How long to meditate for results

However, as a beginner, these effects are weak, and you will soon be back to your normal state once the meditation is over. You want more than measurable effects. You want effects that make a real difference.

If a scientifically measurable effect is detectable in a few minutes, how long do you need to meditate to get real effects that you can feel yourself? Enthusiastic beginners sometimes testify that meditating for five minutes a day, or even less, has a tangible impact on their lives.

However, I remain sceptical of the value of such practice. I would say that as a very minimum, you need 10 minutes of daily meditation to get a light yet noticeable impact that you can perceive yourself.

Some teachers legitimise mini-meditations with the motivation that little is better than nothing. I think we can raise the bar a bit. There is usually a lot you can cut down on to make the time for meditation.

If you are interested in robust benefits from meditation, you should consider following the advice of Herbert Benson, a pioneering meditation researcher at Harvard Medical School.

He was the one who first discovered the positive effects meditation has on our bodies and nervous systems. According to Dr Benson you can neutralise the adverse effects of stress with 20 minutes of meditation, twice daily. For a robust routine that can fit into the life of most of us, I think this amount is a good starting point.

The late meditation teacher Goenka suggested meditating for one hour twice daily. While this will give outstanding results, it requires quite a bit of motivation. Two hours a day is suitable for some avid meditators, but it is in the upper range of what people with normal obligations can fit into their lives. For most people, meditation is quite disappointing in the beginning. You struggle with restlessness, bodily pain and racing thoughts. When one is in this phase, it is easy to despair and wonder when the results will come.

How long you will need to persevere depends on how long your sessions are and how often you meditate. With a daily practice of 10 to 20 minutes, you should see positive results from within a few weeks to a couple of months. As your practice matures, your sessions will more frequently be enjoyable, and you should be able to sense the state effect both during and after the sessions.

You will be able to notice how mental tensions dissolve as you meditate, and that gives you inner lightness. Your thoughts will become less dense and less invasive. You will be able to perceive them as fleeting thoughts and ideas rather than as something that is a part of who you are.

Once energy bound in thoughts is released, you will experience an energetic surplus. Physically your stress level will drop, and your parasympathetic nervous system will more easily kick in to initiate natural healing. A stronger parasympathetic nervous system will make your general health better, and it will make you more resilient to illnesses.

Furthermore, as a regular meditator, you will find it easier to concentrate and more natural to be present in whatever you have chosen to do at the moment. Scientific studies have shown that long-time meditators display remarkable trait effects.

Getting such results might be your motivation to start with. However, the subjects who exhibit these traits count their accumulated meditation time in the thousands or even ten thousands of hours. S ure, the idea of being that person in the office who's always blissed out instead of anxious and overcaffeinated sounds pretty great—and it's been said that meditation can help you get there.

That's in addition to other reputed benefits like relieving pain , slowing down the aging process , and better sex. But if the idea of carving out time to actually sit down and do it stresses you out, then the findings of the latest meditation study will be good news to you.

Related Stories. Loading More Posts Featured Collection. Meditation can help us improve our mental and physical health, and it has become increasingly popular in recent years. In fact, Research has shown that regular meditation can help us manage anxiety, stress, and can help us manage our emotions. More and more people have come to feel reliant on their meditation practice to help them feel centered and calm. But what happens when the demands of life limit the time we have to meditate?

If you miss a day, how big a deal is that? Is five minutes a day sufficient to experience the benefits of meditation? Does it need to be ten? There is not one simple answer, unfortunately, but there are several helpful clues around about how long to meditate and how often. Mindfulness-based clinical interventions such as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction MBSR typically recommend practicing meditation for minutes per day.

The Transcendental Meditation TM tradition often recommends 20 minutes, twice daily. Interventions based on the Relaxation Response Benson, also often recommend minute meditations. Traditionally, shamatha meditation a breath-focused meditation was and is practiced by monks and nuns in Tibetan monasteries for ten- or fifteen-minute stretches. The monks and nuns did this several times a day. However, there is nothing magical about these recommended numbers. Meditation appears to be similar to physical exercise in this way.

There is no optimal length of time you should exercise, and there is no perfect number of minutes to meditate, either.