The question is: How long should guided meditation be?
There is no optimum amount of time that should be spent meditating. You are better off meditating five minutes than not at all. That being said, you won’t experience most of the benefits until after about the twenty-five minute mark.
How Long Should A Guided Meditation Be
Because this is the amount of time suggested to be spent meditating each day by mindfulness-based treatment methods such as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), the average daily meditation session should last between 40 and 45 minutes (MBSR). It is common practice within the Transcendental Meditation (TM) tradition to recommend meditating for forty minutes twice daily.
However, based on Benson’s study on the Relaxation Response, interventions often advocate meditating for a total of twenty minutes (Benson, 1975). The practice of shamatha meditation, a kind of meditation that focuses on the breath, was traditionally practiced by monks and nuns in Tibetan monasteries by having them sit in silence for periods of ten to fifteen minutes at a time. This was done so that they could conduct the meditation. This was something that the monks and nuns did several times each and every day. On the other hand, the numbers that have been suggested do not exhibit any supernatural characteristics.
There is no such thing as the optimum amount of time that should be spent meditating.
It is more important to consistently include meditation in your daily routine than sitting quietly for a certain length each day. Because of this, the quantity of time you spend meditating needs to be something you can keep up over an extended period.
It won’t do you much good to meditate for ninety minutes on a single day when you have the time and then beat yourself up for the rest of the week because you can’t recreate that amount of time spent meditating. Instead, you should try to spread your meditation sessions throughout the week to get the most out of them.
As with physical activity, it appears that even a short period of meditation may be beneficial, even if your schedule does not permit you to engage in the full quantity that you would normally do. This is the case even if your schedule does not permit you to engage in the full quantity you would normally do.
Consider the following hypothetical situation: let’s say that you jog for a total of two kilometers daily. There will come a day when you will be so busy that you can only run a half mile. Is participating in this activity more beneficial than taking it easy on the couch? Yes. Will it provide the same health benefits as jogging a mile and a half? It’s not very likely to happen.
The same is true for meditation; there does not seem to be a certain number of precious minutes that, if you do not fulfill, you are wasting your time by meditating, and there is no indication of such a number.
Three studies released during the last few years provide scientific advice on how long an individual should meditate. First, a cognitive scientist by the name of Dr. Amishi Jha, who conducted a study on the effects of meditation on a group of United States Marines who were preparing for deployment, found that even brief periods of meditation—as short as 12 minutes—caused improvements in the participants’ cognitive abilities.
A study carried out in 2018 found that practicing Kirtan Kriya meditation for only 12 minutes a day was sufficient to elicit substantial positive changes in blood markers that are known to be indicators of dementia. The study was published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology. The third study concluded that first-year college students who meditated daily for 10 minutes had superior performance on the Graduate Record Examination (GRE).
Does this indicate that we should each make it a daily habit to meditate for 10 to twelve minutes? Although this is not the case, it does seem that some of the advantages of meditation start to become apparent somewhere around the ten-minute mark of practice.
According to the study’s findings, it seems that a minimum time threshold of ten minutes is required for some of the benefits of meditation to take effect. In addition, it also happens to be a period that many different people can finish without any problems.
How Often Should You Meditate
In the same way that we sharpen our bodies through the practice of exercise, we may also sharpen our brains through the practice of meditation. The more we practice a skill, the better we get at applying it when faced with challenges in the actual world. Because of this, it is strongly advised that you meditate daily if at all feasible.
If this is not possible, you should at least try to meditate weekly. Because you won’t experience the same level of muscle soreness that you do after working out, there is no need to give yourself a break in between different training sessions. Having said that, it is also important to have compassion for oneself if you cannot meditate on a consistent basis and to stop giving yourself a hard time for “insufficient discipline.”
When practiced regularly, whether daily or on a less frequent basis, meditation’s many health advantages may be enjoyed to their fullest extent. (Again, this is quite similar to participating in physical exercise!) If we stick to this practice for a significant amount of time throughout the course of time, we can acquire a deeper familiarity with our own thoughts than we would be able to achieve by any other means.
It is reasonable to suppose that even a short time spent meditating, such as ten minutes daily, will result in positive outcomes. Indeed, twenty minutes would unquestionably be more beneficial, all things considered. It is important to keep in mind, however, that even if you have the intention of meditating for 10 minutes each and every day, and you achieve that objective on any given day, you still have the option of meditating for twenty minutes if you feel the need to do so.
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