Can Meditation Make You Sick? Explaining The Fatigue That Can Come With A New Practice

A common occurrence for new meditators is to fall ill – fatigue, colds, and other minor ailments arise within a week or two of serious practice. Why is this the case? It could be that the practice is triggering the parasympathetic nervous system to finally totally activate after years of proper functioning. This ‘illness’ could be your body returning to homeostasis.

Transcript

Can mindfulness meditation make you sick?

This is a question that I've been asked a couple of times recently,

So I figured that it would be a good time to address it.

So,

There's a common phenomena that happens when people start meditating.

Basically,

They sit down,

They start meditating,

And they're sort of establishing a consistent daily practice.

Typically,

About 20 minutes in the morning,

20 minutes at night,

Sitting in silence,

You know,

Quote unquote,

Meditating properly.

That means they're,

You know,

Actively focused on the practice and either following a master or a spiritual tradition or a guideline,

Or they're just,

You know,

Focused.

What I mean by this is they're not sort of doing it casually.

They're sort of getting into it a little bit more seriously.

And then,

You know,

Within a week or within a month or a couple of months,

They start getting feelings of sickness.

It could be feelings of like physically wanting to vomit or actually vomiting.

It could be tiredness or fatigue.

It could be the need to sleep a lot.

It could be headaches.

And then the only change in their life is that they've added the meditation in.

And then they wonder,

It's like,

Well,

Is meditation making me sick?

What's going on?

So I wanted to address that in this little talk.

And the second reason I want to address this is I've recently upped my meditation amount and for the past couple of weeks,

I've noticed a significant amount of fatigue.

I've been needing to take day naps,

Which for me is quite abnormal.

So I can certainly relate to this on a personal level.

Basically,

There's a couple of responses.

The first is if you're feeling sick,

See a doctor.

Make sure that you are not actually physically ill.

You know,

You could have the flu,

You could be hungry,

Thirsty,

All of those sort of things.

So check off the physical potential problems.

But beyond that,

What could meditation be doing to cause this?

Well,

In the books that I've read and my personal experience,

The idea is that when you get into a proper meditation practice,

You're causing the parasympathetic nervous system to trigger.

And that system is basically the thing that calms you down after excitement.

So traditionally,

If let's say you're in a car crash or an animal is chasing you or a fight or something like that,

Your sympathetic nervous system triggers.

And you basically send adrenaline and blood goes to certain muscle groups and digestion stops and a whole variety of things happen to get your body ready to fight or fly.

As in run away or deal with the conflict as it's occurring.

And then what's supposed to happen is the sympathetic nervous system is supposed to trigger,

Which causes you to return back to a state of homeostasis.

Your body will start recovering itself,

The hormones will balance out,

Your pupils will return back to normal,

Your digestion will start again.

A whole variety of things that's just like your normal functioning.

But unfortunately,

What can happen is that particularly in modern society,

There's this sort of continual level of minor stress that just continues,

Chronic stress,

Which causes the sympathetic nervous system to never quite regulate you back to your quote unquote,

Normal.

So when you start meditating and sitting in silence for prolonged periods of time,

You're letting your body rest and recover.

It's like when you stretch your muscles,

Stretching it for 10,

20 seconds doesn't work.

You need to be in that stretch for minutes before you actually,

Your body knows that it's safe to loosen up those muscles and it's been like,

Okay,

I can release.

So what happens is your sympathetic system,

Parasympathetic nervous system starts to trigger and you're like,

Okay,

I'm going to recover.

I'm going to heal.

I'm going to calm down.

I'm going to deal with the stuff that I've been putting off.

Because remember your parasympathetic nervous system,

The one that recovers you,

Job is to get you back to normal functioning.

But it could feasibly have been months or years before you've let your body recover to such an extent.

And that could be the cause of the fatigue that you're now feeling.

It's sort of like when you were in school or if your work has consistent holidays,

People typically get sick on those holidays because you're finally allowing your body to rest and recover and just sort of deal with whatever it's been putting off.

The other side of things,

If you don't deal with them intermittently,

If you don't give yourself the chance to rest and recover,

You may break.

So if you go back to the exercise analogy,

If you just push and push and push and push and push your muscles and never give them a chance to rest,

Eventually they may snap.

The ligaments might break,

There'll be tears,

All of those sort of things.

So in terms of meditation,

If you find yourself starting a meditation practice quite seriously and you start feeling fatigue or sickness,

Get yourself checked out to make sure it's not an actual condition.

And then just realize that it's like,

Okay,

This is actually necessary,

I do need to recover and heal and rest and grow because that's what my body's needing.

And after the week,

After however long it takes,

You'll be back to normal,

But you'll be in a more calmer,

Controlled,

Clear,

Rested normal.

Happy meditating.

Reviews

Well said. Ever since the late 1980s, I've been aware that during the breaks between school semesters, intense projects, or military assignments (when I was serving), I needed to plan for at least two or three days of that break to basically just be ill. I pushed so hard, all the time, it was an extremely predictable pattern. I noticed the same thing when my serious meditation practices started many years ago.

When a high-intensity job I held for over 14 years started causing the same type of response, I started re-evaluating my tasks there. I reassigned what I could, and my rounds of illness started to decrease. I ultimately needed to medically retire from that position about a year and a half ago, but still find myself experiencing this intermittent illness sequence as I am currently in my final (🤞🏻) year of my PhD studies. Sure as always, I find myself becoming ill between quarters. (I am right now, and just entered week two of the three week between-quarters break.)

I have resolved to rework my meditation practice to include more of the quiet and calm practices, rather than almost exclusively walking and physically active practices.

There is much value in what you say about relaxation. I also have resolved that my morning mobility exercises are not to be used as a cardio, "get it over with" practice, but rather an opportunity to make immediate morning inquiries of my body and gently discover where and how I can best facilitate a healthy habitat for my spirit each day.

Thank you for sharing this wisdom with us here in the Insight Timer community. I see you and the light within you. Be well. 🤲🏻💖🤲🏻

Interesting. Thanks for posting