When Is the Best Time to Meditate? (And Why Most Advice Is Wrong)
There’s an old story I’m rather fond of.
A student goes to a monk and asks, with great seriousness, “When is the best time to meditate?”
The monk thinks for a moment and says: “Now is always the best time.”
Which is either deeply profound or a very elegant way of dodging the question, depending on your mood. :) But I think it’s genuinely the most useful answer anyone has given — and I’ll come back to why at the end.
First, though, the practical version. Because there is a real answer, and there’s some rather good research behind it.
The short answer
For most people, morning. Not because there’s anything sacred about dawn, but because morning practice is far more likely to still be happening in six months.
But — and this matters more than most articles admit — if you’re genuinely a night person, forcing yourself into 6am meditation may be the fastest route to giving up altogether.
So: morning if you can, whichever time you’ll keep if you can’t.
Here’s the detail.
What the research actually shows
This is one of the rare questions where we have real data, because meditation apps record when millions of people actually practise.
Morning meditators stick with it roughly twice as often. In a study of 10,409 users across 103 countries completing nearly 290,000 sessions, those who practised in the morning were 2.1 times as likely to reach their 150th session as evening meditators (Cearns & Clark, 2023).
A separate study of 14,958 Calm users and 899,071 sessions found the same direction: every 10% more of someone’s practice done in the morning was associated with roughly 5.5 extra days before their final session. Late-night sessions showed the opposite pattern (Berardi et al., 2023).
An honest caveat, because it matters: both studies are observational. They watched what people did; they didn’t randomly assign anyone to a time. So it’s possible that morning meditators are simply the sort of people who stick at things generally, and the morning isn’t doing the work. Nobody has run the trial that would settle it.
Still — two large datasets pointing the same way is worth taking seriously.
And the bigger finding: in the same research, people meditating 4–7 days a week were 2.3 times more likely to reach their 150th session than those practising once a week. Consistency mattered more than almost anything else — including, notably, session length.
Which tells you what the question really is. Not what’s the optimal hour but what’s the hour I’ll still be doing this in?
Why morning tends to win
Four reasons, none of them mystical.
1. Nothing has gone wrong yet. At 7am, the day hasn’t started making demands. By 7pm you’ve had eleven hours of things landing on you, and the meditation is competing with exhaustion, family, work that overran, and a strong desire to look at a screen.
2. It’s the most protectable hour you own. Almost nothing gets scheduled at 7am. Meetings don’t move into it. It’s the one slot the world rarely takes from you.
3. You’ve not yet used up your willpower. Decisions get harder as the day goes on. A practice that depends on you choosing it at 9pm is a practice on thin ice.
4. The ripple effect. This is the one my members mention most, and it’s the reason I do it. Meditating first doesn’t just give you a calm twenty minutes — it changes the twelve hours that follow. You notice yourself getting tense in a meeting. You catch the sharp reply before it leaves your mouth. You meet the day slightly differently.
Meditate in the evening and you get the benefit, genuinely — but you get it after the day is already spent. Meditate in the morning and you carry it through the day.
That’s the honest case for morning, and I think it’s a strong one.
But temperament is real
Here’s where a lot of advice goes wrong, and I want to be straight with you.
Chronotype — whether you’re a lark or an owl — is a genuine, measurable thing, substantially biological, and not a moral failing. Some people are sharp and clear at 6am. Others don’t properly arrive until eleven, and are at their best at 10pm.
If you’re a night person and you force yourself into dawn meditation, one of two things usually happens. Either you do it badly and resentfully while half-asleep, or you manage it for a fortnight and then quietly stop.
Neither is better than a practice at 9pm that you actually enjoy.
The morning advantage in the research is on average. You are not an average. A confident 2:1 finding across thousands of people still leaves an enormous number of individuals for whom the opposite is true — and you might be one of them.
So take the morning as a strong suggestion, not an instruction.
The case for evening
Evening has real advantages, and they’re not consolation prizes.
Sleep. There’s decent evidence here. In a randomised trial published in JAMA Internal Medicine, older adults with sleep disturbances who did a six-week mindfulness programme showed improved sleep quality compared with a group given standard sleep-hygiene education (Black et al., 2015). If your main problem is lying awake at midnight, an evening practice targets it directly.
Unwinding. Meditation as a punctuation mark between work and rest — a way of saying the day is over now — is genuinely valuable, and morning practice can’t do it.
It might just be when you’re alive. If 9pm is when you’re most present and least rushed, that’s not a compromise. That’s your time.
One caution: the research suggests it’s specifically late-night practice that struggles, rather than evening generally. Nine o’clock is a different proposition from half past midnight.
What about the middle of the day?
Underrated, and worth a try.
A short sit at lunchtime, or before you collect the children, or in the car before you go into the house — these can be the most useful five minutes of the day, precisely because they land in the middle of the stress rather than at either end.
Some people find a “bookend” pattern works best: a short morning sit to set the tone, and a couple of minutes in the evening to put the day down.
So how do you find your time?
Experiment. Honestly, this is the whole answer.
Try a week of each. A week of mornings, a week of evenings. Not to find which one produces the most blissful meditation — that’s not the test — but to notice which one you actually did. The one you kept is the right one, regardless of what any research or teacher says.
Then ask yourself two questions:
- When could this happen without a negotiation? The best time is the one that needs no daily decision.
- What could it attach to? After the kettle goes on. Before you open your laptop. After you brush your teeth. A time plus an existing habit beats a time alone.
And one honest complication from that Calm study: the researchers found that rigid consistency of timing helped short-term engagement but, oddly, was associated with worse long-term persistence. They’re cautious about why. My reading is that it’s a small argument against being too rigid — if 7am becomes a rule you can fail at, it may work against you. Aim for a regular time, but hold it lightly.
If you’d like more on the length question, I’ve written about how long you should meditate — where my honest minimum is one breath. And if you’ve ever wondered whether mindfulness and meditation are actually the same thing, they’re not.
The best time, in practice
I’ll be upfront: I run the Daily Mindfulness Club, so apply the appropriate pinch of salt.
But here’s the thing I’ve learned from guiding a live sit every weekday morning at 7:30am UK time for the last six years. The people who keep going aren’t the ones who found the perfect hour through careful self-analysis. They’re the ones for whom the time was decided already — because a group was meeting, and they’d said they’d be there.
That’s the quiet advantage of a fixed group sit. It removes the question entirely. There’s no daily negotiation about whether now is a good moment, because it’s 7:30 and people are arriving.
If you’ve been trying to find your ideal time on your own and it keeps slipping, the missing piece probably isn’t the hour. It’s that nothing is holding the hour in place.
Come and sit with us at 7:30am — 7 days free
No card needed. And there’s a recording if that hour isn’t yours.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best time of day to meditate? For most people, morning. Research across 10,409 meditators found morning practitioners were 2.1 times as likely to still be practising at their 150th session. But if you’re a night person, an evening practice you’ll actually keep beats a morning one you won’t.
Is it better to meditate in the morning or at night? Morning wins on habit-formation and gives you a “ripple effect” through the day. Night wins if your goal is sleep, or if that’s genuinely when you’re most present. Late-night specifically shows the weakest adherence.
Should I meditate before or after breakfast? Before, generally — it’s easier to protect and you’re less likely to feel sluggish. But don’t sit there hungry and miserable; a glass of water and a few minutes is plenty of preparation.
Can I meditate right after waking up? Yes, and many people do. If you find you simply fall back asleep, sit upright, splash some water on your face first, or move it to after your shower.
Does it matter if I meditate at different times each day? A regular time helps, mostly by removing the decision. But don’t be rigid about it — one large study found overly fixed timing was associated with worse long-term persistence. A rough rhythm beats a strict rule.
When is the best time to meditate for anxiety? Morning, to set the tone before the day builds — plus something short you can use in the moment. See five proven breathing exercises for the in-the-moment part.
How soon after meditating will I feel the benefits? Some settling is immediate. The deeper changes take longer than people expect — one study found benefits at eight weeks that weren’t yet present at four.
So — now, then
The research says morning. Your temperament might say otherwise, and it’s allowed to.
But I’d come back to the monk, because I think he was right in a way that’s easy to miss. People spend a remarkable amount of energy working out the optimal moment to begin, and that planning is itself a way of not starting. There is no hour so perfect that it’ll meditate on your behalf.
So pick a time this week and try it. If it doesn’t fit, try another.
And in the meantime — now is always the best time. Take one breath before you close this tab. That counts. :)