Cleaning the kitchen every night before I go to bed. What a task. What an enormous & daunting task it was. You can imagine how hard this has been for me. Okay, maybe not, but since cleaning does not come natural to me at all, it was a bit of a challenge. At first, but as I got into it, it was actually pretty nice. And the benefit was always worth the extra 20 minutes after dinner: Coming downstairs and seeing everything beam and gleam is a very relaxed way to wake-up and make breakfast. We’re almost a month in already (because there is only so much you can write about cleaning a kitchen I kind of skipped on updates), and I like it so much I’m keeping it up. Successful 30 Day Trial, basically. Here’s why.

One,  clean kitchen straight after dinner. What’s not to love about that? Your pans and pots don’t stick with food, you give fruit flies less of a chance to populate your kitchen and the smells of cooking leave your Arena of Food way sooner. And the next morning, you can start over with all the healthy and delicious foods you want to eat that day. As darling Eva so eloquently put it: “Clean slate to work with.”

Two, it inspires the sexy manfriend I live with. Don’t get me wrong, he was already often a dear: we have the silent rule that if I’ve done all the cooking he cleans the kitchen and vice versa. Now he sees me cleaning the kitchen straight after, he started doing it straight away too, not the morning after.

Three, it seems to help me grasp some concepts of ‘household’. For one thing, I’ve started doing some dishes and putting ingredients away while I’m cooking. Instead of after when I’m all full and slow. This saves plenty of time after dinner. And once you have a clean kitchen, you become much more inclined to take care of other household tasks. You kind of want other areas to look neat too and that pile of laundry upstairs just seems a bit silly; you could do that right now! Whereas no interior magazine photographer will ever get into this place without three weeks notice, I definitely see all over improvements.

Hmm. Maybe I should call my mom: there might just be hope for me after all.

Well…after my last post a long period of trying, trying it again, and trying it differently ensued. The highlight was bribing myself with Chanel; which worked, but would probably work on anyone. Great trick for girls in need of discipline. Just promise yourself Chanel. Seriously.

But after all that trying, and then some, it’s -once again- time for me to conclude that at home yoga is just not for me. Maybe never, maybe some day, but right now it really isn’t. I am only sitting stretching out my required time. It’s kind of a part of my day that I’d rather skip. I don’t notice any amazing benefits. I’d written about this sooner but to be honest there was so much boredom (if not dread on worse days) about just getting onto that mat in the living room most days, I couldn’t really muster up any interest  to start writing about it too. Let’s take a look at the final scores, shall we?

It’s not that it was truly terrible, it has just been really ‘meh‘. I don’t want to waste any more of my time with ‘meh‘. ‘Meh’ does not make me happy. See, I kind of thought that I’d feel super-epic, limber and energetic if I added this half an hour. That has been kind of a let down. Which tends to happen if you have insanely high expectations,  but that’s a point for another time. Points for today would be:

For the past few weeks, I’ve been taking classes between 4-6 times a week and I know exactly why this works for me. The benefits are instant, and amazing. I’ve experienced such a surge in energy that I am so much more productive and active during the day. I sleep easier. I crave healthy foods. I have a kick ass immune system and a great mood most days. Because of this I am more convinced of something that I have always intuitively felt: at home practice pales in comparison to what Bikram yoga classes do for me. Let me make it clear that I only say this because it’s true for me, not for anyone else.

But whereas I half-assedly flop around on my yoga mat at home, and feel next to nothing, I have a serious but enjoyable yoga practice in the studio where I can feel the work I’m doing in terms of physical, mental and spiritual health. Not only is it beneficial, it is fascinating. I feel limitless when I practice Bikram Yoga.

So this month has once again opened my eyes to how important Bikram Yoga is for my well-being. I am making it a top priority to be able to practice in terms of willingness, time and finances. I’ve saved up money for my next Unlimited Card and I’ve started going to the 06:30 AM yoga class before work (which is insanely good for me, I’ve found). Which is why I’m thankful for trying this Trial.

I do love a good Standing Bow but the meditation was great. It’s amazing how great five minutes of silence can make you feel, and how clear certain things become if you just let your thoughts come and go. I’d be interested in trying more meditation, and I think that is going to be a next thirty day trial.

So to sum up, although not as riveting a tale as I hoped it would be, I’m thankful for this trial, it has nudged me into all the right directions. And knowing where you want to go next is always wonderful.

- I work with an egg timer, my yoga mat and a yoga towel. I am barefoot, but wear leggings and a comfortable longsleeve t-shirt. Not only is it not in my million-degrees-celcius studio (and it’s currently minus a million degrees outside), I suspect that my neigbors can see me from their windows.

- I do 5 minutes of sun salutations, 20 minutes of standing postures (click here for examples on those), 20 minutes of floor postures (click here for examples on those) and I end with 5 minutes of silent meditation. This way it’s done in less than an hour while it’s still long enough to be a work-out and get the benefits.

- Although not mandatory, mornings are the best time for me: I am most active in the morning anyway, plus I get it done and can continue with the rest of my day.

Well…I got up at 8:30 and did my routine. And the problem I have with at home yoga instantly presented itself: I start to struggle. Suddenly, I want to be in the yoga studio. In the heat. With a teacher. With other people. Without the annoying sound of an egg timer. I find it hard to focus, because all I think about is everything I still have to do. Dishes, work stuff, boyfriend upstairs in bed, stuff like that. Suddenly, time goes by slower, I don’t enjoy the postures and I am fidgety, annoyed and frustrated because all I want to do now is run to my yoga studio for some real yoga. Or at least, how I have defined real yoga for myself.

But that’s not the point. I am doing this because I want to invite an easier, faster and more flexible yoga routine into my life. I am doing this out of curiosity, out of interest and because it would be good for me. If only it would feel that way.

After I finished, it didn’t feel like an accomplishment. I just really missed Bikram Yoga and felt really frustrated I couldn’t go. I didn’t have the money right now. Moving has been expensive and living on my own for the first time in my life means more expenses in general too. I needed more money before I could buy a new yoga card. 

Lin came over, right after her first Bikram Yoga class in months. She told me how great it had been, which as you can imagine didn’t really help my mood. I told her that this 30 Day Trial already felt like a pain in the ass and that I wish I could go to yoga. She offered helpful advice, and after that we dropped the subject.

I had no intention to give up, I really want to keep going for 30 days to see what that’s like. I just needed to figure out ways to make it easier. I thought about that, and decided this needs to include getting it out of the way by doing it first thing in the morning, treating myself to weekly rewards and also doing a few single classes this month to treat myself as well.

Later that day, I decided to check into my on-line bank account, and came to a very pleasant, seriously unexpected surprise. My bank account’s balance had unexpectedly received money overnight. Turns out I got a ‘financial housewarming gift’ from one of my uncles. I had not seen that one coming.

That money makes the difference between me being able to go to Bikram yoga in a month, and me being able to go to Bikram Yoga tomorrow. Creating a yoga routine at home does no longer have to be substitute for my yoga classes, but can become an addition to them. It doesn’t have to serve as the consolation price for something I love. It can be a whole new thing entirely for me to love. And that feels like such a relief to me.

However, that does not mean I instantly started loving at home yoga the next day(s). Man, I wish.

You know those kids who keep going: “But I don’t wanna!” in that incredibly irritating whiny way? That’s what my brain keeps doing. That’s what I have to listen to before and during. It takes an incredible amount of effort and focus to shut it out, and I fail a lot of the time. This results in a fidgety, annoyed practice, with lots of checking the egg timer and continuously trying to bring myself back to the present moment.

The sun salutions are going pretty okay though and I do like the quiet meditation at the end. If only I now could figure out how to do everything in the middle with the same relaxed enjoyment. I hope I will, so on we go.

Wanting a Bikram Yoga card. Expressing this to my best friend in the morning. Receiving the financial gift that will make that possible, that very same afternoon.

I got the idea from Steve Pavlina (who wrote about it here), who in turn got it from the computer industry. Companies often offer 30-day trials of certain games or softwares for you to try out: if you like it, you buy it. If you don’t like it, you stop using it and try something else. It can effectively be applied to habits. You might be familiar with the idea that it takes 21 days to install a new habit. I’m not sure if it’s exactly true but if there is one thing I know is that forming a new habit takes time…and can be really hard.

Human beings are wired to have habits take up as little mental capacity as possible. This is most effective if you look at it on a day-to-day basis; we often repeat behaviors, and if they take up as little brain space as possible, this leaves more cognitive capacity for other things. However, if your habits are ineffective, such as eating junk food, always saying ‘yes’, browsing the Internet for hours and watching countless television shows, your day-to-day functioning becomes incredibly limited, and the worst thing is: breaking the patterns will take up an incredible amount of cognitive energy.

Basically what you do is you do something differently for 30 days straight. You commit to doing this certain thing fr 30 days, nothing more. You don’t have to give up cigarettes for the rest of your life, you don’t have to visualize every single day for the rest of the year: you just have to do something for 30 days. After that, you can always decide to go back or to use a different approach. You commit to 30 days of doing something and see where it leads.

30 days is completely do-able and yet it’s plenty of time to really see the benefits of a new habit. If you don’t drink coffee for a few days, you can’t really tell any difference — except for maybe withdrawal, which wouldn’t give an accurate idea of what life wihout coffee really would be like anyway. If you exercise for three days in a row, that’s not really going to change anything.

But 30 days? That will actually show the real benefits (or disadvantages). That might actually make a big difference in your life. Anything can be done for 30 days in a row.

It’s also a great way to install habits you may not want to continue to do daily, such as exercise. By committing to doing it every day for 30 days, it becomes a daily habit. And those require very little cognitive capacity, remember? Therefore much, much easier to maintain than forming it by doing it a couple of times a week. You can always cut back after the thirty days.

If you can’t think of anything, this is the list of Steve Pavlina’s suggestions in the article I linked above.

Now, last year I did two of these, sort of. One was in March, with a limited Internet time. This was quite a succesful one, definitely cleared my mind. Then I did a Bikram Yoga Challenge in April: I took a 90-minute yoga class for 30 days in a row. That 30-day trial was for charity, which is why it was a good thing on its own, but that challenge was also responsible for how I look today. Nothing has changed my body quite the way that those 30 days of yoga did.

But you know what? You don’t have to just read this and believe it. I’m going to do 30-day trials and write regular reports.  After all, if I didn’t, what kind of Self Help Hipster would I be?