Change your life IN 10 MINUTES

Can spending one percent of your day focusing on your wellness make you 99 percent happier? Self-professed self-help addict Marianne Power tries the habit hack

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I once spent a whole year of my life living, breathing and, in many cases, crying my way through self-help books. Each month, I picked a new book and did absolutely everything it told me to do in the hope that it would transform my broke, hungover, periodically depressed existence.

In the name of conquering my fears, I jumped out of planes, did stand-up comedy and modelled naked. I spent a month getting rejected every day as a part of a masochistic form of self-help called “Rejection Therapy” in the hope that the flames would rid me of my anxiety. Spoiler alert: It didn't happen. Not at all. By the end of the year, I had not turned into a cross between Buddha and Beyoncé. Instead, I was exhausted and overwhelmed by all the crazy things I'd done.

I learned that when it comes to wellness, less really is more.

Fortunately, the self-help world seems to be catching up to this approach with a book that embodies this ethos: The 1% Wellness Experiment by life coach Gabrielle Treanor. Its premise is that you need not devote hours to working on your wellbeing, you can improve your life by taking just one percent of your day - equal to about 10 minutes - to focus on your mental health.

MICRO-GAIN-GETTER

Research backs up this strategy of what's called “marginal gains”. The book cites British Cycling as the proof that micro changes soon add up. For many years, British Cycling was in the gutter. In 110 years, no British cyclist had ever won the Tour de France and, by 2003, the British team had won just one Olympic medal in the previous 100 years.