Five minutes sitting still: a meditation guide for people who have never meditated, no cushion or app required

Most meditation guides are longer than they need to be. They talk about the lotus position, chakras and paid apps, and beginners come away thinking it is too complicated to start. This is the shortest version that still works.

Thirty seconds of preparation

Sit on an ordinary chair, both feet on the floor, back upright but not stiff. Hands on your thighs. Close your eyes, or leave them half open looking at a spot on the floor about a metre ahead. Set a five-minute timer on your phone, then turn the phone face down so you are not tempted to check the time.

That is it. No cross-legged sitting, no perfectly quiet room. A corner of your desk at lunchtime, or the car before you walk into the house, both work.

During the five minutes

• Breathe normally. Do not try to breathe deeper or slower; just notice it.
• Pick one place to rest attention: air at the nostrils, or the belly rising and falling. Keep to that one place.
• When you notice you are thinking about something else, and you will, many times, gently come back to the place you chose.
• When the timer goes, open your eyes and sit for ten more seconds before getting up.

What will happen, so it does not surprise you

You will be bored. You will remember jobs you have not done and want to open your eyes to write them down. You will wonder how long it has been. Your nose may itch. All of it is normal and none of it means you are doing it wrong. It only means you are sitting still, something modern bodies very rarely get to do.

A session where you had to come back thirty times is not a failed session. It is thirty repetitions.

What the science says, honestly

In 1979 the molecular biologist Jon Kabat-Zinn started an eight-week class at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, teaching mindfulness meditation to chronic pain patients whom medicine could help no further. That programme, known as MBSR, spread to thousands of hospitals and became the template for most meditation research.

In 2014 a team at Johns Hopkins University pooled more than forty controlled trials of meditation programmes. Their conclusion was modest and believable: mindfulness meditation reduces anxiety, depression and pain to a moderate degree, comparable with some other interventions, and is no miracle cure. That is why this piece promises nothing big. Five minutes of sitting will not change your life. It gives you one small skill, and small skills used daily add up.

Thích Nhất Hạnh's telephone trick

At Plum Village, whenever the bell sounds, everyone stops and takes three breaths before carrying on. The Vietnamese monk Thích Nhất Hạnh carried the idea into daily life in a very easy form: treat your phone's ring as a temple bell. When it rings, do not answer at once. Breathe in and out three times, then pick up.

Three breaths take about fifteen seconds, and callers barely notice. But it turns the thing that keeps yanking you out of what you are doing into a reminder to come back. If five minutes a day still feels hard, start here.

How long before you notice anything

Expect nothing in the first week. What tends to appear first, usually after two or three weeks of steady practice, is a tiny delay between something irritating happening and your reaction. Someone says something that annoys you, and for the first time you notice you are annoyed before you answer. The delay is short, but it is where every other change starts.

If you miss a few days, do not reset yourself to zero in your head. Just sit again the next day. There is no streak to keep, and nobody is keeping score.