Standard wisdom around meditation tends to prescribe 20 minutes or more per session.

A recent study shows long-time meditators use longer sessions, but beginners are best served by short bursts.

Consistency is key, but skipped days are okay, and 5 minutes several days a week might be all you need.

Over many years, I tried to meditate with a baby in my lap (not recommended), in yoga class, before getting out of bed, after getting into bed, in meditation groups, alone, and even (literally) in the closet. It never worked. I could rarely make it to 20 minutes. But even if my mind wandered like crazy, I thought I had to sit there for that full, magical meditative 20 minutes.

Turns out, that was the wrong approach, according to a new study published by Insight Timer (the most utilized free digital meditation app), which spins what we thought about meditation on its head (pun intended).

Today, it makes sense nothing worked to jumpstart my meditation practice until my kids were older (or at least toilet-trained). Then, I gave Headspace a try—a meditation app that offers ten days of free, ten-minute meditations. Even ten minutes seemed like a lot, but I could make that work. After the free trial, I was too cheap to buy in, but the meditation habit finally stuck. It’s almost ten years later, and I’m still at it.

Insight Timer’s study looked at meditation habits and several novel targets, showing that my experience was common. They looked at dose (how long meditators meditate), habits (meditation routines and times), and types of meditation (interoceptive, based on internal foci like the breath or body; and exteroceptive, based outwardly, like lovingkindness or mantra meditation). Between spring 2021 and summer 2022, they followed more than 10,000 volunteers from 103 countries. (As you might recall, this was a lovely time to meditate as we were often home alone in lockdown.)

A highlight of the study was that it was longitudinal: Instead of looking at meditators (or potential meditators) at one or two timepoints, they measured participants for over a year. And they delved into much more than a binary yes-no of meditation, including what, how, when, and so on.

They found that meditating with a digital app consistently offers improvements in mood, equanimity, and resilience. But we already knew that. Digital meditation apps are known to be effective. This study, however, found much more:

Over the first 50-100 meditations sessions, rapid improvements in mood, equanimity, and resilience stood out, and improvements continued increasing through the end of the study.

Consistency was more important than minutes meditated, but “consistency” was measured as four to seven days a week—not every day.

Yes, longer (21-30 minute) sessions offered greatest benefits in improved mood, but 11-20-minute sessions were associated with the greatest benefits in resilience, and mood stabilization effects (a feeling of equanimity) were similar no matter what the length of the meditation session.

A greater variation in types of meditation—interoceptive and exteroceptive—was associated with better mood, equanimity, and resilience.

Morning meditation doubled the likelihood of continuing to meditate (versus evening sessions).

Beginners who started with 5-10-minute or 11-20-minute sessions reaped higher mood scores (up to the 20th session, when longer sessions took over in predicting better mood).

So how do we put this together for beginning meditators who want to make it a habit? Meditating a few times a week, consistently, is more important than length of time spent meditating. Five minutes a day (most days) is more likely to keep you meditating and accruing greater mindfulness and mood results. If one day gets away from you, don’t give up; just start again.

As you enjoy meditation and its benefits over time, you’ll likely want to increase session length and/or frequency. It’s self-reinforcing because it feels good.

And finally, mix it up: Balance interoceptive meditations where your mind sometimes takes over (“I’m not breathing right.” “Damn, my mind keeps wandering.” “This sucks, I’ll never make a good meditator!”), with external meditations, like lovingkindness, mantra, or metta sessions.

Cearns M, Clark SR. The Effects of Dose, Practice Habits, and Objects of Focus on Digital Meditation Effectiveness and Adherence: Longitudinal Study of 280,000 Digital Meditation Sessions Across 103 Countries. J Med Internet Res. 2023 Sep 19;25:e43358. doi: 10.2196/43358. PMID: 37725801; PMCID: PMC10548318.

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