Meditation timer with bells, interval bells and quiet background sound

How to meditate: a simple method for beginners

To meditate, sit comfortably, choose one thing to pay attention to, such as the breath, and each time you notice your mind has wandered, bring attention back without scolding yourself. That return is the exercise itself: noticing a wandering mind is the skill you are training.

For the first week, keep it small: a fixed time, such as after waking or before dinner, and 5 to 10 minutes. In the studies described below, beginners improved with practices of 5 and 13 minutes a day.

• Sit on a chair, a cushion or a kneeling bench with your back upright but not stiff. Rest your hands on your thighs or in your lap.
• Close your eyes, or lower your gaze to the floor a little in front of you.
• Take a few slower breaths, then let the breath find its own rhythm.
• Rest your attention on the sensation of breathing: the air at the nostrils, or the belly rising and falling.
• When you notice that a thought, a sound or a plan has taken over, note it briefly and come back to the breath.
• When the bell rings, stay still for a few breaths before you get up.

If attention on the breath is hard to hold, give the mind a simple job: counting breaths, moving attention through the body, or repeating kind phrases. Each has its own page: breath-counting meditation, body scan meditation and loving-kindness meditation.

How long should you meditate? What studies show

There is no proven ideal length: research suggests that a short session you actually do every day, 5 to 15 minutes, is a good start, and that benefits appear after several weeks of regular practice. Three lines of research point that way.

The first is a direct test of length. In a small UK experiment (Strohmaier, Jones and Cane, Canterbury Christ Church University, published 2020), 71 healthy adults with little meditation experience did four 20-minute practices, four 5-minute practices or listened to an audiobook over two weeks. Both meditation groups improved in mindfulness, depression, anxiety and stress compared with the audiobook. The 5-minute group showed the larger effect on mindfulness (d = 2.17) and stress (d = −1.18). The study was small, short and limited to novices.

The second is time. At New York University (Basso and colleagues, 2019), non-experienced meditators aged 18 to 45 listened either to a 13-minute guided meditation or to a 13-minute podcast every day for 8 weeks. After 8 weeks the meditators had less negative mood, better attention, working memory and recognition memory, and lower anxiety in a social stress test. After 4 weeks the difference was not yet there.

The third is the big picture. A meta-regression of 203 randomised trials with 15,971 participants (Strohmaier, 2020) found “no evidence that larger doses are more helpful than smaller doses” for depression, anxiety and stress, though more practice did predict higher mindfulness scores. Very brief training, from one session to two weeks, does little: a review of 65 trials (Schumer and colleagues, 2018) found a small effect on low mood and anxiety (g = 0.21) that shrank to 0.04 after correcting for publication bias.

Put together: regular practice over weeks matters more than long single sessions. Choose a length you will not dread, and lengthen it only if you want to.

5, 10 or 20 minute meditation: which one to choose?

For most beginners a 5- or 10-minute meditation is the better first choice, because it is easy to repeat daily; 20 minutes suits people who already sit regularly and want a longer stretch of quiet. The table sums up what is and is not known about each length.

For longer sittings, interval bells mark time: a soft strike every 5 or 10 minutes tells you where you are without opening your eyes.

Does meditation work? What large reviews found

Yes, modestly: large reviews find that mindfulness meditation programmes reduce anxiety, depression and stress by a small to moderate amount compared with doing nothing or a placebo-like activity, and about as much as other active treatments, not more.

The most cautious review included only trials with an active control, a comparison that looks like a treatment but contains no meditation. In 47 such trials with 3,515 participants (Goyal and colleagues, Johns Hopkins University, JAMA Internal Medicine, 2014), mindfulness programmes gave moderate evidence of improved anxiety, depression and pain. Evidence was low or insufficient for positive mood, attention, substance use, eating, sleep and weight, and there was no evidence that meditation was better than drugs, exercise or other behavioural therapies.

In healthy adults in everyday settings, a University of Cambridge review of 136 trials with 11,605 people in 29 countries (Galante and colleagues, 2021) found that mindfulness courses reduced anxiety (SMD −0.56), depression (−0.53) and distress (−0.45) and raised well-being (+0.33) compared with no intervention. Against specific active options such as exercise, mindfulness was not better, and when higher-risk trials were left out, only the effect on distress remained.

The broadest summary, an umbrella review of 44 meta-analyses with 336 trials and 30,483 participants (Goldberg and colleagues, 2022), reached the same picture: mindfulness programmes help reliably compared with no treatment and perform about as well as established treatments. None of this means meditation cures an illness; it means a regular practice measurably reduces self-reported stress, anxiety and low mood for many people.

What is mindfulness meditation?

Mindfulness meditation is the practice of paying attention to what is happening right now, such as the breath, body sensations, sounds or thoughts, and returning to it each time the mind wanders, without judging yourself for drifting.

The best-known structured form is Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), which grew out of the Stress Reduction Clinic that Jon Kabat-Zinn founded at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in 1979. Much of the research in the reviews above tested courses of this kind: weekly group sessions over about 8 weeks with daily home practice, built on sitting meditation, the body scan and gentle yoga. The body scan meditation page describes the course in more detail. Counting breaths, scanning the body and walking slowly are all ways of training the same skill.

What is vipassana meditation, and what happens on a 10-day course?

Vipassana (“insight”) is a meditation from the Theravāda Buddhist tradition in which you observe sensations throughout the body and learn not to react to them. Today it is best known through the 10-day residential courses of S. N. Goenka (1924–2013), who was born in Burma, learned the method from Sayagyi U Ba Khin, was authorised to teach in 1969 and moved to India. Courses in his tradition run at hundreds of locations worldwide (Wikipedia, “S. N. Goenka”).

According to the official site, dhamma.org, participants first take a moral code, then train attention on the breath at the nostrils (Anapana); by the fourth day they begin Vipassana itself, and on the last full day they learn loving-kindness (metta) meditation. Noble Silence, with no communication between students, not even gestures or notes, lasts until the morning of the last full day. The wake-up bell rings at 4:00 am, sessions run until 9:00 pm, and the “10-day” course spans 12 days with arrival and departure. There is no charge for teaching, food or lodging; courses are funded by donations from past students.

Two small Australian studies looked at such courses. At La Trobe University (Szekeres and Wertheim, 2015), 122 course participants were compared with 50 people waiting for a later course: stress fell, and well-being, self-kindness and mindfulness rose. Part of the gain faded by six months, but scores stayed better than before. A University of Sydney study of 36 retreat participants (Krygier and colleagues, 2013) also found higher well-being after 10 days. Neither study was randomised. At home, the first step of the course, attention on the breath, is the basic method at the top of this page.

What is the best posture for meditation?

The best posture is one you can hold still and alert for the whole session: a chair, a cushion and a kneeling bench all work, and no study has compared postures for meditation outcomes.

The Zen description of zazen (Wikipedia, “Zazen”, citing Shunryu Suzuki) is a useful reference: legs crossed, spine erect, hands in the cosmic mudra with thumbs lightly touching near the navel, eyelids half lowered. Other traditional positions are the Burmese posture and seiza, kneeling on a bench or cushion. Lying down is used for the body scan in MBSR, though it makes falling asleep more likely.

If you get sleepy with closed eyes, open them slightly with the gaze lowered, or sit more upright.

Meditation bell and interval bells: why meditate with a timer?

A timer with a gentle bell lets you stop checking the clock, which is why meditation groups traditionally have a timekeeper and a bell. In Zen, a period of zazen is opened by three bell rings and closed with one or two (Wikipedia, “Zazen”). In Thich Nhat Hanh's Plum Village tradition, the bell of mindfulness is a cue to stop and return to the breath. No study has tested whether a bell itself improves meditation; this is practice, not research.

The timer on this page has six bells created with AI by ElevenLabs: a small bell, a singing bowl, a crystal bowl, a gong, wind chimes and a wood block; tap one to hear it. One strike opens the session and three close it. You can set a length from 5 to 60 minutes or your own, a settling-in countdown of 0, 10, 30 or 60 seconds, interval bells every 1 to 10 minutes and a background sound with its own volume. The screen stays on, you can pause, and a practice log in your browser counts minutes today and in total, sessions, days in a row and the last seven days.

Interval bells are useful in long sittings, to mark time without opening your eyes, and in structured practices where each stage has its own focus. As for the sounds, singing bowls are often sold as an ancient Tibetan healing tool, but Buddhist ritual makes no use of the “singing” mode and bowls made to sing are believed to be a modern phenomenon (Wikipedia, “Singing bowl”). In an observational study of 62 adults (Goldsby and colleagues, 2017), people felt less tense and in a better mood after a singing-bowl meditation, but with no comparison group it cannot show that the bowls caused it. Choose the bell you like hearing.

Meditation with nature sounds or in silence?

Silence is the traditional choice, and a soft background is a reasonable option when your surroundings are noisy; no study has compared the two for meditation.

A steady sound such as rain, a stream or brown noise covers traffic and voices, which makes it easier to stay with the breath in a city flat. The background here comes from the site's noise engine: rain, ocean, stream, wind, fire, brown or pink noise, at a volume set separately from the bell. Keep it low so that it does not become the object of attention.

If you want sound to be the object, listening to sounds as they come and go is a common mindfulness exercise in itself. Guided tracks with talking and melodic music hold attention for you, which can help in the first weeks; a quiet timer asks you to hold it yourself. The rain sounds and brown noise pages explain these sounds in more depth.

How to build a daily meditation habit

The simplest way to build a meditation habit is to tie a short session to something you already do every day and to keep the bar so low that you rarely skip it. In the NYU study the benefits appeared after 8 weeks of daily practice, which is a fair horizon: give the habit two months before judging it.

• Same time, same place. After brushing your teeth or before the first coffee works better than “when I have time”.
• A minimum you will keep. On busy days 5 minutes counts as a session; in the UK experiment, 5-minute practices worked.
• Count days, not minutes. The days-in-a-row figure in the log rewards showing up, which is the part that matters most.
• Do not double up. Missed a day? Sit your usual length the next day; longer sessions have not been shown to be better.
• Change the technique, not the habit: if sitting with the breath gets stale, try a body scan or breath counting for a week.

The log is kept only in this browser; clearing its data resets it.

Can meditation have side effects?

Yes, a minority of people feel worse during or after meditation. A 2020 review in Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica (Farias and colleagues) pooled 83 studies with 6,703 participants and found that 8.3 % reported an adverse effect: 3.7 % in experimental studies and 33.2 % in observational ones. The most common were anxiety, depression and cognitive anomalies, and they also occurred in people with no history of mental-health problems.

Unpleasant feelings are not a sign that you should push through. If a practice makes you feel worse, shorten it, open your eyes, or stop; a practice with an outward focus, such as slow walking, is another option. If distress continues, talk to a doctor or a mental-health professional. Meditation is not a replacement for treatment of a diagnosed condition.