If you’ve already established a strong meditation habit, it can still be difficult increasing the time you sit.

At some point most of us will hit a wall. Some days we’ll have more energy and go for longer, but over the week we’ll find it difficult to stay consistent with longer sits.

Luckily there are several methods you can use here, not just for meditation, but any practice you want to expand on:

1. Increase by a few minutes a week.

Add a minute or two, wait until your mind adapts, then move forward. The problem is that it's hard to estimate right because 10 more minutes for a few days might feel easy at first, but will it become automatic 5 days later? I found that it kind've doesn't. Also I have a tendency to add more time than I should because I'm feeling excited on one day, then the next day it'll drop back down.

2. Sign up for a meditation challenge.

Whenever I've done some sort've organized challenge – National Novel Writing Month, exercise challenges, meditation classes – I'm usually hopped up on Motivation and Novelty, supported by their methodology (usually gamified), the teachers, and the other participants. I also know that I'm only going to do it for a short amount of time.

Afterwards, when I'm done with the challenge, my daily practice is naturally elevated.

I find challenges are best done from the position of already having a solid practice nailed down. The problem is that such challenges often take a lot out of you, and if you don't have a plan on what to do afterwards you can just end up not meditating for awhile.

3. Train with a group.

There are tons of temples, centers, and meditation groups around. And nowadays a lot of them are also offering Zoom practice sessions. The setting makes it so that you're behaviorally bolstered through expectation and forced to do longer sessions, usually 45 minutes to an hour. It's also a great method to learn new things and meet new people. The downside is that you're locked into their style of practice.

4. Change up your practice.

If I do 3 techniques back to back it feels like I can effortlessly extend practice. For example - I was always stuck at 20 minutes of choiceless awareness meditation. Sure, I could sometimes up it to 45 minutes or an hour, but it would always drop back down - and it always felt filled with effort. But if I dropped to 15 minutes, then immediately switched to 15 of metta, and then 15 of anapanasati, 45 minutes suddenly felt really, really easy.

This is my favorite method, because not only does it get you used to longer sits, but we know that interleaved training helps to accelerate progress. I gained things in metta that gave me further insight in vipassana. And I love it when techniques solve two issues for the price of one.

This method also worked incredibly well for other skills, like reading and cardio. I think this works because once you have a habit set up and you’ve done some training, you aren’t limited by capacity, your limited by attention. So you can physically do 45 minutes of cardio, it just gets boring, and forcing attention into doing one thing like this seems to significantly drain your energy.

5. Alternate easy and difficult sessions across a week.

I have not done this for meditation, but in good running training programs you don't just try to continually extend runs linearly - you'll run longer one day, have an easier run the next day, then have an average run day, followed by an even longer run.

If the X axis is time in days, and the Y axis is distance, then day to day the runs would look like undulating waves getting higher and higher. The more I look into it, the more I feel really good running programs are an ideal template for meditative training. The only downside that I can see is that it requires long term preplanning and a lot of tracking.

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