I heard once that meditation is an inherently introspective practice. It brings your focus towards yourself and being present in the moment. Hence if you are narcissistic, the last thing you want is to draw more focus to yourself And meditate.

To loosely quote "McMindfulness", it's possible to be mindful about shitty things. The Western form of mindfulness has been largely washed of the Buddhist dogma that it's rooted in. This is because it was heavily coopted by corporations as a way for people to "meditate" towards tolerating a crappy work environment or coworkers.

Sure. I’m only reporting one thing that I heard. I’d rather read more ideas of why it’s wrong rather than be down voted.

I was agreeing with you - I'm not sure why people wouldn't downvote you, other than not liking to hear about the ugly side of mindfulness.

Meditation and exercise are not comparable. The latter is something our bodies were designed by our evolution to do. The former is something we ourselves developed in certain cultural environments. The actual difference in confidence of benefit between these two is enormous.

I'd argue that exercise (for some) can be a form of meditation and achieve similar effects. Running for a long time will result in a focus on your breath and each stride and step.

Firstly, even if mediation was completely harmless in itself, there is such a thing as opportunity cost. Spending a year unsuccessfully thing to get something from mediation is a year when they could have been trying lots of other things. (You could try other things at the same time, but most medical professionals actively discourage that)

Isn't this a fallacy in itself? There is opportunity cost in everything. How would you know a year of meditation wasn't working out without actually doing the meditation?

If a year didn't work, how would you know that 2 years want going to work? or 5 years?

The problem isn't that you have to try it to see if it's works. The problem is that psych professionals a) have a poor grasp of decision theory and b) have an incentive to optimise their time and not the patients.

> If a year didn't work, how would you know that 2 years want going to work? or 5 years?

The time frame is not relevant as people differ in their abilities, as you have noted. Typically there would be some measurable change that helps determine how "you" are feeling overall in the process, not how other people felt at the indicated time frame. After all the goal is for "you" to feel better, which is subjective to everyone.

> The problem isn't that you have to try it to see if it's works.

I'm not sure I see how this would work any other way than trying it. A person is only trying the recommendation not perfecting it.

> The problem is that psych professionals a) have a poor grasp of decision theory and b) have an incentive to optimise their time and not the patients.

I'm not directly following how this relates to the original comment stating that recommending something for someone was toxic. Much like all professions some people are better at their job than others, sometimes you find the right fit, sometimes you have to keep going. We all have to walk our own path, no one can walk it for us.

*"you" is in the objective sense, not directed at you specifically.

I'm sorry, but I'm not sure how to explain this to you any further. Nothing you are saying is actually wrong, it just doesn't actually refute what I have been saying.

Unfortunately, I do think it refutes your point. You stated the following based on someones post of "everybody should try meditation":

>Here is why it is toxic: for people who those things don't work, or for whom the proposed solution is beyond their ability, it's a short step to blaming them for their problems and writing them off.

It seems very illogical to be on a recommendation engine of a site if its difficult for you to to reason with the recommendations posted and/or the direct feedback that people also post, relating to the topic at hand. I pointed out that this is what HN was based on. I disagree that it is toxic for someone else to make a recommendation, based on their perspectives, to try something on a site like HN.

If you had possible insight I would like to understand two things:

1. Why is someone one a site like HN if they aren't the intended audience?

2. What value would they derive from the site, presumably knowing their own mental health and that any recommendation they could read would be toxic to them because they may not be able to achieve the desired outcome?

If you want to figure out what someone else is saying, you need to figure out the way they have conceptualised the issue. You won't be able to do this by insisting on your conceptualisation.

By all means, please expand on this, preferably in more than a one or two sentence answer. I've posed two questions already to help frame what you are speaking too and so far I've only seen surface level responses.

How would you know a priori that doing it is better than what you could otherwise do with your life? Spending time to build meaningful relations with people around you could be a better use of time. With your spouse or kids, for example.

I'm not saying meditation is bad per se. But claiming straiht away that it can't do harm before you try it is just too strong of a statement. It's easy to dismiss the effect of opportunity cost.

>How would you know a priori that doing it is better than what you could otherwise do with your life?

You don't. Just as equally you can't say a recommendation is harmful that you haven't actually evaluated or performed yourself. No one dismissed opportunity cost, in fact its was clearly stated above that everything has a cost, both doing and not doing something.

There is a population who doesn't necessarily benefit, but we're pretty small: Those of us who have severe dissociative problems can sometimes not do well with meditation - we're basically so used to ignoring our mental and physical cues that training us to do so more isn't a good idea. It essentially reaffirms some toxic priors and heuristics we've developed. Also can really fuck with you if you have issues with things like derealization/depersonalization because you're contributing to that internal wall by detaching yourself.

You might want to read the Wilson et al paper on mindfulness significantly increasing susceptibility to false memories, that’s quite the downside.

> It's hard to do harm with meditation

It's hard to do harm with taking a one hour walk every day.

It's hard to do harm doing yoga for an hour a day.

It's hard to do harm with cooking a really healthy meal every day.

It's hard to do harm watching a self-improvement video on youtube every day.

It's hard to do harm writing down self-reflective thoughts for half an hour before going to bed every night.

...

No, if you compare it with sitting on the sofa staring into the wall, then no, it's likely not going to harm. But that's the wrong comparison. You need to compare with what you instead do not do with your limited time. And then doing all those things can do a lot of (relative) harm.

It's easy to do harm with claiming a certain thing is hard to do harm with.