Regular practice of mindfulness meditation and loving-kindness and compassion meditation in the aging population may protect against Alzheimer's disease by strengthening attention control, emotion regulation, and prosocial capacities, which could reduce risk factors such as stress and depression while upregulating cognitive reserve. The paper presents this hypothesis and describes the ongoing Medit-Ageing study, which assesses the impact of such non-pharmacological interventions.
About one in four regular meditators (25.6%) report having had particularly unpleasant experiences they attribute to their meditation practice. A survey of 1,232 regular meditators found that women and religious participants were less likely to report such experiences, while those with higher repetitive negative thinking, those practicing deconstructive meditation types (e.g., vipassana/insight meditation), and those who had attended a meditation retreat were more likely to report them. The findings suggest that unpleasant experiences are common and that meditation should not be viewed solely as a health-promoting technique; understanding when these experiences are constitutive elements of practice rather than mere negative effects could advance the field.