A New Year's Guide to Daily(ish) Meditation

ONE MINUTE. MOST DAYS. BIG RESULTS.

- Dan Harris

THE NEW YEAR is upon us; a time when many of us will inevitably go about making, and then abandoning, absurdly ambitious resolutions – to do more burpees, to home-brew kombucha, to easily reach ketosis or achieve a permanent in-box of zero.

Let me instead propose an eminently doable resolution: try meditating for one minute on most days – for just one month.

Forming healthy habits is hard, and there’s a reason most of our resolutions ultimately go down in flames. We may be wired to fail. Evolution has bequeathed us a brain that optimises for survival, not long-term health planning. Natural selection primed us for detecting threats and finding food and sexual partners, not for flossing our teeth. The fact that we’re up against this evolutionary challenge is why I like this modest, month-long proposal. Two aspects make it easy to adopt:

First, aiming to meditate most days, rather than every day, is a good goal. Consistency counts – the more often you meditate, the easier it gets and the deeper and more enduring the benefits – but if you miss a day, your inner critic won’t have a chance to call you a failure. I call this approach “daily-ish”. It has elasticity, or “psychological flexibility”, a key concept from behaviour-change research, which can help lead to an abiding habit, be it a meditation practice, a new gym routine, or a commitment to learn Esperanto.