Is there a minimum effective meditation length?

No minimum has been established. Two figures circulate widely, 13 minutes and 15 minutes, and both misread their source studies: the first compared meditation against a control rather than against shorter meditation, and the second let 17 participants choose their own duration, with dose unrelated to outcome. Across the six trials that deliberately varied session length, none identified a threshold below which practice stopped working. Among the contemporary teachers reviewed by Bowles and colleagues, suggestions clustered around 15 to 30 minutes with 5 to 10 minutes used to establish the habit, but those come from pedagogy and tradition rather than dose-response experiments. A practical starting point is a length you are confident you can repeat the next day.