A one-minute meditation you can do anywhere

It might surprise you to find out that in 60 seconds, you can completely reset your mindset. Doing a one-minute meditation can be incredibly effective as it offers us a perfect opportunity to take a break, step away from what we are doing, breathe deeply, and recharge. What’s more, setting aside one minute each day is accessible for even the busiest person.

How to do a 1-minute meditation

Here’s how you can experience the benefits of meditation in just 60 seconds. Find a comfortable seated position, whether you are in your home, office, outdoors, or even sitting in your parked car. Then, close your eyes and focus on your breathing. Breath control in a 1-minute meditation is quite beneficial because of the immediate cognitive connection, which creates a calmer state of mind.

After you’ve found yourself in a comfortable position, silently focus on counting your breaths or doing a body scan. Allowing yourself to deeply drop into your mind and body for one whole minute can help with your decision-making, focus, communication, and energy levels.

More one-minute guided meditations to try

Headspace has numerous minute-long mini-meditations, like the one above to let go of stress. Here are three that will be helpful when timed with particular activities in your daily routine.

Eating With Your Senses: Engage all of your senses before enjoying a meal. This is especially helpful for those of us learning to appreciate our food, taste each ingredient, and understand feelings of satiety.

Get More From Your Workout: Get into the optimal frame of mind before your next gym session with this short meditation.

Goodnight: Soothe the mind and body in readiness for rest. If you’re having trouble falling asleep, this one-minute meditation can help set you up for a good night’s sleep.

Unlock even more health benefits with a daily meditation practice

There are loads of reasons we might feel like skipping our mindfulness meditation practice, the biggest is usually that we may find it difficult to set aside time in our busy schedules. When we become aware that just 60 seconds per day is enough to ease anxiety and improve our mood and focus, it makes it even more doable to create a morning meditation practice. Between the one-minute guided meditations that Headspace offers and the unguided style you can practice entirely on your own, there are numerous ways to fit meditation into everyone’s day.

After you’ve tried a few one-minute meditations, establishing a daily meditation practice can help you to begin unlocking even more benefits. For example, Headspace reduces stress in 10 days, and 4 weeks of Headspace improves focus by 14%. What’s more, 10 days of Headspace increases happiness by 16%! The Headspace app offers one-minute, three-minute, 10-minute, and 20-minute meditations, which use a guided visualization technique in order to achieve a sense of ease and joy within the body.

Headspace

most straightforward exercises — including a 10-day beginner’s course on the essentials of meditation and mindfulness — are available for free and are an ideal way to start building the foundation for a life-changing daily meditation practice.

A One-Minute Meditation to Focus Your Mind

In mindfulness practice, you’ll often hear the term “natural awareness.” By “natural awareness” we mean the awareness that just comes with being a human being. It’s free from judging and characterizing—it’s just noticing and sensing the world. It’s done when you open your eyes, you see something, or you hear something, or you touch something. So, the simplest awareness that just comes as part of the equipment of being alive, without a lot of filters around it or judgments. You can trust that it’s always there.

By “natural awareness” we mean the awareness that just comes with being a human being. It’s free from judging and characterizing—it’s just noticing and sensing the world.

An Awareness Practice You Can Do Anywhere

One Minute Guided Meditation with Barry Boyce

This is a short practice intended for doing in the middle of the day, wherever you are out in the world, for settling. It’s done with eyes open. So let’s begin.

1. Settle into your seat. Begin by taking a seat, or if necessary, standing. The important thing is to feel where your body is touching the seat and touching the ground.
2. Scan the body. Sense where your bottom is touching the seat. Sit up straight or stand straight but not stiff. Make sure your feet are completely touching the ground, connecting you to the earth. Your eyes are open, so take in the surroundings of where you are. Lower your gaze slightly.
3. Connect with the breath. Pay light attention to your breath as it goes out.
4. Follow the out-breath. At the end of the out-breath, let there be a gap while the in-breath is happening. And in that gap you have natural awareness: it’s there already, you don’t have to create it. So, follow the breath out, and out, and out. As thoughts arise, treat them as you would anything else you encounter: Notice it, and use that noticing to bring you back to the out-breath and ride it out. Out, and out, and out.

The Power of One-Minute Meditations

Some people claim that they just don’t have the time to practice mindfulness. These are the people who need mindfulness the most. While it’s a good idea to follow a longer practice that includes 10 to 15 minutes of deep breathing or meditation, taking just one minute can still help you calm your mind and clear your head. So this Monday, take a minute to destress with a one-minute meditation.

Sometimes the best thing you can do during a busy, hectic day is simply stop. If you’ve been sitting at a computer or staring into a phone, the action of looking away from your screen and physically moving from it can bring you clarity. Especially when you’re overwhelmed, taking just 60 seconds for a breath can do wonders.

In order to get the most out of your minute, follow a brief but effective meditation practice. You can do this in silence, or you can listen to one of the audio meditations below, which feature relaxing sounds timed to one minute. You can also set a 60-second timer on your phone — just remember to keep your device in your pocket for the duration of the meditation, so you won’t be tempted to look.

This Monday is a great day to just breathe! Here’s a simple exercise to start with, whether you choose to practice with music or in silence:

1. While standing or sitting (even leaning with your back against a wall is fine), be aware of your feet grounded on the floor. Close your eyes.
2.  Take a deep breath in, scanning your entire body up and down, from your toes to the top of your head, then back down again while breathing out.
3. As you inhale and exhale, breath deep into your chest so your belly fills with the air. When exhaling, control the air as it leaves your lungs.
4. Make breathing in and out your only responsibility. Listen to your breath as it goes in and out of your nose. Feel it as it fills your lungs. Control it as your lungs empty.
5. Do this for one minute. At the end of the meditation, open your eyes.

And that’s it! Start a new one-minute meditation practice this Monday, and make time for it every day. Make it something to look forward to – your one quiet minute – and you’ll get to next Monday in a calmer state of mind

One Minute Guided Meditation by Tara Brach

We often come up with excuses for why we can’t make changes and improvements in our lives, particularly when it comes to changing our habits and routines. Sure, we’d love to exercise more — but how are we going to fit an hour-long workout into our already packed and busy day? It’d be great to eat better, but maybe you feel like you can’t find the time to cook an elaborate meal at the end of an already long day.

The same goes for beginning a meditation practice and attempting to integrate mindfulness into our daily lives. We all like the idea of being more grounded, centered, peaceful, and mindful. But when you have a family, children, a stressful job, a long commute, and all of life’s other pressures weighing down on you, the idea of trying to set aside adequate time each and every day for a 30, 45, or even 60-minute seated meditation just feels like added stress. If anything, the prospect of it seems more stressful than simply going without in the first place.

Begin Your Mindfulness Practice Now

The truth is that meditation doesn’t need to be an arduous, time-consuming task. In fact, it shouldn’t be something that you look at as another item on your to-do list. If you live a busy and hectic life, you can still begin a mindfulness practice right here, right now.

You don’t need to put it off until another day. You don’t need to wait until you have more time, or until your schedule clears up. There’s no need to procrastinate because even a single minute of mindfulness meditation will bring greater peace and clarity into your daily life.

Here we offer this one minute guided meditation by Tara Brach. Her teachings are a mixture of Western psychology and Eastern spirituality, and Tara does an excellent job of helping to engage compassionately and mindfully with the world around us.

Ten One-Minute Meditations To Begin Or Expand Your Practice

We’d all love to meditate more than we do. For some of us, that means beginning. Those of us who already have a meditation practice are aware we can always do more. A one-minute meditation can be the gateway to bring more mindful and grounding moments into your life and either begin or expand your meditation practice. This articles explores different ways of practicing one-minute meditation and also includes a playlist with popular guided 60 seconds practices.

Among the most common excuses for not meditating is lack of time. Ironically, the more we make the time for meditation, the more time we feel we have. We must begin, however, where we are. Practicing one-minute meditation is an accessible means for any level of practitioner to grow and expand their practice.

Why Meditate For Just One Minute?

In just one minute, we can close our eyes, turn inward, and notice physical sensations in our bodies. In just one minute, we can deepen awareness of the movement in our minds. In just one minute, we can find greater clarity by noticing our feelings and emotions.

One minute of single-pointed focus is accessible for beginners and can also be used by seasoned practitioners as a way to combine formal with informal meditation and integrate the practice into the day.

Studies show that just by meditating at all, we’re more likely to increase the time we spend meditating. Even when beginning with just one minute at a time, by doing that meditation consistently, we develop mindfulness that stays with us beyond the sixty seconds.

One minute is achievable. In fact, there are multiple opportunities for us to insert 60 seconds of meditation into our day. When we first wake up, before we sit down to a meal, while taking a bathroom break, at our desk, on our commute, or in any moment of transition from one activity to the next, we can spare one minute.

We can use our one-minute meditations any time a pause is necessary or welcomed. Sixty seconds of meditation is useful when we notice agitation, anger, frustration, or even boredom. It’s equally beneficial as a way to deepen awareness of positive feelings in moments of sheer joy, gratitude, and awe.

How & When To Practice One Minute Meditation?

It’s easiest to practice the following one-minute meditations when you already feel good. Although one minute of pause is extremely helpful in times of stress, you’re less likely to meditate when overwhelmed if you’ve never practiced meditation in times of ease.

By doing your one-minute meditations at the same time of day every day, you’re more likely to form a habit. Many people like to meditate first thing in the morning. You may soon find yourself working your way up to the morning, noon, and night, for a three-minute daily total. There’s no reason not to integrate one-minute meditations into your day multiple times.

Over time, you may feel drawn to add length to your one-minute meditation. Go for two minutes, for three minutes, or more. By adding one minute every week, you’ll find yourself meditating for 52 minutes by the end of the year.

Can One-Minute Meditations Even Show Any Positive Effects?

The good news is, it may not matter whether your total daily meditation time increases due to frequency or duration. While the effects of meditation duration have only recently been investigated by scientific studies, early findings report that meditation’s outcome may be more dependent upon frequency than the length of any one sitting. 

Both neuroscience and Buddhist teachings point to the benefits of consistent, repeated practice. However, time spent meditating in any one session does not significantly predict meditation’s effects. Whether your total accumulated meditation time is made up of one-minute intervals, or a single thirty-minute session, you may experience equally positive results. 

With the knowledge that there’s no perfect meditation duration, why not begin with just one minute? Create a daily habit without needing to meet a self-imposed minimum. The following ten meditations can each be done in sixty seconds. Find one you enjoy, use it consistently, and find greater peace, clarity, and ease in your life.