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Willoughby Britton

lines on the record: 107
first: 2023-11-22
most recent: 2023-11-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Surprisingly, if you're having these experiences, it can be related to some social consequences. People don't like hearing about this. They have all sorts of reactions. Wait till you get your responses to this episode.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sorry, honey. Like, I'm gone. I'm gonna go shave my head and become a monk if you see that all the time. And then the opposite, 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 self-world boundaries can dissolve. We have a whole paper on that as well. And 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”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Else's energy like somatic experiences. So, experiences of sort 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 cognitive or motivational, again, insane just enlightenment or bust kind of changes and motivations.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So 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, we can see Else's energy-like somatic experiences. We have an entire paper on that.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, connotive, which is motivational sense of self and social. So I'm not going to go through all 59. People can look them up. They're on this cheetah house website under symptoms. But just to give you a sort of basic overview of what is in each category. So cognitive types of experiences are increase in thought frequency, which you talked about. Trouble with executive. 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.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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 like actually sit down with myself and be like, where do you want to go? Which is another thing that I recommend for people. Amy Mann as 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.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Anyway, there's lots of people who their ideal state is not calm. And so 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. Like can these contemplative practices be used for”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An example is that the ideal affect or the goal emotion state is more on the calm end of things. And as a direct descendant of General George S. Patton, it's not really in my blood to be calm.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Depends on what you mean by meditate. So meditation when I first undertook it with Jack's sort of meditation 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 like suffering. And so I thought I'm just going to do this so I won't feel so much panic and anxiety and et cetera. And so, you know, I've done tens of thousands of hours of meditation. I've been, you know, the expert meditator in many brain imaging studies. Like 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 like I didn't necessarily choose.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Meditation centers trying to be able to be more flexible. And so if somebody knows, like, 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 say, 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.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know the kinds of people that, and this is kind of where trauma comes in if you've been trained to scan what are the expectations here? What are the sort of unspoken social rules that I need to ace in order to not be punished? If that's like kind of your MO running in the background, then we have all these people like following instructions exactly, not modifying them. Basically listening to an external authority rather than their own internal compass, that's the recipe for disaster. And 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. Not everybody can do that and not all systems are tolerant of that. And so I would also encourage, and we've had lots of trainings with.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's because these are the kinds of people that you're like, okay, you're going to sit and follow your breath. And they're like, okay, like they're the ones that show up early for the meditation and they're the last ones to leave. They follow instructions exactly. They would never modify the instructions for their own benefit. That would not even occur to them.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pretty educated combining all sorts of tools. So something like that. And so 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 slash format. 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 like looked at the data, 75% had graduate degrees, MD, PhDs, JDs. These were like CEOs of major companies. These were like 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.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say we're treats that recruit or are attracting a certain type of meditator, which by the way, like you fit the bill pretty exactly. When I heard the story, I was like, wow, that's pretty emblematic of.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. People are already having like challenging experiences, the regular kind of challenging experiences with meditation. And so to have to manage people who are also taking psychedelics is that's a lot, it's not really fair to a meditation retreat.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Retreats these days, you can do like an afternoon retreat where it's only a couple hours. Start there. Titrate up. 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. You know, like titrate up and add a day at a time rather than signing up for a 10-day retreat.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. I think that there are certain retreats that are pretty repeat offenders. And those are ones that have like high dose, you know, 15 hours of meditation a day, no movement practice. 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”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, they're not really listening to their organism's messages, which is saying that was too intense. Are you listening? There is a very interesting overlap at Cheetah House with people who 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 anadonic and they think, I 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. And 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.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Association, it'll basically shut down the limbic system again. And you'll basically end up in that state, the first state that I just talked about, where you have like a strong activation of the prefrontal cortex and a down regulation of the limbic system. It's two different roads to the same place. And so what's interesting in sort of the overlap with psychedelics is that too much kind of response that can lead to dissociation, it doesn't always have to be negative. People can have like 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're like, they feel dead. And they spend years trying to recreate that awesome experience. But”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Meditation, like there is overlap. So, what's interesting about that model, pre-final 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 up regulating and you're getting more and more and more like your thoughts are racing and you're having flooding of traumatic experiences and you're, you know, 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 disc.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 with 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.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Meditation, and you take it far enough, then you will see a decrease in the intensity of all emotions. Otherwise known as anedonia. According to Obiscari, that could also be something that could be equanimity. So it depends on what you want.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 like we'll just say like concentration practice, you tend to see a down regulation 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 down regulation 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 down-regulate your limbic system.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 problems. And this is also recommended within Tibetan medicine and like an old Buddhist textual reports will also report eating meat and heavy foods, oils can also be something that can help sort of bring people down and more grounded. And when we interviewed the teachers as teachers, which was a second part of the study, there was really not a lot of consensus about like 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 stopped sleeping and when the person stops eating, that's when you intervene. So those are the two things that people, all teachers mentioned as”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do that. I need to go lift some weights. I need to go dial back and I skip the coffee this afternoon or like maybe eat something. By the way, the fasting thing is 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, there's sometimes there's no dinner. And so, you know, it's not fasting so much, but it's definitely like you're going off of your, like my personal high fat, high protein diet. Like I get very unregulated and floaty and sort of ungrounded when I go on retreat.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More of Don't get in a car and drive until you know the gas meter is here, like, this is the tire pressure, like, you know, you have these indicator lights and we have them. We have indicator lights and we all need to be sort of 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 sort of 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 a good idea for someone who's trying to stay stable. And so just having people be able to track that and okay, like that thing, my indicator light is on what typically helps that and go.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Get really hot, a strong stressor for me is when my visual field starts to get wonky. And that's when the sort of dissociation sets in. Things get a little spacey and like you're, you know, 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's also going to be some individual differences. And really what matters is that the person knows what their indicators are, that like 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 like, we'll 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's just gets worse. That is.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you know, just to quit pro quo, I have lots of them, but I think my mouth gets dry is like an indication of sympathetic activation.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Best way to do it is to train each individual person to be like, Tam, how do you know when you're getting outside of your window of tolerance? How do you know when you're feeling quote unquote out of control? Like what is your indicator for that?”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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 like I have, you know, online courses where you're like they have quizzes on the 59 categories and you know there's all this content that they need to learn. But I actually think that the”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 kind of clinical to subclinical anxiety and depression, that came up with the 5 to 15 percent, which is still, you know, they correlate with each other.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the epidemiological study, the denominator was anyone who's ever meditated even once. So that's kind of the lowest common denominator. So like 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% to one in 10 people who had tried meditation even once would have a meditation related adverse effect that was associated with impairment and functioning. And so we can go down the rabbit hole of definitions if you want, but I think that for me, like having a negative experience during meditation, which I call negative valence, I don't consider that an adverse effect. I think that if you don't have some kind of negative experience,”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, I guess my point 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.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so while those are risk factors, it doesn't mean that if you don't have them, that you're safe So, the sort of take home message from me is I'm not a big fan of screening people out. 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, it would be just a strange thing to start saying, oh, you can't. those people can't have access to this technology. And I've gotten letters from people that say like, please don't just rule us out, people with what would be considered serious mental illness. So please don't just rule us out because we seem like it would be a bad idea for us.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 our, 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% 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 history.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, those people shouldn't meditate. You know, it's very easy to kind of do that. Well, first of all, more than 90% of people have exposure to a criterion, a stressor. So that would be like almost everyone gets ruled out.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is a very natural place to start, which is sort of, you know, 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, you know, whether it's racial minority or sexual orientation minority, something like that is going to be a chronic stressor, and that's going to be heighten the risk for adverse effects. And so it's very easy to just sort of”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so 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 like what I wish I'd known when I was your age. You tell your former self advice. I would love you to do that.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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? You know, and like 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? Do you have any lingering questions that haven't been answered yet? 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, mails 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.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, one is just wow, wow, on so many ways, like, wow, 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. 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. 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. to me is like my bread and butter. I see it all the time. It's so common, but what are the actual percentages is”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which 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. Just drink too much coffee. What happens? You have a panic attack and you can't sleep. You take amphetamines or cocaine or, you know, whatever, 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 sort of tendencies in that direction. It doesn't seem like a huge leap to think that like, here's another attention-enhancing product that with certain people and certain types of doses, it's going to lead to a hyper arousal syndrome. And that's pretty much exactly what we're seeing. So that is one of the potential mechanisms.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These stimulants that help attention. And so if you think about meditation as one of those, I mean, think about what happens when you”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And I think, you know, one of the other papers that I wrote, which is called Can Mindfulness Be Too Much of a Good Thing, introduces this idea of at a small amount or an optimal amount can do exactly what the hype and the promotions and the advertising says. Like there is a lot of truth in the advertising and the positive reports, but there's also another side of the story, which often comes with higher doses. 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 sort of marketed alongside riddle in and medaphanil and coffee and caffeine and all these.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's pretty good. But it's a review of different studies across different types of methodologies looking at how meditation affects the wake sleep system. 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. 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, more cortical arousals. So it's a sort of biphasic, non-linear relationship. So, just to recap, it's not going to give you insomnia, probably.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 like over 10 now. It's really just a wormhole, which we're going to go down together.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 wow, like 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 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? Like, 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 quality.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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 it a year of internship to see clients basically to get your license. I worked at an impatient 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 kind of a lot. Seemed like a lot to me. So I went back to the same teacher and I said, well, have you ever seen this before?”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, yeah. And so that was kind of 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 kind of signed up for whatever was around and believed everything that people said and the way that it was marketed as a sort of 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 like really look at the translation process of how these practices, like where they came from.”
2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT