You sit down. You breathe. You let your thoughts pass like clouds. You get up fifteen minutes later and make a worse financial decision than you would have before you sat down.

That’s roughly what a study published in Scientific Reports found. Brief mindfulness meditation, the kind millions of people practice through apps and lunch-break sessions, increased risk-taking behavior across two separate experimental paradigms. The results replicated with participants in both the UK and Singapore, in online and in-person settings.

The meditation-industrial complex does not want to talk about this. But the Stoics would have had plenty to say.

The Quick Version

New research shows that short mindfulness meditation sessions can increase risk-taking behavior, likely by reducing the emotional signals (like fear and anxiety) that normally help us make cautious decisions. This aligns with broader findings that 25-87% of meditators report adverse effects. Stoic philosophy offers a critical missing piece: meditation without judgment training is incomplete. The Stoics practiced attention plus evaluation, not attention minus feeling.

What the Study Actually Found

The researchers ran participants through a standard mindfulness exercise: focused breathing, non-judgmental awareness, observing thoughts without attachment. Then they measured decision-making in scenarios involving risk.

The meditators took bigger risks. Consistently.

This wasn’t a fluke finding in one lab with one population. The researchers tested it across two experimental paradigms, with participants in two countries, using both online and in-person protocols. The pattern held.

The proposed mechanism is straightforward and, honestly, makes intuitive sense. Mindfulness meditation trains you to reduce reactivity to internal states. Fear is an internal state. Anxiety about potential loss is an internal state. When you practice observing those feelings without engaging them, you weaken their influence on your behavior. Including the times when those feelings were trying to protect you from a bad bet.

This is the rarely discussed flip side of “non-judgmental awareness.” When you practice suspending judgment, you also suspend the useful judgments.

This Is Not an Isolated Finding

The Scientific Reports study lands in the context of a growing body of research that complicates the “meditation is always good for you” narrative.

Broader research now estimates that somewhere between 25% and 87% of meditators report adverse effects. That’s an enormous range, but even the low end means one in four people who meditate experience something they didn’t sign up for. Between 3% and 37% report effects severe enough to impair daily functioning. Anxiety. Depersonalization. Emotional blunting. Re-experiencing trauma.

A separate study in Frontiers in Psychology found that mindfulness was positively associated with cognitive reappraisal (the ability to reinterpret situations, which is genuinely useful) but showed no relationship to expressive suppression. That’s interesting because it means mindfulness changes how you process emotions, not whether you show them. The risk-taking finding starts to make more sense through this lens: if mindfulness makes you better at reappraising fearful situations but doesn’t teach you when fear is warranted, you might reappraise yourself right past a legitimate warning signal.

None of this means meditation is bad. It means meditation is a tool, and like any tool, it does specific things. A hammer is great for nails and terrible for screws. Mindfulness is great for reducing unnecessary reactivity and potentially terrible for situations where reactivity is the appropriate response.

What the Stoics Saw That Mindfulness Culture Missed

The Stoics practiced something very close to mindfulness. They called it prosoche: the sustained attention to one’s own mental states and impressions. Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations are essentially a mindfulness journal. Epictetus taught his students to observe their initial impressions before responding.

But the Stoics never stopped at observation. And this is the critical difference.

Modern mindfulness, especially the app-based, corporate-wellness, “non-judgmental awareness” version, treats observation as the endpoint. Notice your thoughts. Don’t judge them. Let them pass.

The Stoics noticed their thoughts and then interrogated them. They asked: Is this impression true? Does it correspond to reality? Is this something within my control or outside it? Should I assent to this feeling or withhold assent?

Epictetus’s discipline of assent wasn’t about suspending judgment. It was about making better judgments by creating a pause between impression and response. The pause wasn’t the point. The evaluation inside the pause was the point.

The research on Stoicism and emotional regulation confirms this: Stoic practices operate through cognitive reappraisal, which involves actively re-evaluating your interpretation of events. That’s fundamentally different from the non-judgmental observation that characterizes most mindfulness protocols.

Approach	What It Trains	Potential Risk
Mindfulness (non-judgmental)	Observation without reactivity	May weaken useful emotional signals
Stoic prosoche	Observation + active evaluation	Requires more effort, harder to learn
Unexamined reactivity	Nothing; default mode	Emotional hijacking, poor decisions
Suppression (“toxic Stoicism”)	Pushing down feelings	Emotional rebound, worse outcomes

The risk-taking study essentially found what happens when you train observation without evaluation. You get calmer. You also lose some of the fear that was keeping you from making dumb decisions.

Why “Non-Judgmental” Was Never the Whole Story

The non-judgmental framing of mindfulness became dominant partly for practical reasons. It’s easier to teach. It’s easier to put in an app. “Observe without judging” is a simple instruction. “Observe, then evaluate whether your impression corresponds to reality, then decide whether to assent based on what is and isn’t within your control” is a philosophy curriculum.

But the Buddhist traditions that mindfulness is drawn from never taught pure non-judgment either. The Buddhist concept of right view involves discerning what leads to suffering and what doesn’t. Sila (ethical conduct) involves active judgment about behavior. The secular mindfulness movement stripped the evaluative components to make the practice more accessible and less “religious.”

What was lost in that stripping is exactly what the risk-taking study exposes. Without the evaluative framework, you get a practice that can reduce suffering (by reducing reactivity) and also reduce wisdom (by reducing discernment).

The Stoics kept both. And the neuroscience research on Stoic practices suggests that the evaluative component activates different brain regions than simple observation does, specifically the prefrontal systems involved in planning, risk assessment, and long-term decision-making.

How to Meditate Without Losing Your Edge

If you meditate and this research concerns you, the fix isn’t to stop meditating. It’s to add what the Stoics would have insisted on from the start.

Practice 1: The Impression Audit

After your meditation session, before you get up, spend two minutes actively reviewing the impressions that arose during practice. Not just “I noticed thoughts about work.” Instead: “I noticed anxiety about the presentation. Is that anxiety pointing at something real? Is there preparation I haven’t done? Or is this recycled worry about something I’ve already handled?”

The Stoics called this checking whether your impressions deserve your assent. It takes the calm state meditation produces and puts it to work evaluating rather than just floating.

Practice 2: The Pre-Decision Pause

When you’re about to make a significant decision (financial, relational, professional) and you’ve recently meditated, explicitly ask yourself: “Am I calm because I’ve thought this through, or calm because I’ve meditated away the discomfort that would normally make me think this through?”

That question alone reintroduces the evaluative function. Sometimes the answer is “I’ve thought it through and the calm is earned.” Sometimes it’s “Oh, I’m about to make a $4,000 purchase because I feel serene.”

Practice 3: Evening Review with Risk Check

The Stoic evening review already asks what you did well and where you fell short. Add a specific question: “Did I take any risks today that I wouldn’t have taken if I were slightly more anxious?” This isn’t about cultivating anxiety. It’s about maintaining the feedback loop between your emotions and your judgment.

The journaling practice guide covers the full evening review format. The risk-check addition is one question, but it directly addresses the mechanism the study identified.

The Bigger Picture: Meditation’s Adverse Effects Deserve Honest Discussion

The meditation-is-always-good narrative has been crumbling for a few years now. Willoughby Britton’s research at Brown University documented that meditation can trigger depersonalization, anxiety spikes, and re-experiencing of trauma in practitioners who weren’t warned these were possibilities.

The risk-taking study adds a subtler concern: even when meditation “works” (reduces reactivity, increases calm), the effects can cut both ways.

This isn’t anti-meditation. I meditate. But the best meditation apps and the teachers behind them need to be more honest about the full range of effects. “Reduced anxiety” sounds uniformly good until you realize that some anxiety is functional. It’s your brain’s way of saying “pay attention to this, something might go wrong.”

The Stoics understood this. Seneca wrote about the difference between passiones (destructive emotions that arise from false beliefs) and propatheiai (initial emotional reactions that contain useful information). The goal was never to eliminate feeling. It was to separate the signal from the noise.

A meditation practice that helps you sit with discomfort is valuable. A meditation practice that helps you distinguish between discomfort worth sitting with and discomfort worth acting on is more valuable. That second version is what you get when you combine mindfulness with Stoic evaluation.

When to Get Support

If you’re experiencing adverse effects from meditation (persistent anxiety, depersonalization, emotional flatness, intrusive memories), these are recognized phenomena, not signs that you’re doing it wrong. Willoughby Britton’s Cheetah House provides resources specifically for meditators experiencing difficulties.

And if you’re making decisions that feel unusually bold or detached after meditation sessions, that’s worth noticing. Not with alarm. Just with the kind of honest self-observation that both Buddhism and Stoicism would endorse.

The practice of paying attention to your own mind is one of the most powerful things a person can do. The study doesn’t change that. It just reminds us that paying attention and evaluating what you find are two different skills, and you need both.

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The risk-taking study is published in Scientific Reports. For the adverse effects research, Willoughby Britton’s lab at Brown University has the most thorough documentation. The cognitive reappraisal findings appear in Frontiers in Psychology. For the Stoic approach to working with impressions, Pierre Hadot’s “The Inner Citadel” remains the clearest treatment of Marcus Aurelius’s practice.