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In 2017, psychologist Eli Susman was on a meditation retreat at the Plum Village mindfulness center in southern France. Accustomed to a lengthy practice, he remarked to a friend and monk one day that he’d just completed a three-hour meditation session.
“Three hours?” he says the monk replied. “How about three breaths? That’s all you need to tune into the present moment.”
That was a lightbulb moment for Susman. It made him wonder if the amount of time spent meditating was really the point when it comes to the benefits of such a practice. While working as a clinical research coordinator at Harvard University and later getting his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, Susman embarked on some research to see how long a mindfulness exercise really needed to be to improve wellbeing.
In one experiment, for example, he and some fellow researchers assigned 135 undergraduate students 20 seconds a day of either a mindfulness practice called self-compassionate touch or a finger tapping activity for one month. Participants then completed assessments of self-compassion, positive affect, stress, etc.
They found the touch exercise led to perceived benefits. “Just 20 seconds a day improved your self-compassion, stress and emotional well-being,” Susman says.
Instead of time spent in practice, the key to success, as Susman and fellow researchers determined, turned out to be consistency. The more days participants adopted that self-compassionate touch, the more they experienced those upsides.
In fact, “when you make the practice shorter, that’s what actually helps you keep coming back to it,” says Susman. “And that consistency is where the real change happens.”
Susman’s forthcoming book, “Micropractice: A Science-Backed Approach for Calm, Clarity, and Joy in 30 Seconds or Less,” is a guide to wellbeing and includes numerous short techniques. It is slated for release in October.
The No. 1 micropractice Susman recommends is that self-compassion-filled touch upon which he based his research. For anyone keen to adopt it themselves, here’s how:
- Allow your eyes to close or soften your gaze.
- Bring to mind a recent mistake or failure, something about yourself that’s been bothering you lately or has made you feel unworthy. Notice what arises in your body as you bring it to mind.
- Put one hand on your stomach, the other on your chest. Send kindness to yourself.
- Ask yourself, “How can I be a friend to myself in this moment?”
Again, the exercise can take as few as 20 seconds at a time and doing it just “once a day is associated with those very outsized benefits,” says Susman, who nodded to participants’ reviews, extolling reduced stress levels, among other improvements.
Even if you miss a day or two, that’s OK. Keep going. “The danger isn’t in skipping a day,” he says. “It’s in quitting.”
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