Will I see any benefits from doing yoga every day for the whole of January?

Welcome to the January update about my healthy habits experiment.

During 2022, I am trialing a new healthy habit each month. The aim is for these new habits to be easy to do every day. All can be done in 20 mins or under (or a shorter 5 min version for those days that are crazy busy).

I’ll be testing out whether practicing these habits proactively rather than doing them reactively when feeling stressed, really makes a difference.

In January, I did yoga every day, except for 2 days where I felt like I hated yoga!

It’s now March, and full confession, I’ve not done yoga since. It is not a habit I have been keeping up.

It’s a good break in the middle of a working day and if I worked at home more, then I think I would do this more. Although, truthfully I probably still prefer other types of exercise.

In terms of the benefits, I did feel subtly more alert and have more mental clarity. But given I do plenty of other exercise & it was only a short yoga session, I did not notice any physical benefits. I think 15mins is probably too short to feel any tangible benefits.

I used to love yoga. I went to a yoga studio a few times a week & I loved seeing friends there and felt inspired by the yoga teacher. All of these things you don’t get by using an app at home in the spare room.

I also found it difficult to prioritise it during the day so ended up doing it late at night which isn’t ideal as by that time all I wanted to do was to shut my eyes.

So, my conclusion is that for me, this habit never became an actual habit even in 31 days as I couldn’t feel enough benefits in doing it. For a habit to stick, you need to be able to see clear benefits (even if these benefits are long term, as with diet for example). I think at the back of my mind I also thought that I could probably gain more mental clarity using an alternative (more efficient?) method, such as meditation.

I will add meditation to one of the habits that I try in 2022. Next up in Feb is eating more nutrients. Stay tuned to see how that went.

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