How To Meditate Longer And More Often

5 helpful strategies

1. Use A Timer To Incrementally Increase Your Meditation

Spontaneity can be great sometimes. You feel inspired to connect more deeply with your spirit, so you sit down, close your eyes and such, and begin to meditate. And then a few relaxing minutes go by — or wait, it was only twenty seconds?

It’s hard to tell with your eyes closed. When I meditate, I usually use a timer, and give myself something like 10 or 20 minutes. The timer helps me relax into focus, without wondering if I’m being lazy and stopping too soon, or being a little too relaxed for too long, and missing an appointment or something.

If 20 minutes of meditation sounds valuable, but maybe a bit too hard for now, start with something easier. In music classes, long ago, my favorite expression about learning to play was: “Go so slowly that you cannot fail.”

What’s an amount of time you know you could meditate for? Two minutes? Set the timer for that. Do that for a week, and then increase it by a little. If you start with two minutes, move to three minutes next week.

2. Meditate At The Same Time Every Day

Think about school, or work. You don’t necessarily always want to do them, but the body kind of makes it happen anyway, out of routine. Your daily meditation could feel like no effort at all, if you made it a habit.

That could mean literally a particular time like 7:00AM every day, or it could mean at a particular point in your routine. I personally don’t really judge when to meditate by the clock, but I do it after showering, however long that takes.

Another great time to regularly meditate is anytime you finish a big productive task, especially if it involved a lot of staring at a computer screen. Meditating after that really helps my eyes stop from melting.

3. Variety Makes Meditation Fun

Back to spontaneity: you don’t have to meditate the exact same way all the time. All forms of meditation are beneficial, and you’ll probably do more of it if you allow yourself to flow based on what you are actually interested in, each moment.