How to Meditate
Meditate with breath-focused sitting for 5 minutes a day. Set a timer, sit upright, rest your attention on your breath, come back each time your mind wanders, and build up to 10 or 15 minutes.
You will end up with a daily 5-minute meditation practice and a plan to build it to 10 or 15 minutes. The method is breath-focused sitting. You sit still, rest your attention on your breathing, and bring it back each time it wanders. It needs no app, no mantra, and no special equipment.
The research supports modest expectations. A 2014 meta-analysis published in JAMA Internal Medicine pooled 47 randomized trials in adult patient groups, with 3,515 participants, and every trial compared a meditation program with an active control group. Mindfulness programs had moderate evidence of improving anxiety, depression, and pain, and low evidence of improving stress and distress. The authors describe the reductions as small to moderate. They found little or no evidence of an effect on positive mood, attention, or sleep, and no evidence that meditation worked better than drugs, exercise, or other behavioral therapies. The trials tested structured programs and measured results at 8 weeks and at 3 to 6 months, so treat 5 minutes a day as a starting point, not the dose the research measured.
Meditation does not replace treatment. The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) says not to use it in place of conventional care or as a reason to put off seeing a health care provider about a medical problem. FAQ 5 below covers what to do if sessions leave you feeling worse.
Find a quiet place where you will not be interrupted
Pick a spot where nobody will interrupt you for 5 minutes, such as a bedroom with the door closed, a parked car, or an empty meeting room. It does not need to be silent. Background noise like traffic, a dishwasher, or birds outside is fine. What breaks a session is a person asking you a question or a phone buzzing beside you, so tell anyone nearby that you need 5 minutes. Put your phone on silent, or leave it in another room and use a kitchen timer (step 2).
Set a timer for 5 minutes
Use a timer with a gentle alarm tone, so the end of the session does not startle you. If the timer is your phone, turn on Do Not Disturb or airplane mode before you start, so no notification interrupts the session. To keep the phone out of the room, use a kitchen timer instead. Start with 5 minutes. It is long enough for your mind to wander and come back several times, and short enough to fit into any day. Once the timer is running, do not check it. Stay seated until it goes off.
Sit comfortably with your back straight
Sit in a chair with your feet flat on the floor and your back away from the backrest, or sit cross-legged on a cushion on the floor. Keep your spine upright and the rest of your body relaxed. Rest your hands on your knees or in your lap. Close your eyes, or lower your gaze to a spot on the floor a few feet in front of you. Sit rather than lie down, because lying down makes it easy to fall asleep. Before you turn to your breath, check three places that hold tension. Unclench your jaw, drop your shoulders away from your ears, and let your fingers curl loosely. If tension creeps back into them during the session, release it again.
Good to know: If the floor hurts your knees or back, use a chair. Any position works as long as your back is upright and you can stay still for 5 minutes. FAQ 5 below covers pain that starts during a session.
Focus on your breathing
Breathe normally. Do not slow your breathing or deepen it on purpose. Notice the air coming in through your nose, your chest and belly expanding, and the air leaving. Then pick one spot to anchor your attention: the tip of your nose where the air enters, the rise and fall of your chest, or the movement of your belly. Keep your attention on that spot. It is the place you return to every time something else pulls you away. If the breath feels too vague to hold on to, count it. Count each exhale from one to ten, then start again at one. When you lose count, start again at one. Losing count shows you straight away that your attention has drifted. Stop counting once you can stay with the breath without it.
Notice when your mind wanders
Your mind will wander. You will find yourself thinking about dinner, a conversation from yesterday, something you need to do later, or an itch on your knee. The moment you realize you are thinking about something else is the point of the exercise, because noticing is the skill you are practicing. It works like catching yourself slouching and sitting up straight. The thoughts come in a few kinds, such as planning what to do next, replaying conversations, and daydreaming. Treat every kind the same way. Notice that it happened, let the thought go, and return to your breath.
Gently bring your attention back to your breath
When you notice your mind has drifted, do not judge the thought and do not push it away. Let it pass, the way you would watch a cloud move across the sky, and put your attention back on the next inhale and the next exhale. The NCCIH describes mindfulness as keeping your attention on the present moment without making judgments, so the return should carry no judgment either. Make the return gentle and neutral, like stepping back to the center of a path after drifting toward the edge. Do not scold yourself to focus. Expect to come back many times in a 5-minute session. Each return is one repetition of the skill, so a session with many returns is not a worse session. In your first sessions, you may drift for a minute or more before you notice. When you do, come back the same way.
Add 1 minute a week after the first 2 weeks
Stay at 5 minutes for the first 2 weeks. After that, add 1 minute a week until you reach 10 or 15 minutes. At that pace you reach 10 minutes in week 7 and 15 minutes in week 12. The 2018 trial in FAQ 2 below used 13-minute daily sessions, which is inside that range. Meditate at the same time every day, and attach it to something you already do, such as brushing your teeth in the morning, your first cup of coffee, or sitting down at your desk before you open email. If a streak motivates you, mark each day you meditate on a calendar. When you miss a day, meditate the next day. In the habit-formation study that our guide on how to build a habit cites, missing one opportunity did not materially affect how the habit formed.
Start with 5 minutes tomorrow, at the time you picked. If you keep falling asleep, sit up straighter, open your eyes and lower your gaze, or move the session to a time of day when you are more awake. If 5 minutes feels impossible, drop to 2 minutes and build back up. If your thoughts race no matter what, go back to counting breaths from step 4. Judge the practice after about 8 weeks, the point at which the 2018 trial in FAQ 2 below first found a difference, not after a few sessions. For a breathing exercise to use in a stressful moment, which sets the pace of the breath on purpose instead of watching it, see our guide on how to reduce stress.
Questions we get asked about this
Answers from experience, not a textbook.
No. Wandering is what the practice works with. Meditation trains you to notice when your attention has drifted and to bring it back, and each time you do, you have done one repetition. If your mind never wandered, there would be nothing to practice. Judge a session by whether you kept coming back, not by how calm you felt at the end.
Start with 5 minutes, and drop to 2 minutes if 5 feels too long. Two minutes is enough for several rounds of drifting and coming back. Then add time on the schedule in step 7. Short sessions have a measurable effect in the moment. In the 2023 Stanford trial described in our reduce-stress guide, 5 minutes a day of mindfulness meditation lowered anxiety scores from before each session to after it. For lasting effects, one trial gives a rough timeline. In a 2018 trial, adults aged 18 to 45 who were new to meditation did a 13-minute guided session every day for 8 weeks, while a comparison group listened to podcasts. After 8 weeks, but not after 4, the meditation group had less negative mood and better attention and memory. That is a single study, so treat it as a rough guide to how long a daily habit can take.
It may help. The 2014 review in the intro found little or no evidence of an effect on sleep, but newer work is more positive. The NCCIH summarizes a 2019 analysis of 18 studies with 1,654 participants, which found that mindfulness meditation improved sleep quality more than education-based treatments, and worked about as well as evidence-based treatments such as cognitive behavioral therapy and exercise. Do your session sitting up, before you get into bed, because lying down makes it easy to fall asleep before the practice starts. For sleep problems that keep going, talk to a doctor. Our guide on how to sleep better covers the other habits that help.
Pick a time you can keep every day and when you are not sleepy, and stay with it for 2 weeks before you judge it. We recommend the morning, right after you wake up and before you check your phone, because the session is done before messages and tasks start arriving. A midday session works if your mornings are rushed. An evening session works too, as long as you sit up and do it before you get into bed (FAQ 3).
Adjust your position. Meditation should not hurt. If your back aches, use a chair with back support or put a cushion behind you. If your legs fall asleep while you sit cross-legged, stretch them out or move to a chair. A minor itch or ache can be part of the practice. Before you scratch or shift, watch the sensation for a few breaths. Notice where it is, how it feels, and whether it changes. If it stays and keeps pulling your attention away, adjust and carry on. Sometimes the discomfort is emotional. The NCCIH says meditation is usually considered to have few risks, but that few studies have looked for harmful effects, so it is not possible to make definite statements about safety. It reports that a 2020 review of 83 studies, with 6,703 participants, found that about 8% of participants had a negative effect from meditation, a share similar to that reported for psychological therapies. It names anxiety and depression as the negative effects reported most often. The review's authors add that these effects may occur in people with no previous history of mental health problems. If your sessions keep leaving you more anxious or low, stop and talk to a doctor or therapist. If you are in crisis or thinking about hurting yourself, call or text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
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