There is an interesting possible link between meditation, Parkinson’s and brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF).

BDNF is a protein that helps the brain maintain and strengthen neurons and supports neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to reorganize its neural connections. BDNF activity may be reduced in Parkinson’s, while exercise is known to increase it temporarily.

Could meditation have a similar effect? A meta-analysis of eight controlled trials found that mindfulness-based interventions were associated with increased BDNF measured in the blood. The studies were not specifically about Parkinson’s, and some interventions included movement, so we should be cautious about drawing conclusions.

Still, it raises an intriguing possibility: meditation may support some of the same biological processes involved in the brain’s resilience and adaptation. It’s a hypothesis worth exploring, not evidence that meditation slows Parkinson’s.

Read the study
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7522212

A Personal Study of Attention Over Time

Over 75 meditation sittings, I counted genuine distractions and recorded sitting length, time of day, and internal and external conditions. Standardized to 30 minutes, distractions declined by about 28 percent. Progress was uneven, conditions mattered, and no ideal time of day emerged. The experiment shows how a simple meditation log can reveal gradual changes in attention that are difficult to perceive within any single sitting.

Introduction

A basic instruction in breath meditation is to notice when attention has wandered and gently return it to the breath. With practice, we expect attention to become steadier. Yet this change can be difficult to perceive. A meditation may feel settled one day and restless the next, while gradual improvement remains hidden within the variability of individual sittings.

To make this change more visible, I began counting genuine distractions during meditation with a small mechanical tally counter. I did not count every passing thought or sensation. I counted only those moments when I had clearly lost contact with the breath and then recognized that my attention had wandered. After each sitting, I recorded the number of distractions, the length and time of the meditation, and simple ratings of my internal and external conditions.

This report examines 75 sittings recorded between December 2025 and September 2026. It asks whether distractions became less frequent over time, whether time of day made a difference, and how strongly attention was affected by conditions within me and around me. The result is not a controlled scientific study, but a structured record of one meditation practice over time.

Method

I used a small mechanical tally counter during each meditation. After allowing approximately one minute to settle, I began counting genuine distractions. I did not count every thought, sound or bodily sensation. I pressed the counter only when I realized that I had clearly lost contact with the breath and had been carried away by something else. Each count marked both the recognition of distraction and the return of attention.

After each sitting, I recorded the date, time, length of meditation and total number of distractions. I also rated the internal and external conditions on a simple scale from 1 to 3. An internal rating described such factors as mental agitation, emotion, fatigue or physical restlessness. An external rating described conditions such as noise, movement, animals or other activity in the environment. A rating of 1 indicated relatively favourable conditions, while 3 indicated substantial difficulty. Brief notes sometimes identified the particular circumstances.

The sittings ranged from 20 to 45 minutes. Raw counts therefore could not be compared directly because a longer meditation provides more opportunities for distraction. Each count was converted to its equivalent rate per 30 minutes. A sitting with six distractions in 20 minutes, for example, became a standardized rate of nine distractions per 30 minutes.

The log recorded how many distractions occurred, but not when they occurred. Any statement that translates the rate into an average interval, such as one distraction every three or four minutes, is therefore a statistical expression rather than an observation of their actual spacing. Distractions may have been evenly distributed, clustered together or concentrated in one part of a sitting.

Results

The Course of the Practice

The distraction rate varied considerably from one sitting to the next. Highly distracted sessions appeared beside relatively settled ones, and the overall decline was interrupted by plateaus and temporary reversals. The practice did not improve in a smooth or orderly way.

The greatest variability occurred around the middle of the record. Several sittings during this period lasted only 20 minutes. When their counts were standardized to 30 minutes, each additional distraction added 1.5 to the reported rate. Some of these sittings also occurred under more difficult internal or external conditions. Shorter duration, changing circumstances and ordinary variation between meditations all contributed to the sharp movement in the chart.

Beneath these fluctuations, the underlying rate gradually moved downward. The later sittings still varied, but they generally varied around a lower level than the earlier ones.

Figure 1. Distractions across 75 meditation sittings, standardized to 30 minutes. The thin green line represents individual sittings, and the thicker blue line represents the ten-sitting moving average. The first 25 sittings averaged 10.6 distractions per 30 minutes; the final 25 averaged 7.6.

Fewer Distractions Over Time

The first 25 sittings averaged 10.6 distractions per 30 minutes. The final 25 averaged 7.6, a decrease of about 28 percent. This was the expected direction of change: repeated meditation practice should help attention remain with the breath more consistently.

Expressed as a statistical average, the rate declined from roughly one distraction every three minutes to one every four minutes. This does not mean that distractions actually arrived at regular intervals. Their timing was not recorded. The comparison simply gives a more intuitive sense of the change in frequency.

The chart also shows why many sittings were needed. No single count would have established the direction of the practice. A high count might reflect a difficult day, while a low count might be followed immediately by a restless sitting. The pattern only became visible across the longer record.

Time of Day

I expected that meditation might be easier at certain times of day. Alertness, fatigue, meals and the rhythm of work could all plausibly influence attention. The log offered little support for a consistently better time.

The raw averages initially appeared to favour midday and evening sittings, while afternoon sittings had a higher distraction rate. However, many afternoon sittings occurred early in the record, when distraction rates were generally higher. Once the stage of practice, sitting length and internal and external conditions were considered, the differences largely disappeared.

This personal record cannot establish that time of day never matters. The sittings were not distributed evenly across the day, and relatively few took place in the morning or late afternoon. Within this practice, however, accumulated experience appeared to matter more than finding an ideal hour.

Internal and External Conditions

Conditions had a clearer relationship with distraction. When internal conditions were rated 1, the average was 8.7 distractions per 30 minutes. The rate rose to 9.5 at rating 2 and 12.8 at rating 3. External conditions followed a similar pattern: 8.7 at rating 1, 10.1 at rating 2 and 12.6 at rating 3.

Neither type of condition clearly mattered more than the other. Internal agitation, emotion and physical restlessness could affect attention much as noise, animals and activity in the room did. The source of the disturbance differed, but its relationship with the distraction count was broadly similar.

The notes make these categories less abstract. They mention dogs walking or barking, an ant on the mat, a fly in the room, illness, post-exam restlessness, grief, meditation planning and difficult memories. Ordinary life remained present in the practice and visible in the data.

Discussion

The main result was expected: distractions became less frequent over the course of 75 sittings. What the log adds is a clearer picture of how that improvement appeared. It did not arrive as a steady sequence of increasingly settled meditations. Individual sittings remained unpredictable, while the underlying level of distraction gradually declined.

The effect of conditions is equally important. A higher count did not necessarily mean that the practice was deteriorating. It could reflect what was happening within me or around me on that particular day. This is one reason a meditation log is more useful than an isolated count. The log places each number within a longer practice and, when needed, within the circumstances of the sitting.

Time of day was less important than I expected. No hour emerged as reliably superior once the progression of the practice and other conditions were considered. This finding may be useful for meditators who spend too much effort looking for perfect circumstances. A regular time may help establish a habit, but this record gives little reason to believe that attention depended on identifying an ideal part of the day.

Sitting length also changed during the experiment. The first 25 sittings averaged 27 minutes, while the final 25 averaged a little more than 31 minutes. I chose to sit longer; the data do not show that counting increased my capacity to do so. The change matters mainly because it makes raw counts misleading. Standardizing the results to 30 minutes allowed shorter and longer sittings to be compared on the same basis.

Several limitations remain. This was one person’s observational record rather than a controlled experiment. The definitions of distraction and difficult conditions depended on personal judgement. Counting may itself have changed how quickly I noticed distraction, and the method cannot distinguish the effects of meditation practice from growing familiarity with the counter. The sittings were also unevenly distributed across dates, times and conditions.

These limitations do not make the log uninformative. They define the scale of the conclusion. The results do not prove a general law about meditation. They show that within one sustained practice, a simple and consistent method revealed a meaningful decline that would have been difficult to detect from memory alone.

Conclusion

Across 75 sittings, the standardized distraction rate declined by about 28 percent. Expressed as an average rate, this was the equivalent of moving from roughly one distraction every three minutes to one every four minutes. The change was uneven, and difficult internal and external conditions continued to affect individual sittings. Time of day, by contrast, did not appear to have a consistent effect.

The deepest lesson of the log may be that progress in meditation is easier to see across many sittings than within any single one. A restless meditation does not erase the larger direction of practice, and a settled meditation does not establish it. Counting provided a modest form of feedback: not a score to pursue, but a way of seeing gradual changes in attention that otherwise might have remained hidden.

Adapting to a Changing Body

Research suggests that meditation may benefit people with Parkinson’s. The strongest evidence concerns reduced anxiety and depression, greater emotional balance, and improved quality of life. There are also promising, though less certain, findings concerning cognition, movement, neuroplasticity, inflammation, and dopamine (see related essay).

Those findings matter, but they do not fully explain the personal value of meditation after a Parkinson’s diagnosis. Meditation offers something more intimate: a way of meeting the body and mind as they are, even as they change in ways we did not choose.

Meditation is not a cure for Parkinson’s, nor should it replace medication, exercise, physiotherapy, or medical care. It is a complementary practice that may help us live more steadily within the life we have.

Stillness Does Not Mean Immobility

I have Parkinson’s. My left hand shakes, and sometimes the shaking distracts me when I meditate. This presents an apparent contradiction: meditation is commonly pictured as perfect stillness—a person sitting upright, motionless and serene—while Parkinson’s may bring tremor, rigidity, restlessness, dyskinesia, pain, or difficulty maintaining a posture. That traditional image can make meditation seem inaccessible just when it might be most helpful.

Yet meditation has helped me recognize that stillness does not require a motionless body. Stillness in meditation is primarily a quality of attention. My hand may shake while I observe the shaking. Sitting on a meditation cushion can also challenge my balance, especially during longer meditations, and I sometimes find myself leaning toward my weaker side. I use this as a gentle exercise: noticing the shift, recovering my balance, and gradually developing greater stability. It helps. The movement may continue while the mind becomes less agitated by it, and posture may be adjusted without the meditation having failed.

Parkinson’s affects movement, but it does not remove our capacity to notice movement. Even an involuntary motion can become part of the field of awareness.

Voluntary and Involuntary Movement

My meditation training has included Goenka Vipassana retreats, where periods of determined stillness—adhiṭṭhāna—are an important part of the practice. The meditator intends not to move and learns to observe sensations without reacting automatically.

Parkinson’s complicates this instruction in an illuminating way. There is a difference between choosing not to move and demanding that the body produce no movement. Tremor is not a failure of determination. Rigidity is not evidence of spiritual resistance. An involuntary movement does not break the intention to remain attentive.

The useful question is not simply, “Did my body move?” It is, “How did I relate to what happened?” Did I tense against the tremor? Did fear or irritation arise? Could I feel the movement directly before surrounding it with judgment?

Meditation may help separate the physical event from the distress we sometimes build around it. This does not mean that suffering is imaginary or that symptoms can be thought away. It means that symptoms and our reactions to them are related but not identical. Within that distinction, there may be room for greater ease.

Bringing Tremor into the Meditation

When my hand shakes, I can make the tremor itself the object of meditation. Instead of treating it as an interruption, I notice its rhythm, intensity, and location. I feel the movement in the fingers, hand, wrist, or arm and observe how it changes.

I also notice my mental response. There may be impatience, embarrassment, fear, or a wish for the shaking to stop. These reactions are part of the experience and can be observed without pretending they are pleasant.

At other times, attending directly to the tremor gives it too much prominence. I can then move my attention to something steadier: the breath at the nostrils, the movement of the abdomen, sounds in the room, or sensations elsewhere in the body. The shaking remains, but it moves into the background.

Neither approach is more advanced. Sometimes we turn toward a difficult sensation; sometimes we widen the field around it. Meditation allows for both.

Supporting the Body

Meditation should adapt to the body rather than requiring the body to conform to an ideal. On some days, sitting upright may feel natural. On others, a supportive chair, a cushion behind the back, or lying down may be more appropriate.

The hands can also be supported. Resting a shaking hand on the thigh, in the lap, or against a cushion may reduce its movement or make it less distracting. Gently placing one hand over the other can sometimes provide steadiness. The aim is not to suppress the tremor at all costs, but to find a position in which the body does not require constant management.

If discomfort makes movement necessary, I can reposition myself slowly and attentively. The movement becomes part of the meditation: the intention to move, the lifting of the body, the change in pressure, and the return to rest.

A short, attentive meditation may be more useful than a longer period spent struggling against pain or rigidity. Five or ten minutes can be a complete meditation, not merely preparation for a “real” one.

Meditation in Motion

Sitting is only one form of meditation. Walking meditation may be helpful when sitting is uncomfortable or the body needs to move. The practice can be as simple as feeling each foot meet the ground and noticing the sequence of lifting, moving, and placing it.

For someone with Parkinson’s, walking may already require attention. Meditation brings a different quality of awareness, but its purpose is not to perfect the gait or replace movement therapy. It is to inhabit the experience of walking without judging every step.

Gentle stretching, standing, and other deliberate movements can also be approached meditatively. Attention remains with bodily sensation, breathing, balance, and intention. The boundary between meditation and daily activity begins to soften.

Working with Difficulty

Meditation is sometimes presented as a way to become calm. Calm may arise, and reduced stress and anxiety are among its most credible potential benefits for people with Parkinson’s. But making calm the immediate goal can create another difficulty. If agitation, tremor, or fear continues, we may conclude that the practice is not working.

The first task is simpler: to know what is happening. If anxiety is present, we can notice how it appears in the body. If frustration arises, we can recognize it. If the breath is shallow, we do not need to force it deeper. We can begin by feeling one breath as it is.

This is not passive resignation. Clear observation can help us respond intelligently. We may recognize that we need to change position, rest, move, exercise, take prescribed medication, or speak with someone. Acceptance does not mean refusing to act. It means beginning with an honest perception of present conditions.

Self-compassion belongs here too. Meditating with a changing body can require patience and courage. Kindness toward ourselves is not a consolation prize for failing to remain still. It is part of the practice.

The Body as Teacher

Parkinson’s can make the body feel unreliable or even alien. Actions that were once automatic may require conscious effort. Symptoms can fluctuate, leaving us uncertain about what the body will do next.

Meditation may not restore our old relationship with the body, but it can help cultivate a new one. Sensations can be observed as changing events rather than as a single fixed condition called “my Parkinson’s.” Tremor changes in rhythm and intensity. Rigidity has location, pressure, and texture. Even discomfort is not entirely uniform when examined closely.

The purpose is not to make symptoms fascinating or pleasant. Close attention simply restores detail to experience. Parkinson’s is a diagnosis, but the body remains a living process, changing from moment to moment.

Meditation may also reveal what remains available: breath, sensation, sound, emotion, memory, and awareness. Some of these capacities may change over time, but the practice does not depend on performing a complicated sequence or meeting a physical standard. It can become simpler as necessary.

A Practice That Can Adapt

Meditation is a practice that can remain with us for life. It requires no special equipment or physical ability. At its simplest, all we need is our breath and the capacity to notice it.

Parkinson’s varies not only from person to person but from hour to hour. A durable meditation practice must therefore be flexible enough to meet the body of the day. As our circumstances change, the posture, duration, or method may change with them.

Some people may find it easier to meditate during an “on” period, when medication is working well. Others may find that gentle observation during an “off” period helps them meet discomfort with less alarm. Neither choice is more authentic. The best time is the one that makes a sustainable practice possible.

Fatigue, sleepiness, pain, medication effects, or cognitive changes may alter the practice. Guidance, recordings, group meditation, or the presence of a teacher may become increasingly valuable. The form can change while the heart of the practice continues.

Meditation can last thirty minutes in a quiet room, five minutes in a chair, or a few breaths while waiting for an appointment. Wherever we are and whatever the body is doing, the breath offers a way back to the present moment. Meditation can travel with us through the changing circumstances of a life.

Beginning Gently

For someone with Parkinson’s who is new to meditation, a modest beginning is usually best. Sit for five or ten minutes in a stable, comfortable chair. Let the hands rest wherever they feel supported. Bring attention to the breath where it is easiest to feel—perhaps at the nostrils, in the chest, or in the abdomen.

There is no need to breathe in a special way. When attention wanders, return gently. When movement occurs, notice it. If the tremor becomes overwhelming, shift attention to a steadier anchor. Adjust the body when necessary and then continue.

• Comfort and stability matter more than an ideal posture.
• Involuntary movement does not interrupt meditation.
• Tremor can be observed directly or allowed to remain in the background.
• Deliberate movement can be made slowly and attentively.
• Short, regular sittings are more valuable than occasional tests of endurance.
• Walking, standing, reclining, and seated meditation are all legitimate forms.
• Difficult symptoms may be observed, but they do not always need to be endured.
• Meditation should complement—not replace—medical care, medication, exercise, and social support.

Parkinson’s asks for many forms of adaptation. Meditation can help us adapt without fighting every movement, judging every difficulty, or abandoning ourselves.