As a yoga student, you’re familiar with the feeling of well-being that comes after yoga practice and deep relaxation. You go home feeling so alive and clear-headed, it’s a feeling you never want to end. The feeling may stay with you for a few minutes, or hours, or maybe even a few days if you’re lucky. But soon, daily life creeps in and you find yourself gossiping with a friend or watching a trashy television show, and suddenly you feel clouded again.

Just as eating junk food can make the body sluggish, taking in mental junk leads to a murky mind. When you first begin yoga practice, it’s hard enough to simply sit up straight for a few minutes, so that’s where you start. But as you gain experience working with the body and learn to focus the mind as you move through the postures, you grow eager to bring these feelings of mental clarity beyond the mat and into your daily life.

Just as you began your yoga practice with small steps – focusing on how to position your feet in triangle pose, how to let go of tension in corpse pose – you must begin with small steps as you explore how to stop filling your mind with mental junk food.

Once you start you may feel a strong desire to change everything at once, but instead chose one habit and observe yourself when you engage in that habit. Become a detective, make note of the surrounding circumstances. Do you tend to gossip when you get together with a certain friend? Do you bad-talk others when you’re feeling insecure? Do you watch junky television when you’re tired, or bored, or feeling blue?

The most important thing to remember while in detective mode is that you should not try to make changes. You’ll undoubtedly feel frustrated and embarrassed by the frequency with which you’re taking in this mental junk food, but that’s only because you’re paying such close attention. Before you can make a change, you must become intimately aware of the habit. This is your chance to practice being gentle with yourself, rather than beating yourself up. Recognize that these are simply behaviors you’ve grown accustomed to, and with some practice and awareness you can make a change.

Then start slowly, keeping in mind the information you’ve gathered. When you find yourself in a circumstance that led to this undesired behavior in the past, pay closer attention. Let the friend know that you’ve been gossiping too much lately and you need her help in cutting back. Instead of talking badly about someone when you’re feeling insecure, vocalize your concerns about your own abilities and recognize that it has nothing to do with that person. Rather than automatically turning on the television, find some other way to relax and unwind when you come home from a long day at work, something that doesn’t cloud you or leaving you feeling mentally sluggish.

Then, just as you did with your warrior poses and your down dog – practice. Expect that you’ll go back to the undesired behavior many times on your road to leaving the behavior behind. When you slip up, revisit detective mode: observe that you’ve taken a misstep and consider the reasons behind it, then quit worrying about it and return to your practice. True change comes slowly.

As you begin to change how you feed your mind, you may find yourself feeling more energetic, much as you would after changing what you feed your body. The power of the mind is incredible, so if you pay as much attention to your mental diet as you do to your physical one, you’ll be rewarded with a clear, fit mind and that wonderful post-yoga-class feeling on a daily basis!