What Is Meditation and Why Is It Different from Yoga?
Meditation is a practice of training attention and awareness — deliberately directing mental focus in ways that cultivate clarity, calm, and insight. It’s one of the oldest human practices, with roots in multiple contemplative traditions including yoga, Buddhism, and Jainism. While meditation is a component of comprehensive yoga practice (the seventh limb in Patanjali’s eight-limbed path), the two are distinct: yoga encompasses physical postures and breathwork; meditation is specifically a mind-training practice.
In the last two decades, meditation has undergone extensive scientific study, moving from a spiritual practice to an evidence-based clinical intervention. Mindfulness-based interventions are now recommended in some clinical guidelines for stress, depression relapse prevention, chronic pain, and anxiety. This scientific validation has made meditation more accessible to people who might previously have dismissed it as purely religious or unscientific.
Types of Meditation: Choosing the Right Practice
Focused attention meditation
The most common starting point. You direct your attention to a single object — typically the breath, a mantra, a visual point, or a sound — and gently return your attention when it wanders. Over time, this practice trains sustained attention and reduces mind-wandering. Examples: breath awareness, trataka (candle gazing), mantra meditation.
Open monitoring meditation
Instead of focusing on a single object, you maintain non-reactive awareness of whatever arises in consciousness — thoughts, sensations, sounds — without judging or engaging with any particular experience. This trains metacognitive awareness — the ability to observe your own mental processes. Examples: mindfulness meditation, vipassana (insight meditation).
Loving-kindness meditation (Metta)
A practice of cultivating warm, compassionate feeling — first toward yourself, then toward progressively wider circles of people (family, friends, strangers, difficult people, all beings). Research on Metta practice has found associations with increased positive emotions, social connection, and self-compassion.
Body scan meditation
Systematically directing attention to each part of the body in sequence, observing sensations without judgment. Often used for reducing physical tension and body-based anxiety, and for improving interoceptive awareness (the sense of your internal body state). A core component of MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction) — this overlaps closely with the body-scanning stage in Yoga Nidra, if you’d rather try a guided version lying down.
Transcendental Meditation (TM)
A specific mantra-based technique from the Vedic tradition that involves silently repeating a personalised mantra for 20 minutes twice daily. Has a research base examining blood pressure and cardiovascular outcomes. Traditionally taught by certified TM teachers.
What Meditation Does to the Brain and Body
The neuroscience of meditation has advanced significantly. Consistent findings across studies:
- Cortical thickness: Long-term meditators show increased grey matter density in regions associated with attention, emotional regulation, and interoception (including the insula, prefrontal cortex, and anterior cingulate cortex).
- Amygdala reactivity: Regular meditation is associated with reduced amygdala reactivity to stressors — the brain’s emotional alarm system responding somewhat less intensely.
- Default mode network: Meditation is associated with reduced activity in the default mode network (the “wandering mind” network active during rumination) — linked to reduced mind-wandering.
- Stress hormones: Cortisol reductions have been measured after single meditation sessions, and regular meditators sometimes show lower baseline cortisol.
- Telomeres: Preliminary, still-developing evidence suggests a possible association between meditation and telomere length (a marker of cellular ageing) — this is an early research area, not an established finding.
How to Start a Meditation Practice
Week 1–2: Breath awareness (5 minutes)
Sit comfortably with your spine upright. Close your eyes. Bring your attention to the physical sensation of breathing — the rise and fall of the chest or belly, the feeling of air at the nostrils. When your attention wanders (it will — repeatedly), notice this without judgment and gently return it to the breath. Set a timer for 5 minutes. If you’d like more structured breathing techniques to draw on, see our guide to pranayama breathing exercises.
The goal is not to stop thoughts. The goal is noticing when attention has wandered and returning it. Each “return” is the practice.
Week 3–4: Extend to 10 minutes
Add 5 minutes as the practice becomes more familiar. You’ll notice the mind still wanders frequently — this is normal at 4 weeks. You may also notice you’re getting better at recognising when it wanders, which is real progress.
Ongoing: Consistency over duration
10 minutes daily consistently tends to produce more benefit than 60 minutes once a week. Morning practice, before the cognitive demands of the day set in, works well for many people; a pre-sleep practice can also help with winding down — see our Yoga Nidra guide for a structured lying-down option built for exactly that.
A Note on Safety
Meditation is low-risk and beneficial for most people, but a small subset of practitioners — particularly with intensive or prolonged practice, or with a pre-existing mental health condition — occasionally report difficult experiences such as heightened anxiety, depersonalization, or unwanted intrusive thoughts. If you notice a meditation practice is making you feel worse rather than calmer, scale back, switch to a gentler technique like brief breath awareness, or talk to a mental health professional rather than pushing through.
Apps and Resources to Get Started
- Headspace and Calm: Two widely used guided meditation apps with structured beginner courses.
- Insight Timer: A free app with a very large library of guided meditations from teachers across many traditions.
- Structured programmes: Organisations such as Art of Living offer structured courses including breathwork-based meditation (Sudarshan Kriya), available both in person and online in many countries.
- Silent retreats (Vipassana, S.N. Goenka tradition): Free 10-day silent retreats are held in many countries worldwide. These are intensive and demanding — not recommended as a first introduction to meditation without prior practice.
If you are in crisis or having thoughts of suicide, please reach out right away: in the US, call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline); in the UK and Ireland, call Samaritans at 116 123.
Related Reading
- Pranayama for Anxiety: 5 Breathing Exercises That Help
- Yoga Nidra for Deep Sleep and Stress Relief
- Restorative Yoga Poses: A Practice Guide for Stress and Fatigue
References
- Hölzel BK, et al. (2011). Mindfulness practice leads to increases in regional brain gray matter density. Psychiatry Research, 191(1), 36–43.
- Goyal M, et al. (2014). Meditation programs for psychological stress and well-being. JAMA Internal Medicine, 174(3), 357–368.
- Kok BE, et al. (2013). How positive emotions build physical health. Psychological Science, 24(7), 1123–1132.
This article is for general information and is not a substitute for professional mental health advice.
