New Year’s resolutions are promises we make to be good to ourselves. Even if they sometimes bring disappointment (when we learn that we can’t actually go running at dawn, unless we’re being chased), they’re a great opportunity to allow our better natures to surface.

If you’d like to really treat yourself in the new year, we cannot recommend meditation practice highly enough. Here, in no special order, are five reasons why:

It’s extremely good for you. The studies on the health benefits of meditation read like a public health researcher’s fevered dream. A couple we’ve found interesting: Meditation practiced regularly over the long-term cuts overall mortality from heart attack and stroke in half It makes you smarter–“significantly improved visuo-spatial processing, working memory, and executive functioning”–in four days. See our “Benefits of meditation” page for more.

It helps you be kind to others. Meditation is known for allowing practitioners the mental space to notice and empathize with others. If you’d like to help the world, more kindness and sanity in your everyday interactions is a fantastic place to start. Meditation can help you follow Gandhi’s advice to “be the change you wish to see in the world.”

It’s free. Maintaining a meditation practice doesn’t take much more than a clean room and a place to sit. You can start right now, and it’s one of the best things you can do for yourself and others. (Or your money back!)

It’s good for personal development. Over time, regular meditation is known to instill gentleness, perceptiveness, courage, resiliency, dignity, decency, and a lot of other personality traits that turn out to be nice to have even if you weren’t specifically planning on developing them.

It can help you keep your other resolutions! Meditation has been linked, for example, to increased success quitting smoking. One psychotherapist who runs a clinic that uses meditation for smoking cessation reports: “We’ve seen people not only quit smoking, but begin daily exercise, change their diet, be more generous to others, increase their curiosity about life and improve relationships.” If any of that sounds resolution-worthy, meditation could be a great way to ring in the new year.

We started Medivate to help people bring the benefits of regular meditation into their lives. If you’re interested, we recommend you have a look around the site, and set yourself an easy, achievable meditation goal. (5 minutes a day would be a great place to start.)

If you start off easy and make use of the tools and support we offer, we think you’ll be in a great place to make regular meditation an easy, delightful, and permanent part of your life. We hope we can help you make the new year a kinder, healthier, more peaceful one—that’s our resolution. Best wishes!