Most people can benefit from meditating for 10–20 minutes per day. Research suggests that even 10 minutes of daily meditation may provide meaningful benefits. Consistency is generally more important than duration.
Meditation can help us improve our mental and physical health, and it has become increasingly popular in recent years. In fact, 18.3% of people in the U.S have tried meditation, according to a 2024 study. 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? Twenty? Thirty? There is not one simple answer, unfortunately, but there are several helpful clues around about how long to meditate and how often.
How Long Should You Meditate For?
Mindfulness-based clinical interventions such as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) typically recommend practicing meditation for 40-45 minutes per day. The Transcendental Meditation (TM) tradition often recommends 20 minutes, twice daily. Interventions based on the Relaxation Response (Benson, 1975) also often recommend 20-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. With either physical exercise or meditation, it’s important that the amount of time you do it be sufficient to challenge you a bit, but not so much as to leave you feeling demoralized or exhausted.
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Making meditation a regular part of your day is more important than how long you meditate. For that reason, the length of time you meditate should be sustainable for you. It won’t do you much good to meditate for 90 minutes one day when you happen to have the time, and then feel guilty the rest of the week when you can’t replicate that.
Similar to exercise, there seems to be benefit in even a small amount of meditation if your schedule doesn’t allow you to do your usual amount. Consider this example: let’s say you go jogging for two miles a day. One day, you’re busy and can only do half a mile. Are you better off doing this than sitting on the couch? Yes. Will it benefit you as much as doing two miles? It’s unlikely. Meditation is similar — there does not appear to be a magical minutes threshold that, should you fall short, you’re wasting your time.
What Does Science Say About It?
Having said that, three recent studies do offer some scientific guidance as to how long to meditate. Cognitive scientist Dr. Amishi Jha‘s research found that in a sample of U.S. Marines preparing for deployment, meditation sessions as brief as 12 minutes produced cognitive improvements. A 2018 study found that 12 minutes a day of Kirtan Kriya meditation was sufficient to produce significant positive changes in predictors of dementia found in the blood. A third study found that 10 minutes of daily meditation improved GRE test performance in undergraduate students.
Does this mean that we should all meditate for 10 to 12 minutes per day? No, but it does suggest that some of the effects of meditation kick in beginning around the 10-minute mark. Ten minutes, evidence suggests, does seem to be a minimum threshold for some of meditation’s benefits to occur. It also happens to be a very doable length of time for many people.
How Often Should You Meditate?
Meditation is similar to physical exercise in that we are practicing a skill. The more we practice the skill, the more capable we get at using it. For that reason, it’s best to meditate daily if you can. Unlike with exercise, you won’t feel sore afterward, so there is no need for days off. Having said that, if you’re not able to meditate daily it’s important to be gentle with yourself and not beat yourself up for having “inadequate discipline.”
Meditation works best when we commit to doing it regularly, whether that’s daily or less frequently. (Again, like physical exercise!) Maintaining that regularity over long periods allows us to gain a more intimate familiarity with our mind than we could otherwise.
How to Build a Daily Meditation Habit
Start small
Pick an amount of time that makes you think, “well of COURSE I can meditate for that long, that’s easy.” Maybe that’s two minutes, maybe five, it doesn’t matter. Start there.
Link it to an existing routine
Maybe it’s your morning routine, maybe it’s when you get home from the day’s activities, or maybe it’s before bedtime. Think about where this short meditation would fit best so that you won’t feel like you need to hurry when doing it, and like it’s not an unfair imposition on your time. For example, if you plan to meditate before going to sleep, you might plan to meditate after brushing your teeth but before changing into your bedtime clothes.
Track your habit
Keep a simple log of the days on which you meditate vs. the days you don’t. You want to be able to easily look back at the end of a week or a month and see how you did.
Progress not perfection
Your goal isn’t to instantly establish a rock-solid daily habit. It’s to increase your consistency of meditation over time — if you’re at three days per week now, shoot for four next week. And celebrate that achievement if you do it! Meditation requires a kindness toward yourself — that extends to your assessment of the regularity of your practice.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is 10 minutes of meditation enough?
Yes. Research suggests that some benefits of meditation begin to emerge with sessions around 10–12 minutes long.
Is 20 minutes of meditation better than 10 minutes?
Possibly. Longer sessions may provide additional benefits, but consistency is generally more important than duration.
What happens if I miss a day of meditation?
It’s okay — simply resume your practice the next day, and try to refrain from being self-critical about it.
Is it better to meditate every day or a few times a week?
Daily meditation is ideal for building a habit, but regular meditation of any frequency is beneficial.
How Long and How Often Should You Meditate: Summary Recommendations
If you have 10 minutes a day to devote to meditation, it’s reasonable to expect it to be helpful. Twenty minutes may provide additional benefits, but consistency matters more than duration.
The goal is not perfection but establishing a sustainable practice. Start with an amount of meditation you can realistically maintain and gradually build from there.
Updated: June 15th, 2026
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