Calm and Steady: Simple Ways to Create the Habit of Mindfulness

So you want to try out this thing called mindfulness. You’re in the right place!

You might be totally new here. Maybe you’ve already engaged in some guided meditations, but you’re not sure what to do next. Or perhaps you used to meditate fairly often, you’re feeling out of practice, and you want to get back into it. Wherever you find yourself today on the path of mindfulness, welcome! 

In these pages, you’ll find a variety of tools for creating (or enhancing) your own daily mindfulness practice. Yes, every day. We get it—that may sound unachievable. “Sure, I want to feel calmer and be kinder to myself, but don’t they know I have a life to get on with?” you may be thinking. All very understandable. As we’ll go on to explore, you needn’t do hours of formal practice every day (or ever). In fact, practicing just a little bit each day is the best way to build the habit of mindfulness.

The Tyranny of Structurelessness

Some of the reasons we recommend daily mindfulness are common sense. Have you ever set out intending to do something that seems too straightforward to fail—“I’m going to eat more vegetables”—and found it a lot more difficult than expected? For example:

“I’ll have those carrots with my lunch. Yum! Oh, but eating crunchy food in the office is so awkward. I’ll make roasted carrots this evening. But what about the leftover spinach? Maybe I’ll make a salad instead. I don’t feel like eating salad, though… and I ran out of salad dressing. Maybe I’ll run out to the store. No, I won’t have time. Gosh, it’s annoying to be so focused on food. I’ll just have that frozen pizza. I can always make up for it tomorrow!” 

Without a habit-change plan that’s got some structure to it, we’re likely to feel overwhelmed by options, or hindered by some aspect of our circumstances, so that habit change feels hard. At the first stumbling block, good intentions will probably give way to ingrained habits, with new intentions remaining in the future tense. 

Eating some veggie sticks every day with your lunch—or doing 10 minutes of seated mindfulness each morning—may not sound thrilling. From a practical standpoint, though, it’s easier for your brain to remember vs. juggling all of the possibilities and trying to pick between them. Practice mindfulness for a short time each day, and that’s your foundation for a mindful life.

Make It Real

The key to meditation is to commit to sit every day, even if it’s for five minutes. You can think of this as an important appointment that you keep with yourself.

“One of my meditation teachers said that the most important moment in your meditation practice is the moment you sit down to do it,” says meditation teacher and author Sharon Salzberg. “Because right then you’re saying to yourself that you believe in change, you believe in caring for yourself, and you’re making it real. You’re not just holding some value like mindfulness or compassion in the abstract, but really making it real.”

If the wisdom of teachers throughout the ages echoes the wisdom of consistent mindfulness, today’s science isn’t far behind. Neuroscientist Amishi Jha taught mindfulness to active-duty members of the United States armed forces, and her research established that doing at least 12 minutes of meditation, 5 days a week can protect and strengthen your ability to pay attention— even under incredibly stressful circumstances. “It wasn’t a situation where you could say ‘any exposure to training is helpful.’ It required regular practice to benefit,” Jha writes in her book Peak Mind.

The Power of a Mini-Practice

Many other studies show that short mindfulness interventions of 10 or even 5 minutes are equally beneficial to our health as longer practices.

In a 2024 randomized controlled trial published in The British Journal of Health Psychology, participants from all over the world were asked to do just 10 minutes of mindfulness practice per day using an app, with other participants placed in a control group. After 30 days, the mindfulness group reported significantly better well-being than the controls, including less depression and anxiety. 

Science writer Misty Pratt sums up other findings: “One meta-analysis of over 200 trials of mindfulness-based programs found that there was no evidence that larger doses are more helpful than smaller doses—it was greater frequency and consistency that appeared to provide better benefits.” 

Mindfulness Meditation for Beginners (and Everyone Else)

So where do you start? How much? How long? Formal or informal? While there are plenty of programs and bountiful guidance available, you can also explore your practice without following any special program. You can experiment, touch into your awareness (that’s what it’s all about!), and see what way of engaging mindfulness works best for your own mind, body, and life. 

As you travel this path, it may help to remind yourself what mindfulness is: an inherent human capacity to be aware of our present experience, without judgment. There are traditional and standardized mindfulness instructions, such as those you might learn in a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Class. These are supported by substantial history and scientific research, and they hold great value. 

There are, as well, as many ways of experiencing and practicing mindfulness as there are human beings. From trauma-informed mindfulness to teachings that embrace neurodiversity (see Sue Hutton’s article) or that incorporate meaningful cultural traditions, it’s clear that these practices evolve and thrive through adaptation. Engage with mindfulness with the guiding intention to honor your own wisdom, not to “do it right” or follow a rigid set of rules.  

5 Steps to Mindfulness: Breath Awareness Meditation

Learning mindfulness meditation may sound like a serious undertaking, but it really comes down to just a handful of steps. 

1. Get comfortable. Find a place to sit, kneel, or lie down that feels calm and quiet. 
2. Set a time limit. At the beginning, choose a short time, such as 3 to 5 minutes. Keep it less than 10 minutes to start.  
3. Notice your body. You can sit in a chair with your feet on the floor, or with your legs loosely crossed. If you’re lying down, you may want to place a pillow under your knees for back comfort, and keep your arms relaxed at your sides. You can also kneel if that’s more comfortable. Whichever posture you take, make sure you are stable and comfy enough to stay there for a while. 
4. Feel your breath. Follow the sensation of your breath as it flows in with your inhale, and as it flows out on your exhale. 
5. Notice when your mind has wandered. Inevitably, your attention will leave the breath and wander to other places. When you get around to noticing this—in a few seconds, a minute, or however much time—simply come back to following the sensations of the breath. Don’t judge yourself—just come back. 

That’s it! That’s the practice. You go away, you come back, and you try to do it as kindly as possible. 

Judgy Brain

At some point, the critical part of your brain will try to take over. You’re bad at this! This is boring! All these thoughts are stressing me out! Why are you doing this, anyway? When you become aware of any such judgy thought, notice it in a neutral way (for instance, you can label it “thinking”) and let it go. Your mind is simply doing what minds do: generating thoughts. Congratulations, you’re human!

There is never a need to make your thoughts stop or “empty your mind,” although you may notice your inner voice calming down and becoming a little quieter as you practice mindfulness. Through repeating the cycle of attending to your breath, noticing that your mind has wandered off, and returning attention to the breath, writes Barry Boyce, “we indeed notice our thoughts, but we see them for what they are, just thoughts. They are not truth. They only tell a partial story.”

Sitting Pretty 

Practicing mindfulness doesn’t require you to sit like a pretzel, but finding an upright, sustainable posture for your body can still take some trial and error. 

1. Stay straight and relaxed. To align your spine, drape your body forward and then slowly straighten up, feeling each vertebra stack as you go. 
2. Check in with your knees. Both knees should be lower than your hips. If they’re higher, your hips, back, and neck will strain. If you have long legs, you may need a higher cushion or chair.
3. Sit actively as you’re able. If you’re sitting in a chair, resist the urge to lean into its back—when you let your spine go soft, your breathing will be less open, and you may also find this invites discomfort or distraction. Keep your feet resting flat on the floor.  
4. Rest when you need to. If you feel stiff or tired, it’s OK to take a break. Allow your spine to curve forward, relaxing the upper body for a few breaths. When you’re ready, gently lift back up. 

What About Other Types of Practices? 

A common place we get stuck is in deciding what kind of meditation to do, either when we’re first starting out or from day to day. Look at any meditation app or podcast and there are dozens of guided practice options just a click away. It’s easy to end up being a “meditation tourist”: hopping from one style or type of meditative practice to another, sampling them all but never going deep.

Especially when you begin meditating consistently, it’s a good idea to make yourself at home with the simple activity of tuning in to your breath while sitting still before you add other types of practices. That’s why we recommend coming back to basics with breath awareness. (When you’re ready to add more foundational mindfulness practices, see the Discover Mindfulness calendar with a week’s worth of guided audio meditations.)

Video: Connect with Your Attention

Follow along with an 8-minute video guiding you through a basic seated mindfulness meditation.

Practice Over Perfection

Thanks to popular culture and some spiritual sources, seeing monks and nuns seated silently from dawn to dusk has given us a rigid idea: We need the perfect time and place to practice meditation. 

For most of us, though, shaping the rest of our life around our meditation is misaligned with our reality, which includes a busy life with a job, family, social life, hobbies, and so on. This is a recipe for getting off-track, getting discouraged, and quitting almost before you’ve begun. 

“A formal mindfulness practice is an acknowledgement that if we aim to build certain traits, we access them more readily in daily life,” writes Dr. Mark Bertin. “If you want to be more aware, responsive, emotionally balanced, compassionate, or anything else, it takes effort. It doesn’t require being perfect—when you see that voice taking over, it’s an opportunity to move past its influence.”

When you’re first getting started, it’s important to build the practice into your normal daily routine. If you can, aim to meditate at about the same time each day for about the same amount of time. Here are our top tips for making this doable. 

1. Schedule your meditations

It may sound obvious, but if you want to meditate every day, decide and write down when you’ll do it. Scheduling something means it’s important to you. Whether it’s blocking off time in your virtual calendar or writing your meditations in an old-fashioned planner, scheduling time to meditate signals to your brain that you’re committing to see it through. This will remind you of your intentions when life feels hectic and other things might seem more crucial than your well-being.

2. Minimize distractions

Ask yourself what time of day you can be the least distracted and also when you can stay awake. Many teachers recommend first thing in the morning as the optimal time for meditation. If you wake up and get your meditation in right away, you don’t have to worry about getting swallowed up in your other daily activities and forgetting to do it. But your life may call for something different, like in the evening after your kids have gone to bed and work is finished for the day. If you do shift work or have other major variations in daily routine, you may need to move your meditation time around. That’s OK. 

3. Use the gaps in your day

Most people don’t have luxurious multi-hour blocks of time every day, but even at our busiest times, we all have small chunks of 10 or 15 minutes that we can put to good use by meditating. Think about the lulls where you tend to pull out your phone and check notifications. Could you treat your mind to a five-minute meditation, instead? (If you tend to start scrolling when you wake up or before bed, this is an especially good opportunity to do something calming and healthy instead—a meaningful act of self-kindness.) 

4. Harness connection for consistency (and compassion)

In North America, you’ll mostly see mindfulness portrayed as a solo practice: a person sitting alone, focusing on their breath, and cultivating attitudes such as curiosity and gentleness. When you have a buddy or a group to meditate with, you get the added benefit of learning with and from one another. Meditating together reminds us that our struggles are not unique and that we don’t have to go it alone. Mindfulness teacher Ed Halliwell writes: “We’re all in this together. And we’re not feeling bad because we’re defective, but because this is the way of things in the world we share. It’s not all our own fault. This lessens and lightens the pressure to have it all together. The journey into mindfulness—together—has begun.”

Video: Drop In 

Learn Jon Kabat-Zinn’s three simple tips for a mindful morning routine.

Keep Your Momentum 

You’ve decided how often you want to meditate, where you can do it, and for how long. And you’re looking forward to it!

But then you get a phone call. A work deadline changes. Guests are on the way and your house needs tidying. Your kids are arguing. Your knee hurts. Your email inbox and social feeds demand a response right now. In other words, life happens—and it will keep right on happening, whether you spend a few minutes meditating or not. 

When you feel off-kilter, or life seems too busy to sit, it’s easy to decide to skip your meditation “just for today.” But if you commit to breaking your schedule only for true emergencies, it will get easier to discern what’s urgent and what’s merely distracting. By staying the course of meditation, even when it’s difficult to keep this appointment with yourself, you are building inner resilience. With each meditation, you’re strengthening a healthy habit that will support you in all other areas of your life. 

Drop the guilt! 

Whatever happens, even if you miss your meditations for a while, no sweat. Just acknowledge that it happened, let go of any self-judgy feelings, and get back on track at your next scheduled practice. 

As meditation author David Dillard-Wright says, “Guilt tripping is not productive. This is not about some imaginary yardstick of perfection, it’s about your own unfolding development.”

Soothing a Noisy Mind 

A racing mind and intense emotions can make it even harder to keep our awareness focused on our breath. Meditation gives us the opportunity to reframe these moments as a success, says Dr. Mark Bertin. “The mind always stays busy. Things happen that draw our attention and awareness away throughout the day, and each moment you come to the breath is a moment of awareness, a moment of intention,” he says. He recommends that any time you get distracted, “Remember this sense of intention with clarity. You can say to yourself, Oh, my mind is busy—and then let go and simply come back to the next breath.”

“Mindfulness plays a beneficial role when it comes to acknowledging the judgmental thoughts that intensify negative emotion,” writes mindfulness teacher and coach Caren Osten Gerszberg. “Take the state of loneliness, for example. If you have the habit of piling on judgment when you feel a twinge of loneliness, it can grow into something that feels unbearable.” If self-critical thoughts arise—I’m the only one who feels this way, this is never going to change—you can practice mindfulness to let go of these judgments. “You are left with the feeling itself,” writes Gerszberg, “which you can then investigate.”

An Essential Loving-Kindness Practice

1. To begin, you can get into a comfortable position. Decide on the phrases of kindness you will use for this meditation. Common phrases are things like, May I be safe, may I be happy, may I be healthy, may I live with ease. 
2. Silently repeat the phrases you’ve chosen. See if you can gather all of your attention behind one phrase at a time. You don’t have to try to force a special feeling, the power of the practice is in that gathering. And when your attention wanders—because it will—don’t worry about it. See if you can gently let go and just return your attention to the phrases.
3. Then, think of someone who’s helped you. Maybe they’ve helped you directly and picked you up when you had fallen down. Maybe you’ve never met them and they’ve inspired you from afar. If someone like that comes to mind, you can bring them here. An adult, a child, a pet, whoever it might be, see if you can visualize an image of them, or say their name to yourself.
4. Offer the phrases of loving-kindness to this helping person. May you be safe, may you be happy, may you be healthy, may you live with ease.  Even if the words don’t seem perfect, it’s fine.  The power of the practice is in that gathering of attention behind one phrase at a time.
5. Now let’s have a gathering with whoever comes to mind: friends, family, colleagues, pets. And offer loving-kindness to the group, to the collective. May you be safe, be happy, be healthy, live with ease.6. Then, shift your attention to all beings everywhere, all people, all creatures, all those in existence, near and far, known and unknown. May all people be safe, be happy, be healthy, live with ease.

Audio: Loving-Kindness Meditation

Follow along with an 8-minute audio version of this practice, guided by Sharon Salzberg.

5 Mindfulness Practices for Everyday Life

Inevitably, your careful plan to meditate won’t pan out every single day. That doesn’t mean you have to skip mindfulness today. Informal, or integrated, mindfulness is useful every day (especially when life feels extra hectic and demanding), creating opportunities to bring that calm, clear present-moment awareness into every aspect of your life. With just a few minutes of mindful attention sprinkled throughout your day, you can live more intentionally, calmly, and compassionately.

Here are five informal mindfulness practices you can try, adapted from Parneet Pal, Carley Hauck, Elisha Goldstein, Kyra Bobinet, and Cara Bradley.

1. Mindful Wakeup: Start with Purpose

Intention is the motivation behind everything we think, say, and do. Too often, automatic impulses overrule the brain’s wiser judgment. Setting an intention first thing in the morning helps align both, so our choices reflect values like kindness, patience, or purpose rather than reactivity.

• On waking, sit comfortably, close your eyes, and take three slow, deep breaths.
  
• Let your breath find its rhythm and simply follow it.
  
• Ask yourself: How do I want to show up today? What quality of mind do I want to strengthen? How can I care for myself and others?
  
• Choose a simple intention: “Today I will be kind to myself,” or “I will stay patient with others.”
  
• Revisit this intention during the day whenever you pause or breathe deeply. Notice how it shifts your interactions and mood.
  

2. Mindful Eating: Enjoy Every Bite

We often eat on autopilot—multitasking, rushing, or not even noticing what we’re consuming. Mindful eating turns mealtime into an opportunity to nourish the body and mind, helping us truly enjoy food and tune in to what we need.

• Pause before eating. Take 8 to10 deep belly breaths to calm your body and create a transition from whatever you were doing last.
  
• Check your hunger level on a scale of 1 to 10, noticing physical sensations like emptiness, growling, or lack of desire to eat.
  
• Explore how it feels to eat according to your body’s hunger signals, not the clock.
  
• Slow down while eating, breathing deeply and savoring flavors and textures.
  

3. Mindful Pause: Train Your “Slow Brain”

About 95% of our actions run on autopilot, guided by old neural shortcuts. This “fast brain” helps us function, but (you guessed it) often pulls us back into habits we’d rather break. Mindfulness activates the “slow brain”—our executive control—allowing more intentional responses.

• Trip over what you want to do: Place your yoga mat in the middle of the room so you can’t ignore it.
  
• Refresh triggers: Rotate sticky notes or reminders so they stay fresh and effective.
  
• Create patterns: Link mindfulness to daily cues. For example: “If the phone rings, take a deep breath before answering,” or “If I reach the break room door, pause for one breath before opening it.”

Every small shift strengthens the brain’s capacity for presence and intentional choice.

4. Mindful Workout: Move with Awareness

Exercise isn’t only for fitness—it’s also a chance to connect body and mind. Whether you’re running, swimming, or gardening, bringing awareness to breath and movement can transform activity into meditation in motion.

1. Set a goal: Before you begin, decide how you’ll approach the session—perhaps focusing on breath, sensations, or surroundings.
   
2. Warm up (5 min): Match your breath to gentle stretches or movements.
   
3. Find a rhythm (10–15 min): Coordinate breath with movement until you settle into flow.
   
4. Challenge yourself (10–15 min): Push intensity while staying present. Notice how alive and alert you feel.
   
5. Cool down (5 min): Slow your pace, observing body sensations.
   
6. Rest (5 min): Quietly notice the “symphony” of feelings in your body and environment.

5. Mindful Commuting: Stay Calm on the Road

Traffic can easily spark stress and anger, but driving a vehicle or taking public transit also provide countless opportunities to practice mindfulness and compassion.

• Begin with a deep breath to create space between the stress of commuting and your reaction.
  
• Ask yourself: What do I need right now—ease, safety, relief?
  
• Offer it to yourself: soften your body, adjust posture, or repeat phrases like “May I be safe. May I be at ease.”
  
• Extend it outward: Acknowledge that other passengers and drivers want the same—safety and happiness. Silently offer the wish, “May you be safe, may you be happy.”
  

Take another deep breath, letting go of tension and reconnecting with calm.