How long should you meditate each day?
Classic mindfulness courses ask for 45 minutes a day. Most people never get close, and many give up. The good news from the research: shorter sessions can work, as long as you keep them up for weeks. Ten to fifteen minutes a day is a sensible place to start.
The 13-minute study
In 2019, Julia Basso, Wendy Suzuki and colleagues at New York University tested a deliberately short dose. Adults aged 18 to 45 who had never meditated listened to either a 13-minute guided meditation or a 13-minute podcast every day for eight weeks.
After eight weeks, the meditation group had better attention, working memory and recognition memory, lower negative mood, and less anxiety in a stress test than the podcast group. After four weeks there was no difference yet. The authors suggest that brief daily practice works, but needs time to show.
It was a small study, so treat it as a promising result rather than a rule.
What longer programmes found
The best-known courses, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), set 45 minutes of practice a day at home. A 2017 meta-analysis by Parsons and colleagues looked at how much people actually did. Across 43 studies, participants managed about 64% of what they were asked, roughly 30 minutes a day, six days a week. People who practised more did a little better, but the link was small, and it relied on people reporting their own practice.
A larger 2020 analysis by Sarah Strohmaier covered 203 randomised trials of mindfulness programmes. Bigger doses did not reliably lead to better results for depression, anxiety or stress. They did go with higher mindfulness scores. In other words, more is not clearly better for how you feel.
What meditation can and can’t do
A 2014 review in JAMA Internal Medicine by Goyal and colleagues pooled 47 trials with 3,515 people. Mindfulness programmes gave moderate evidence of small to moderate improvements in anxiety, depression and pain. The evidence for stress and quality of life was weaker. Meditation also didn’t beat other active treatments, such as exercise or therapy. It is a useful habit, not a cure.
So how long?
- Start with 10 to 15 minutes. It is long enough to have shown benefits and short enough to keep up.
- Every day beats long once a week. The study that used short sessions ran them daily for two months.
- Give it eight weeks before deciding whether it works for you. Four weeks wasn’t enough in the 13-minute study.
- Go longer only if you want to. Longer sessions are fine, but the evidence doesn’t say they are required.
Not a substitute for care. If you are dealing with depression or anxiety, meditation can sit alongside treatment, not replace it.
A timer that doesn’t make you check the clock
Timefall is a visual timer for iPhone. Set 13 minutes and watch time fall as particles instead of counting seconds. Sessions can be saved to Apple Health as Mindful Minutes.
Get Timefall on the App Store →Sources
- Basso JC, McHale A, Ende V, Oberlin DJ, Suzuki WA. Brief, daily meditation enhances attention, memory, mood, and emotional regulation in non-experienced meditators. Behavioural Brain Research 2019;356:208–220. PubMed 30153464.
- Parsons CE, Crane C, Parsons LJ, Fjorback LO, Kuyken W. Home practice in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy and mindfulness-based stress reduction: a systematic review and meta-analysis of participants’ mindfulness practice and its association with outcomes. Behaviour Research and Therapy 2017;95:29–41.
- Strohmaier S. The relationship between doses of mindfulness-based programs and depression, anxiety, stress, and mindfulness: a dose-response meta-regression of randomized controlled trials. Mindfulness 2020;11:1315–1335. doi:10.1007/s12671-020-01319-4.
- Goyal M, et al. Meditation programs for psychological stress and well-being: a systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA Internal Medicine 2014;174(3):357–368. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2013.13018.