Meditating More Made me Sleep Better and Feel Worse

Findings from a year's worth of N=1 experiments on meditation

I recently ran a 204 day long experiment on meditation with Reflect. Each day, I was randomly assigned to meditate either once or twice per day. I usually meditate for 15 minutes per session, so this came out to 15 min vs 30 min of meditation per day. I found it improved my sleep, and impacted my mood in ways I didn’t anticipate.

Background

I have been meditating regularly since the start of 2019. My interest in doing this was sparked by a podcast episode with Sam Harris in late 2018, which presented it as a great way to regulate your emotional responses to stress by paying attention to your emotions as they arise, with clear, non-judgmental attention towards the contents of your consciousness.

Hours of meditation per day and weekly average trend line over time

I started out with the Waking Up app which offered guided meditations. I did this for about a year, then I read Stress Less, Accomplish More: Meditation for Extraordinary Performance which describes a mantra-based meditation, which I stuck with as my primary meditation type for a few years. Since then, I've shifted primarily to mindfulness meditation and “just sitting” meditation.

I recently ran a 204 day long experiment with a schedule where each day was randomly assigned to meditate either once or twice per day. I usually meditate for 15 minutes per session, so this came out to 15 min vs 30 min of meditation per day.

Results

Mood

I track dozens of mood metrics on a daily basis. I created metric formulas to combine individual mood metrics into an average score for each category. As an example, Tension/Anxiety is the daily average of Nervous, Frantic, Afraid, Pressed for time, Uneasy, Conflicted, Dreading things, Restless, Tense, Anxious and Stressed.

I found meditating more:

• Increased my levels of frustration, anxiety and depression.

• Had no impact on my level of vigor, how social I felt, or how directed I felt during the day.

• Lowered my levels of happiness and fatigue, but this difference was not statistically significant.

These were somewhat surprising results. There is a plethora of research out there which points to the mental benefits of meditation, such as Meditation Programs for Psychological Stress and Well-being, a review paper which summarized 47 research studies and found mindfulness meditation decreased depression and anxiety.

Sleep and Recovery

I tracked my sleep and recovery with an Oura ring and Whoop wrist band.

Oura Ring

I found that meditating more increased my readiness score the next day, increased my sleep score and sleep duration, and significantly increased my REM sleep the night after meditating. There was also a very small, but significant decrease in average heart rate and respiratory rate the night after meditating more.

Whoop

I found that meditating more increased my recovery score the next day by 4% (though not statistically significant), increased my sleep performance, sleep duration, HRV and significantly increased my deep sleep the night after meditating. I napped less on days when I meditated more. There was also a very small, but significant decrease in respiratory rate the night after meditating more, and I spent less time awake during the night.

While both wearables showed improvements in sleep, the two wearables didn't quite agree on the magnitude of changes for different sleep stages. Oura showed more of a REM sleep increase than deep sleep, and I trust the Whoop data on naps more as Oura sometimes doesn't pick up when I take a nap, and it's impossible to manually add sleep sessions that weren't automatically detected with Oura.

Discussion

This wasn’t the first experiment on meditation I have performed with Reflect. I ran two shorter experiments in 2024:

1. A 90 day random experiment comparing no meditation to 30 minutes of meditation per day (split across two sessions)

2. A 31 day experiment comparing 15 minutes to 30 minutes

I trust the results of these experiments less, as they were both shorter, and the 90 day one had only 87% compliance as opposed to the >99% compliance in the remaining two.

Mood impact with 0 min vs 30 min meditation (90 day experiment)

The results disagreed for many of the measured mood areas, but an increase in depression was the most consistent finding across all three.

Mood impact with 15 min vs 30 min meditation (31 day experiment)

The previous two experiments showed similar directional findings with the wearable data from Oura and Whoop on sleep and recovery:

• They all found increases in sleep score and readiness/recovery score

• Total sleep and sleep stages increased in all experiments, except for deep sleep decreasing in the shortest experiment)

• HRV was consistently higher

Next Steps

I’m not sure how to interpret the increases in certain negative emotions, as they seem to conflict with published research on the topic. I have heard from other meditators that they have observed similar increases in negative emotion, and interpreted it as being more in tune with their emotional responses instead of bottling them up.

My baseline levels of negative emotion are pretty low, so a small increase in negative emotion doesn't represent a large difference. I'm interested in continuing to tinker with this with further experiments, and I suspect some of the effects of meditation are likely cumulative, so even doing an experiment with a random daily schedule of meditating vs not is unlikely to show the full picture. Something like alternating phases of weeks or months might be more informative.

I also have several years of combined data on meditation, mood, and Oura data going back to 2018. I am currently in the process of identifying and retroactively analyzing periods of time when I alternated between meditation and no meditation, and will write about my findings here.