Current medical advice recommends meditation as a treatment for stress. Personally, I would advise against it unless you have a full understanding of how it works and what problems could (theoretically) be associated with it.
Background
Now, to my understanding, meditation is a genuine skill for accomplishing real things. People have used it to control their heart, regulate body temperature, and reduce stress.
But, it should be noted, that it has often been used to let people fly. Given the shortage of footage of people actually floating in air, nor practicing any other magic, I think it’s safe to say that this is nonsense.
Other claims - for example in my previous link - are along the lines that meditation improves the world, making it more peaceful, gives you great new ideas, improves your thinking, etc. But if we look at the history of Europe as compared to the history of India - the leading source of meditation - we should note that Europe became a better place for people of different color and gender as time went on, through reflection, debate, and critical thinking. In India, the caste system continued through thousands of years of yogic practice (including meditation) by the leading classes, the practice was forbidden to women until the late 20th century, and India was a mess of warring tribes and kingdoms. The founders of yogic practice, in the US, seem to have also had issues with sexual assault on their students. Today, even the native people will tell you that India is a crazy country, where you can always expect a large segment of the populace to behave in crazy ways that beggar belief.
Underlying Premise
Of course, a potential practitioner could take up meditation with the specific intent of reducing stress and simply run away from any teacher who tries to teach you how to fly or who tries to fondle you, surreptitiously. But we should ask if there’s something about how meditation works, that explains why it has these good effects but also explains why we have these negative (or false positive) effects.
The area in which meditation has shown to be the most provably effective is in self-control. So, let us say that meditation is largely a practice of learning self-control. That is to say, it might be comparable to a strong form of self-hypnosis.
If we take that understanding of the practice, then we might note that if you put a person under hypnosis and, for example, tell them that aliens are coming to attack them - they’ll become scared and try to get away. And if you told them that they can fly, they will experience flight.
Part of self-control is brain control. Just as much as you can control your heart and your body temperature, you can control your brain. And within the brain we have, for example, endorphins, endocannabinoids, serotonin, and other hormones which could - in theory - be released through conscious manipulation just as we might slow our heart or increase our body temperature. You might note, for example, the common association between meditation and transcendental experiences.
Instinct and The Reward System
Underneath it all, humans are an animal, with an evolved set of instincts that guide our behavior.
On average, we desire social contact, a certain amount of mental and physical activity, procreation, delicious food, a comfortable shelter, regular sleep, etc. These desires are mediated by the natural release of certain hormones in response to various signals - making us feel good about what we are doing or depressed about the things that we are lacking. In example, if you bring home a large haul of food for your family, you’ll be awarded with endorphins. Our instincts believe that this is a good activity for us to engage in. On the counter, if you’re largely unsuccessful at most tasks and spurned by potential lovers, you’ll feel depressed and stressed - your brain signaling that you need to change your ways to something more instinctually acceptable.
For a more practical, modern day example, you might have an assignment at work. If you aren’t working on it and aren’t sure how to do it, you’ll experience anxiety. This is as it should be; you have something that you should be doing and which you aren’t, and you might fail at being able to do it.
At this point, we could spend our time doing research to figure out how to succeed at our project or, conversely, we could go sit in a corner and activate the endorphin releasing part of our brain. The first strategy should, ultimately, get us our endorphin release as well but - more importantly - it’s a much better strategy for personal success in the world.
Meditation and Side Effects
The default understanding of meditation, today, is that it is an activity with no side effects. But, I would note, the medical world would generally not view religion nor transcendental experiences as negative things. They’re accepted in society as normal and - by many - as good. There’s a good chance that you, my reader, are all into that sort of thing.
But let’s say that a transcendental experience for some people - not you, of course - is the conjunction of low outside stimulus with a large flow of endorphins, endocannabinoids, serotonin, etc. and let’s further say that a practitioner is unaware that she is engaged in an activity that can produce that sort of effect. Let’s say that several million people, over the course of several thousand years, engage in that sort of practice.
We would probably expect to see a large body of people who feel like they have achieved amazing and holy things while an outside observer might note that they’ve reinforced beliefs about race, caste, gender, etc. into their religion and hop around on their knees like a bunch of loonies. The ability to reward yourself for the way you live today and believe today, and to hypnotize yourself into thinking that you can accomplish magic would give us the history of meditative practice, exactly as it is. We see exactly what we would expect.
And, likewise, we would expect to see a medical community which holds that meditation is an effective and side effect free practice.
Self Medicating with Meditation
Now, to be sure, there’s no rule in life that you can’t be a person prone to anxiety because of a busted body chemistry. You might get stressed about your clothing being just slightly less mauve than it had been in your memory, and break down crying about it and other matters of similar scale. That would be a fair signal that we need something more strong than “getting your act together”. A side effect of a heightened likelihood of gaining some nutty beliefs might not be the worst trade off, just as amnesia and sleepiness might be reasonable tradeoffs to start taking Xanax. Ultimately, that’s up to you to decide. But, just as you should be aware of the side effects of Xanax, before you decide to start taking it, you should be aware of what meditation is, how it works, and what effects that could produce. And particularly if that could help to guide you away from using it in a way that would be more likely to produce those effects.
As example, most people who I have encountered who seemed to have regular issues with anxiety seemed to have a lot of pent-up energy and overly active mind. Maybe they have some task they need to do and they get so fixated on it that the scale inflates and their need to perform it perfectly becomes too strong. It’s simply impossible to ever, adequately succeed at a task if it’s 10000 times more imposing than in reality and only sheer and pure perfection could ever be a sufficient resolution!
From medical literature a commonly recommended suggestion for correcting stress is exercise. Exercise helps to divert the mind, release pent up energy, and also rewards you with endorphins. And, certainly, we are far less active in modern day than our ancestors. Just as it would, generally, be better to do research if you’re incapable of accomplishing a task; if you’re inflating the task because you have too much pent up energy, then the right answer for many would be too let it go in the gym.
But for our example let’s say that, even with exercise, you still have too much of an issue with fixating and being unable to focus on your tasks. You would prefer to try meditation rather than moving on to Ritalin or some other drug.
If you understand that the source of your anxiety is fixation and a need to be perfect, rather than your body having a mistuned regulation of Cortisol (the stress hormone), you might choose to use the power of meditation to consciously adjust yourself to be less fixated and less obsessed with perfection, rather than just trying to seek a relaxed, endorphin-filled state of transcendental bliss.
If your issue is high, unexplainable Cortisol then, sure, go ahead and start doping with meditation-induced endorphins as the need takes you. I wouldn’t say otherwise.
Meditation should be considered along with its risks, just as it would be with any treatment, and its use should be optimized for the task at hand, in the minimal dosage.