A scientific narrative about what meditation does can offer a helpful lens on what is happening when you take your seat on the cushion. But no matter the story, there’s no substitute for actually doing the practice. Which raises the question: If you’re interested in exploring deeper meditation, how long will it take you to actually get somewhere?

There’s no fixed relationship between how much time you put in and how much progress you get out. And even thinking about meditation in these terms — time you spend meditating as an investment in particular outcomes — will earn you smirks from some meditation teachers. But there are clear trends and useful benchmarks to help you think through how much daily meditation might actually deepen your practice.

Meditation is more like learning physics than exercising

Meditation is often compared to exercise, where the relationship between effort and outcomes is usually clear. The more time you put in, the more results you get. But it’s not quite as straightforward as that, whether in exercise or meditation.

This was first published in More to Meditation

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Take the Buddhist idea of “Right Effort,” which is kind of like learning proper weightlifting form. “If you want to lift more weight, but your form is bad, the only thing your weightlifting actually measures is how close you are to injury,” said Tucker Peck, a meditation teacher and clinical psychologist who specializes in working with advanced meditators.

Given proper form, you might then expect a consistent relationship between how often you work out and the bulge of your biceps. But meditation outcomes can be jagged and unpredictable. As cognitive scientist and meditator Ruben Laukkonen explained to me last year, the amount of time you spend practicing isn’t a reliable indicator of how much progress you’ve made.

Instead, he suggested thinking of meditation like learning physics. There’s a lot to learn that does just require putting in the work — memorizing all those equations and theories, mastering the math that underpins it. And you want to make sure you’re learning correct ideas, rather than wasting your time on fake equations or disproved hypotheses.

But there’s also intuition at play, and flashes of insight can erupt at any point in the learning process. Meditation, too, can be quick and intuitive for some, or a long slog for others.

Consider the Indian sage Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950). Among the hordes of gurus out there, he’s widely considered one of the least assailable cases of being the spiritual real deal.

At the age of 16 while hanging out at his uncle’s house, with no particular interest or commitment to meditation, Maharshi got the sudden feeling that he was going to die. So he laid down, observed the process, and a few minutes later, stood up, permanently enlightened, as the story goes.

Now, I’m not sure what that actually means, and I’m skeptical of anyone who says they do. But the point is that some people can spend their entire lives meditating in search of some big psychological transformation, only for nothing much to happen. Others, like Maharshi, can get hit with what some traditions call “sudden awakening,” without any real prior meditation practice to speak of.

And making progress in meditation, at least traditionally speaking, depends on more than just doing the actual meditation. Across almost every school of both Buddhism and Hinduism, getting your ethics in order — sīla, or “moral conduct” in Buddhism — comes before sitting down to practice.

According to Buddhist scripture, no matter how long you sit for, you won’t be able to access the jhānas — states of deep meditative absorption — unless your mind is relatively free from the five hindrances (which are obstacles to deep concentration like ill will, sloth, or restlessness). And as the Buddha’s teaching of the Eightfold Path holds, establishing moral thought, speech, action, and livelihood all come before getting to mindfulness practice.

All of which is to say, there’s no obvious formula here, and a lot of moving parts. Still, whether you’re looking to drop every ounce of tension you’ve stored up in your muscles, deconstruct some harmful mental habits, or embark upon a first-person investigation into the nature of mind, we can flesh out a bit more detail on different approaches to daily meditation.

How much of my day will I have to sink into advanced meditation practices?

Let’s assume you won’t spontaneously launch into the deep end of meditation experiences with a Ramana-style sudden awakening (but you never know). There’s no blanket answer to how long you should meditate, of course. But if........

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