How to start meditating: a beginner's guide
To start meditating, five minutes a day is enough: sit down, bring your attention to your breath and, every time your mind wanders, come back to it. That's it. Your mind will wander — it always does, even for people who have practiced for years — and coming back is the practice, not a failure. The hard part isn't your first meditation, it's your tenth: that's why it helps to start short, at the same time each day, and with guidance.
What do I need to start?
Nothing you don't already have. No special cushion, no special clothes, no perfect silence, no calm mind. That last one is the most common misunderstanding: you don't meditate because your mind is calm, you meditate with your mind however it is today.
The only thing you need is a moment in your day you can repeat. When you wake up, before lunch, when you go to bed. Hooking it onto something you already do every day is what helps it stick.
Your first meditation, step by step
- Sit on a chair, feet flat on the floor, back upright but not rigid. Hands wherever they land.
- Close your eyes or let your gaze drop, without fixing it on anything.
- Notice your breath wherever you feel it most: nose, chest or belly. Don't change it. Just notice it.
- When your mind wanders — to a memory, a task, a conversation — notice that it went and come back to the breath. No scolding.
- Repeat step 4 as many times as it takes. It might be fifty times in five minutes. That's fine.
- When you finish, stay still for a few seconds before you get up.
What do I do when my mind wanders?
This is the question everyone asks, and the answer changes how the practice feels: noticing you got distracted and coming back is the meditation. It is not what happens when the meditation fails. Every time you come back, you train exactly the skill you are after: noticing where your attention went and bringing it home.
According to Meditar, people who quit in the first week almost never quit because they dislike it. They quit because they think they get distracted too much to meditate — which is like quitting the gym because the weights are heavy.
Guided or in silence?
To start, guided. In silence there is nothing to remind you to come back, and it is easy to spend all five minutes somewhere else. A voice that brings you back to the breath every so often does that job for you while you learn to do it yourself.
Silent meditation can come later, if you want it. It is not a higher level: it is just another way to practice.
Does it actually work?
The most cited review on the subject, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, analyzed 47 randomized trials with more than 3,500 participants. Mindfulness meditation programs showed moderate-strength evidence of improvement in anxiety, low mood and pain at eight weeks.
The authors were also clear about the limits: the effects are small to moderate, and they found no evidence that meditation beat other active treatments. In other words, it helps, measurably, and it isn't magic. For something that costs five minutes a day, that's a good deal.
How to keep going after the first week
- Same time, every day. A fixed time does more than willpower.
- Short beats long. Five minutes every day is worth more than half an hour on Sunday.
- If you miss a day, come back the next. There is no streak to protect. What counts is the pattern over weeks.
- Try different times of day until you find yours. Some people do best in the morning; for others, only the evening works.
Start with a voice you like
What helps most with coming back every day is finding the practice pleasant, and the voice guiding you has a lot to do with that. In Meditar you pick the voice that guides you: you listen before choosing and keep the one that feels right. There are meditations for sleep, anxiety, focus and breathing, many of them just five minutes long, and it is free to start: download it here.