Feeling bored while meditating and how to get past it
I looked around to see what other people were reporting and discovered that, even when someone commits to a daily practice, there was quite a bit of variation in the time it took for people to get past the boredom stage to the point when it became a consistently positive experience. I was surprised to discover that most people find the change taking place somewhere between two and eight weeks. I was surprised because it had taken me a couple of years to get to that point!
I found that typical reasons people gave for feeling bored were that the novelty of meditation or contemplative prayer wore off, or they felt restless and/or uncomfortable, or their thoughts were wandering the whole time. Meditation teachers often refer to the latter as “monkey mind.” And typical responses to these experiences were, “This is pointless,” “Why am I doing this?” By the way, I put links to a couple of research-based articles and papers that I looked at, into the Sources section below.
A couple of ideas that I found helpful, and that are supported by others too, are:
• Try ‘little and often’ meditating. In other words do three or four 5-minute meditations scattered through a day, rather a single 20-minute one. This is also useful if you find your motivation to get started is fading.
• Another very helpful technique is doing guided meditations, either with a live teacher or following recorded audio / video guidance. There are so many of these that the problem is usually wading through them all to find something that suits you. And some people on YouTube use them to make money so you can find yourself in the middle of a pleasant meditation when an advert suddenly intrudes! You can avoid this by using set courses. The free app ‘Insight Timer’ includes hundreds of guided courses – some free, some not. There are also specialist courses such as the Buddhist-oriented Headspace (by Andy Puddicombe) and The Way (by Henry Shukman), or the Christian-oriented Contemplative Outreach (developed by Fathers Thomas Keating, William Meninger, and Basil Pennington). The latter’s centring prayer is similar in its practice, although different in its aims, to Eastern meditation techniques.
• If you are more bothered by your mind wandering or by lots of thoughts popping up, then you could try ‘noting’. In other words, every time you notice a thought, you think “thought”, every time you feel an emotion you think “emotion” and so on. This one takes a bit longer to have an effect but it can help.
• Some people say that chanting a mantra or a prayer over and over helps too. It also seems to make a difference if the words or sounds are meaningful to you.
• I should also add that I long since gave up sitting on meditation stools or adopting uncomfortable cross-legged positions on the floor. I sit on a chair with back support and I no longer care who knows it!
And if you have found something helpful in making meditation easier and more comfortable, I hope you’ll share it in the comments below.
Finally, you could also give up meditation and take up yoga instead! I thought I would compare meditation with something more dynamic and so I asked one of the free AIs (sorry I forgot which one it was), to compare meditation with yoga, in peer-reviewed studies, on boredom and other factors relevant to beginners and yoga won on almost all counts! Here is the table that the AI produced:
So, for Beginners, yoga wins on most measures for the first 8 weeks because:
• It’s easier to stick with
• There is less boredom
• Benefits are felt faster
• It’s more socially acceptable
Meditation is cheaper and can be done without a teacher, but about 70 % of drop-outs cite “nothing is happening” or “it’s too hard to sit still” - issues that yoga sidesteps through movement.
Conclusion
For anyone who is experiencing boredom while meditating, I hope that these ideas will help you get through this phase because, for most people, it is just a phase. And if they don’t, there is always yoga!
When you become bored in zazen, that is precisely the moment practice begins. Zen Buddhist saying.
(N.B. ‘zazen’ is the main meditation practice of Zen Buddhism and mainly consists of sitting upright while looking at a blank wall...)
Sources
Britton, W. B., Lindahl, J. R., Cahn, B. R., Davis, J. H., & Goldman, R. E. (2014). Awakening is not a metaphor: The effects of Buddhist meditation practices on basic wakefulness. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1307(1), 64–81. https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.12279
Goetz, T., Fries, J., Stempfer, L., Kraiger, L., Stoll, S., Baumgartner, L., Diamant, Y. L., Porics, C., Sonntag, B., Würglauer, S., van Tilburg, W. A. P., & Pekrun, R. (2025). Spiritual boredom is associated with over- and under-challenge, lack of value, and reduced motivation. Communications Psychology, 3(1), Article 35. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-025-00216-7
If you want to go beyond the topics discussed in this blog and into meditation-related challenges considered broadly, then you might like:
Lindahl, J. R., Fisher, N. E., Cooper, D. J., Rosen, R. K., & Britton, W. B. (2017). The varieties of contemplative experience: A mixed-methods study of meditation-related challenges in Western Buddhists. PLOS One, 12(5), Article e0176239. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0176239)
Key words
boredom, contemplation, discomfort, mantra, meditation, prayer, restlessness, wandering mind, yoga
Link
https://herethewaking.blogspot.com/2025/11/feeling-bored-while-meditating-and-how.html
Archived at
https://cantab.academia.edu/PeterForster
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