Meditation Timer

How long should you meditate?

Start with 5 to 10 minutes. There is no proven best length, and the studies we found do not show that longer sessions work better.

These are small samples of mostly young adults over short periods. The 2020 review covers 8-week programs with a teacher, not single sittings. Our reading: a short daily sit is a fair place to begin, and you can add minutes later if you want to. Pick 5 or 10 minutes and press Start.

How to use a meditation timer

New to meditation? Start with meditation for beginners, then come back here for longer sits.

1. Choose the length. Tap a preset or type 1 to 60 minutes. Add a settle-in of 10 or 30 seconds if you want time to get comfortable.
2. Sit comfortably. A chair is fine. Close your eyes or lower your gaze.
3. Press Start. Follow your breath. The timer counts from the system clock, so a pause in the browser does not shift the end time.
4. Stay still after the bell. Keep your eyes closed for a couple more minutes ^[4].

If you want to know how long you will be sitting, look at the "ends about" line before you start, then do not check it again. For a guided practice to run with the timer, try the body scan meditation script. For more, see all meditation practices.

What to do when your mind wanders

Notice it and bring your attention back. Wandering is part of the practice.

Say you are three minutes in and you are writing a shopping list. That is what the practice trains: noticing the drift and coming back. The NHS puts it this way: "If your mind wanders off 10 times during a meditation, bring it back to the breath 10 times" ^[4].

One brain-imaging study of 14 meditation practitioners described a cycle of four stages during breath meditation: mind wandering, awareness of mind wandering, shifting of attention, and sustained attention ^[5]. Drifting is the first stage, so it is expected. A separate 2010 smartphone study, which was not about meditation, found that, in daily life, people think about something other than what they are doing almost as often as they think about what they are doing ^[6].

Interval bells: when they help

An interval bell gives a long sit checkpoints. Without one, the sit is a single stretch of silence. The bell rings partway through so you can check your posture and attention without watching the clock. We offer it as a convenience. No study we know of shows that it improves the practice.

• If you sit 5 to 10 minutes, leave it off. The end bell is enough.
• If you sit 20 minutes or more and your attention fades, try a bell every 10 minutes.
• If you tend to slouch or tense your shoulders, a bell every 5 minutes works as a posture check.
• If the bell startles you, lower the volume, choose the singing bowl, or set the sound to "no sound" and tick Vibrate.

How often should you meditate?

Thirteen minutes a day for 8 weeks, but not 4, reduced negative mood and improved attention and memory in the Basso trial ^[3]. This is the only daily-practice trial we found.

It is one trial, with adults aged 18 to 45 who had not meditated before. The control group listened to a podcast instead of doing another practice. And the meditation was guided, so it may not carry over to sitting in silence.

From this evidence we suggest 5 to 10 minutes most days.

Sound and silent mode: bowl, bell, vibration

The page stays silent until you press Start or Test sound, because browsers block sound that a page plays on its own. Both sounds are generated in your browser, with no audio files.

• Singing bowl. A low tone with slow overtones that fades over about 10 seconds. It is the softer choice for the start and the end.
• Small bell. A higher, shorter ring of about 3 seconds. It is easier to hear over street noise or a fan.
• Volume and Test sound. Set the slider, then press Test sound to hear one strike before you close your eyes. You can change the sound and volume during a sit; the remaining strikes follow the new setting.
• In the background. The strikes are scheduled ahead on the browser's audio clock, so they sound even when the tab is in the background. A locked phone may still suspend the page, so run a 1-minute test first.
• Vibrate. A separate checkbox, so you can use it with or without sound. It works only while the page is on screen. iPhone Safari does not support it, because the browser feature we use, navigator.vibrate, is not available there.
• Keep screen on. The checkbox appears only in browsers that support the Wake Lock feature. If you do not see it, change your phone's auto-lock setting instead.
• No sound. The display flashes at each signal. If your system asks to reduce motion, the flash is turned off and only the text changes.

Want words, not just a bell? The mindfulness meditation script paces each line. Without JavaScript, use your phone's own timer. For what to do with the minutes, try breathing exercises or the progressive muscle relaxation script.

Frequently asked questions