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Meditation is HARD.
Keeping still and staying focused is so unnatural that most who give meditation a try don’t keep it up.
So it's important to understand a few things about meditation:
If we meditate for 50 hours but see only small benefits, well… we would be better off spending our time on other happiness hacks.
To answer those questions I looked at three meta-analyses, which integrated the results of almost 20,000 meditation studies.
What I found surprised me.
What You Will Learn
- Meta-Analysis Research on Meditation
- Why so late?
- Meditation is 150% over-hyped. Meditation doesn't work.
- Does meditation work?
- Are the effects of meditation larger than what one would get from similar exercises?
- How long does it take for meditation to work?
- Meditation is HARD.
- Meditation is not immune to the laws of the universe.
- What Type of Meditation?
Meta-Analysis Research on Meditation
The most useful meta-analysis I looked at was done by researchers from The University of Chemnitz, who combined the results of 595 studies on meditation.
This analysis was done in 2013. You can read the abstract here.
The second most useful was done by researchers at The Johns Hopkins University Evidence-based Practice Center, which reviewed 18,753 meditation studies. Although these researchers included more studies, they also had higher standards. That meant they ignored many studies of what they considered lower quality. This analysis was done in 2014. You can read the full study here.
The third most useful was done by researchers at The University of Alberta Evidence-based Practice Center, who looked at 813 studies. This analysis was done in 2007. They looked at the effects of meditation on health. You can read the full study here.
[Want to learn more about “how to meditate”? Check out this beginner's guide to meditation.]
Why so late?
Meditation is the most studied happiness hack. So why haven't I written about it before?
I have a condition called hypersomnia. Unless I'm doing something interesting, I need to bite myself to stay awake.
That's why my hand has bite marks, not because I have a kinky girlfriend.
So meditation? Impossible. Anything more than a few minutes and I’m out.
Five weeks ago that finally changed. Through a combination of exercise, a modified diet, lifestyle adjustments, and drugs, my hypersomnia could be temporarily controlled.
That meant I could give meditation another try.
But before I dived in, I wanted to make sure it would be worth the effort.
I knew that the benefits of meditation were over-hyped. The question was, how much over-hyped?
How Could The Benefits Be Overstated?
News stories overstate the benefits of meditation by talking about those studies which report the largest gains while ignoring those that suggested more mild benefits. Talking about large gains is interesting; talking about mild benefits isn't. Interesting equals more page views, which equals more advertising revenue.
Transcendental Meditation®, the multi-billion dollar enterprise, hypes the benefits because, well, it's a multi-billion dollar enterprise in an unregulated industry. I'm willing to bet my entire life savings that the benefits of transcendental meditation are overhyped. What makes me so confident?
1 – The Science of Creative Intelligence, a term from transcendental meditation, is pseudoscience. It's a theory that contradicts modern physics and neuroscience. I'll take experimental evidence over unproven magic any day of the week.
2 – There are statistical checks you apply to determine whether or not a group of studies is biased or not. Transcendental meditation studies fail those checks.
The transcendental meditation folks aren't deliberately misleading people. It's a white lie – when you talk to people, you tend to share your most positive stories, not the negative ones. Likewise, with transcendental meditation – they tend to talk about and focus on the outstanding successes while ignoring and shoving under the rug the failures.
Of course, just because the technique is wrapped up in mysticism and is overhyped doesn't mean it doesn't work.
Meditation is 150% over-hyped. Meditation doesn't work.
Just kidding.
If meditation didn't work, we'd know already.
Or would we? Doctors used blood-letting for generations before they figured out that it was usually doing more harm than good.
Meditation seems to have large effects. According to one study, meditation can reduce Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) pain 30%.
I have IBS! Meditation can reduce my pain? Sign me up!
But a closer look made the pictures less clear:
- In one study of back-pain, meditation was no more effective at reducing pain than being placed in a support group.
- In one study of fibromyalgia, meditation reduced pain by 17%. Yes! 🙂
- In another fibromyalgia study, meditation reduced pain by just 6% – the same as the control group. No! 🙁
(The emoticons are there because I have fibromyalgia – those study results are personal.)
Why the varying results?
Because some people are idiots and don't know how to meditate properly.
Not.
People are different. For some, meditation is life-changing. For others, it does nothing.
The evidence that mindfulness meditation reduces chronic pain for the average person is strong.
But will it reduce chronic pain for me in particular? There's no data that can answer that question. All we can look at are the averages.
Does meditation work?
More specifically, what effects do mindfulness meditation and mantra meditation have on the average American?
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Benefits
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Of the benefits commonly ascribed to meditation, meditation is most effective at improving the quality of your relationships and least effective at increasing your memory and intelligence.
Well, meditation is actually least effective at helping you levitate, but to any reader of this blog that's obvious.
In other words, yes emotional intelligence and no 486 x 713 intelligence.
That's freaking awesome!
According to the inside-view, I'm a good person and a match for my imaginary wife, so we're unlikely to get divorced. According to the outside-view, 40% of marriages end in divorce.
Anything I can do to increase my chances of success you can be sure I'll do.
Another surprise was that meditation decreased negative emotion three times as much as it increased positive emotion. Anxiety begone!
That shouldn't have surprised me. Meditation initially drew attention for its ability to reduce stress and anxiety. Forms of meditation that focus on positive emotion, like loving-kindness meditation, are only recently starting to receive interest.
So, does meditation work miracles? No. But noticeable improvements? Absolutely.
[Mantras are often a big part of meditation. They can act as affirmations and also help you focus and guide meditation. Check out this complete guide to mantras.]
Are the effects of meditation larger than what one would get from similar exercises?
In 2007, the answer came out unequivocally as no. According to a meta-analysis of 813 studies by The University of Alberta Evidence-based Practice Center, meditation was no more effective than yoga or qigong in reducing anxiety, stress, and blood pressure.
In 2014, a meta-analysis of 18,753 meditation studies by The Johns Hopkins University Evidence-based Practice Center came to the same conclusion.
In our comparative effectiveness analyses, we found no evidence that meditation programs were more effective than exercise, progressive muscle relaxation, cognitive-behavioral group therapy, and other comparative therapies.
And yet, this contradicts the results of a meta-analysis of 595 studies done in 2013 by the University of Chemnitz. They calculated that meditation was more effective than relaxation training and exercise.
Well, sorry for the Germans reading this, but I'll take Johns Hopkins over Chemnitz any day of the week.
Also:
- Although the Germans calculated that meditation was more effective than relaxation training and similar exercises, the amount by which meditation was more effective was small.
- In coming to their conclusions, the Johns Hopkins researchers only used the highest-quality studies.
According to the Chemnitz researchers, only 15% of meditation studies are of high enough quality to get useful data. According to John's Hopkins researchers, then the number is even lower, at 4%.
Let me give you an example of a typical meditation study and it's problems.
Researchers might ask volunteers, who are interested in learning meditation and contributing to science. Of those volunteers, half will be put through the meditation program, and the other half in the control group.
The purpose of having a control group is to ensure that the effects of the treatment aren't due to the placebo effect.
The problem is that there is no blinding, and the control group sucks. Blinding is important because if a person knows they're doing something which is supposed to make them happier, the placebo effect will kick in to provide the change. This is why patients aren't told if they're getting the sugar pill or the real medicine in clinical trials.
But with these studies, there is no blinding. The control group usually involves something which is very obviously not meditation, like being part of a support group or receiving health education. So if you're receiving meditation instructions, you know you're in the group which is supposed to see the benefits.
On the other hand, it may not matter that the effects may be due to the placebo effect. Happier is happier, regardless of the reason.
50% of doctor's purportedly prescribe sugar pills.
How could meditation be no more effective than exercise or yoga?
After all, scientists have scanned the brains of master meditators and shown that their brains have been re-wired into happiness machines.
For one thing, those brain scans aren't of John Doe, they're of folks like Tenzin Gyatso, who've meditated for tens of thousands of hours. For another:
- Those masters are Buddhist. They believe that meditation will lead to enlightenment. At least some of the benefits of meditation are a placebo effect. The stronger your belief, the stronger the placebo effect.
- Those masters have partially avoided the problem of diminishing returns. You'll understand what I'm talking about when you read the next section.
- Exercise, progressive muscle relaxation, and yoga are all awesome and under-rated.
Right!
Who cares if meditation is only as effective as yoga? Yoga is damn effective.
Who cares if meditate is only as effective as seeing a professional therapist? Would you rather sit quietly and meditate a few times a week, or over-analyze your childhood, over and over again?
But that meditation works means little if it takes years to see any benefits. Let's be honest. We're human – by definition, that means we're shortsighted.
How long does it take for meditation to work?
With practice, you’d expect that you’d get more and more benefit out of meditation. Perhaps something like the graph below.
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For better and worse, that's not the case. Yes, I said for better and worse.
Meditators experience a rapid onset of benefits, after which additional meditation has smaller and smaller effects.
That means that meditating for ten years won't transform you into a zen-like sage. But that also means that although your guru might tell you that patience is necessary, that's not true.
Those who meditated for one month had similar improvements to their psychological variables as those meditating for half a year.
Or to flip that quote around – if you're not seeing much change after a few weeks, it's likely you won't ever.
Here are the actual benefits you can expect:
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Benefits
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It was this data that pushed me past my indecision. Those meditating for one month see on average 60% of the benefits of those meditating for 10 years.
There are some more subtle shifts that haven't been captured by the research, but what this means is that those meditating for one month see about 60% of the stress reduction, relationship satisfaction, empathy, and positive emotional benefits as those meditating for ten years.
Absolutely fantastic news! You don't have to wait months or years to feel better.
Crazy, isn't it? So crazy that you're probably thinking you'd better ignore those results.
Nope. It isn't so crazy at all.
There are two things going on.
Meditation is HARD.
In predicting the effects of meditation, the amount of time participants spent meditating each day, rather than the total number of hours of meditative practice over their lifetime had more effect.
That means that if you meditate for the next two hours, you're likely to see more benefits than your neighbor who's been meditating for ten years but has been off-track for the past month.
Yes, meditation causes long-term changes to your brain. But it's more short-term effects are significantly larger.
That means that one reason that experienced meditators get more benefits than folks who are new is simply that they can meditate longer.
In the lab, where most studies are conducted, participants are placed into a room and then told to meditate for 30 minutes. You can be sure that they actually do (or at least try hard).
In real life, you might set for yourself a goal of meditating for 30 minutes. But 5 minutes in, you've lost your focus, have gotten bored, and have decided to quit.
So if you want to get 60% of the benefits of those who've been meditating for 10 years, you've got to meditate as much as those in the average meditation study – 2 to 3 hours a week.
If you think you can do it, great.
But the lesson is, if you can find a good meditation class, you'll be better off.
I haven't had luck – all classes I've gone to so far have involved the instructor wasting 30 minutes of my life preaching about the evils of attachment. But I'm sure I just haven't looked hard enough.
Meditation is not immune to the laws of the universe.
Please don't tell me that meditation is the path to happiness. For us folks with jobs and lives and hobbies and dreams, that's a false claim.
Past an hour a week, the correlation between hours of meditation practice and benefits is small.
This is a finding true of all meditation studies I've looked at.
Let's break down that statement.
In a typical meditation study, participants might be led through two or three classes a week, and then asked to meditate on their own as well. As the study progresses, the participants are measured.
Do they report higher life satisfaction? Is their blood pressure lower? Is their spouse happier with their behavior?
Then, these results are compared against how many hours they meditated. Are those who reported meditating for 4 hours a week reporting significantly better health and marital satisfaction than those who reported meditating just 1 hour a week?
The answer is usually no.
Those who reported meditating for 1 hour a week report a much happier spouse than those who reported 0 hours. But those who reported 4 hours don't see results all that different from those who reported just 1 hour.
It's not that I want to give you an excuse to be lazy. This is just how meditation seems to work.
The first time I saw that in the data, I was confused. Was it a fluke? The second time, I was even more confused. Another fluke? The 20th time I saw it, I realized something I should have thought of from the start – meditation is not immune to the laws of the universe.
Meditation evangelists like to peddle meditation as the cure to all our ails. Meditation is mysterious, and people like one-word answers to their problems.
No. Meditation is effective. But effective in the same way that exercise, gratitude, and money are effective.
- The first 20 minutes of exercise a week account for almost all of the exercise's mortality benefits.
- The first 3 minutes of gratitude practice a week offer as much happiness benefits as the next 20 minutes.
- The first $60,000 of income offer 90% of the life satisfaction benefits of someone making $120,000. This is why you should make many small purchases.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't exercise for more than 20 minutes a week, that you shouldn't utilize the gratitude hack, or that you shouldn't try to increase your income past $60,000.
Just keep in mind – diminishing returns.
Meditation is the same.
The good news is that with fifteen minutes of meditation a day, you can get most of the benefits.
The bad news is that if you want even more benefits, you're going to have to diversify.
20 minutes of exercise plus 20 minutes of meditation is several times more effective than 40 minutes of either alone.
You can incorporate additional types of meditation – perhaps loving-kindness meditation in addition to mindfulness meditation. Or you can incorporate additional happiness hacks.
Diversify. Golden advice for investing not only your money but also your happiness-hacking time.
Just one more question remaining.
What Type of Meditation?
There are hundreds of kinds of meditations. But because transcendental meditation and mindfulness meditation are the most popular here in the West, they're also the most studied. There isn't enough data yet on those other kinds to make any conclusions.
Back when I lived in NYC, I joined one meditation class where we did a different type of meditation each week. All told, there were 24 different meditations (I quit before we got to any repeats).
The two most common are transcendental meditation and mindfulness meditation.
In transcendental meditation, a person repeats in their head, over and over again, a mantra. The mantra is typically nonsensical, e.g. “eng or shirim.” The purpose is to focus on repeating the mantra, “eng, eng, eng, eng, eng, eng, eng, Agh! this is boring, eng, eng, eng.”
In mindfulness meditation, a person typically focuses on their breathing. The goal is to use breathing as an anchor. Thoughts will arise. The purpose is to gain detached awareness of those thoughts and then re-direct attention back to one's breathing.
Both of my explanations are simplifications, of course. Here are two additional kinds of meditation:
In loving-kindness meditation, one attempts to generate feelings of love and compassion. Typically, one is told to focus on generating love and kindness for themselves, then trying to do the same for someone close to them, typically their teacher, then trying to do the same for someone less close, like a friend, then trying to do the same for someone neutral, and finally for someone they dislike. The purpose is to get better and better at generating love and compassion on command.
In death meditation, one contemplates the fragility of life. The religious purpose is to release our detachment from life, but from a secular perspective, this meditation increases appreciation. Indeed, it's quite similar to negative visualization, a technique I'm a huge fan of.
There are many more. Also, there is nothing divine about these meditations. A focused session of gratitude journaling is similar to meditation. The key feature of both is that they involve focusing the mind's attention in a way that hacks happiness.
So for now, let's stick with transcendental and mindfulness.
According to the 2013 meta-analysis, mindfulness meditation has the same size of effects as transcendental meditation.
That would suggest that the decision of which meditation type to pick doesn't matter. No, it does!
Although the size of the benefits was the same, the benefits themselves were different.
But according to the 2014 meta-analysis, mindfulness meditation is more effective than transcendental meditation.
So is mindfulness meditation better or not? Which analysis to believe?
I believe mindfulness meditation is more effective. Many transcendental studies (TM) are sponsored by TM®, the multi-billion dollar enterprise. Just as I'm careful when a pharmaceutical company says, “look, our studies show that our drug is safe and effective!”, I'm careful when TM® says, “look, our studies show that TM is the best!”
Even the Germans admitted that the TM studies exhibited signs of bias.
I'm not accusing either pharmaceutical or TM researchers of deliberate fraud. Just zealousness and motivated cognition.
But if you're curious, click here to see a graphic summary of the 2013 meta-analysis.
According to the 2013 meta-analysis, transcendental meditation is one and a half times as effective as mindfulness meditation in reducing the frequency and intensity of negative emotion.
Effects of Transcendental Meditation
On the other hand, mindfulness meditation is one and a half times as effective in reducing stress and increasing mindfulness.
Effects of Mindfulness Meditation
That means that the type of meditation that's best for you depends on your goals (at least, according to the Germans).
With all of the research under my belt, I finally felt comfortable coming to a decision.
I decided on 15 minutes of mindfulness meditation each day.
The results have been beautiful.
I didn't believe my uncle when he told me that just a few weeks of meditation had significantly reduced his stress. Now I do.
Five weeks into a regular practice, I can terminate many of my negative thought patterns. I also feel less stressed, which is great. Running your own company is not so relaxing.
But I'm not stopping here. After a few months, I intend to add in 15 minutes of another kind of meditation – perhaps loving-kindness, but I'm not sure yet.
Remember – the average person meditating for one month sees 60% of the stress reduction and pain relief benefits as the average person meditating for 10 years.
If you want to hack your happiness, start meditating now!
Great article that’ll help me use my time more wisely, thanks to your explanation about diminishing returns !
Thank you, I admire the way you put things together. For the last few years I always thought that something like what you write in your articles needed to be made, using science to put together practices that make us happier, to help people to determine kind of a “happiness action plan”, and that’s what you’re doing in a really smart way !
If the science of happiness was taught at school in a similar way, I bet it could change a lot.
This is great :).
Thanks! I’m glad you found it useful 🙂
“If the science of happiness was taught at school in a similar way, I bet it could change a lot.”
Thomas – it was exactly that thought which inspired me to start HappierHuman. If I had been taught scientific self-help advice in school, I could have avoided many of the problems which I encountered (e.g. like my depression).
Wow, that’s crazy. You’d think that the longer you meditated, the more results you would see. I guess the image I have in mind is the old sage who has meditated all his life and has a long white beard. Yeah, that’s probably just a stock character that you see in movies and books.
With you way you said it, it makes sense. It should have diminishing returns. That’s how life goes for most things so it should be the same for meditation too.
Yup. I was disappointed to realize that old sage is just a stock character – I would love to become him through such a simple path as just meditating a lot.
Awesome explanation on benefits of meditation, Amit.
I wish meditation can make me ultra-calm like a Zen Master. I guess I need to practice meditation a lot more in life.
Right 🙂
You could spend thousands of hours meditating… but it would be faster to spend dozens of hours each doing many things (e.g. exercise, desensitization therapy, improving your nutrition, gaining life experience).
Meditation does other things that you might not be aware of, however. None of those other practices will specifically help you address the problem of having a subjective illusion of a self, for example, nor anything else that micro-attention to the contents of consciousness would illuminate.
So the idea of a “faster” route to the same thing is a false comparison – physical exercise and nutrition have different goals, a phobia is a specific problem that requires techniques that running, say, would not address (unless you have a phobia of runnign), and life experience is another muddled variable to throw into the analysis (*anything* worth doing requires experience, and practice).
The idea of a faster route depends on what your goal is. I agree, if you’re trying to follow Buddhist teaching then meditation is essential.
But from a positive psychology perspective, weakening one’s sense of self is likely to be more harmful than beneficial. And so one’s not missing out by not solving that problem. Specifically, I believe that people benefit from having a strong personal identity, not from being self-absorbed (that’s different).
Personally, I don’t understand the alternative. The self is an illusion. Yes. But what’s the alternative to accepting the illusion?
Back to your comment, there may be more subtle benefits which aren’t captured by current research. In fact, I think it’s quiet likely that there are. Meditation research is still in its infancy.
Apparently you are unaware that the distinction between Yoga and meditation — as you use it — is pretty much meaningless, considering that for thousands of years, Yogis have described the goals of Yoga *as* meditation, and the techniques of meditation have always been part of Yoga (and still are).
I didn’t know that Anthony, thank you for sharing!
The distinction isn’t meaningless though. In the West, the two mean very different things. Likewise, in research studies the things being studied are quiet different.
Hi, i just came across this blog while looking for info about meditation. I’ve personally been meditating (mostly) twice a day for 20 minutes for the past 6 weeks. I can’t say i really feel a big difference between now and 6 weeks ago, other than maybe trying to justify to myself that i must have made some kind of progress. So i was considering doing even longer meditation sessions when i read this article. The part about diminishing returns stuck out, which now leads me to believe that i should maybe DECREASE my meditation sessions to 15 minutes twice a day instead.
There’s just something i don’t quite understand in your article:
“So if you want to get 60% of the benefits of those who’ve been meditating for 10 years, you’ve got to meditate as much as those in the average meditation study – 2 to 3 hours a week.
If you think you can do it, great.
But the lesson is, if you can find a good meditation class, you’ll be better off.
I haven’t had luck – all classes I’ve gone to so far have involved the instructor wasting 30 minutes of my life preaching about the evils of attachment. But I’m sure I just haven’t looked hard enough.
Meditation is not immune to the laws of the universe.
Please don’t tell me that meditation is the path to happiness. For us folks with jobs and lives and hobbies and dreams, that’s a false claim.
Past an hour a week, the correlation between hours of meditation practice and benefits is small.”
What seems contradictory to me is when you claim that one should meditate 2-3 hrs a week to get 60% of the benefits of those who have been doing it for ten years, but then you go and say that past one hour a week, the returns diminish…how exactly does this fit together?
Hi Amit —
(First time commenting here). This was a very interesting write-up. I really appreciate how empirically-supported your site is and how thorough you are in citing research. I think your site is an excellent resource and impressively captures a wide variety of happiness research (something very interesting to me).
I want to argue with you about one point in this article, though. I could certainly be wrong on this, but I would bet that meditation leading to sustained or frequent periods of true “no-self” is euphoric, potentially life-altering, and a frequent trigger of “peak experiences.” I haven’t seen a ton of notes about peak experiences on your site, but I think they can help transform a modestly happy (or even modestly unhappy) person into an exorbitantly fulfilled person.
I know there are several studies that show expert meditators have significantly increased control over autonomic nervous system abilities (changing heart rate, changing mood, removing stress, etc.), which are not present in beginning meditators, but my bigger issue as to why I think the research study you cited is unlikely to fully answer the question of whether expert meditators are more fulfilled is because of the very small number of meditators who are able to achieve significant periods of “no-self.” So, the study would need to: a) search for and find these Buddhist/Hindu preachers, many of whom live in near isolation away from large cities; b) eliminate a lot of language barriers (since most of the practitioners are Eastern and probably don’t speak English); c) ask the right question in a way that is understood (since the various ways of asking for subjective well-being or enjoyment or happiness will make a big difference). I just doubt this ever happened. (I would suspect your reasonable counter-argument may be, “If consistent no-self is so difficult to achieve, then is it worth pursuing for most people?”)
Relevant second-order sources that have pushed me to this viewpoint: Waking Up! by Sam Harris, WaitButWhy post on A Religion for the Nonreligious, and The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt. My current view (subject to change) is that there are basically 3-5 “levels” that work together to affect happiness (you can argue which to combine). 1st is maybe hedonistic pleasures/pains. 2nd is subjective well-being (e.g., just plain being happy due to social interaction). 3rd would be the extent to which you can re-frame things and adjust your mood (e.g., gratitude journals, beginner meditation). 4th would be presence of “peak experiences,” “living now” and ability to obtain states of “no-self” to directly experience reality without an interpreter (what the WaitButWhy article refers to as “higher levels of consciousness” and “Whoa moments). 5th would be living a transformative, purpose-driven, cohesive life. My view is that most people focus on #1 and #2. Some do #3. Almost nobody does #4 or #5, but they lead to the greatest levels of fulfillment by far. The upsetting part is that there is just starting to be academic interest in this, so the jury is a bit out. (I have a significant personal interest in this topic and have read a decent amount on it, so would be happy to discuss further).
Please excuse the sloppiness of this comment. And sincerely, thanks again for providing an excellent site.
Justin
Fake edit: I just read your reply below. Like Sam Harris, I’m not religious and still think there is a significant non-religious benefit for achieving no-self. The goal does not need to have anything to do with ending cycles of rebirth. I would strongly doubt that achieving no-self would result in a personal identity crises leading to negative subjective well-being (but am open to research showing otherwise). It leads to savoring every moment, living “now,” and directly experiencing your true reality in a deep and fulfilling way every moment. I am open-minded about the concept and again admit I could be wrong, but I really doubt I am overstating the benefit (granted, I haven’t achieved the state myself).
Great article my friend. Very well written and the presentation is pleasing. I will sign up for that e-book of yours and certainly visit this site again. Thanks for your work.
Wow, this is a great article and I enjoyed it a lot. I wanted to give meditation a try, but as you say, it is really hard. Besides, I was a little scared because some people preach that meditation is evil (seriously), but it looks to me otherwise.
Meditation is seriously amazing !! I have been practicing it for 3 months and the results are great.. U should try it too .. 🙂
You … are … awesome!
I love all the critical thinking you put into this post. I was looking into developing a meditation habit and wanted to find out how I would measure results to help me stay motivated. Knowing in advance that most of the benefits are to be had with 15 minutes and with a month of practice really helps.
Also, I’m glad to know that most of the benefits of gratitude practice come in the first three minutes.
We must always keep in mind the law of diminishing returns. Thanks for this reminder.
Keep up the good work.
Thanks for the article, I’ve been meditating 10min every night for the past 3 weeks and I can see a huge difference already, I’m way more relaxed and my mind is less noisy. I want to be able to do 20min next.
Hi,
Perceived well-being is a thing that is pretty hard to quantify. If someone would ask “how much better do you feel” compared to before I started working with different well-being stuff (meditation, Tai chi, Trauma releasing exercises) it’s hard to put a number on it. It’s like night and day. I just feel better.
Sometimes complexity can’t be quantified, but felt. You just have to go with trusting that stuff become better and let it take time and learn to listen to yourself 🙂