Meditation for Beginners

How to meditate: your first session, step by step

Sit upright, pick one place where you feel the breath, and each time you notice your mind has gone somewhere else, bring it back.

1. Choose a seat. A kitchen chair is fine. Feet flat on the floor, back upright but not stiff, hands resting on your thighs. You do not need special equipment, says the UK's National Health Service (NHS) ^[1].
2. Pick the length before you start. Two or three minutes for the first day. Deciding first means you are not checking the clock halfway through.
3. Close your eyes or lower your gaze to a spot on the floor about six feet ahead.
4. Find your anchor. Notice where the breath is easiest to feel: cool air at the nostrils, the chest rising, or the belly moving. Choose one and stay with it. Do not try to breathe in a special way.
5. Catch the drift. Sooner or later you will be planning dinner or replaying a conversation. When you realize it, tap the button in the tool above (or just note "thinking") and return to the next breath.
6. Finish slowly. When the time is up, keep your eyes closed a little longer, then open them and stay seated a moment before you get up. The NHS suggests a couple of minutes ^[1]. After a 2-minute sit, three or four slow breaths with your eyes closed will do.

An itch or a sudden urge to check your phone will probably show up. Notice it, scratch if you need to, and go back to the breath.

Noticing is the rep: why drifting is part of the practice

Every time you notice you have drifted and come back, you have done one repetition of the skill. A session with ten drifts has ten returns in it.

Picture a three-minute sit. You start on the breath, and twenty seconds later you are thinking about an email. You catch it and come back. Then a noise outside pulls you away, and later a memory from yesterday. If the counter in the tool reads 7 at the end, you noticed a thought seven times and chose where to put your attention. The NHS advises that when your mind wanders, you "simply congratulate yourself for noticing" ^[1].

The button in our tool borrows a research method. In a 2012 brain-imaging study, 14 experienced meditators focused on the breath and pressed a button whenever they realized their mind had wandered. The researchers used those presses to mark a four-stage cycle: mind wandering, awareness of mind wandering, shifting attention back, and staying with the breath ^[2]. It was a small study of practiced meditators and does not show a benefit for beginners.

How to start meditating: a 7‑day plan

Start at two minutes and work up to five over the week, at the same time each day. Each day changes one small thing, so you learn the practice in pieces.

Nobody has tested this exact schedule; it is how we would start. The closest study we found had people new to meditation do 13 minutes of guided practice a day. After 8 weeks, but not after 4, they had less negative mood and better attention than people who listened to a podcast instead ^[3]. So give any routine a few weeks before you judge it. If you miss a day, start again the next one without making up for it. For week 2, set 5 or 10 minutes on our meditation timer and leave the clock alone.

Which type of meditation is best for beginners?

Breath focus is the usual first practice, because the breath is always with you and you can feel it without imagining anything. If it does not suit you, try one of these.

• If sitting still with the breath makes you restless, try mindful walking: you pay attention to your feet and the sounds around you while you move.
• If you prefer a voice to follow, a guided recording or app is a fine start. Most of what this page says still applies: the drifting and coming back are the same. If someone can read to you, use the mindfulness meditation script.
• If your attention keeps sliding off the breath, a body scan gives you a new place to look every minute or so.
• If you are hard on yourself, loving-kindness meditation uses short phrases of goodwill instead of the breath.
• If you came to meditation because of anxiety, start with short mindfulness exercises for anxiety, several of which keep your eyes open.

Can you teach yourself to meditate?

Yes, for everyday stress the basics on this page are enough to start. A teacher or a class helps most if you want to go deeper or if practice brings up things that are hard to handle alone.

The strongest evidence comes from structured courses. A 2021 review of 136 trials in adults outside clinical settings included only in-person programs defined by experts ^[4]. Those results do not tell us how well self-taught practice or apps work. If you want something close to what was tested, look for an in-person mindfulness course such as MBSR or MBCT.

What meditation can and can't do

In trials, mindfulness courses eased anxiety and depression by a small to moderate amount on average. There is no evidence that they work better than other active treatments such as exercise, and they do not replace treatment.

A 2014 review of 47 trials with 3,515 adults found moderate evidence that mindfulness programs eased anxiety and depression at 8 weeks, and pain. The effects were small to moderate (effect sizes 0.30 to 0.38). The authors found no evidence that meditation was better than medication, exercise or other therapies. Evidence for sleep, attention and positive mood was low or insufficient ^[5].

The 2021 review found that, compared with doing nothing, courses reduced anxiety, depression and distress. Compared with other activities that were not specific to mindfulness, only the effect on depression held up. Confidence in the evidence ranged from moderate to very low ^[4]. For everyday stress it is worth learning, with modest expectations.

When to stop: if meditation makes you feel worse

Stop the session if you feel panic, intense fear, or as if you or the room are not real. Unpleasant effects are not rare. A 2020 review of 83 studies with 6,703 people found unpleasant effects in about 8% of participants overall: 3.7% in experimental studies and 33% in observational ones. Anxiety and depression were the effects reported most often, and they sometimes happened in people with no history of mental health problems ^[6].

• If focusing on the breath makes you more anxious, open your eyes and switch to sounds or to the feeling of your feet on the floor.
• If old memories or strong emotions come up and do not settle, end the session and do something ordinary and physical: make tea, walk around the room.
• If you feel detached or unreal, stop and name five things you can see. Our 5-4-3-2-1 grounding steps walk you through it.
• If you live with trauma, psychosis or severe depression, talk with your doctor or therapist before starting, and practice with a trained teacher if you can. The review did not list risk groups; this is our caution.

The US National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health says meditation is usually considered to have few risks, but that few studies have looked for harm, so definite statements about safety are not possible. It also advises not to use meditation to replace care or to put off seeing a doctor about a medical problem ^[7].

Frequently asked questions