Many of us know when something’s not right—there’s a familiar, heightened sensation: blood rushing, mind racing, gut dropping. Maybe you’ve just received an unwanted email from your boss, a hefty text from a family member, or a heavy headline running across your television screen. And in the moment, bringing a hand to your chest, closing your eyes, and breathing might be what brings you back to the present. A long inhale, a long exhale—what quiets your mind enough to move forward in your day.
Turns out, ultra-brief contemplative practices—what many researchers are now calling micropractices, sometimes as short as 20 seconds—may produce meaningful mental health benefits. But there’s a catch: early findings suggest the benefit only emerges when done consistently enough to become a daily habit.
What makes a tiny practice actually stick? The question has occupied Eli Susman, a psychologist and Mind & Life Varela Grantee, for years. The seed was planted during a month he spent living at Plum Village, the mindfulness practice center founded by Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh in France. He remembers one day during his stay, when he’d been meditating for three hours. He went to share his progress with a monk, a close disciple of Thich Nhat Hanh, whose response stopped him cold: “How about three breaths? That’s all you need to tune into the present moment.”
That inquiry led Susman to find a research study showing that just 20 seconds of self-soothing touch—placing one hand over the heart and one over the belly—lowered cortisol levels at least as much as receiving a hug. Not hours of effort, not a marathon of meditation. Just something you can do in a single intentional moment. Susman wondered: what happens if you do this every day?
The idea that brief moments woven into daily life might matter as much as formal practice is supported by other research, too. A 2021 workplace study, co-authored by incoming Mind & Life Podcast Host, David Cresswell, found that employees who applied mindfulness to moments already built into their day—a commute, a conversation, a walk to a meeting—showed stronger stress-buffering effects than those who relied on scheduled, audio-guided practice sessions alone. The formal sessions helped, but the informal ones, woven into life as it was already happening, did more.
A related thread runs through neuroscience research on long-term meditators. A 2018 study out of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin–Madison found that, among experienced practitioners, time spent on meditation retreat was more strongly associated with certain positive brain changes than time spent in formal home practice. Susman has a theory as to why: on retreat, he says, people aren’t only meditating on the cushion. They’re practicing awareness while walking to the hall, eating, or getting ready for bed. Practice, in other words, folded into the rest of the day rather than cordoned off from it. That’s the core of what micropractice is reaching for: not less practice, but practice that lives inside the moments we already have.
“That’s the core of what micropractice is reaching for: not less practice, but practice that lives inside the moments we already have.”
Susman’s Initial Study
The cortisol finding was compelling, but a single moment of touch in a lab setting is a long way from a daily practice. Susman wanted to know what happened when people practiced consistently, over time, on their own. In an initial randomized controlled trial with 135 undergraduate students, he tested whether a 20-second daily self-compassionate touch practice could improve mental health outcomes over one month. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups: the first learned self-compassionate touch—placing one hand over the chest and one over the belly, or any other touch that supported feelings of warmth and kindness toward themselves. The second learned a 20-second finger-tapping practice with no contemplative element. Both groups watched a single instructional video and were asked to practice daily on their own.
The results were striking—but only for those who actually practiced consistently. Among participants who did the self-compassionate touch exercise regularly, self-compassion increased and levels of stress and a range of mental health symptoms, including depression and anxiety, decreased compared to the control group.
The benefits were on par with what researchers typically see from programs that take weeks longer, but consistency was the missing ingredient. Over 60% of participants struggled to practice every day.
“What if this points to something bigger,” Susman recalled thinking, “like an entirely new category of practice—something short enough to weave into daily life, yet powerful enough to change it?” That question led him to micropractice—and to ask what the science of habit formation might have to offer contemplative research.
Designing a Practice That Sticks
With support from a 2022 Mind & Life Varela Grant, Susman designed a follow-up study to test exactly that. In a sample of 497 adults from across the United States, participants were randomly assigned to learn self-compassionate touch either on its own or alongside a set of evidence-based habit formation tools. The habit training took about 15 minutes.
Habit forming tools included choosing a specific cue—an existing daily routine to anchor the practice to, like after brushing your teeth or putting on pajamas. Susman found in the earlier study that specificity mattered: “before bed” isn’t a cue, because by the time you get to bed, there’s nothing left to trigger the practice. The more specific people were in describing their cue, the more likely the practice was to stick. Participants in the habit tools group also set smartphone reminders, made implementation plans, and learned to plan for obstacles.
One of Susman’s favorite tools was the emergency skip day: participants were given up to two skip days per week. Counterintuitively, permission to skip made them more likely to practice. “The danger isn’t in skipping,” Susman says, “it’s in quitting.” The skip days built self-compassion directly into the structure of habit formation—offering the same grace a caring friend might extend when life gets in the way.
The findings, now complete and being prepared for publication, were encouraging. Compared to those who learned self-compassionate touch alone, participants who also received the habit tools practiced about a third more often at both three and six months. They showed greater increases in self-compassion and what Susman calls self-compassion automaticity—how effortlessly self-compassion arises in daily life, without having to consciously reach for it. By the six-month mark, the habit tools group also showed greater reductions in overall mental health symptoms. Most tellingly, the extent to which the practice became a habit explained accounted for a substantial share of the improvements across outcomes—suggesting that habit formation wasn’t just a delivery mechanism, but the active ingredient. “It’s not just what we teach,” Susman writes, “it’s whether it sticks.”
“It’s not just what we teach, it’s whether it sticks.”
Why Micropractice Matters
Susman is quick to note that micropractices are not a replacement for therapy or clinical treatment. “Just as brushing your teeth or flossing doesn’t replace the dentist,” he says, “micropractice is not a replacement for professional mental health care when you need it.” They are not a call to stop meditating, either. Can we carry what we cultivate off the mat and into the rest of the day? He describes a familiar pattern: after yoga, meditation, dancing, or a hard run, we feel great. Often, “as soon as we step back into our day, that serenity slips away,” he says. Micropractices are about helping us continue that serenity—moments waiting at the stoplight, the walk from the parking lot to the office, the 20 seconds before sipping your morning coffee.
The stakes of getting this right are significant. Study after study shows that the biggest barrier to engaging with contemplative practices, including meditation and yoga, is time. And the gap between knowing what helps and actually doing it is vast: research suggests that fewer than one in four people who learn to meditate practice daily. Meanwhile, more than half of Americans with psychological symptoms go without treatment each year. Existing self-compassion interventions, though effective, often require anywhere from one to twenty hours of guided instruction plus substantial home practice—a commitment that is neither feasible nor affordable for many people.
If a 20-second practice, done habitually, can produce meaningful benefits—and if researchers can figure out how to help people be consistent—that changes who contemplative tools can reach.
That possibility is now animating other researchers, too. Rob Klein, a developmental psychology PhD candidate at Cornell University and a 2025 Mind & Life Research Grantee, is asking a related but distinct question: what if the communities most excluded from traditional contemplative programs helped design the practices themselves? His forthcoming pilot study will work with unhoused Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) youth at the Ali Forney Center in New York City to co-design brief micropractices that integrate mindfulness and identity affirmation—practices shaped by the people who will use them, not adapted for them after the fact. His study hasn’t launched, but the question it’s asking marks a meaningful shift: not just who receives these tools, but who gets to shape them.
What Micropractice Research Doesn’t Yet Know
The evidence is promising, but it’s early. Susman’s first published micropractice study was conducted entirely with undergraduates—a sample from one university, which limits how broadly the findings generalize. The follow-up study, though larger and drawn from across the United States, is still undergoing peer-review. And there’s no consensus in the research literature on what, precisely, a micropractice is—20 seconds, under 10 minutes, a moment of awareness during a commute—and consistent measurement across studies remains an open problem.
As Susman puts it, research on micropractices is “how mindfulness was in the 80s—still in its infancy.” The field is moving quickly and generating real momentum. Susman is hoping to accelerate that momentum himself: his forthcoming book, Micropractice (Penguin Random House, October 2026), translates these findings into practical tools for a general audience, with 14 brief practices—each 30 seconds or less—organized around four elements: move, touch, breathe, and flow. But Susman tells readers that the scaffolding for this research is still going up, even as the public conversation around it accelerates. He shares ongoing insights on the emerging science of micropractices in his free newsletter, The Micro Memo.
The Question Worth Asking
“Life isn’t lived in 30-minute meditation sessions,” Susman observes. “It’s lived in the other 23 hours and 30 minutes.” Research is beginning to suggest that those hours aren’t empty space between practices. For outcomes like well-being and sleep, informal moments woven into daily life are turning out to matter as much as longer sessions.
Three breaths. Twenty seconds. A hand over the heart. The question researchers are now asking isn’t just whether something so small can help. It’s whether, given the right conditions, it might become the kind of thing we reach for without thinking—carrying what we cultivate into the rest of the day.
