I take long, indulgent showers. I spend a minute or two under the showerhead for no other reason than to bask in the rush of water. I even step out from under the water to lather up, shave, and wash my hair, letting the water run directly down the drain. It’s terrible. I’ve known it’s terrible for a long time, but this is one daily ritual that I’ve been, up till now, unwilling to change. My long showers have always felt central to my sense of wellbeing.

Fortunately, my water footprint is smaller in other areas. As a vegetarian, my diet consumes less water than it would if I ate red meat regularly. I turn the faucet off while brushing my teeth, only run the washing machine when it’s full and keep a close eye on drips and leaks around the house. I’m also very conscious of my role in keeping our collective water clean. I’m careful about what goes down the drain, and only use nontoxic cleaning and personal care products.

Greg and I have made other meaningful changes throughout this week to reduce our impact, like giving up the car, turning off overhead lights, and buying whole local foods instead of processed and packaged products. And these are all changes that I can see us keeping up with long after No Impact Week is over. But for some reason, it’s been hard to imagine life without my luxurious showers.  You know those mornings when you have somewhere to be and you wake up to no hot water? You either jump in and out of the shower hastily, or you wash your face, brush your teeth, run a wet cloth under your underarms and call it a day. No one likes those mornings. In fact, they have a tendency to set an unpleasant pace for the rest of the day that can be hard to shake. And that has always been the image I get when I imagine a day without a long, hot shower.

To give me a little motivation to revise my morning ritual, I decided to get a better idea of how much water I actually use in those beautiful, soothing, self-affirming showers. Turns out a typical shower head uses up to eight gallons of water per minute. Our low flow shower head uses only 2.5 gallons per minute, but considering that my showers are about ten minutes long on average (I know, it’s terrible), that means I use 25 gallons of water per shower, 175 gallons per week, and 9,125 gallons a year. Meanwhile, the majority of our global population has to walk for at least three hours to fetch water, it takes six gallons of water to grow a single serving of lettuce and nearly 49 gallons of water to produce just one eight-ounce glass of milk. What’s more, two-thirds of the world’s population, 52 countries, will have water shortages by 2025. I’m feeling pretty selfish right about now. I have to be able to do better.

So for No Impact Week, I’ve given up showers. I’m still clean, I swear. Today I filled a gallon bucket with water, dunked my head in it, sudsed up with shampoo and soap, and then dumped the bucket over my head to rinse off. I had to fill it again halfway to get the rest of the soap off, but I managed to cut my shower water use today down from 25 gallons to one and a half. I don’t feel any less clean, and instead of feeling off kilter all day like I expected, things went pretty smoothly.

Maybe I won’t bathe this way every day for the rest of my life, but hopefully this exercise will give me the perspective I need to make those long showers an occasional luxury, instead of a daily entitlement. I would like to reiterate here that I AM STILL CLEAN!! You can ask Greg.

And for today, I’m finding other ways to relax and refresh. Like aromatherapy. I recommend anything eucalyptus. And Yoga. Those backbends are amazing. Ahhhh.