I’ve taught meditation for 13 years in over 5,000 classes to thousands of people. One thing I have learned is that most people who begin a meditation practice struggle to stick with it.
Over this time, the focus of my training has shifted from teaching the formal practices to helping people integrate meditation into their lives. I’ve built a training framework for this, which I call the Frictionless Way.
The frictionless way is a set of practices, supported by concepts that help us understand how to build these new habits.
I draw on modern research, my experience, and my students' experience to gain insight into how habits form and how we can support them when they are helpful to us.
Right at the top of the list of resources for building new and helpful habits is a brilliant book by James Clear called Atomic Habits. His book is based on research into the modern science of habit formation and provides an evidence-based foundation for building a meditation practice.
I hope you find this useful. Please do ask any questions that arise, and let me know how you get on.
Habits and Meditation
Your brain is designed to automate repetitive tasks and delegate them to run in the background. Subconsciously.
This is why you can drive to work without thinking about every turn. It’s why you end up at the fridge without knowing why you walked there. Your brain delegates routine behaviour to the autopilot so it can focus on what it considers important. This subconscious mechanism makes it hard to build and break habits. You’re working against a system that’s been running for decades.
A cycle of starting and stopping creates its own problem. Each failed attempt reinforces a belief that meditation is something that “Just isn’t for you.” You begin to associate the practice with failure rather than progress.
The key is to stop fighting this system and start using it.
Breaking this cycle requires a different approach, one that’s so small your brain barely notices you’ve changed anything.
Start Ridiculously Small
In Atomic Habits, James Clear describes a principle called the Two-Minute Rule.
The idea is simple. When you build a new habit, scale it down until it takes less than two minutes. For meditation, this might mean a handful of extended breaths.
Not 20 minutes of sitting with your eyes closed. A few breaths where you extend the exhale. (Don’t underestimate the power of extending the breath for two minutes. Learning it can change your life.)
This sounds almost pointless, which is exactly why it works. Your brain doesn’t resist a two-minute action. There’s no internal negotiation about whether you have time. There’s no energy barrier to overcome. You can just do it.
The goal at this stage isn’t to meditate deeply. The goal is to introduce a tiny micro-practice.
Once a regular micro-practice becomes automatic, those two minutes can become a placeholder which you can extend into a longer practice.
Think of it this way. If you wanted to start running, you wouldn’t begin with a marathon. You’d jog for a while, then maybe walk back. Three steps forward, two steps back. That’s how all sustainable change happens. The same applies to meditation. A micro-practice done consistently beats an ambitious session done occasionally. You can always do more once the habit is established.
It is much harder to build a new habit if you believe the entry cost is high.
Habit Stacking
You already have dozens of habits that run on autopilot every day. You clean your teeth. You make coffee. You close your laptop after work. You wash up after dinner. These are anchor points; reliable moments in your day that happen every day without thinking. The habit stacking strategy is to attach your new micro-practice to an existing habit.
The formula is straightforward: After I [existing habit], I will [new micro-practice].For example:
- After I close my laptop at the end of the day, I will take three extended breaths.
- After I put the kettle on, I will check in with my body for 30 seconds.
- After I brush my teeth at night, I will sit on the edge of the bed and focus my breath for one minute.
This works because your existing habit acts as a cue. Your brain already has a well-worn pathway for making coffee or closing your laptop. By consistently associating a new action with that pathway, the new action begins to piggyback on the old one. Over time, finishing one activity automatically triggers the next. Then you don’t have to remember to meditate. The cue does the remembering for you.
I’ve explained this a few times in our recent training classes: the brain is an association engine.
The brain navigates the world by associating any new things it encounters with other things that it’s encountered in the past. If we see a new car that we’ve never seen before, the brain can accurately identify it as a car, although it’s never seen one before, because of all the attributes of 'carness', such as the wheels, the fact that it’s moving along the road, the bonnet, the roof and the windows.
It’s your associative brain that sees you through the day, and it’s your associative brain that can make your day better. By practising meditation the frictionless way, we're using the way that the brain works to benefit us.
Your Brain on Autopilot
Your brain spends most of the day on autopilot. You move from one task to the next without consciously choosing to do so. To build a new habit, you need something that interrupts this pattern and brings you back to the present moment. Present moment reminders do this really well.
Present-moment reminders are also known as visual cues or anchors. They anchor us to the present moment.
A present-moment reminder is an object placed somewhere it doesn’t normally belong. A pebble on your desk. A Post-It note on your bathroom mirror. A small stone by the kettle. When your brain encounters something out of place, it flags it. That moment of noticing is a tiny gap in your autopilot, and that gap is your opportunity to practise.
In meditation, we call this moment of noticing that our mind has wandered the moment of recognition.
The cue doesn’t need to say anything profound. Its job is to break into your habitual thinking and create a brief moment of awareness. That moment is itself a meditation.
Place these physical reminders in the spots where you spend most of your day. Each time you notice them, apply a micro practice. This is your first step to integrating the power of meditation into your life.
Present-moment reminders are the perfect frictionless way to practice. They require zero effort and zero motivation. You don’t have to decide to meditate. You just have to notice the pebble. The pebble does the work of reminding you. Over time, noticing becomes natural, and the practice that follows becomes automatic. This is how habits move from something you do to something you are.
Over time, you will discover that the present moment reminder wears off. Your brain gets used to it being there, and it no longer breaks into your autopilot. If you begin using present-moment reminders, put a regular entry in your diary every couple of weeks to swap them around or move them to a slightly different place.
The Frictionless Way
Most meditation advice assumes you have spare time. Find a quiet room. Sit for 30 minutes. Do this every day. But most people don’t have spare time. Life is already full. Adding another commitment, even a beneficial one, creates resistance. We call this the law of reversed effect.
The solution is to stop adding meditation to your schedule and start weaving it into what you already do. This is what I call The Frictionless Way. By using the frictionless way, instead of finding time to meditate, you turn existing activities into meditations:
- Walking to the station can become a walking meditation.
- Lying in bed before sleep becomes beditation, a practice that helps you both meditate and sleep better, with zero additional time required.
- Washing the dishes becomes a sensory exercise in which you notice the water's warmth, the plates' texture, and the sounds. (This practice was famously introduced in the West by the great Buddhist meditation teacher Thich Nhat Hanh.)
The Frictionless Way works because it removes the two biggest barriers: time and motivation.
You don’t need to find time because you’re using time you already spend. You don’t need motivation because there’s nothing extra to do. The activity is already happening. You’re just changing how you pay attention to it. Some of my most successful students don’t formally meditate. They apply frictionless micro-practices throughout their day and still report significant benefits.
The Secret to Training the Mind Is Gentle Repetition.
Think of it like training a kitten. You don’t shout at a kitten to use the litter tray. You gently place her there, over and over, until she goes on her own. That’s what we do with the mind. We gently redirect our attention over and over, with patience and compassion, until the mind learns to refocus on its own.
An Example Frictionless Way Strategy for Building a Meditation Practice
You don’t need to overhaul your life. Pick one of these approaches and try it for seven days:
- Habit Stack One Micro-Practice: Choose an existing daily habit — making coffee, brushing your teeth, closing your laptop. Immediately after that habit, take three extended breaths. Just three. Do this every time for a week.
- Place Your First Present Moment Reminder: Put a pebble or small object somewhere you’ll see it repeatedly: your desk, the kitchen counter, next to the kettle. Each time you notice it, use your favourite micro-practice. You will have taken the first step to building a mindfulness practice into your life.
- Try Beditation: Meditate in bed, either before you fall asleep or after you wake up. Many people meditate to help them get to sleep at night, but you can also meditate just before you get to bed and just after you wake up. Remember, it only needs to be a short micro-practice.
Don’t try all three at once. Pick one. Do it consistently. Add more when it feels natural.
The micro-habit comes first. The practice comes later. Each time you refocus, even for a few breaths, you’re building a new neural pathway in your brain that makes the next time easier. A million tiny moments of practice, each one barely noticeable, add up to something that changes your life.
This article draws on insights from James Clear’s book Atomic Habits and from the Bromley Mindfulness Frictionless Way training framework.
Click below to learn more.
RobertMitchell
Atomic Habits is a #1 best-selling personal development book by James Clear, published by Avery (an imprint of Penguin Random House), 2018.
