What twenty minutes a day actually is

Most meditation teachings will tell you that twenty minutes a day is a reasonable amount. They will also tell you, in slightly different words, that less is fine if that is what you can manage and more is better if you can sustain it. The whole landscape of recommendation is broad and accommodating, which is correct, because different practices want different durations and different bodies want different things.

I have, for the last ten years, settled at twenty minutes a day. Sometimes split into two ten-minute sessions; more often a single twenty-minute sit in the morning. The settling at twenty minutes was, for me, the end of a long phase of experimentation with shorter and longer durations, and I want to write a small piece about why the unfashionable middle ended up being the right answer.

What ten minutes did not do

It did not, for me, produce the deeper settling that twenty minutes did. Ten minutes was about the time it took for the mind to start arriving. By the time I was actually in the practice, the timer was ringing and the session was ending. Ten minutes had been useful as a habit-builder for the first few months but it had a ceiling I kept hitting.

What forty minutes did not do

It did not produce, for me, more than the twenty minutes had. Past around twenty minutes the additional time was largely the mind drifting, or the body becoming uncomfortable, or me starting to think about what I was going to do after the session ended. The diminishing returns were real and they kicked in earlier than I had been told they would.

What twenty minutes does

The first five minutes are the arrival. The mind, which has been busy, slows. The body, which has been holding the previous activity, releases. The breath, which had been short, lengthens. By the end of the five minutes the practice has properly started.

The next ten minutes are the practice. Whatever is happening that day — whether the breath is the focus, or the body, or just the noticing of thoughts — gets its proper time. The mind has room to wander and to come back, several times, and the wandering-and-returning is, more than the stillness, the actual training.

The last five minutes are the deepening. The mind, having been steady for ten minutes, settles further. Sometimes there is a small period of unusual stillness. Sometimes not. Either way, the final five minutes are when whatever the session was building toward gets its small chance.

On the consistency

Twenty minutes a day, every day, for ten years, is something like seventy-two thousand minutes of practice. The number is large enough to be useful and small enough to be doable inside an ordinary life. I do not think any contemplative practice depends on this exact number. I do think the consistency matters more than the duration, and twenty minutes is the duration my consistency has settled at.

If you have been wondering what to commit to, try twenty. Most days for a year. See what shifts.