Flaky breakthroughs pervade inner work, but practitioners don't track them
Has someone you know ever had a “breakthrough”… only to be no different a few weeks later?
![Ulisse Mini @MiniUlisse
after my @[redacted] retreat I was like "I'm never going to be depressed again!" then proceeded to get depressed again because I was no longer meditating 8hrs/day isolated from everything in my life, lol
2:42 PM · May 10, 2025 · 23.9K Views](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!7iT2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9f008073-c393-410b-9eaa-3754d9679641_1125x851.jpeg "Ulisse Mini @MiniUlisse
after my @[redacted] retreat I was like \"I'm never going to be depressed again!\" then proceeded to get depressed again because I was no longer meditating 8hrs/day isolated from everything in my life, lol
2:42 PM · May 10, 2025 · 23.9K Views")
Just as “flaky breakthroughs” are pervasive with psychedelics, they’re also pervasive with coaching, retreats, and meditation.
Flaky breakthroughs have set people back years.
I found that almost no ‘inner work’ practitioners track long-term outcomes.
Practitioners aren’t aware of their outcomes
In early 2025, I attempted to make a list of the best practitioners on my area of twitter. 20+ ‘coaches’ reached out, and I asked each to share the best evidence that they had helped their clients improve their lives.
I was hoping for stories like: “worked with a man who had never asked women out. hundreds of hours of IFS and meditation didn’t do it for him. after our first session, he asked out multiple easily… several months later he was in a happy long-term relationship.”
Instead, they forwarded testimonials like:
The session I just had was really nice. I felt a big release near the end!
They have such a kind presence. Best coach I’ve ever worked with!
Evidence of life improvement was almost not referenced.
I discovered that even well-respected practitioners don’t track results. For example, a well-known coach posted a video stating he’d discovered “how procrastination can completely dissolve” for someone he coached. When I asked the coach how he knew this (did the effect last? had he followed up months later?), the coach explained: “I do not follow up on folks after coaching as that would feel intrusive to me… Most all of [the people who come back] have told me about or I have seen their lasting change. But I suspect those who have had a lesser experience may not seek me out again.”
(Update: The person he coached had been trying to launch a website. I searched several times over the following year but never found any website launched by that person.)
In another case, there’s a popular inner work retreat calls itself “data-driven” and “life-changing”… but doesn’t track data on whether alumnis’ lives change. When a competent alumnus offered to completely handle this tracking for free, the retreat declined. They did not provide an explanation.
In the end, I did not find practitioners who track whether their clients live net-better lives.
—@chrislakin | Writing | Now
V1.7: 2025 Jun 4 - 2026 Feb 10.
Thanks to Brian Toomey for the conversations that prompted this post.
2026 Update: I found a compelling explanation:
LessWrong version: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bqPY63oKb8KZ4x4YX
Yup, this is a common problem with coaches, therapists, doctors, pharmacology, etc.. It is often why the effect size of all psychological and pharmaceutical interventions seem to decrease over time. Not just regression to the mean, but because a flaky breakthrough gives a sense of improvement. The resulting optimism shows up in all the standard and coarse psychological or clinical instruments. Most studies only study 10-12 weeks and don't track long term results. Long term results are prone to a lot of missing data from people who don't benefit. It is hard to distinguish this phenomenon from the more positive hypothesis that the intervention created a temporary period of actual neural plasticity that faded.