There are many different pieces of advice and recommendations for how long you should meditate, as well as how often you should meditate. Some say you should meditate for an hour each day, but you may not have that much time available on a daily basis.
In this article, you'll find research-based recommendations for how long and how often you should meditate.
The rise in popularity of meditation
Meditation can help us improve our mental and physical health, and it has really become more popular in recent years. Research indicates that about 15% of people have tried meditation. Regular meditation can help us manage anxiety and stress and keep our emotions in check. More and more people are relying on their meditation practice to help them feel centered and calm.
But what happens when the demands of life limit the time we have to meditate? If you miss a day, how bad is that? Is 5 minutes a day enough to experience the benefits of meditation? Or should it be 10, 20 or 30 minutes a day that you meditate? Unfortunately, there isn't one easy answer for everyone, but there are several helpful pointers on how long and how often you should meditate.
How long should you meditate?
Mindfulness-based clinical therapies such as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) usually recommend practicing meditation for 40-45 minutes a day.
The Transcendental Meditation (TM) tradition often recommends 20 minutes, twice a day.
Interventions based on the Relaxation Response (Benson, 1975) also often recommend 20-minute meditations. Traditionally, a meditation like the shamatha meditation (a breath-focused meditation) is practiced by monks and nuns in Tibetan monasteries for ten or fifteen minutes. The monks and nuns do this several times a day. However, there is no absolute requirement with these numbers as far as meditating is concerned.
You could look at meditation as exercise in this way. There is no optimal length of time for exercise, just as there is no perfect and precise number of minutes to “must” meditate. In either exercise or meditation, it's important that the amount of time you spend on it is enough to challenge you a little, but not so much that you don't feel like it or feel exhausted.
Make it a habit
Making meditation a regular part of your day is more important than how long you meditate. For that reason, the time you meditate for the longer term should also be workable for you. It won't do you much good to meditate for 90 minutes one day if you happen to have the time, and feel guilty for the rest of the week if you can't live up to it.
As with exercise, even a small amount of meditation seems to have benefits if your schedule doesn't allow you to do your usual amount of meditation.
Example: Suppose you go jogging three kilometers a day. One day you are busy and can only do half a mile. Can you do this better than sitting on the couch? Yes. Will it help you as much as running two miles? That's unlikely. Meditation is similar – there doesn't seem to be a magic minute line where if you're short on time, you're wasting your time. Every minute of meditation is included, as long as you build in the regularity.
What does science say about how long you should meditate?
With that in mind, three recent studies do offer some scientific guidance on how long it is right to meditate.
From the research of cognitive scientist Dr. Amishi Jha found that in a sample of U.S. Marines preparing to go on a deployment, meditation sessions of just 12 minutes yielded cognitive improvements. A 2018 study found that 12 minutes a day Kirtan Kriyameditation was sufficient to produce significant positive changes in blood dementia indicators. A third study showed that 10 minutes of daily meditation significantly improved the performance of undergraduate students.
Does this mean we should all meditate for 10 to 12 minutes a day? No, but it does suggest that some of the effects of meditation start around 10 minutes. Ten minutes, evidence shows, seems to be a minimum threshold for some of the benefits of meditation. For many people it is also a very feasible amount of time that you can spend on meditation on a daily basis.
And how often should you meditate?
Meditation is similar to exercise in that we practice a skill. The more we practice the skill, the better we can use it. For that reason, it is best to meditate daily if you can.
Unlike with exercise, you don't have to take a rest day for your muscles, so a day off is not necessary. In addition, it is good if you could meditate daily, because then you have a real habit know how to make. However, if you are not able to meditate on a daily basis, it is important not to be too hard on yourself and beat yourself up for having "too little discipline". The following applies: maintaining compassion for yourself is also important!
Meditation works best when we commit to doing it regularly, whether daily or just very regularly. By maintaining that regularity for long periods of time, we can become more familiar with our minds than we otherwise could.
Short summary with recommendations
If you have 10 minutes a day to devote to meditation, it is already good because it will be useful to you. 20 minutes will probably be a bit more useful, that's true. But remember that if you decide to meditate for 10 minutes a day, on any given day once you have formed the habit of 10 minutes a day, you can always build up to 20 minutes of meditating.
For most of us, it's about taking the time and sitting down to meditate regularly, not so much for how long. Remember the following tips to create a regular meditation habit:
- Choose a fixed time of day when you take the time to meditate. We find it best for us to do a meditation early in the morning immediately after getting up.
- If you miss a day, that's okay too. Part of meditating involves having self-compassion. Focus on the days of the week or month when you can meditate, rather than the one day when you couldn't.
- If you don't meet your daily goal of meditating, try decreasing the number of minutes slightly until you reach a number where you can do it every day. This takes some of the pressure off, where you can get into the habit first and then build into longer meditations later once you're ready.
When determining how often you want to meditate, keep the basic principles above in mind. If you do, you will increase your chances of starting and maintaining a regular and therefore valuable meditation routine!
Sources ao Calm (link), In-Bloom Project (link), Manhattan CBT (link), Mindful (link), VeryWellMind (link)
