The Cheater’s Guide to Meditating: Keep It Brief

The benefits of a regular meditation practice are well established. Meditation provides a broad suite of benefits ranging from improved attention and mood, to reduced loneliness and stress. It is for these reasons that I require students in my Positive Psychology class to meditate daily throughout the semester.

Unfortunately, many people struggle to maintain a regular meditation practice. There are tricks that can help you develop a consistent practice. It may be useful to create a routine that associates meditating with an environmental cue. For example, you might try meditating the moment you walk in the door after work, or the moment you first sit down when arriving at your office.

However, a major barrier to a regular practice is finding the time. It can be easy to overcommit oneself in the early days of establishing a routine. For instance, you may plan to meditate for 30 minutes every day. While doing so would indeed yield many benefits, it can be extremely difficult for the novice to maintain. Not only is meditation challenging at first, but it can be easy to let other distractions and life priorities interfere with the time you set aside for meditation.

With this challenge in mind, I make my students’ meditation assignment extremely brief. I require them to meditate for only five minutes each day. Although it can be very difficult to squeeze a 30-minute meditation into an already busy life, I argue that everyone can find five minutes to do something so beneficial.

My students seem to agree that the method works. They report adhering to the habit, benefitting from it, and planning to continue after the semester ends.

Outside of these anecdotal reports, however, it is important to examine formal studies of the potential impact of brief meditation. There are, in fact, only a handful of studies that consider meditations as brief as five minutes. Yet, those that exist suggest powerful impacts. For example, palliative care patients showed improvements in perceived distress and physiological markers of distress after just five minutes of mindful breathing. Similarly, a study of teenagers with ADHD found that doing five-minute meditations daily over the course of four weeks was associated with reduced symptoms and improved sleep.

When we expand our consideration of the research to look at studies of 10-minute meditations, the case for brief meditations is substantially bolstered. For instance, after 10 minutes of meditation, people show reduced blood pressure, increased pain tolerance, increased accuracy on an attention task, and improved mood. Likewise, these brief meditations have been shown to improve feelings of hopefulness, gratitude, and mindfulness, even after just a single session. Importantly, a recent study comparing the effect of 10-minute to 20-minute meditations found minimal differences, underscoring the power of these abbreviated sessions.

Attempting to develop a new habit can be frustrating and setbacks are discouraging. By recognizing the value of even very brief meditations, I am hopeful that aspiring practitioners can find the time and energy to cultivate this immensely valuable practice.