How do you Play the Shortest Shower Game?

Here’s the rules: Have a buddy time your shower time using a stopwatch. Pause the stopwatch every time the water is off. Start the timer every time the water is back on. Easy Peasy! Write down your time in minutes:seconds.millseconds under your name.

To get your daily average shower time: Add up all your time. Divide your total time by the number of days of the contest.

Here’s the fun part! After the restrictions are lifted, the one with the shortest daily average wins!! The winner in your group gets to pick a fun group activity like a movie, hike, or arcade games! Woot!

The fine details: Be encouraging and share your short shower tips with your fellow gamers. If you live by yourself, you can still play! Try to get a personal best! If you skip a shower on a day, record a zero for that day; it reduces your total time!

PDF Download >> Shortest Shower Game Score Sheet

Get your Family involved in a friendly game to make water-saving fun. Who wouldn’t want to pick the movie, or have everyone go rollerskating, or go out for ice cream? If you win with the shortest time in your house, you get to choose what to do!

Share the fun! Share this post with friends and family to help add a fun challenge to the water restrictions.

How the Shortest Shower Game Got Started

Like many Calgarians, I’ve been looking for ways to reduce water around the home since the water main break on June 6th. Mostly, I just pretend that I’m camping, and that makes it all so much easier.

Showers though, that one is a challenge on the mental health side. By limiting the length of my usual shower, I realize that I get a significant boost to my overall well-being that goes way beyond the physical. It’s a recharge and reset for my mental health and happiness.

So when it was announced that the water main repairs would take 3 to 5 more weeks longer than expected, I admit I was pretty sad. I was really looking forward to the familiar reset of a regular-length shower.

Everything you Feel is Okay

When I’m faced with situations like these, I let myself feel what I’m actually feeling for a few minutes. If I try to push through to feeling positive too soon, I just end up suppressing the feeling rather than processing it.

This might help you if you’re having a lot of feelings about the water situation. For a few minutes, just sit in a cozy place and close your eyes. Breathe slowly and just make space for all that you feel.

You might like these meditations:

What can you do?

If you’re a natural helper, it can be so difficult to sit back and feel helpless in times of crisis. It is so important to have a task or a challenge to keep you motivated on the tiny changes that all add up.

My solution was to turn the part that I struggle with the most, short showers, into a game. The Shortest Shower Game!

We can do anything, if it is a game or a challenge. I’m a big fan of gamifying nearly everything I do! It instantly turns something from a worry to something that can be approached with a lighthearted spirit of adventure.

We can manage and it will be okay. Maybe even a little bit of fun we can all have while we’re waiting.

Gratitude helps to shift Everything

Even while I was feeling down about my short showers after the news broke, I still felt a complex feeling of knowing how incredibly lucky I am to have indoor plumbing at all.

In so many places in the world, there is almost no access to clean water. And even in our own country, there are communities with boil water advisories all the time.

Even my shortest showers are a huge luxury. It can sometimes be a shame trap when we think about our privilege. It is important to stay out of the shame spiral because shame never changes our behaviour, but empathy does.

Just notice the discomfort and make peace with it. Then, expand the view to a greater solution and compassionate commitment to change.

Part of my compassionate commitment is to make a donation to a water charity that helps to bring clean drinking water to the nearly 2 billion people who don’t have access. I also love Kiva.org because I can see who I’m helping with microloans for water projects.

What we’re doing at LunaHolistic to Conserve Water

I definitely had a reality check on my water usage. This is a really good thing in the long-term because it makes us grateful for every drop and more mindful and respectful of water in general.

My gratitude for water has never been higher, and I want that to remain a permanent change after all this is a memory. I’m also happy to start implementing new habits in our home to reduce water, like using grey water to water plants at home and the office.

In our workplace, we’re delaying washing our dishes and laundry and only using full loads —basically waiting until we’ve used up the clean ones. We’re also looking into purchasing additional linens to extend the times between laundry days.

Learn more about Reiki and what we do here!

I’d love to hear how The Shortest Shower Game goes for you! Please leave us a comment below and share this with everyone.  🙂