Meditation Guide

How long should you be meditating

Many people meditate daily. Even well-known people like billionaire Ray Dalio to Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey, swear by daily meditation. But exactly how long and how often should you be meditating to feel its benefits? Mindfulness-based clinical interventions such as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) typically recommend practicing meditation for 40-45 minutes per day. However, there are apps that provide 60 second to 5-minute guided sessions, and online videos that can go over an hour. So, if you are wondering how much meditation time you should be working into your schedule, we have some answers for you.

Science says:

20 minutes once a day is the minimum amount to make an impact says a study out of Michigan State University. For the experiment, 212 undergraduate college students with no meditation experience followed along with a guided meditation recorded by Steven Hickman, a licensed clinical psychologist and the founding director of the University of California San Diego Center for Mindfulness. The meditation instructed participants to notice the feelings, thoughts and physical sensations that arose in the moment and take note of them without judgement.

After meditating, participants completed a quiz on a computer that was intended to distract them and test their concentration. Throughout the experiment, participants were wearing electroencephalography (EEG) sensors, so researchers could measure their brain waves. Researchers were looking for a specific neural signal that fires a half-second after you make a mistake, called “error positivity.” They found that the strength of the “mistake” signal was stronger in people who had meditated, meaning they were able to recognize and correct their slip-ups.

If you would like to see what a difference less than 30 minutes a day can make in your life there are many guided meditations to choose from here. https://soundcloud.com/ucsdmindfulness