How long should you meditate?

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.

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 you’re interested in deepening your meditation practice, there are at least two general principles to follow:

• It’s more important to practice regularly than to sporadically do longer sessions. 20 minutes a day is a better bet than 60 minutes once a week.
  
• Therefore, you should do the most meditation that you will actually do every day (within reason, which we’ll get to).

As mindfulness has gone mainstream, though, much shorter sessions have become the vogue. Many of the stress-relief meditations on popular apps like Headspace or Calm cluster around 10-minute sessions.

Some teachers — especially those coming from non-dual traditions that believe we’re all already enlightened but just don’t know it — say that even short, 5- or 10-minute meditations can be powerful stuff. Nondual meditation teacher Loch Kelly teaches “mindful glimpses” that take no more than a few minutes, but, he told me, can give a real peek into deep states of meditation. Though he added that it then takes about three years of practice to stabilize those glimpses. 

Glimpses, stress relief, and sudden awakenings aside, most meditation teachers I spoke with agree that you’ll have to sit for more than 10 minutes per day to really get acquainted with meditation’s deeper practices. 

Even the formal method of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), which trojan-horsed mindfulness into Western science more than 40 years ago, is an eight-week course that recommends 45 minutes of daily meditation. Jon Kabat-Zinn — meditation teacher, former biologist, and MBSR’s creator — settled on 45 minutes as a middle ground between longer sessions that could get you past the initial fidgety phases of meditation, while being somewhat realistic for people to actually do on their own (though a 2017 review found that people wind up doing more like 30 minutes). 

MBSR’s timeframe is pretty close to that of Transcendental Meditation, a technique based on silently repeating a personal mantra that’s been practiced by a range of celebrities, from the Beatles to David Lynch, which prescribes two 20-minute sessions per day. And meditation teacher Leigh Brasington, who we’ll hear from later in this course, recommends a minimum of 45 minutes per day if you want to get into states of deep concentration like the jhānas.

So if you’re used to shorter meditations, or none at all, work upwards incrementally. Try starting with at least a 20-minute session per day. Jack Kerouac, a writer who introduced much of the 20th-century Beat Generation to Buddhism, wrote to his fellow poet Allen Ginsberg that “it takes twenty minutes to quiet the machine motor of the mind.” Despite his competing infatuation with benzos and wine, I think he was on to something.

If you think back to yesterday’s newsletter, quieting the motor of the mind is equivalent to doing enough focused attention practice to release the mind’s first layer of priors — or habits. A quiet mind is one where attention no longer gets snagged on mental activity, clearing the path to deeper open-monitoring or nondual practices. And 20 minutes can be a helpful benchmark for getting there.

But instead of using a timer, try using a stopwatch, and practicing to intuitively stop around the time you’re shooting for. This might be tricky at first, but it gets easier. And that way, if you find yourself in the midst of a particularly spacious and comfortable meditation, you can stretch it a bit longer without being jolted out by a timer. Or, if your “sit” is getting particularly tortuous, or your back hurts, you can just stop with less grief about not lasting the whole time.

As an added bonus, you’ll begin to develop an internal clock for meditation duration, which is actually something advanced practitioners train to do anyway.

Peck, the meditation teacher and psychologist, suggests that if you’re doing anything more than 45 minutes, you should be checking in with a teacher every now and then. Longer sessions are more likely to send you into deeper states, where meditation shifts from relaxing to potentially transformative. But there’s no guarantee that things change for the better, which is where experienced teachers can help steer your practice. “I’ve seen quite a number of people become psychotic from meditating six hours a day in their room without talking to anybody,” he said. 

A word on the under-studied risks of meditation

Research on the risks of meditation is unsurprisingly lagging behind the benefits. A 2020 systematic review of 83 meditation studies found that the prevalence of “meditation adverse events,” which can include anything from anxiety and depression to suicidal behaviors, hovered around 8.3 percent. But experts I spoke with are all over the map on whether that number looks too high or too low.  

The relative lack of knowledge about the risks has given rise to various organizations trying to fill in the gaps. Networks of scholars and practitioners are looking to educate healthcare professionals on how to support people going through challenging meditation experiences. Communities like Cheetah House offer direct support, alongside training meditation teachers to better handle difficult experiences. And resources like psychotherapist David Treleaven’s book, Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness, can help guide people through a more supported approach to meditation.

The goals and benefits of meditation change over time

According to the original framework for meditative development presented in Buddhist scripture — the four-path model — as your practice develops, real, durable changes to your psychology set in. Different traditions have their own maps of what making “progress” in your contemplative practice looks like — and yes, some teachers will ridicule the idea of spiritual progress as precisely the goal-oriented approach that undermines development — but most share the idea that if you keep up your practice over time, deeper stages begin to unfold. 

So instead of thinking about meditation as just a daily practice, then, we can also think about what it means to make progress over time. Are there benchmarks of progress in meditation? If you spent 30 minutes a day meditating over the next decade, you’d rack up about 1,800 hours of practice. Would the benefits of that much effort justify the opportunity cost of other things you might’ve done with about 75 days of your life?

One of the few studies to explore the relationship between lifetime hours spent meditating and benefits was published in 2022 by psychologists from the University of Melbourne’s Contemplative Studies Centre. They surveyed 1,668 English-speaking adult meditators with an average of 1,095 lifetime meditation hours. (On the spectrum of expertise, this is still fairly low. For comparison, when Harvard neuroscientist Matthew Sacchet studied an advanced meditator in his lab earlier this year, they had roughly 23,000 hours of lifetime practice).

The psychologists looked at the correlation between lifetime meditation hours and four variables: life satisfaction, positive affect, negative affect, and psychological distress. Across all four cases, two things immediately jumped out.

First, steeper benefits show up in the first 500 hours of practice. In the cases of life satisfaction and positive affect (basically, pleasure), the sharpest gains registered within the first 200 hours. 

The authors point out a range of limitations to their study, from sampling bias to basing lifetime practice hours on an extrapolation of prior-month self-reported meditation time. But overall, they come away with two conclusions: Meditation outcomes appear non-linear with time spent practicing, and the strongest gains seem to show up in the first 500 hours of practice.

I found that strange. If you look at the range of claims people make about their meditation practice, my read is that they get more intense, not less, as someone’s practice develops.

So I reached out to Nicholas Bowles, PhD student in psychology and lead author of the study, to ask if he really thought the beginning stages of meditation are more potent than the later ones. He explained that in his more recent research, he’s finding that as meditators practice more, their goals and motivations change. “People who have practiced less tend to value mental health, improving relationships, etc, while people who have practiced more tend to value spiritual growth,” he said via email.

Peck said that he sees this pattern of changing motivations with almost every student. “That people’s motivations change is universal. When you first start meditating, your mind is just wasting most of its energy on this idiotic, circular rambling. You have no sensory clarity, you don’t really understand what’s going on deeper in your mind.” 

Which means that there’s no single metric that can capture the thrust of meditation’s effects from 0 hours of practice out to 1,000, let alone 23,000. If you find major improvements to life satisfaction in the first 200 hours that level off afterward, that could be because the category of “life satisfaction” no longer captures the sort of benefits you’re getting out of sustained practice. “Overall then,” Bowles added, “the gains from practice for experienced practitioners probably continue to be quite impactful, but perhaps they’re impactful in different ways.”

How do movement and meditation fit together? Q+A with Tibetan Buddhist meditation teacher Chandra Easton

In my early 20s, I spent some time at a Zendo in southern India. During sesshins, which are like Zen’s form of silent meditation retreats, our daily schedule would mostly alternate between periods of sitting meditation (zazen) and walking meditation (kinhin).

After sitting for something like 10 hours a day, walking was obviously crucial for my Western joints, as well as my sanity. But kinhin isn’t supposed to be just a respite from the tyranny of crossed legs — it’s meditation, too. But I struggled to really believe that.

To my mind, the “real” meditation was sitting still, and walking was mostly a concession we make on account of having bodies that need movement. If you think back to our framework for how meditation deconstructs the predictive mind, I saw movement as just a part of the first layer of “focused attention” practices. The deeper stuff requires sitting still.

Now, I think of sitting still in meditation as training wheels for the real practice, which is finding the same states of deeper awareness while your mind is thrashing around and navigating the stuff of daily life, whether the subway in Manhattan, the grocery store aisles the day before Thanksgiving, or while your kids are screaming. That’s when you find out if your meditation practice is actually working. Ram Dass has another good quip: “If you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your family.”

But moving engages the mind, so if meditative depth is about shutting down the predictive mind, and moving triggers it, aren’t these opposing forces? How’s it possible to progress into deeper open-monitoring and non-dual states while doing yoga poses, walking, or dancing?

To explore these questions, I spoke with Chandra Easton, a meditation teacher, yoga instructor, and translator of Tibetan Buddhist texts. This excerpt of our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You’ve been teaching a class that combines meditation, mantra, and movement. How do these three fit together?

In Buddhism, the body, speech, and mind are called the three doors, or gates. We can work through each of those different doorways into the same space. There’s one big room: presence.

Sitting in stillness is the ultimate body door. But that’s not easy for a lot of us to do. So in my class, I designed it to touch on those three doors and give people different access points into awareness or presence.

Can you go as deep into meditation during movement as you can when you’re sitting still?

It’s true that stillness allows us to access very deep states of attention. When we move, the mind moves. So we tell people don’t move if you don’t have to, because you’re just stirring up the dust again. But one’s not better than the other, it just depends where you are in the arc of your own practice.

For me, I’ve had some challenging chronic pain issues. So sitting still in traditional meditation posture is not always an option. It’s forced me to find other ways to practice, and it’s been really liberating and helpful.

I’ve practiced through walking meditation, and supine [lying on your back] meditation. I was in such bad shape that I had to lie down while teaching meditation. And that was a really good thing for me to do in public. People would come up and say thank you for teaching us how to tend to our bodies.

A lot of people deal with chronic pain, which can be a boundary for people to get into meditation. There were periods when I was in so much pain that I had to do moving meditation, like yoga, qi gong, or tai chi. For many years, I taught a style called shadow yoga, which is based on Hatha Yoga and South Indian dance and martial arts. There’s a quality of slow, mindful movement.  Currently, I practice Tibetan yoga and shadow yoga adapted for my situation, and I teach elements of these in my courses to help prepare people for meditation. So for people who are facing illness or chronic pain, moving meditation options are really important.   

That’s also why working with a skillful teacher is very important, somebody who can help the student navigate different phases of their lives in different circumstances.

I think I’ve been a little biased against movement meditation because when I think of meditation, I picture the Buddha sitting quietly under the Bodhi tree. 

A lot of people don’t know that after the Buddha sat under the Bodhi tree and got liberated from the roots of suffering, he got up and he walked. He taught for 45 years, and he spent more time walking than sitting. And that doesn’t get communicated to a lot of us Westerners. 

So we get this perception that seated meditation is the most important thing. And there are times in our life when that should be the case… so we can train the mind to go into deep concentration. 

But then, the advanced practice is getting up from that and blending the meditative state with the post-meditative state. The true advanced practice is to blend the awareness that we steep in and touch during [still] meditation with all our life, our movement or driving or parenting or cooking. All the mundane things.