Intensive meditation retreats produce primarily pleasant peak experiences—such as deep peace or sudden insights—rather than unpleasant ones. In a preregistered study, 96 adults attending 6-day Vipassana retreats reported more pleasant peak experiences than 47 matched controls from the same meditation community. Unpleasant peak experiences did not differ significantly between groups. At two-week follow-up, both pleasant and most unpleasant peak experiences were rated as more beneficial than harmful, with a large average effect size (Cohen's d = 1.61). The findings contradict uncontrolled retrospective studies suggesting that intensive meditation training often leads to adverse experiences.
Decades of research on how mindfulness training affects attention have produced mixed results. To explain these findings, the Mindfulness Internal Attention (MIA) framework proposes that mindfulness primarily trains internal attention—processes focused on internally generated experiences like bodily sensations and thoughts. These internal attentional skills then generalize to late-stage external processes that handle abstracted information, such as inhibitory control and working memory updating. However, mindfulness training is unlikely to affect early-stage external processes that handle raw sensory input, like alerting or orienting to visual stimuli. Internal attention is proposed as essential for key mindfulness benefits like decentering and acceptance. A critical review of empirical findings supports this framework.
A 6-day intensive mindfulness meditation retreat led to significant improvements in well-being, negative affect, perseverative thinking, brooding rumination, and depression symptoms at a 2-week follow-up compared to matched controls, with effect sizes comparable to longer 8-week mindfulness programs. Effects on positive affect, emotion regulation, and anxiety symptoms were not significant. Rates of reliable deterioration in mental health were equal or lower among retreat participants than controls, including among those with clinically elevated depression or anxiety. The findings suggest that such retreats are safe and effective, even for clinically vulnerable adults.
A new framework, the Mindfulness Internal Attention (MIA) framework, proposes that mindfulness training primarily targets internal attention—processes operating on internally generated or stored information—rather than early-stage external attention. The framework reviews evidence suggesting that mindfulness training affects executive functions and working memory shared between internal and late-stage external attention, but does not affect early-stage external attention processes that do not share cognitive resources with internal attention. This account reconciles the paradoxical disparity between theoretical predictions and mixed empirical findings from over two decades of research on attention and mindfulness.