I went back to the same teacher and I said, “Well, have you ever seen this before?” And I remember distinctly that there was no actual verbal reaction, but there was this look of like, “Oh, shit.”
And I was like, “Oh, oh, wow. There is a story here. There is a knowledge that this can happen, and meditation teachers are sitting on this, just a ton of information that needs to be mined.” And as a meditation researcher, I was like, “Okay, we need to start asking these questions.” So that whole story is the beginning of the Varieties of Contemplative Experience study, which was probably the simplest study that I’ve ever done, the hardest, but simplest. And that it was basically just going to meditation centers, and teachers, and saying, “What types of challenges have you observed in your students? How do you make sense of them? What are they? How do you interpret them? And then very practically, what do you do about them?” Very straightforward set of questions, and that took 10 years. It’s 3,000 pages of qualitative data, and I don’t even know how many papers we’ve written. We’re still writing papers based on that data. I think we’re at over 10 now, so it’s really just a wormhole, which we’re going to go down together.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, we are going to go arm-in-arm down the wormhole. So let me pause for a second. I want to make a promise to folks, and I’ll give you a heads-up also, we will come back to the near-death experiences. I’m going to leave that as a Scooby Snack at the end for people, so I do want to talk about that. However, I want to dig into the sleep for one second, because if people stop sleeping, period, full stop, eventually they die, right? So the restorative functions of sleep, as it is still poorly understood, but are critical to human functioning, and survival. How would you explain, if it is indeed true, that if people meditate enough, they stop sleeping, or they start sleeping very minimally? How would you explain that? Is it that the meditation practice itself provokes a state that is restorative, and therefore the sleep is less necessary, or is there something else that you would put as the front-runner for explaining that?
Willoughby Britton: We can point readers to various papers. There is a paper that was called “Awakening Is Not a Metaphor.” I had to fight hard to keep that title.
Tim Ferriss: That’s pretty good. That’s pretty good.
Willoughby Britton: Yeah. But it’s a review of different studies across different types of methodologies, looking at how meditation affects the wake-sleep system, and it’s not as straightforward as you stop sleeping, or you sleep less. It’s going to be dependent on many factors. And I will say that in the study that I was just talking about, my dissertation study, we found a non-monotonic, non-linear relationship. So if people who are meditating less than half an hour, and less than every day, they actually had an increase in sleep quality. But people who are meditating more than that, that’s when it sort of switched and turned into, they were prone to being more awake, more insomnia, and more cortical arousal, so it’s sort of biphasic, nonlinear relationship.
So, just to recap, it’s not going to give you insomnia, probably,
Tim Ferriss: Automatically, yes. Because when we talk about meditation, it’s like, “Oh, you do meditation?” It’s kind of like, “Oh, you do sports,” or, “You do exercise.”
Willoughby Britton: Right.
Tim Ferriss: It’s like, well, there are a million different parameters, and types, and so on.
Willoughby Britton: Right. And I think one of the other papers that I wrote, which is called, “Can Mindfulness Be Too Much of a Good Thing?” Introduces this idea of that there’s, at a small amount, or an optimal amount can do exactly what the hype, and the promotions, and the advertising says. There is a lot of truth in the advertising, and the positive reports. But there’s another side of the story which often comes with sort of higher doses. So, one of the ways to understand this particular finding, and actually a lot of the other ones that are on the hyperarousal spectrum would be, if you think about meditation as a attention-enhancing product, it gets often compared with, or marketed alongside Ritalin, and Modafinil, and coffee, and caffeine, and all these stimulants that help attention. And so, if you think about meditation as one of those, I mean, think about what happens when you —
Tim Ferriss: Spiritual Modafinil, which is an anti-narcolepsy drug for people who don’t recognize it.
Willoughby Britton: Yeah. If you think about any of the consequences, and many of us have personal experience with a lot of these substances, taking too many of them, taking too much. Just drink too much coffee, what happens? You have a panic attack, and you can’t sleep. You take amphetamines, or cocaine, or whatever the stimulant is, you take enough of it, and it’s going to be on the fear spectrum. And some of them, if you take enough of it, it’s going to be on the psychosis spectrum, especially if you have tendencies in that direction. So, it doesn’t seem like a huge leap to think that here’s another attention-enhancing product that, with certain people and certain types of doses, it’s going to lead to a hyperarousal syndrome, and that’s pretty much exactly what we’re seeing. So, that is one of the potential mechanisms.
Tim Ferriss: So, what I might do for folks who just don’t have the personal context on me that I alluded to earlier is, I’ll tell if it’s okay with you, a bit of my story, which in some ways led to this conversation, and certainly, it sounds like, based on what we were discussing before recording, that people have mentioned this to you. So, it’s been a match made for many reasons, so I want to give folks sort of a contrast by giving present day, and then the story of what happened to me at my silent retreat, which was a Vipassana retreat. So if we look at, for instance, the last two weeks, I have meditated twice a day, 20 minutes a day, very straightforward transcendental meditation. And there’s lots of wacky weird stuff if you go deep enough and weird enough with TM. But if you’re taking it for the off-the-shelf offering, and following the basic guidelines, I find it incredibly therapeutic.
And I find also, difficult to disambiguate. I haven’t had any caffeine whatsoever in two weeks, so the combination of those two, for, I suppose, a lot of sensible reasons, seems to really help. I’ve been getting some of the best sleep in the last 10 years, probably, in the last one or two weeks. I’m sure, the abstinence from coffee, and caffeine, no small part of that. And I’ve seen no adverse events whatsoever, and I’ve done a lot of TM over the years, and other types of meditation. But TM, I find to be the easiest life raft of sorts. However, if we flash back, and this sort of alludes to the, maybe like the Paracelsus, the dose makes the poison, I approached my meditation retreat, and this was at Spirit Rock, which is a beautiful, beautiful facility, beautiful campus, really run by excellent people, and ended up being very fortunate that the author of the book you mentioned, A Path with Heart, that Jack Kornfield was at Spirit Rock.
He ended up being the person who effectively triaged, and helped address the situation I found myself in, ultimately. But I approached the silent retreat with the wrong mindset, and the wrong set of expectations. I thought to myself, I’ve done lots of meditation. If you add up all the time that I’ve meditated, it’s quite a bit. I’ve spent time by myself, and I’ve also done A, B, C, D, and E, really not recognizing that they’re two different, for me at least, and for many people, two different species of experience. And since I had heard that it was the last time Jack would be leading a retreat, I’m not sure if that ended up being the case or not, I decided that I wanted to get absolutely as much out of it as possible. I’d seen benefits from fasting before, I’d seen benefits from lower doses of psychedelics before.
So I thought to myself, this is probably aggressive, but why don’t I combine all three? And that ended up being incredibly problematic, but not immediately. I’d done the fasting. So I fasted going into this week-long retreat, and then after a few days of establishing my baseline, let’s call it three days, I started adding increasing doses, daily, of blended, homogenized, dried psilocybe mushrooms, so people might know these better as magic mushrooms, starting at about 100 milligrams. And then slowly working up to about, I want to say it was 600 or so milligrams, which just is reasonably high. It’s far above what one would consider a microdose. Microdose, let’s just call it 50 to 100 milligrams. And simultaneously, I’m having this first experience of being silent for effectively the entire day, maybe outside of asking a question or two at a Dharma talk at night.
This is brand new. And what ended up happening, just to jump to the punchline, is around — I was having difficulty with the meditation, to begin with. I was very physically uncomfortable. My mind began to accelerate in terms of just rumination. The velocity of thought, and velocity implies a direction, it was more like a ping pong ball bouncing around, or a pinball bouncing around in a machine at increasing speed, sort of nonlinear exponentially growing speed, and it was very uncomfortable. And then I want to say, around day four or five, I had this flooding of memories of childhood abuse, and it wasn’t just snapshots. It was like being stuck in a fully immersive VR experience that was as convincing as this reality, whenever I closed my eyes. So whenever I closed my eyes, that’s what I saw. It was a re-experiencing of these traumatic experiences from age two to four.
And if people go to tim.blog/trauma, they can listen to a podcast about this, and certain modalities that helped me. But nonetheless, I did not expect this, and I was utterly incapable of stopping it. I could not stop it, and this went — talk about not sleeping, anytime I closed my eyes, so I couldn’t sleep. So, now what do you have? You have compounding lack of sleep, and I had never heard of this before. I didn’t think this was a possibility. I certainly thought it was a unique experience, unique to me. I should be able to figure this out. But eventually got so desperate, I was like, “I’m not going to be able to function. I mean, I am able to navigate my day-to-day here right now with extreme pain, but I have no confidence I’ll be able to go back to normal life and make decisions, manage my business, interact in all the ways that are necessary.”
And that’s when I set up meeting with Jack, and thankfully, he had the experience. He has a lot of experience also as a clinical psychologist with cutters, with people who’ve been abused, with veterans who have lost limbs, and have moral injuries, and PTSD. He has a lot of mileage with many different patients, and clients, and meditators, so he was able to, thank God, provide a safety net, and provide me with recommendations to clinicians, and so on, therapists I could meet to try to address this. But if he had not been there, I shudder to think what would’ve happened. So, that’s the story, and ultimately was able to pull out of it, and manage life. But not everyone has access to Jack. And the contrast, and I’ll shut up in a second, between my day-to-day over the last two weeks, all upside, and that experience are just black and white. I mean, there’s really no comparison.
Interestingly, and I’ll add one more thing, I recently spent a week in isolation in the wilderness, fasting for that entire week, and it was not nearly as challenging. But I did see some similar symptoms, let’s say, in terms of that increased speed of the pinball bouncing around in my head, as did another person I was with, so two for two, without any attempt to meditate, which raises all sorts of questions, right? So it’s hard for me to parse what caused what I experienced, but I know that it was terrible, and without Jack, I would’ve been fucked, for lack of a better technical term. How common is that kind of experience, I guess? And certainly feel free to start wherever you’d like, or pick that apart in any way that makes sense. But it was a disaster, unmitigated disaster, and I’m very fortunate I had someone like Jack. Because I had actually spoken with one other just junior teacher at the time, and she was unequipped, she was not equipped to handle what was happening, but Jack was.
Willoughby Britton: Yeah, so many different thoughts.
Tim Ferriss: Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
Willoughby Britton: I mean, one is just wow, and wow in so many ways. Wow that that happened to you, and two, that you’re talking about it, publicly. That’s amazing. So, thank you, because I think it’s going to be really helpful to a lot of people.
Tim Ferriss: My pleasure.
Willoughby Britton: Maybe a second thought is, you’re definitely not alone. You’re definitely not the only one. There were probably other people on your retreat that this was happening to, and that in my work at Cheetah House, I see someone like that every day. I try to see at least one person every day. I’m seeing someone later today, actually. So this, to me, is my bread and butter. I see it all the time. It’s so common. But what are the actual percentages? That’s where we get into the rabbit hole of research, and frequency research, which is actually quite complicated, because it’s about like, “Well, what do you mean by this?”
Tim Ferriss: Right.
Willoughby Britton: “And frequent among who?” And so, it becomes more complicated. And I guess one other question is, given what I do, that I’m an expert on meditation-related challenges, and neurobiology, is there anything that we can talk about that would be useful to you to sort of make sense of? Do you have any lingering questions that haven’t been answered yet? So I’ll just put that out there. And then another thing is, let’s create a public service announcement for people like you, because let me tell you, males 18 to 30 who think that combining every possible powerful tool, all at once, to break on through to the other side is a story that I see again over, and over, and over again.
Tim Ferriss: That doesn’t always turn out well, you’re saying?
Willoughby Britton: No, it’s more like a risk factor.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah, for sure.
Willoughby Britton: And so we’ll see like — at Cheetah House, we have a program called “Letters to My Former Self,” where people come on, who did stuff like that, and then they’re like, “Honey, let me tell you what I wish I’d known when I was your age.” You tell your former self advice, I would love you to do that.
Tim Ferriss: There should also be a letter to your future self, so you don’t do the same thing again. I do have a couple of questions, or a few observations, and a couple of questions. So, looking back at that experience separately, prior to that experience, and afterwards, I had a lot of experience with fasting, including extended fasts, and a lot of experience with psychedelics, and that was pre-meditation retreat, and certainly post. Based on my last experience over the last three weeks, where I was in isolation in the wilderness, fasting and so on. I tend to wait, in this particular case, the fasting as an exacerbating factor more than the microdosing of psychedelics, which is not to recommend to anyone that they combine things on their first meditation retreat. Look, there are lots of meditation retreats, do it the plain vanilla way first would be my strong recommendation. It’s going to be hard enough, don’t worry, would be recommendation number one.
There are some people, and this is going to lead to my question, like Yuval Noah Harari, who wrote Sapiens, who I’ve had on the podcast, who does a silent meditation retreat for a month every year, as far as I can tell, and handles it like a champion. It is like a warm bath for his mind. I found it much harder — I’m sure there are people who find it harder. My question is this, what are the, not necessarily exclusionary criteria, but what are some of the characteristics or profiles that make someone more vulnerable or likely to have this type of experience?
Because for instance, if you look at classical psychedelics, and we could spend a lot of time defining what that means, but broadly speaking let’s just say with the usual suspects that a lot of people would recognize, let’s say LSD, psilocybin, et cetera, there are certainly others, ayahuasca could be thrown into this or N,N-DMT, that if you have a family history of schizophrenia, it is likely a bad idea for you to engage with using these things simply because, not to say that it will make you schizophrenic in a lifetime where you would otherwise not become schizophrenic, but it could expedite the onset of symptoms. And there are many documented cases of this.
So in a case that you have a family history history of schizophrenia, maybe you should not consume these things. And I’m wondering how you would paint what the intake form should look like, what does the intake look like for a meditation retreat so that a facilitator could say, you know what, I think maybe you should do 20 minutes a day, or 30 minutes a day, but not do seven days silent because that would be taking ayahuasca for a schizophrenic. How would you think about the things that make it more likely?
Willoughby Britton: This is a very natural place to start, which is sort of screening out people who shouldn’t meditate. And now I’m going to unpack why that’s a very difficult thing to do.
I conducted a epidemiological study with Richie Davidson and Simon Goldberg looking at meditation-related adverse effects, how often they happen, and risk factors. And so statistically speaking there is an increased risk factor for a large range of variables that would be considered stressors, adversity. So trauma history, psych history, being some kind of minority group, whether it’s racial minority or sexual orientation minority, something like that, is going to be a chronic stressor and that’s going to heighten the risk for adverse effects.
So it’s very easy to just sort of, “Well, those people shouldn’t meditate.” It’s very easy to do that. Well first of all, more than 90 percent of people have exposure to a criterion A stressor, so that would be almost everyone gets ruled out, except for the extremely sheltered and privileged, which would be not what we’re trying to do with meditation, is just limit it to those people.
And then in the Varieties of Contemplative Experience study, we found that a lot of the risk factors that were the most obvious ones to consider, like psych and trauma history, they didn’t know what they were doing, incorrect practice, that kind of thing, that none of those actually panned out to be true. And so in our study, 60 percent of the people who had meditation-related challenges were themselves meditation teachers, so they were getting correct practice instructions, they were meditating correctly, they had good supervision, they had good knowledge about what to do, and there were a number of people that did not have psychiatric or trauma histories. So while those are risk factors, it doesn’t mean that if you don’t have them that you’re safe.
Tim Ferriss: Right.
Willoughby Britton: So the sort of take home message from me is I’m not a big fan of screening people out. I think the other side of this is that there are a lot of people, and this might be not as true for psychedelics as it is for meditation, but meditation is being marketed for schizophrenia, for psychosis, for bipolar disorder, for all the things that you might, as a retreat manager, want to red flag, so it would be just a strange thing to start saying, oh, those people can’t have access to this technology. And I’ve gotten letters from people that say, “Please don’t just rule us out,” people with what would be considered serious mental illness, “Please don’t just rule us out because we seem like it would be a bad idea for us.”
Tim Ferriss: Well, let me pause for one second and just say, it seems to depend on the type of meditation we’re talking about, right? For meditating 20 minutes in the morning, there might be one intake, but for doing a seven-day silent retreat there might be a different intake. So I don’t know if you’re able to speak to that, because those two things, I mean, had about as much in common for me as playing with a Hot Wheels car on the top of your kitchen table and driving an F1 car around a hairpin turn.
Willoughby Britton: Right.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, they both involve cars, okay.
Willoughby Britton: Right, I guess my point is is that I think that the action item here is not screening people out as much as being much more informed about how to monitor them closely and how to have more off-ramps as part of the retreat.
Tim Ferriss: I want to give people, just so not everyone is like, “Oh, my God, the next time I meditate am I going to have a psychic implosion and end up in a straightjacket!” Just to put some numbers to things, I want to read something here and just have you fact check this so people have some numbers on prevalence, and also just a comparative parallel of sorts that we’ll spend a little bit of time on. Then I want to talk about safety training, monitoring, and off-ramps, and things like that.
So this is from mindfulnessexercises.com, which is pulling from an interview with you:
“With a more clear definition of adverse effects in hand, Willoughby and her team set out to research the true prevalence of life-impacting adverse effects following meditation. The first surprising result was that their epidemiological sample indicated nearly half of the US population has meditated at least once.” I’m sure that’s higher now. “Of these people, six to 14 percent had lasting negative effects.”
So that’s what I wanted to bring up, a number that closely mirrors the adverse effects of psychotherapy, five to 13 percent. Is that roughly accurate, would you say?
Willoughby Britton: Frequency research is very challenging, and so I do think that the epidemiological study is probably the most valid research, but somehow the data that they’re citing is actually from combining two different studies.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, got it.
Willoughby Britton: So the epidemiological study, the denominator was anyone who’s ever meditated even once. So that’s the lowest common denominator, so the lowest possible chance. And within that study we found that people who had tried meditation even once, half of them would have at least one negative effect. And it could be extremely brief, no big deal. More concerning is that 10 percent, so one in 10 people who had tried meditation even once, would have a meditation-related adverse effect that was associated with impairment in functioning.
And so we can go down the rabbit hole of definitions if you want, but I think that for me, having a negative experience during meditation, which we call negative valence, I don’t consider that an adverse effect. I think that if you don’t have some kind of negative experience in your meditation at some point you’re probably sleeping, because it’s not a warm bath for the mind, it can be challenging. So I’m not worried about that part, but I’m more worried about if it has a negative impact on your life and functioning off the cushion, then I’m like, okay, that’s when we need to start talking about whether there’s maybe alternatives. And so one in 10 is really the number that is jumping out of that paper.
The other paper, which was a clinical trial that I did, much smaller trial, very selected sample of people who have clinical to subclinical anxiety and depression, that came up with the five to 15 percent, which is still, they correlate with each other, but yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So what are some things that we can do to risk mitigate in terms of, and you can pick whichever makes sense to start with, but training for instructors, or monitoring. I’m actually pretty interested in the monitoring, I’m interested in all of it. And then off-ramps, what to do if somebody does have a break, I suppose, like I did. I wouldn’t necessarily describe it as a psychotic break, but I felt out of control. I felt like I would not be able to function normally had I returned to normal life without some intervention. What can we do to make things safer, I suppose?
Willoughby Britton: I think it helps to start with, we created a taxonomy of 59 categories of meditation-related challenges, and it wasn’t until many years later that I went through the somatic experiencing trauma training that I started to actually see a lot of those 59 categories in terms of trauma symptoms, and in terms of symptoms of the way that the body tends to react to extreme stress. And that these are not necessarily so altered states, but things that might be somewhat recognizable to people.
So one of the ways that I think is the most efficient way, because we can train meditation teachers and be like, I have online courses where you’re like, they have quizzes on the 59 categories, and there’s all this content that they need to learn. But I actually think that the best way to do it is to train each individual person to be like, Tim, how do you know when you’re getting outside of your window of tolerance? How do you know when you’re feeling “out of control?” What is your indicator for that?
Tim Ferriss: It’s when I seem incapable, or maybe when I am incapable, of stopping very high-speed negative rumination, I suppose. It would be perseverating on either a real event, like a memory, or a perceived threat, like a hypothetical worst case scenario, and I just loop and loop and loop and loop. And I’m furthermore aware of the looping, right? There’s part of me as the observer that’s like, holy shit, I can’t believe I seem incapable of stopping this. I know it’s not productive, I know it’s not helping me, and yet it just goes and goes and goes. That would be my canary in the coal mine, or maybe a flock of canaries in the coal mine.
Willoughby Britton: So is there anything that is an earlier indicator than that, before you get there?
Tim Ferriss: I would say it’s more I’ve realized which factors can contribute to that. It’s something for me that comes on, so this may be a dissatisfying answer, but it’s something that can come on really suddenly, but I would say that overcaffeination, lack of sleep, fasting, there are a handful of things that seem more likely to precipitate this type of experience than other things. It doesn’t happen all the time, but I would say probably, if I were to try to back into what I described, I’m sure that it starts with, and I’m sure it started, I have to imagine, at my Vipassana retreat with having bouts of this come up and then trying to suppress it, I’m sure it took some form like that. I would have to imagine it was something like that.
Willoughby Britton: So, just to quid pro quo, I mean, I have lots of them, but I think my mouth gets dry, is like an indication of sympathetic activation.
Tim Ferriss: Very interesting, yeah.
Willoughby Britton: I get really hot, and when I’m really about to, a strong stressor for me is when my visual field starts to get wonky, and that’s when the dissociation sets in. Things get a little spacey, like that.
So if this was a meditation class, I would have everyone go around and talk about their own personal indicators. Because no matter how much research we do, those indicators are, there’s going to be a lot of overlap, but there are also going to be some individual differences. And really what matters is that the person knows what their indicators are, they’re like, okay, my system is stressed, don’t keep doing what you’re doing that’s making this happen, let’s dial it back. And unfortunately the response is often, well just keep going, just keep meditating, keep doing whatever you’re doing, at some point there’s going to be a breakthrough, but instead it just gets worse.
So that is more of the angle that I’m taking, is teaching everybody what their indicator lights are. Just like you don’t get in a car and drive until you know, okay, the gas meter’s here, this is the tire pressure, you have these indicator lights, and we have them, we have indicator lights, and we all need to be trained on what they are individually. And that will keep you a lot safer when you know what your indicator lights are.
I think one of the things that undermines that is this fascination and romanticization of altered states. And you can think of altered states as a deviation from baseline, a deviation from homeostasis, which is, in trauma speak, that is dysregulation. An altered state is not necessarily something that you want to be, it’s not necessarily a good idea for someone who’s trying to stay stable. And so just having people be able to track that and, okay, that thing, my indicator light, is on, what typically helps that? And go do that. I need to go lift some weights, I need to go dial back and I need to skip the coffee this afternoon, or maybe eat something.
By the way, the fasting thing is really, really interesting. We had a lot of information in the varieties project about diet, but we really hadn’t done anything with it, and actually one of my students this year has just started to delve into the diet data and is finding that it’s really making a difference. That a lot of people have reported that when you go on meditation retreats, because they tend to be vegetarian and they tend to feed you very light food, sometimes not even, sometimes there’s no dinner.
And so it’s not fasting so much, but it’s definitely like you’re going off of your, like my personal high protein diet, I get very unregulated and floaty and ungrounded when I go on retreats and I really want to have heavy food. And so a lot of people found that to be a factor, and found that actually eating really high fat protein meat is a remedy for the problems. And this is also recommended within Tibetan medicine, and old Buddhist textual reports will also report eating meat and heavy foods, oils can also be something that can help bring people down and more grounded.
And when we interviewed the teachers as teachers, which was the second part of the study, there was really not a lot of consensus about what was a problem, what wasn’t a problem, what was a risk factor, what wasn’t. But there were two things, and one was when the person stops sleeping and when the person stops eating, that’s when you intervene. So those were the two things that people, all teachers, mentioned as being something that they worry about.
Tim Ferriss: So let me hop in for a second just to mention something that I found in the process of doing homework for this. This was actually a Harper’s piece about you and your team, and it discussed something that I’ve also seen, which does not really get discussed, so I’m bringing it up very deliberately, post certain potent psychedelic experiences. So this is something that I’ve seen in both, well actually I should say now I’ve seen described here as an adverse effect of meditation, possibly, for some folks, and also I’ve seen this post-psychedelic. And this is, I’ll just read:
“‘Practicing letting go of concepts,’ one meditator told Britton, ‘was sabotaging my mind’s ability to lay down new memories and reinforce old memories of simple things, like what words mean, what colors mean.’” What I’m going to underline is what’s coming next: “Meditators also reported diminished emotions, both negative and positive. ‘I had two young children,’ another meditator said. ‘I couldn’t feel anything about them. I went through all the routines, you know: the bedtime routine, getting them ready and kissing them and all of that stuff, but there was no emotional connection. It was like I was dead.’”
So this anhedonia, let’s call it, which interestingly can also be, for some people, addressed with psychedelics, but what’s less talked about is that it can be initiated in some people by psychedelics, where they come out and they’re sort of numb to the world. People think of the amygdala as this fear center, but it’s not exactly a fear center. So maybe you could just speak to this particular manifestation of issue, because I’ve seen it in both camps.
Willoughby Britton: Yeah, so there’s kind of two different ways that this can happen with meditation and psychedelics. With meditation, if you look at the neuroscience of meditation, and there’s lots of different kinds, but we’ll just say concentration practice, you tend to see a downregulation of the limbic system, the amygdala, and activation of the prefrontal cortex. So attention system goes up, downregulates the limbic system. And again, this can be great, good things, you regulate all your anxiety and depression.
But if you keep going, then you’re going to see a downregulation of not just negative emotions, but also positive ones. People forget that the amygdala is a salience detector for all sorts of things, positive and negative, and you’re going to see, if you continue to downregulate your limbic system with meditation, and you take it far enough, then you will see a decrease in the intensity of all emotions, otherwise known as anhedonia. According to [inaudible], that could also be something that could be equanimity. So it depends on what you want.
Tim Ferriss: Tomato, tomato, right?
Willoughby Britton: Yeah. Obviously the person who didn’t feel anything for her children, that was not her goal. But I actually, that particular quote that you’re reading, I read that quote in a conference and a Buddhist scholar jumped up at the end and said, “Cutting attachments, affection with your families, is exactly what you’re supposed to be doing.” And so I was like, “Okay, well, we need to talk about what your goals are.”
Tim Ferriss: Thou doth protest too much.
Willoughby Britton: So with meditation, there is overlap, so what’s interesting about that model, prefrontal cortex control over the limbic system, is that that’s also the neuroscience of dissociation. So there are certain forms of meditation that mimic the exact neurobiology of dissociation, so that’s one way to end up in this place.
The other way, so I call that the low road, because you’re just basically just taking everything down, getting calmer and calmer and calmer. The high road is the one we were talking about earlier where you’re training your attention and everything’s upregulating and you’re getting more and more and more, your thoughts are racing and you’re having flooding of traumatic experiences and everything’s getting heightened. And at some point your system’s like, “Whoa, this is too much,” and you have this beautiful, adaptive, natural breaker switch called dissociation that will basically take the heightened, it’ll basically shut down the limbic system again, and you’ll basically end up in the state, the first state that I just talked about, where you have a strong activation of the prefrontal cortex and a downregulation of the limbic system. And so it’s two different roads to the same place.
And so what’s interesting, and the overlap with psychedelics, is that too much response that can lead to dissociation, it doesn’t always have to be negative. People can have a euphoric unitive experience where they merge with the universe, or they have just something just ecstatic kind of experience, but their organism is like, “That was too intense. That was too much for me. I’m turning on the breaker.” And they wake up in the morning and they feel dead, and they spend years trying to recreate that awesome experience, but they’re not really listening to their organism’s message, which is saying, “That was too intense. Are you listening?” And so they go back.
And so we actually see a lot of people, there is a very interesting overlap at Cheetah House when people come for help, we see the combination of psychedelics and meditation very often, a lot of times in this scenario, where they go on a meditation retreat, have an ecstatic experience, or just a very intense experience, wake up feeling dead and anhedonic, and they think, “I’ve got to sort of shock the system back into action and they go take a psychedelic.” And that just makes things worse because the system’s like, “I’ve been trying to tell you that this is too much and now you’re just really pushing the envelope.”
In the end we also see the opposite, people who have the initial experience on psychedelics and then they decide, “Well, I’m very dysregulated,” and they get told by various authorities, “You should go on a meditation retreat,” or, “You should meditate.” Either way, at least the people who show up at Cheetah House, the combination was not the answer for them.
Tim Ferriss: Let me hop in for a second just to ask a few follow-up questions on retreat specifically. Are there any intensive retreats that you recommend, or extended retreats? And I suppose the broader question is how can one know where to practice and vet properly if someone wants to do a meditation retreat?
And the reason I ask is, for instance, with psychedelics, which are still largely underground at this point, even though at some point hopefully there will be an entire framework for administering them reasonably safely to people who fit certain criteria, if someone finds a facilitator who says, “I’ve never had — no one under my care has ever had a bad trip,” that is a huge red flag because it means they’re either deluding themselves, they’re lying, or they’re really inexperienced. Those are kind of the only options on the table because you’re effectively using nuclear power to change the plasticity of the mind, of course, there are going to be adverse events, of course there are going to be outliers, and so you want someone who has actually handled those cases.
If you go to, to push my F1 analogy, if you go to a racetrack, let’s just say, and you’re going to a track day, and the track owner says, “We’ve never had any accident of any type on our track,” that’s a bad thing because someone’s going to have an accident, you want to make sure they have protocols in place, they have experience, they have the presence of mind to handle it calmly, et cetera, et cetera. So I could see that applying also to vetting meditation retreats.
But putting myself in the position of someone listening to this, they might say, “Holy shit, of the people who have tried meditation once, X percentage of these persistent problems, this seems really, really dangerous, maybe I just shouldn’t meditate.” So for those people, to maybe offset that a little bit, are there retreats that you ever recommend? And how can someone vet if they’re considering doing a retreat?
Willoughby Britton: Yeah, wow. I mean, I think that a lot of it has to do with matching the goals to the person. So I don’t want to necessarily rule out or recommend any particular retreat across the board.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Willoughby Britton: I think that there are certain retreats that are pretty repeat offenders, and those are ones that have high dose, like 15 hours of meditation a day, no movement practice. So often you see an alternation between walking and sitting, and sometimes there’s even yoga added. So more intense practices with no movement, and also not necessarily tailored feedback from teachers. So I would be very careful before going on one of those.
And I think, just in general, there are so many different options for retreats these days, you can do an afternoon retreat where it’s only a couple hours, start there, titrate up, see how it is. And you can do this at home, you don’t even have to necessarily spend the money, you can just download an app and do that for a day and see how you do. Titrate up and just do it one, add a day at a time if you’re worried about, rather than signing up for a 10-day retreat.
Tim Ferriss: There’s something I have not mentioned before is that I’ve done shorter meditation retreats, like two or three days, with no issues whatsoever.
So I just want to point that out. The other fine detail that I want to mention, because I think Spirit Rock runs a very good ship, and I think they’re very well-formatted and they do have safeguards in place that they explicitly advise against fasting, and I violated that rule. I overrode that, and also added the psychedelics, which certainly I had not mentioned to anyone until I had already capsized.
Willoughby Britton: Yeah, this never used to be an issue, but I know that people are doing that, that people are bringing psychedelics on retreats. And I think a lot of the retreats, they have to manage a lot of people, and people are already having challenging experiences, the regular kind of challenging experiences with meditation, and so to have to manage people who are also taking psychedelics, that’s a lot, it’s not really fair to a meditation retreat. So I think that —
Tim Ferriss: No, it’s going to be invisible to them, for the most part, I’m sure, right? It’s not going to be reported. Just like people lie on their medical intakes about the psychiatric medications they’re taking if they are wedded to taking psychedelics with a facilitator. This happens all the time, people misrepresent their health status because they’re so vested in this last Hail Mary, “Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re our final hope” solution panacea that they see in psychedelics, and I have to imagine that also happens with meditation retreats.
I should also say, I’d love for you to say a bit more about repeat offenders. Are there any other characteristics or format issues that you see producing more problems than others outside of what you already mentioned?
Willoughby Britton: So in terms of the retreat or meditation type, or in terms of personal risk factors?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that seems to produce, the retreat or meditation type that seemed to produce a higher volume of people with these issues.
Willoughby Britton: So I would say retreats that recruit or are attracting a certain type of meditator, which by the way, you fit the bill pretty exactly. When I heard this story I was like, wow, that’s pretty emblematic of —
Tim Ferriss: Textbook.
Willoughby Britton: Yeah. Young male, pretty educated, combining all sorts of tools, fairly aggressive. We used to joke that one of the risk factors was zealotry, a kind of zealotry, a zeal, so something like that. And so people, there’s a certain kind of, almost like military, this is going to be a really, really hard retreat, those types of retreats are a little bit more high-risk. And I think there’s also the combination of the person and the teacher/format. And so for people who are — so one of the things that we found that was really shocking in the Varieties of Contemplative Experience study is that on one hand, we expected to see people who ran into problems, as people who had lots of problems in their lives. But when we actually looked at the data, 75 percent had graduate degrees, MD, PhDs, JDs. These were CEOs of major companies. These are super high-achieving people, and we were like, “This is so interesting. How do we make sense of that?” And we’re like, “Oh, right, being a high achiever is a risk factor.”
Tim Ferriss: I was just about to say that drug addiction in the medical profession is suicides off the charts. Right.
Willoughby Britton: It’s because these are the kinds of people that you’re like, “Okay, we’re going to sit and follow your breath,” and they’re like, “Okay.” They’re the ones that show up early for the meditation and they’re the last ones to leave. They’re the ones that are like — they follow instructions exactly, and they would never modify the instructions for their own benefit. That would not even occur to them.
Tim Ferriss: Unless they make it more intense.
Willoughby Britton: This is kind of where trauma comes in. If you’ve been trained to scan, what are the expectations here? What are the unspoken social rules that I need to ace in order to not be punished? If that’s kind of your MO running in the background, then we have all these people following instructions exactly, not modifying them. Basically, listening to an external authority rather than their own internal compass, that’s the recipe for disaster, so if you can interface with, really, any type of meditation spiritual system with maintaining your inner compass, that’s going to be a recipe for a much better outcome.
But not everybody can do that and not all systems are tolerant of that, so I would also encourage — we’ve had lots of trainings with meditation centers, trying to be able to be more flexible. So if somebody knows, “I need to be able to leave the meditation in the middle so that I’m not continuing to meditate,” and the meditation retreat manager is like, “No, that won’t be allowed. You have to stay. If you come, you have to stay for the whole thing,” that’s not really allowing flexibility. So are there ways that people can titrate the amount of practice that they’re getting within a retreat? Is there a way to like, “Hey, on Wednesday, we’ll have burger night for people who need to increase the fat intake.” That is actually happening now.
Tim Ferriss: The vegetarian diet piece is super interesting. I mean, I don’t know if the sort of acuity is sufficient as a factor, but it makes me think also, for instance, some of these conditions that are, let’s just say, contraindicated for most psychedelic use, schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, understanding these are all kind of word salad things taken from the DSM, which is kind of a big question mark for a lot of reasons. But some of these more, for lack of better terms, sort of chaotic conditions or contraindicated, respond really well to something called metabolic psychiatry. And Chris Palmer has spoken about this out of Harvard, using effectively ketogenic diet but high-fat, moderate protein, some of these people respond incredibly well. So if you look though at the food served at these meditation retreats, uniformly effectively the exact polar opposite, which is kind of interesting.
Do you meditate? Do you meditate now, or is that not a practice for you?
Willoughby Britton: Ooh, that’s a long, long story. It depends on what you —
Tim Ferriss: All right. Let’s do it.
Willoughby Britton: It depends on what you mean by meditate.
Tim Ferriss: Okay.
Willoughby Britton: Meditation, when I first undertook it with Jack’s sort of meditation, it came from a specific tradition and it had a whole bunch of implicit goals and values that weren’t really clear to me because I was just suffering. So I thought, I’m just going to do this so I won’t feel so much panic and anxiety and et cetera. So I’ve done tens of thousands of hours of meditation. I’ve been part of meditation. I’ve been the expert meditator in many brain imaging studies. I’ve done my time as a Buddhist meditator, but I’ve started to understand that there’s a whole set of implicit values that I didn’t necessarily choose, so —
Tim Ferriss: What would be an example, if you don’t mind?
Willoughby Britton: Well, an example is that the ideal effect or the goal emotion state is more on the calm end of things.
Tim Ferriss: Right.
Willoughby Britton: And as a direct descendant of General George S. Patton, it’s not really in my blood to be calm.
Tim Ferriss: More of a border collie, and less of a great Dane. Yeah.
Willoughby Britton: Yeah. Anyway, there’s lots of people who their ideal state is not calm. Yeah. There’s lots of implicit values, and I think that this is just something, as meditation is moving into the West and kind of mixing with a lot of different cultures and subcultures and goals and values, can these contemplative practices be used for many different types of goals, rather than ones that were preset as part of a religious practice? And I think that is happening, but for myself in particular, I have specific practices that I do, that I feel I have permission now from myself to modify a practice to not just follow the rules the way that I did before and end up somewhere that I didn’t want to go, but rather to modify things and make sure that I’m going where I want to go. But that also requires me to actually sit down with myself and be like, “Where do you want to go,” which is another thing that I recommend for people.
Before, Aimee Mann has a song, “Write down what you need before you sign away the deed.” Make sure you know what you want because you’re going to get on a highway and it’s going to be kind of fast-tracking you to somewhere, making sure that you are actually going where you want to go.
Tim Ferriss: I want to know what practices that you follow. Not to imply that anyone should just copy/paste, right? You’ve got to know your own needs, but I am curious where you’ve landed personally. You tell me. Where would you like to start?
Willoughby Britton: I want to go to the Varieties of Contemplative Experience. This was the study that took us 10 years, and we came up with 59 categories of meditation-related challenges and adverse effects, and we categorize them into seven different domains, cognitive, perceptual, affective which is emotional, somatic, conative which is motivational, sense of self, and social. I’m not going to go through all 59. People can look them up. They’re on the Cheetah House website under Symptoms.
But just to give you a sort of basic overview of what is in each category, cognitive types of experiences are increased in thought frequency which you talked about, trouble with executive functioning, so making decisions, paying attention. The loss of conceptual meaning structures, which you also mentioned. Probably the most famous example is the woman who, on the way back from retreat, stopped at a red light, saw the red color, but didn’t register what it meant that it meant stop.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, boy.
Willoughby Britton: You can see how that would be —
Tim Ferriss: Problematic.
Willoughby Britton: Sometimes you need your concepts.
Tim Ferriss: Executive function? You need your concepts?
Willoughby Britton: That’s the cognitive domain. Perceptual, you see perceptual hypersensitivity. You can also see hallucinations, visions, changes in perception, also changes in derealization, so feeling like you’re in a dream or things feel flat or cartoon-like. Emotions can go in either direction which you’ve already kind of touched on, so increases in fear and panic and reexperiencing of trauma, but also affect of blunting, so loss of emotions altogether. You can also see, in the somatic domain, ELSEs, energy-like somatic experiences. We have an entire paper on that.
Tim Ferriss: Wait, say that again. What does that stand for?
Willoughby Britton: ELSEs, energy-like somatic experiences, so —
Tim Ferriss: What was that?
Willoughby Britton: — experiences of electricity or voltage going through the body. We talked about insomnia already and lots of different kinds of pain syndromes, headaches, different kinds of pains.
In terms of conative or motivational, again, insane, just enlightenment or bust kind of changes in motivation like, “Sorry, honey, I’m gone. I’m going to go shave my head and become a monk.” We see that all the time. And then, the opposite like complete loss of motivation. “Why would I do anything?” No goals whatsoever.
The sense of self domain is my personal favorite. I teach an entire class on it called “Me, Myself, and I,” but there’s lots of changes in senses of self and that can range from the narrative self, the story of me, your identity self, all the way down to your sense of ownership over your own body, over body sensations, emotions, thoughts. And then, also down to your sense of self-other or self-world boundaries can dissolve which we have a whole paper on that as well. Obviously, there’s a lot of overlap with psychedelics with that particular category, so we can unpack that if you want.
And then, within the social domain, not surprisingly, if you’re having these experiences, it can be related to all kinds of social consequences. People don’t like hearing about this. They have all sorts of reactions. Wait till you get your responses to this episode.
Tim Ferriss: I want to talk about the Dalai Lama too, before we get too far.
Willoughby Britton: People don’t like to hear about this. So a lot of people get shunned by their communities. Sometimes their teachers get irritated with them, and then there’s also trying to go to work and trying to explain why you can’t function. So, there’s all sorts of social dynamics that go with that.
That was kind of the quick and dirty overview of the 59 categories. And I will say that within that particular study, the Varieties of Contemplative Experience study, we looked at duration of symptoms and duration of impairment, and duration of impairment, the average was one to three years. So, it was quite a bit of time, and it ranged from a few days to more than a decade, and I think in your experience, you can kind of understand why. It could be quite a long time before you recover. If you don’t happen upon Jack Kornfield for a while, it could be quite a long time.
Tim Ferriss: Yes. I won the lottery on that latter part of things. The duration you’re describing, I just want to draw a couple of parallels. I mean, you alluded to this, but you could take almost everything you just mentioned if not everything, and map it to adverse events related to psychedelic experiences, pretty much everything. I think everything that you mentioned. And in terms of duration, there’s something that doesn’t get talked about very much also because it is viewed as perhaps risking the cause and the momentum of the psychedelic renaissance, but there’s something. It’s a bit of a mouthful. I wish it had a better name, but HPPD, Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder. I know people who’ve experienced this where they are effectively hallucinating on some level for years. I have a family member who experienced this by marriage, and I have a very close friend who experienced this for the second half of his undergrad and for several years afterwards. People can find more on this online.
I suppose we could move into scaffolding, but I’d like to ask you, are there any particular distinctions, clear differences between meditation-related adverse events and psychedelic-related adverse events?
Willoughby Britton: Well, we don’t really know. That’s actually a study that we’re in the middle of collecting data on. I’m glad that you mentioned that there’s a lot of overlaps because I’m also seeing them, and a lot of people that have had both experiences are mentioning that there is a lot of overlap. The study that we’re conducting is basically looking at all of the meditation-related, basically seeing how much they overlap and whether there are systematic differences. If I had to guess, I would say that the perceptual changes, the HPPD-like changes, would be more common in the psychedelic world.
I do think there’s something neurological going on there that might be not happening in all forms of meditation, but we definitely see visual snow and lots of — there can be some perceptual changes that are enduring, visual changes that are enduring. But if you look at the HPPD literature, it’s actually a lot more than just visual changes. There’s a whole lot of different things going on. So, I think that’s a really interesting question, not how they compare, but also whether somebody’s a dual user and whether it’s changing that way.
Tim Ferriss: A lot of people are dual users. Yeah. It’s very hard to disambiguate. The resource I want to recommend, and I can’t vouch for it personally because fortunately I do not have HPPD, but the more people use these compounds, meaning psychedelics of various types, the more this is going to become prevalent and really need proper addressing. There is a website. It’s perception.foundation, and that’s the Perception Restoration Foundation. They have resources. They have frequently asked questions about HPPD. They have a documentary trailer. They also have a specialist directory. I cannot vouch for the capabilities of any of the specialists, but a lot of people who experience this feel the way I did in the midst of my silent retreat, which is, “I am broken. I don’t know how to fix this. Everyone else seems fine. I don’t even know what to call this,” and there’s a real sense of futility or hopelessness that can come with that. So, suffice to say, the Perception Restoration Foundation may be a place to start. I can’t vouch for it, but perception.foundation for folks who may want to look that up. What is scaffolding?
Willoughby Britton: For people who come to Cheetah House, and let me just back up a little bit about the Cheetah House sort of origin story, I mean, the actual Cheetah House started as a halfway house for Brown students who wanted to become monastics because of our contemplative studies program. So kids will get meditation training in school as part of college, and they get so inspired by it that they want to go to India and ordained as monks, and going there and coming back, and living in dorms as a celibate, non-intoxicant-taking college students doesn’t really work, so they lived at Cheetah House. That was the original place. That was the original function of Cheetah House was to support semi-monastic Brown students.
Tim Ferriss: Is it true Cheetah is a play on words, the name?
Willoughby Britton: Cheetah is a play on words. It’s a play on the Sanskrit term, citta, which means, loosely, “mind.” When we started doing the Varieties of Contemplative Experience study, we were interviewing a number of people who were having meditation-related challenges, and some of them had just gotten out of the hospital, and they’re like, “I’m 27 and I’m living with my parents. Can I live with you?” I live at Cheetah House, so this is my house. It’s a big Victorian house with lots of floors. So there was an entire floor where meditators could live and kind of recover from whatever was happening. That was the beginning of Cheetah House.
It is now entirely online, and it is helping people recover from meditation-related challenges, and a number of them, they are not able to meditate at all. They’re not able to engage in anything that looks like meditation. All the trauma cues and associations are around everything meditation, so sitting with your eyes closed, sitting on a floor with your legs crossed, using a soft voice and guidance, all of that triggers the response.
Tim Ferriss: Trigger city.
Willoughby Britton: So basically, half of the mental health world just becomes inaccessible to these people because they go to a therapist and the therapist is like, “Oh, you need to do mindfulness.” And they’re like, “No, not mindfulness, please. Anything but mindfulness.” So we have to figure out a way to help people build their own practice.
And I think the other piece that I wanted to unpack with you after I heard your podcast was the term ideological power. Ideological power is the power to control meaning, language, and which concepts are available and how they’re used, the power to interpret your own or others’ experiences, behavior or feelings, and the power to silence or undermine.
The important thing here is that trauma is associated with powerlessness and a lack of options and a lack of agency. So, for people who have been traumatized by meditation or meditation systems, any kind of system is also a form of ideological power over them. Even CBT is a system, any kind of therapy or model is a system, so that also becomes something that they’re not able to work with because it feels controlling. It feels like it’s some kind of value system or model that’s being imposed on them. So how do you work with that? This is called person-centered approach.
So if you were my pretend client, I would ask you, “Before you started meditating or just outside of your meditation life, what is something that is a resource for you?”
Tim Ferriss: Just for general well-being? Are we talking about psychological well-being as a resource?
Willoughby Britton: I mean, what I typically do is actually ask you to look around where you are right now and pick something like a tangible object that’s in your immediate vicinity. That’s something that’s meaningful to you but unrelated to meditation.
Tim Ferriss: Right. I was going to say, intense exercise. I’ve told every girlfriend I’ve ever had, “If you see me trying to sit down and think my way through a problem for more than a half hour, just tell me to go lift some heavy stuff for an hour.” It’s just like, “Tell me to get out of the house and go exercise, and chances are, it’ll resolve itself.”
But if I’m looking for something meaningful that is near me right now, there’s quite a bit here around me at the moment. I could say there’s an artist’s sketchbook for working with mostly graphite and ink where I do some drawing. There is a copy of The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran, which I read when I hop in the sauna. I’ll just read a couple pages frequently, and then put it down. I can keep going, but those are two.
Willoughby Britton: As you’re scanning the environment, you’ll notice that when I asked you notice something that’s meaningful, there’s a salience kind of skipping over certain areas but glomming onto certain objects, but it’s not that the salience has a different flavor for each one.
So if you were going to think about, “I’m going to take my nervous system in that direction,” you could actually start to chart where you could go, different options. Just by looking at these different objects, they’re kind of telling you like, “Oh, this will be activating. This will be energizing. This will be calming. This will be strength inducing.” So, pick a direction. Where would you want your nervous system to go? And then, pick an object that goes with that.
Tim Ferriss: I’ll choose the sketchbook because that’s where I am totally immersed in something, present tense. I can get lost in artwork. I don’t think about whatever mistake I made in a conversation yesterday. I don’t think about whatever bullshit I have to handle tomorrow. I find that very nourishing in a calming way, so I’ll choose that.
Willoughby Britton: As I’m watching you, I can see your eyes are kind of going somewhere that’s not anywhere in particular, which means you have probably some images that are in your mind.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, maybe. I’m also looking at the sketchbook that’s directly past the laptop, but we can work with that.
Willoughby Britton: Yeah. So, maybe more generally, when you look at the sketchbook and you’re talking about it and you’re thinking about what it can do for you, what are you noticing that goes with that?
Tim Ferriss: I would say just my sympathetic nervous system seems to downregulate. Breathing seems to slow a little bit. Hmm, if I’m being totally honest, I have a small amount of anxiety because I was really consistent with my art for a while and I’ve lapsed for the last two months, and I feel badly about it, some level of guilt, but that’s not what I’m going for.
Willoughby Britton: Yeah. Let me just pause there. So, some kind of drop in your sympathetic nervous system, how is that manifesting? You said your breathing is starting to calm down. What else is going with that? What are other ways that you’re noticing —
Tim Ferriss: Some muscular relaxation.
Willoughby Britton: Any particular area?
Tim Ferriss: Less tension. Yeah. Back, neck. Those would be most obvious, I would say. Less fidgety, right? Less bouncing of the foot.
Willoughby Britton: As you’re looking at this object, this sketchbook, and talking about it, you’re noticing that the sympathetic activation is decreasing. It’s changing your breathing. There’s something happening in your back that’s easing. And as I’m feeding this back to you, what are you noticing that goes with that?
Tim Ferriss: I think it reinforces it. It’s not exactly positive reinforcement, but it sounds like positive reinforcement for the relaxation, so I’m able to settle into it, I suppose.
Willoughby Britton: This is kind of the beginning of scaffolding. This is what it’s like because if I try to say like, “Okay, you’re going to focus on your breathing,” or “I’m going to give you an object to focus on,” 50 percent of people who are given the breath as an object of meditation find that it is not the optimal — it’s not a safe object and it can actually induce anxiety. So, if I have you pick the object, I couldn’t have picked that in a million years. If I got to wander around your house and be like, “Which thing should I pick,” I wouldn’t have been able to pick something. You know immediately. You have so much going on, and as a meditator, you’re able to feel into your environment. And there’s like, “Oh, wow, these have different flavors of how they’re actually impacting me.” So I would spend an hour with you unpacking one particular object and I would be watching how your hands are moving, and it would be certain kinds. You might be like, “Oh, there’s a story that goes with the sketchbook,” and you might end up on who gave you the sketchbook, and it’s really about that. So, we kind of go down this rabbit hole together, and I’m tracking your physiology with mine, and if you’re very, very dysregulated and dissociated, and you’re one of those people who can’t feel anything anymore, I can notice very small changes in your physiology and be like, “Hey, you remember that one thing that you just said?” Because I saw your eyes brighten up a little, I’ll be able to specifically amplify certain things, but I’m following your lead.
So, as somebody who’s been very traumatized about power dynamics and following any kind of instructions feels like oppression and feeling trapped in sort of some system, if I’m following you and just reflecting back to you what I’m seeing, that can be a little bit more palatable to people who — that’s kind of what scaffolding is, and that’s what we offer to meditators who have basically developed a trauma response to meditation itself, which can really rule out a lot of things. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. That’s an elegant workaround/approach. And I would say that I feel very fortunate that I don’t personally, despite the childhood experience with the abuse, have that aversion to systems or coaches or teachers, I think in part, because I’m such a problem student in the sense that I just will constantly stop things and question things, and I don’t feel like I need to take anything that is just off the rack, so to speak. So, I feel very fortunate about that.
Let me return, since I made a promise to my listeners and to myself that I would, to your personal practices. What does your self-care look like in that department? What are those practices? Where have you landed?
Willoughby Britton: Well, I’ve been doing this resourcing for a long time, this scaffolding, and where it landed me, I started to realize that in some ways not super surprising, but I have a very strong reaction to living things like animals and plants. So, I started to realize how powerfully impacted my gardening. I started getting really obsessed with rare plants and growing them in a grow light.
Tim Ferriss: What kind of rare plants? Can you name one? I’m so curious.
Willoughby Britton: Oh, just, I don’t know, weird tomatoes, things that you can’t buy in the grocery store. Just things that you can’t find otherwise. But basically where I ended up was my husband and I bought 90 acres in an undisclosed mountain area in Vermont, and we built an off-grid cabin there, and it is so awesome that I think I’m going to move to Vermont.
Tim Ferriss: Nice. Don’t tell anybody.
Willoughby Britton: Oh, whoops, I just did it on the Tim Ferriss podcast. But this exercise that we just did, if that becomes the practice replacing the hours a day that I did with Vipassana, with a practice like that actually amplifying my positive engagement with the world and what’s in it, that grew into something so beautiful and magnificent as this place in the mountains. So it’s not just a technique that you do at your house in order to perform better. It’s just completely taken over my life, so that’s where I ended up.
Tim Ferriss: So it sounds almost epicurean in a way like tending the garden, engaging with nature.
Willoughby Britton: Sure.
Tim Ferriss: Certainly, not to add the label to it, I’m just saying that, do you find that you derive the benefits you hope to derive from meditation through this new engagement that you’re referring to? Or have your goals just change?
Willoughby Britton: If you wanted to paint a picture of what my daily practice looks like, imagine — I’m wearing actually my plaid shirt sort of in commemoration of my Vermont self, but imagine me putting on some Carhartt overalls and getting a weed whacker or chainsaw and going out and doing trail work. Even for the basic idea of coming back and writing a paper or running statistics or something, meditation never really improved my cognition. I always found that I was sort of one of those sleepy meditators. I would just get really, really, really calm and my brain just kind of got dull. But if I go out there and just use power tools outside in the cold, then I’m like, my blood’s moving, my brain’s working. That’s doing more of what I was hoping meditation would do. I am also just ecstatically happy, which meditation never did that for me. So there’s that.
Tim Ferriss: Humans are built for movement. You’ve got to move. The meditation’s great, but it’s for me, very valuable. So I will say that small dose, high frequency, high meaning twice a day, is very strengthening to my life and my experiences. And I spend four to five times minimum, as much time moving every day. Right? The movement. The movement is a critical piece of things.
Where can people find more information, with respect to a class or training, related to the meditation-related adverse effects? Preventing them, mitigating them, recovering from them, whether it’s as an individual or a facilitator/trainer.
Willoughby Britton: The public-facing sort of service branch, info branch of my lab is at Cheetah House, so that’s cheetah, like the animal, house, like a house, .org. And there’s tons of information on the website, lots of videos and links to different kinds of symptom specific resources. But if you’re interested in training specifically, on the Cheetah House website there’s a tab called online courses. If you’re a meditation teacher or a clinician, you can actually take the courses. And there’s a quiz and it will give you, you can make sure that you know the content. So there’s more information there.
You can also just sign up for the Cheetah House Newsletter, and that will alert you to any of the kind of public lectures that we have. We have one a month, and actually, we have one today that’s on SERT, which is Spiritual, Existential, Religious, and Theological Issues in Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies by Roman Palitsky. So that’s a good one to see today. He just published an article in JAMA about that topic and he’ll be unpacking it for people. So we do meditation-related challenges, meditation-related issues, but also psychedelics are becoming much more of a topic. It’s sort of, it’s unavoidable that those, the meditation and psychedelics are combining.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, absolutely. And I want to zoom out for just a quick second and say that — well, actually, let me volunteer something I don’t think I’ve said publicly, which is we’ve been talking about, aside, among other things, these adverse events, adverse effects that can be associated with meditation. Different types, different volumes and psychedelics. However, I don’t want to lose what I mentioned earlier. I may have gotten the boundaries, the upper and lower bounds wrong on the numbers, but adverse events in psychotherapy.
After my experience at Spirit Rock, I went to one of the most famous psychotherapists who works with trauma in the world, and if I mentioned his book, everyone would recognize it who’s in the trade, per se. And this guy was one of the most narcissistic, unbelievably unempathetic people I’d ever met in my life. And he did a tremendous amount of damage. I met with him twice for two individual sessions, and his ego was so out of control and his recommendations so intense and so flippant, that it did a tremendous amount of damage. And that took, this was related to the childhood sexual abuse, and it took a long time to undo the damage inflicted by a famous psychotherapist.
And I guess I wanted to bring this up to say that when you engage with these mind-altering modalities or consciousness altering modalities, assume that you’re dealing with power tools and you need people who will admit that, “Yes, you can cut fingers off if you use power tools incorrectly.” And furthermore, who have lots of time not just working with clients, but handling adverse events. And handling them is not just an issue of capability, it’s also an issue of empathy and will.
So Danny Meyer, who’s famous for Shake Shack and hospitality and many different restaurants, Gramercy Tavern, and others, has this sort of matrix on the wall for employees and it’s The Will/Can Matrix. So just because someone is a skilled psychotherapist does not mean they’re going to be willing to provide aftercare or a safety net if you have an unraveling. So it’s to me, really important that you assess practitioners in advance to ensure that they have in fact handled these cases and feel very capable, and have demonstrated competency in handling these things calmly.
So I just want to say that because there’s so many fly-by-night rent-a-shamans running around, and people who have done one yoga retreat and had one or two psychedelic experiences who were suddenly acting as on the road messiahs, trying to proselytize everyone. And this also goes for meditation. I know people who have basically had what I would call psychotic breaks pursuing Kundalini awakening, and then they are suddenly traveling salespeople for endorsing this, and they haven’t yet even achieved stability for themselves. This is really common. So just make sure you’re dealing with people who have handled redline cases and have a clear demonstrative track record, regardless of the modality.
Is there anything you’d like to add? Not necessarily along those lines, but any comments you’d like to make? I have more questions. I do want to ask about NDEs.
Willoughby Britton: Oh, I forgot about that part of my life.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I know. I take notes so I don’t forget.
Willoughby Britton: I mean, one of the things that we’ve learned at Cheetah House is that, exactly that scenario that you’re describing, is that the helper professions can also be the source of harm and trauma. This is called institutional betrayal, when the people who are supposed to be helping you are actually the cause of harm. Then what happens when you have not only trauma to meditation, but trauma to all helping professions or helping professionals? It really restricts your options.
And so there’s other groups that do this, too. We run a peer support model, because a lot of people get to the point where they don’t trust anyone until they can sort of prove that, “I was completely undone by this. I understand what it’s like to be leveled by this scenario.” And then you’re like, “Okay, you get it. Now I can talk to you.” Because that empathy, when you’ve been leveled that much, this is one of the silver linings, is that you have so much compassion and empathy when you’ve been leveled. You really understand what that’s like to be in that place, to be a puddle on the ground.
So, that’s one of the models that we have at Cheetah House, and I think it really works, and it works in two ways. One is that people feel heard and validated, and not alone, because they’re like, they’re being able to talk to someone that this happened to as well, who’s also recovered. So they’re like, “Oh, my God, I can actually recover from this.” And then for the people who are offering care, they’re like, “Wow, I had this five-year hole in my life that was just a hole that drained. It is just this thing, that is not good for anything. And now I can actually, it’s something that’s actually a gift I can give to somebody else.” And so every moment that they spend with someone else is actually, is being fueled by that trauma. So it’s nice to be able to have that trauma mean something and be useful in some way, and not just be a drain on your life. So that’s another piece that I think is a nice model that’s out there. But yeah, I hear you with the trouble finding a good therapist. Boy, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, there are a lot of clowns running around all over the place. And just to underscore the peer support, because you reminded me of something. I’ll put out a plea to the psychedelic communities, which is if you have not — this is also related to your getting leveled comment. If you have not had at least 30 to 50 high-dose psychedelic experiences, you should not be serving psychedelics to anyone. That’ll be statement number one. That would be a minimum.
And I’m not recommending people do anything illegal, but I’m simply saying people are going to do what people are going to do. If you have not been tumbled and humbled in a way that has left you questioning whether you should ever touch these compounds again, you are not in a position to administer to other people. And the equivalent would be if you go skiing once on the bunny slope and you happen not to fall, and all of a sudden you’re taking people on heli-skiing trips without any type of guides or airbags, because skiing is fun and helpful. That is what I see all over the place.
So step number one is 30 to 50 minimum, personally, because that’ll give you a chance to go skiing 50 times. And not only will you fall, you’ll have some bad falls and you’ll have different types of falls, and then you’ll be more informed on a subjective level about the risks involved.
Then I would say secondly, you should, and this connects to your peer support comment, volunteer with an organization like Zendo at festivals where the age range skews younger. Like lightning in a bottle in other places, Zendo is peer-driven harm reduction related to psychedelic, but really drug consumption. And you get a decent amount of training. It’s pretty nominal, it’s non-directive support. So you’re not trying to therapize people.
But, here’s what I would suggest, is you volunteer for the roughest shift, which is generally going to be after midnight. And, if you’re capable and you should determine if you’re capable, volunteer what they sometimes call the crisis tent, which is when they have redline cases, when people are really freaking the fuck out and losing their minds, often for hours at a time, and see how well you handle those. If you don’t handle those really well, you should not be serving psychedelics to anyone. So, that’s my public service announcement.
Anyway, NDEs, how did you become interested in near-death experiences? I am deeply interested in this.
Willoughby Britton: Wow, this was not a question that, I was like, “I wonder what part of my website he’s going to find and discover.” I totally forgot about this. I mean, I think, wow, this is a really long time ago, but I was really interested in temporal lobe epilepsy and how people have religious experiences as a result, or as part of, they call it the sacred disease. And there’s been speculation that there’ve been a number of saints that had temporal lobe epilepsy. And so, I was really interested to know whether near-death experiencers, well, I was just really interested in the question of whether religious experiences and temporal lobe epilepsy, if there was an overlap.
But, near-death experiences are actually one of the few types of spiritual experiences that are actually kind of similar. There’s a typography, there’s a tunnel, there’s a light, there’s a life review. They’re kind of similar. And so, that’s kind of an ideal thing to study. And so that’s what I did. And I happen to work in a sleep lab, and sleep is a natural activator of hypersynchrony. So it basically, epileptiform brain activity, because as you go to sleep, your brain synchronizes. And so if you tend to have epilepsy, it will show up in your sleep. And so you can also use strobe lights, but because people sleep and you’re not really —
Tim Ferriss: Do you mean to induce epilepsy? Do you mean?
Willoughby Britton: Yeah, it’s a screener for —
Tim Ferriss: Hence, the warnings on all the video games.
Willoughby Britton: Right, but from an institutional review board, human subjects.
Tim Ferriss: IRB will love that.
Willoughby Britton: I’m going to induce seizures in people, but hey, I’m not doing any induction. They’re just sleeping. I don’t have to tell them that they’re — so anyway, they slept in the lab and we looked at their brains to see whether they had any kind of hypersynchrony, and they did. That was the shocker.
Tim Ferriss: Wait, when you say they, these are people with diagnosed epilepsy or you’re talking about people who had NDEs?
Willoughby Britton: I taught a class on death and loss in graduate school. And as part of that class, one of the people, I kind of inherited a lot of the guest speakers from other people that taught the class. And one of them was a woman who had had a near-death experience, and ran a near-death experience support group. And I was like, “Oh, amazing.” So I went, started going to the support group, and I was like, “There’s so many of them.” And then I was like, “Hey, you guys want to come sleep in the lab, and we’ll scan your brains and see what’s going on there?”
And so I kind of made friends with the near-death support group, and that’s how that study happened. So, the group was, I forget how many there were, but I don’t know, 20 or something people who had had near-death experiences. And then, we had people who had, there was some type of non-near-death experience control group. I forget if they were trauma survivors. I can’t even remember.
Tim Ferriss: A far-death experience?
Willoughby Britton: Yeah. Anyway, we had a control group and they did not have any kind of epileptiform activity in their brains.
Tim Ferriss: How do you explain that? That’s so fascinating.
Willoughby Britton: So I mean, I’m pretty agnostic as to what that means.
Tim Ferriss: Just, if you’re two drinks in and speculating.
Willoughby Britton: Yeah, I mean there’s two possibilities. One is that they did not have epileptiform activity, and it’s a scar, right? It’s like a residue of the experience.
Tim Ferriss: Right.
Willoughby Britton: Chances are when you have a near-death experience, and these are people that all had their heart stop, so they definitely had some anoxia, oxygen deprivation, so that which can cause hypersynchrony and epileptiform activity. So that’s one possibility. The other possibility is that they had a sort of tendency towards hypersynchrony, and that was what caused the experience. But, I was very agnostic about not choosing a position or having an interpretation. I just said, “This group has a different, it has a sort of distinct brain activity compared to non-experiencers.” And I just left it at that. But what was so interesting was the response that I got from both complete skeptics, and from the near-death experience community. So I got the total opposite, from no interpretation on my part. And this has been actually a kind of thing that’s followed me for my whole life.
Tim Ferriss: The universe Rorschach test. Let’s see how people take it.
Willoughby Britton: They were like, “Thank you so much for verifying and proving scientifically with neuroscience,” because neuroscience can prove anything, right? “That heaven exists.” And I’m like, “Well, I don’t think I really did that, but thanks.” And then these —
Tim Ferriss: I’m not sure that was in my summary.
Willoughby Britton: And then the skeptics would write me and be like, “Thank you for finally proving that these people are all nuts.” And I was like, “Okay, I did neither of those things, but that’s interesting.” And so, wow. I mean, that’s a whole other conversation is, be a researcher or just talk about charged topics and see what kind of responses you get.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, fascinating. I could keep going on the NDEs. I have a lot of questions about that. A lot of the descriptions seem to be incredibly similar to the mystical experiences reported by users of higher-dose psychedelics. The descriptions are very, very similar, which is interesting because you have this sort of fear extinguishing, related to death in both camps frequently. It seems to be the case.
And I’ll ask you a question, we can cut it out of the audio if you want, but I’m curious. So there seemed to be, and I don’t think there’s anything in any peer-reviewed studies or anything, but many case studies of supposedly, reports of people who observe things while their hearts are stopped or they are technically brain-dead. So conversations that are happening, things that are moving around, the tools that are used. They take the dentures out of someone and put them on a specific tray, these types of things. Is that just complete nonsense or do you think that’s something that’s worth investigating? It’s my curiosity.
Willoughby Britton: It’s funny, because I have the reputation for being the grumpiest skeptic ever. And now I’m going to tell you some mind-blowing stories from my near-death experience research. What are you trying to do to my reputation here, Tim?
Tim Ferriss: We don’t have to keep it, but I know people will be interested. And I’m interested! I have to follow my own interests.
Willoughby Britton: I’ll tell you a crazy story that happened. This is true. And it happened. The sort of end of the story happened recently. I’ll tell you the end of the story first. So I was at, we want to move to Vermont, and we’re building another off-grid cabin, so we’re interviewing builders. And so we went walking around, we met this builder, and we were walking around this other house that he built, and he’s showing us all the features of this house. And one of the features was a double-paned glass that you can just flip the switch and there’s an opaque gas. Maybe you have one of those.
Tim Ferriss: No, I don’t have one, but I know the windows you’re talking about.
Willoughby Britton: And I was like, “That’s so awesome.” Suddenly this window goes opaque and it’s kind of foggy. And so, Matt reminded me of this experience that this woman had in my study. She was actually a survivor of a World War II bombing in London. So it was a very long time ago. First of all, she came back speaking another language from her near-death experience.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, wow.
Willoughby Britton: So that was the first weird thing. So I was like, all of these stories, I was a graduate student, and all of these stories were very far-fetched to me.
Tim Ferriss: And this was a language she had not been exposed to?
Willoughby Britton: I don’t know. But anyway, I —
Tim Ferriss: Okay, she came back speaking another language.
Willoughby Britton: Yeah, I wasn’t paying that much attention. I was just like, their stories were kind of, we never published their stories, but I have them.
Tim Ferriss: You’re like, “Okay, Kathy. All right, I’ll write that down.”
Willoughby Britton: Yeah, I was like, “Okay, let’s see what you’re — going on in your brain.” But she told me this story about, so some near-death experiencers have, a lot of them have life reviews, where they go through their lives and they kind of experience the consequences of their actions from the perspective of who they impacted, which can be very hellish, depending on the kind of person you’ve been. But then if people are sort of dead long enough, they also have flash forwards, where they actually not only see the past, but also the future. So this was one of the ones that was a flash forward.
And so she told me that she basically saw this city and all the buildings were basically made of this glass that had — and this is a woman, she’s probably like 80 at this time. She’s not super technologically sophisticated. And she’s describing this glass that when you flip a switch, you can turn it. It has some kind of gas in between it, that you can flip a switch and it turns into opaque and that the future will be this glass. And I was like, “Whatever. Okay. That’s so crazy sounding.”
And then maybe four years later, she called me and she was like, “The glass exists.” And she sent me to like a Scientific American or Discover magazine, and it was like Smart Glass, I think it’s called. She’s like, “This isn’t the exact company, so don’t invest in it or anything, but this is the precursor to what it’s going to be.” She’s like, “This is the future of what things are going to be made out of.”
Tim Ferriss: Wild.
Willoughby Britton: So again, completely sealed off that part of my life for, I don’t know, 25 years, 23 years. And now, I just saw the glass myself.
Tim Ferriss: In Vermont.
Willoughby Britton: So, I don’t know. I don’t know. I mean, people think I’m super grumpy and skeptical, but I’m just agnostic. I don’t know. I think just letting the mystery be there is fine. It just doesn’t need to be solved. But I have heard crazy stories like that. I don’t know what to make of it. Will I be investing in Smart Glass? Maybe. I mean, it can’t hurt, right?
Tim Ferriss: I mean, it could hurt, depending on how much you invest.
Willoughby Britton: Right?
Tim Ferriss: A little bit. A little bit might go a long way, if they’re going to build cities out of it. That’s amazing. Yeah, there’s part of me that with no defensible foundation, well, I’ll leave that alone for a second. But it feels like some of these NDEs, the high dose, or they don’t even need to be high dose, but let’s just say higher dose psychedelic experiences and many other things. Some of these meditative states are kind of touching parts of the same thing. It’s like the five blind men holding onto different parts of the elephant, that whole parable. But anyway, working pet theory without a whole hell of a lot to back it up, that would stand up to the capital S kind of skeptic societies and so on. But still, something that sticks in my mind.
Well, Dr. Britton, this has been great. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. I think it will be helpful to people and to many who are listening, probably who have had some of these adverse events or effects, who have felt very much alone. And certainly, I could have used that feeling when I was going through what I went through at my meditation retreat. Is there anything else that you would like to add? People can find Cheetah House on Twitter, @cheetahhouseorg, on Facebook, cheetahhouse.org, and Instagram, Cheetah.House. Anything that you’d like to add before we wind to a close?
Willoughby Britton: I mean, I think that I’d like to end just by thanking you for being as open and forthcoming as you have been. I don’t know if you’ve gotten any pushback, but a number of people who share their negative experiences, any kind of negative experience, but particularly ones with meditation, get a lot of kickback, and it’s not an easy thing to do. So I’m very appreciative that you’ve done that and you didn’t have to. I think it’s going to be really helpful for people, and especially this kind of group of people that emulate you and these young male, 18 to 30 demographic. In my world, you’re really a hero and doing something that’s hard. And yeah, just so, I just want to say thank you.
Tim Ferriss: Thank you. I really appreciate you saying that. And it’s my pleasure to do it because by offering my story, I’m not saying, “Meditation bad.” I actually find meditation in small doses to be incredibly, incredibly helpful in my life. And that is not mutually exclusive with also saying, “Hey, in different formats and different doses, things can go off the rails.” And you need to, being a good boy or girl scout, be prepared for that. And institutions and groups, and facilitators and centers need to be prepared for that. And hope is not a strategy, right? It’s like you get in your car and drive with the seatbelt off. It’s like, that’s just stupid. It’s like maybe you haven’t had a head-on collision, but they happen every day, so wear a seatbelt. I mean, they’re basic precautions.
And I hope that will help people to think about this in a sort of risk-informed way, not so that they can say, “I’m never going to meditate,” but simply to know this is a possibility and to ensure that they have support structures around to help them, in case they run into turbulence or something even more extreme, as I did. And that’s true for so many things in life, and I really appreciate you doing the research you do. I’m sure you get a hell of a lot of flack for it.
And, it’s important to have this be part of the conversation, and it’s going to increasingly be part of the conversation. I mean, you have startups and companies that are worth billions of dollars promoting mindfulness and meditation. You have the same thing happening in psychedelics, lots of profit motives, which is not automatically something that begets evil, but it does beget incentives. And that means, we will most certainly have tens of thousands, potentially hundreds of thousands and millions of people engaging with things, that historically were pretty limited to a fine slice of the population. And, we are going to see adverse events. You know what? I promise, one other thing that I have to ask about. So how did the Dalai Lama receive your description of your research?
Willoughby Britton: Oh, boy. Did you watch the video?
Tim Ferriss: No, I didn’t see the video. I saw some text about it, but I did not see the video.
Willoughby Britton: Okay. So there is a video of me presenting to the Dalai Lama, as part of the Mind & Life Dialogues. I will let viewers make their own decisions about what they think. I will tell you some feedback that I got. I mean, you’ll see me there, if you want to watch Willoughby in sympathetic overload. It was a pretty terrifying experience in general. So, I don’t really remember the feedback as it was happening, because I was a little bit out of my body probably, but there were a lot of people there. The entire Mind & Life Board was there. And so, they gave me some feedback.
A lot of people found his response fairly dismissive and also, a bit not particularly compassionate. He was laughing half the time. And I was like, “Well, did I tell you that the duration of impairment was three years?” Also, the people that it happened to were some of our best and brightest meditation teachers. Name any meditation teacher that you can name, who’s written Dharma books. He was probably in our study and he probably had a meditation-related challenge. And the Dalai Lama was basically saying, that this happened to people because they didn’t have enough Buddhist training. And it was like, I don’t know. So, I don’t know. You’re not really supposed to talk shit about the Dalai Lama, so you might want to cut this one out.
Tim Ferriss: People need to grow up, come on.
Willoughby Britton: But I wasn’t particularly impressed, if you’re allowed to say that.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Willoughby Britton: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: It’s fine. I just think people need to grow up. It’s like if you have externalized your agency into someone you view as a god, you’re setting yourself up for trouble. And I think, I am not a Dalai Lama expert. I’m sure that he has, and demonstrably, has offered a lot to the world, but it doesn’t mean he’s infallible. Right?
Willoughby Britton: Well, and this is also, my husband was like, “He’s the Dalai Lama. He was brought up from age zero until however old he is now, to defend Buddhism. What do you expect?” So I think that’s a pretty good answer. And also, it’s very emblematic of, it’s possible that certain teachers have never heard of any problems, because why would you tell them that?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah.
Willoughby Britton: You never want to be the one that’s failing the practice that they’re giving you, or telling them that the practice that they gave you is harming you. That’s just not even a possibility. So yeah, it is what it is. Yeah, I left it up there as sort of a historical marker, but I didn’t refer you to it, because it’s kind of a mixed bag.
Tim Ferriss: All right, so boys and girls out there, be safe. Measure twice, cut once. And thank you, Willoughby, so much for the time. I really have enjoyed this. I think it will be valuable for people, and at the very least it’s going to spark conversation. So I’m going to get a ton of shit. I’m fine with it, because I think this is important.
And for people listening, you’ll find links to everything, the resources we’ve mentioned, any books, et cetera, people, and so on, in the show notes as per usual at Tim.blog/podcast. And until next time, be a little kinder than is necessary, not just to others, but to yourself. I’ll quote Jack Kornfield actually, which, and I’m going to paraphrase here, but if your compassion does not include yourself, then it is incomplete. And part of being compassionate now, this is my voice, is making sure you account for risks. And not live in fear, but certainly live informed. So until next time, everyone, thank you for tuning in.
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Great stuff here. I used to work at Mind & Life and now am with UVA’s Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS), where we study consciousness. Would love to connect you with my colleague Dr. Bruce Greyson, who created the Greyson NDE Scale.
[TOPIC: New VQR essay—Rewriting the American Cult Story]
This conversation with Britton is so in-depth and valuable. I’m a reporter and writer who’s been listening to Tim since 2017. I’ve also been following Britton’s work ever since I spent a year of my twenties entangled in a small but international meditation group that ended badly for me. Thought your team and blog readers might be interested in the topics (related to the risk of meditation) that I explore in a new reported essay for Virginia Quarterly Review—Through a House of Mirrors: Rewriting the American Cult Story
https://www.vqronline.org/essays-articles/2024/01/through-house-mirrors
When my year in the group ended in a nervous breakdown, I reached for that word “cult”— like so many disillusioned seekers. I spent a decade researching this piece that ended up turning the cult narrative on its head. More about me: SarahFussKessler.com.
Thanks for your all your work!