The science of being unable to meditate – and what to do instead

“[But] this is something practitioners are recommending to almost everyone.”

Who benefits from meditation?

While meditation is thousands of years old, it only started to get a serious foothold in the West in the 1960s. Scientists were just learning to study the electrical activity of the brain and soon discovered Zen masters seemed able to alter it through meditation.

The discovery was catnip to the counter-culture hippies of the 1960s. By the late ’60s, the Beatles were ensconced in Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s transcendental meditation ashram, and by the mid-’70s, the media was well on its way to portraying meditation as a panacea.

Now meditation is firmly part of mainstream health. About a fifth of Australians meditate, Australia is in the top three globally for meditation search traffic, according to Google, and two meditation apps sit in the country’s top five health and fitness Android apps.

Meditation and mindfulness are promoted as evidence-based interventions in the handbook issued to doctors by the Royal Australian College of GPs.

‘Many of the clinicians who recommend this are not aware [of the evidence].’

Dr Julieta Galante

But this wide embrace of meditation troubles the people you would most expect to back the practice’s benefits: leading meditation researchers.

“Anecdotally, there is this push in the field to offer mindfulness to everyone,” says Dr Julieta Galante, deputy director of the Contemplative Studies Centre.

High-quality meta-analyses show mindfulness meditation can have a significant effect – somewhere in the ballpark of antidepressants – on depression and anxiety, and has benefits for overall mental health.

But there are two big problems translating that data into real-world health advice.

First, clinical studies focus on the average overall effect seen by a group of meditators. As in nearly all clinical trials, some people will respond strongly, while others will get no benefit, and some will get worse.

Few meditation trials try to calculate how many people actually benefit from it – a technique known as “responder analysis”.

In one that did – a 2020 American randomised-controlled trial of 156 people undertaking an eight-week program of mindfulness meditation – 43 per cent of participants reported their symptoms worsening.

Meditation is showing promise as a treatment for chronic headaches. Yet just a third of people in a small trial saw a benefit. The same is true for irritable bowel syndrome: it “works” yet two-thirds of patients in one 2022 trial didn’t see a meaningful improvement.

The second problem is that most meditation trials are run with volunteers, who often have already tried – and enjoyed – meditation. People who have a positive attitude, who try hard and who expect meditation to work tend to reap the biggest benefits, further skewing the data.

“Only those who are interested actually engage in the exercises,” says Galante. “Who knows what’s going on when someone closes their eyes in silence? Unlike most other things, you can’t force or control the practice of meditation.”

To fix this, in 2021, researchers published a study of more than 8300 randomly selected British school students who were enrolled in an at-school mindfulness intervention. The conclusion: the intervention had no benefits.

“Many of the clinicians who recommend this are not aware [of the evidence]. There is no awareness of the evidence base,” says Galante.

When patients find meditation isn’t working for them, they often come back to their GPs – who tell them they must be doing it incorrectly, effectively gaslighting the patient, says Van Dam.

Try this instead

What is the takeaway from this data?

Don’t assume that meditation is going to work for you – and don’t blame yourself when it doesn’t. If it isn’t working, consider another evidence-based approach, such as journaling or exercise.

“Mindfulness is unlikely to necessarily be better than those other evidence-based approaches; what likely matters most is what people are willing to actually do,” says Van Dam.

But it also points us to a second idea. “You can’t have a one-size-fits-all approach,” says associate professor Simon Rosenbaum, a University of NSW researcher who has published a large meta-review of meditation. Some people will respond differently to different types of meditation.

We often think of meditation as about sitting still and quiet. But there are other, more active, forms that might suit those who struggle to calm mind and body.

Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, often described as the “father of mindfulness”, was a great advocate of walking meditation. “You allow your mind to rest. You don’t need to think,” he has said. “You put your attention on the sole of the foot – as if I kiss the Earth with my foot.”

O’Keeffe teaches movement meditation at a dance studio in Carlton, which incorporates breath work and improvisational dance. Some people respond better to movement than stillness, she says.

“It’s about bringing people into connection with their breath, just like traditional meditation,” she says. “Just slowing down and recognising what is happening in each moment, and how rich and full each moment is.”

In her studies, Galante has seen small additional benefits if a mindfulness practice includes exercise. Different people will find their mindfulness, their calm, in different places, she says.

“There is no reason to tell someone who likes jogging that they should do mindfulness or meditation.

“People have this assumption it’s one kind of practice. And when they can’t do it, they go, ‘I’m no good at it, I can’t meditate.’ You might struggle with one version of one practice – that doesn’t mean you’re incapable of engaging in meditation.”

Jane Langof, who could never quiet her mind, has discovered the calm of … netball.

“If I had some sort of issue … what I’d find is when I played netball, I’d be so focused on the game, the ball, all the other thoughts and stresses would just disappear,” she says.

“You’d really give your mind a break from all that crap – which is what meditation is all about.”