In this edition of The Gift, our expert shares her month living out the instructions from one of our favorite self-care gifts.As I rounded the street corner on a balmy, rose-gold morning last month, I came upon exactly what I hoped to avoid: another human. I could not see anyone through the tinted windows of their idling car. But if they were peering out, I surely looked ridiculous.I was on Day 9 of following The Marina Abramović Method: Instruction Cards to Reboot Your Life, which I will heretofore call “The Cards.” This one’s directive? Run in a fixed circle first thing in the morning around your home, dressed as you were for sleep. So here I was at 6:40 a.m., dashing around a Philadelphia block in yolk-yellow floral pajamas and pink-and-navy running shoes.The boxed set — one of our most popular gifts for self care and for people who have everything — contains 30 exercises, based on Serbian performance artist Abramović’s own practices, to help one “focus, reconnect with the present, and locate your highest creative potential.” Abramović is particularly famous for her extreme endurance performances, like sitting and staring into the eyes of museum visitors every day for months.I’ve never set my sights on a solo show at an art museum. But when I began The Cards, I’d come to a point where thoughtless habits had formed deep unwanted grooves in my life. The promise of a life reboot, boxed up for $20, felt like a beacon of hope. So I committed to 20 days of The Cards — and to put aside my reservations about their eccentricity in an effort to shake myself out of stuck places.Some of the cards were quite short (jump up and scream three times), while others seemed interminable (stare at yourself in a mirror for an hour). As I worked through them, I found that each of the norm-challenging exercises jostled my thinking in some way or another, with moments of beauty, micro-epiphanies, and surprising mental feats along the way.On the morning I jogged around the block, I overcame that initial wave of self-consciousness with bemusement, but then I found a deeper empathy for the adolescents in my life and their social anxieties. On the day I was instructed to count each grain of rice and lentil, a mere ¼ cup turned out to be 2,035 grains of rice and 858 lentils. It brought to mind both the Japanese proverb, “There are seven gods in every grain of rice,” and the Mitch Hedberg joke, “Rice is great if you’re really hungry and want to eat 2,000 of something.” And after staring at a blank wall for an hour on Day 10, I felt like I’d completed a marathon of the mind.Many of the exercises, like complaining to a tree, seemed best-suited to the solitude of a rural estate or artist retreat. (One day, while doing a breathing exercise on the living room floor of my partner’s parents’ house, I suddenly felt the wet tongue of their bichon-poodle, Sugar, on my face.) But that challenge itself, of working The Cards into the reality of my life and occasionally failing, proved to be one of the most powerful aspects.Unlike a wellness retreat, I had to contend with my life as it is. The exercises had to fit around work schedules and cooking dinners, and my old habits had to be adjusted to accommodate them. The Cards turned out to be placeholders for the things I’d been meaning to do but kept putting off.After several weeks with a few of the endurance exercises now under my belt, I was surprisingly more tolerant of life’s minor indignities. At Lowe’s one day, I found out that the saw was out of order after waiting 20 minutes for an associate to cut a plank. Instead of lapsing into overblown anger, I laughed with the employee and went to Home Depot.I also started making different kinds of decisions in small ways: getting an app-blocking device for my phone to kick my nighttime scrolling addiction, trying a new yoga teacher’s class instead of a familiar favorite, returning to a procrastinated house project. Did any one of these change my life? Surely not, but just as I’d gotten into my rut one choice at a time, I found myself climbing out of it step by conscious step.With the season of renewal upon us, it may be the best time to give these crazy exercises a go. Perhaps you know someone who’s been kvetching about losing themselves to parenthood, partnership, or the doldrums of adult working life. If so, The Cards are a low-stakes offering of inspiration for an autumnal rebirth and fresh perspective on life. But if they seem a little too out there, we love these other change-making gifts, too: While I just started using the app-blocking device, Brick, I’ve heard from both my colleague Elissa Sanci and the co-owner of my local coffee shop that it has transformed their lives by freeing them from screen addictions.Even self-help skeptics are fans of this seminal and best-selling meditation book Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn, a pioneer in the American practice of mindfulness.Couples looking to reboot their relationship may find this conversation card game brings them closer by prompting deep discussions.For those who could benefit from a mere brain break, this Kyoto-inspired book nook is engrossing to build and beautifully detailed once finished.Or this illustrated watercolor workbook, along with this set of vivid paints, could easily whisk the most amateur of artists out of a funk into a brighter state of mind.