A dozen years ago, I had an hour-long conference with a yoga teacher, and when I asked what sort of benefits I could expect, he promised that yoga would bring me pleasure. I hadn’t even considered this possibility, but I liked the sound of it. I will try this yoga, I thought. And when I get my pleasure, everyone else can go to hell.

Then I went to one of his class in a London studio, full of supple people in leggings, and saw the whole experience nerve-racking and humiliating. It wasn’t relaxing at all. It was like auditioning for Cats.

So I’m done doing yoga in front of people, but a volume called The 10 Minute Yoga Solution creates the possibility that I could get my joy in the privacy rights of my home, softly and rapidly. The writer, Ira Trivedi, makes a lot of bold asserts: she says that 10 minutes of yoga a day will not just build me calmer and more physically fit, it will improve my eyesight, control unhealthy feeing habits and cure a multitude of hair problems( it’s all about blood flowing to the scalp ). She also mentions joy, if only in passing.

The book itself has very few terms in it. It is simply a collect of illustrated poses- or asanas- with instructions, grouped into workouts tailored to specific requirements. Again, I find myself in a position to skip bits: yoga for women, for kids, for weight loss, for fasting, for binge-eating. I like the sound of” yoga for lazy people” and” yoga for hangovers”, but for the moment I am concentrating on yoga for beginners: eight poses, 10 minutes in all.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from a basic, self-administered yoga programme, but I hadn’t expected it to hurt quite so much. Sitting cross-legged hurts. The seated spinal twist hurts. Even the shavasana, the so-called corpse pose- lying flat on your back, limbs and legs spread, palms up, toes pointing out- hurts. I am, I discover, a collecting of small aches. As instructed, I contract the muscles in my feet and then relax them. My toes refuse to uncurl. Ten minutes begins to seem like an age.

***

There are, of course, a lot of self-improvement podcasts available- I found one titled simply You Suck: Be Better. Another, created by a former lawyer, suggested that I think of my period as if it were broken down into billable hours, so I learn to prize it more. I’d rather use my headphone time to acquire some actual information. I’ve got the happy volume and the yoga routine already. What I truly involve is a little knowledge.

I’ve always resisted the idea of learning more about economics. It was a passive resistance- I only wasn’t that interested in the subject- but perhaps, armed with the right podcast and a decent situated of headphones, I could enter into a new stage of passive learn. By common consent, NPR’s Planet Money is one of the best economics podcasts running. I haven’t listened to many- well, any- but Planet Money is entertaining, informative and aimed squarely at the layman. It’s not a primer, but more of a fun route to engage with what for many remains an off-putting subject. I encounter no mathematics.

But there’s a lot of it: two years’ worth, with a new episode posted every couple of days. Where to begin? What’s more, the average duration of each instalment is close to 20 minutes, which, in today’s self-improvement surrounding, is positively leisurely. There is a solution: it turns out you can just speed a podcast up. At first I supposed: who would do this? But lots of people do it. My own children, it transpires, routinely listen to sped-up records of their university lectures in order to save day. I had to download a new app to acquire the facility, but I can now listen to Planet Money at three times the original speed. Actually, I can’t – it’s pretty well unintelligible at that clip- but I soon find that if I expend a few minutes trying to keep up with the podcast at doubled speed, it then sounds perfectly normal at a more relaxed one-and-a-half hours. Within a few days, I’ve worked my route up to 1.8 x. Over the course of a week, I grow increasingly impatient with the pace of actual human conversation. Spit it out, I want to say.

A week in, I rise( 10 minutes) early and run through my yoga positions, beginning with some breathing: inhale the future, exhale the past, as the book says. I move on to the spinal spin and the shoulder stand. The corpse pose no longer hurts; in fact, my impersonation of a corpse is so convincing that I worry about my spouse walking in and procuring me. He died doing what he loved, she would think. Express yoga.

I listen to a podcast about robots taking over our chores on my style to and from the shops; about 1.6 x builds it the right length for the journey. Back at home, I sit down to settle on my next 15 -minute happiness task. Deciding often takes longer than 15 minutes, because I reject a few out of hand. Going through Nicholls’ volume, I come across the following passage:” If we’re grateful for life then we can’t be fearful, which means that any nervousnes we experience gets processed as exhilaration instead. If we’re grateful, then we act out of a sense that we have enough rather than out of a sense of scarcity or envy .”

He goes on to suggest spending” 15 minutes writing about some positive things that have happened to you “. I am extraordinarily resistant to this idea. I merely like writing about bad things that have happened to me, in part because I know I will never run out. At first, I can’t even think of any recent positive experiences, but after a few minutes, I recall a long and mostly tedious drive to Exeter the previous week.

I was thinking about nothing but my destination when I came upon Stonehenge at sunset, the stones glistening in the low, pink light. At that moment, traffic slowed to a crawling, enabling me to get a long look. This is free, I believed. A wondrous thing to marvel at, and I haven’t driven an inch out of my style. After 10 minutes, the traffic cleared and I was off again, feeling strangely moved. And then I forgot all about it.

The exercise takes 20 minutes from start to finish- too long. I recall that email from the life coach-” This is REAL WORK, isn’t it ?” I begin to think of my time in terms of billable hours.

***

Time is becoming an issue. Ten minutes of yoga is one thing, but when you add in a happiness exercise and the 12 minutes it takes me to listen to a 20 -minute podcast, you’re talking about almost a whole hour. It occurs to me that I might double up on some of this improvement.

There is a certain amount of natural overlap. Both 15 Minutes To Happiness and The 10 Minute Yoga Solution stress the importance of breathing, and the exercises are not dissimilar. But focus is the key to both, and the focal point are different. It’s harder to mix mindfulness and stillness than it sounds. Add in a podcast explaining what GDP is, and the whole thing becomes an exercise in annoyance. I am reminded, to my eternal letdown, that there are no quick fixes.

After a fortnight of this, I would have to say the improvements have been marginal: some extra flexible here, a bit more gratitude there, a lot more to say when the subject of GDP next comes up at a dinner party. The Nicholls book is worth a read even if you do none of the exercises, if merely to come away with the knowledge that the successful pursuit of happiness mainly involves not trying too hard.” It’s not unrealistic to think that in stopping trying to be happy, you can find that you’re happy enough already ,” he writes.” Paradoxically, it could be that the only reason for you being unhappy is your relentless endeavor at trying not be .”

And I’ve learned the lesson I was always going to learn, only faster: stop stimulating New Year solvings. Again.

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