Is 10 Minutes of Meditation a Day Enough?

If you're anything like me, battling with continuously high expectations, meditation can fall victim to the same habits.

It's unfortunate. We decide we'll meditate regularly and then before we know it: we get ambitious.

And so it begins.....

Tomorrow we're going to get up early, find somewhere peaceful, sit for half an hour and begin the day serenely.

Tomorrow morning arrives.

We're tired. The cat thinks he's sitting down to a full taster menu. Emails are already waiting. And suddenly that peaceful half hour has become another thing we haven't managed to do.

So we do nothing and probably chastise ourselves for the rest of the day.

But here is the good news:

meditation doesn't have to take half an hour.

What if ten minutes is enough to build a practice worth having?

Is 10 minutes of meditation actually worthwhile?

It's easy to assume that longer must be better.

If ten minutes of meditation is good, surely twenty minutes is twice as good?

But meditation doesn't really work like that.

A longer practice can give us more time to settle, explore what's happening and work with our attention. There can certainly be value in occasionally practising for longer.

But there is also tremendous value in practising regularly.

Because what we're developing can extend beyond our meditation time.

It's not just about how we feel during those few minutes. Meditation gives us skills that we can take into everyday life.

• We practise noticing when our attention has wandered.
• We practise bringing it back.
• We become more familiar with our thoughts, emotions and physical sensations.
• And perhaps most importantly, we practise noticing what's happening without immediately getting carried away by it.

Ten minutes gives us plenty of opportunities to practise that.

The meditation you do is more useful than the meditation you planned to do

This sounds ridiculously obvious.

And yet it's very easy to create an ideal meditation practice that bears absolutely no resemblance to our actual life.

• We'll meditate for 30 minutes every morning.
• We'll never miss a day.
• We'll get up earlier.
• We'll put our phone somewhere else.
• We'll create a beautiful peaceful corner of the house.

Then Wednesday happens.

One of the most useful things I've learned from teaching mindfulness is that making a practice manageable matters.

Ten minutes is easier to find than half an hour.

We can slot it in before work, maybe during our lunch, or in the morning before everyone else gets up.

And when something feels manageable, we're more likely to come back and do it again.

Why does regular meditation matter?

We often think about meditation in terms of individual practices.

Did that meditation make me feel calmer?

Sometimes it will.

Sometimes it won't.

You might spend ten minutes feeling wonderfully peaceful. You might spend ten minutes noticing that your mind has apparently decided to revisit every conversation you've had since 1987, a theme we explore in Why We Replay Conversations.

Both can be meditation.

Because we're not simply practising feeling calm.

We're developing awareness and training our ability to direct attention.

Regular mindfulness practice gives us repeated opportunities to notice what's happening in our minds and bodies and become more familiar with our habitual reactions.

Over time, that can begin to change our relationship with thoughts and emotions outside meditation too.

And that's why regular practice can matter more than creating the perfect practice.

Do I need to meditate every day?

No.

There isn't a meditation attendance register.

Missing a day doesn't mean you've failed, lost everything you've learned or need to start again from Day One.

But there is something useful about creating a period of regular practice.

When meditation has a place in the day, we don't have to keep making the decision:

Shall I meditate today?

That's one of the reasons structured challenges can be helpful.

The decision has already been made.

Today, you practise.

Tomorrow, you come back and practise again.

Not because you've suddenly become a person who meditates perfectly every day, but because you're giving the habit an opportunity to establish itself.

What are the benefits of meditating for 21 days?

There's nothing magical about Day 21.

Despite some of the claims you may have seen online, we can't say that doing something for exactly 21 days guarantees it will become a permanent habit.

What 21 days can give us is a manageable period of consistency.

Three weeks is long enough to experience meditation in different moods, on different sorts of days and with different levels of enthusiasm.

There will probably be days when you really want to practise.

There may be days when you can't be bothered.

Those days might actually teach us something important.

Because building a meditation habit isn't about always feeling motivated to meditate.

It's about making the practice accessible enough that we can return to it.

What if I've already fallen out of the habit?

Welcome to being human.

Perhaps you used to meditate regularly and then went on holiday. Sometimes a change of scene quietly takes us off track.

Or maybe work got busy.

You were ill.

Christmas happened.

You missed a couple of mornings and somehow three months disappeared.

It doesn't mean meditation didn't work for you.

And you don't need to wait for the perfect moment to start again.

One of the simplest ways back is to make the practice smaller.

Don't begin by promising yourself an hour every morning for the rest of your life.

Start with ten minutes.

Or even less if that's what fits today.

Then come back tomorrow.

A 21-day meditation practice

Manageable, regular practice is the foundation of my 21-Day Meditation Challenge.

For three weeks, you have one guided meditation each day, with practices taking around 12 minutes.

You don't have to decide what meditation to do.

You don't have to wonder whether you're doing it properly.

And you don't need to find half an hour of spare time.

You press play.

You practise.

And tomorrow, you come back.

The challenge includes 21 different guided meditation practices and lifetime access, so you can also return to it whenever your meditation habit needs a reset.

Start the 21-Day Meditation Challenge – £35

If you're completely new to meditation, the Just Breathe App also includes my 10-Day Learn to Meditate mini-course. You can start there, move into the 21-Day Challenge and then continue with the wider library of practices.

Explore the Just Breathe App

So, is 10 minutes of meditation enough?

I'd ask a slightly different question.

Is ten minutes something you can actually do?

Because a short meditation practice doesn't have to be the lesser version of the long, perfect practice you're planning to start one day.

It can be your practice.

Ten minutes.

Today.

And then, tomorrow, you begin again.

About the author

Julie Perrigo MSc is a qualified mindfulness teacher, Stress and Emotional Awareness Specialist and creator of the Stress Interruption Method.

She holds an MSc in Mindfulness from the University of Aberdeen, where her postgraduate research explored the use of a structured digital mindfulness programme to support stress and emotional wellbeing. Julie combines her research and teaching experience with more than 25 years working in corporate environments.

She is also the author of The Emotional Hustle and founder of Just Breathe Solutions, where her work focuses on helping people understand the patterns that can keep stress going and develop practical skills to interrupt them.