Dr. Richard Davidson

You know, my practice has changed many times over the course of these years and very different traditions in which I've practiced.

Morning.

It's always been morning for me.

No, I get up and I make myself these days a cup of strong black tea and I drink the tea, which takes maybe 15 minutes, and then I meditate.

Yeah, I do set a timer and I meditate at various lengths, but my modal time sitting is about 45 minutes a day.

Sometimes it's longer, sometimes it's shorter, but usually around 45 minutes a day.

And maybe three or four days a week I do a really short practice at night, maybe five minutes before I go to sleep.

What I would suggest is check in with yourself and see how you're feeling about it and how it's resonating with you.

And if you feel like you can't really do much more,

just stick with five minutes a day and keep doing that.

The important thing is to stick with the daily practice.

And one of the things that we talk about in this new book, Born to Flourish, is a lot of people have a really difficult time coming up with really being able to do this daily.

And one of the things that we talk about based on our finding that it doesn't matter, at least in the early stages, whether you're meditating as a formal practice or doing it while doing other activities of daily living that are not demanding like walking.

or commuting, you tie this to regular activities that you do every day, whatever those activities are.

And we talk about this idea of social zeitgebers.

A zeitgeber, as you know, is an environmental event, a signal that marks, in the classical literature, a biological rhythm like

Light is a zeitgeber to set our biological rhythms.

But in the modern world we have social zeitgebers that are human created zeitgebers.

So eating, for example, is a zeitgeber.

We eat typically at roughly similar times every day, at least most people.