I personally enjoy taking long walks. It doesn’t matter if it’s in the woods, on a bike trail, or just through town. There’s something nice about just meandering and being alone with your thoughts while still being immersed in the outside world.
There was a period in my life that lasted about 4 or 5 years when I refused to admit that I needed to decompress. I had multiple employers, spent 6 days a week leaving before the sun came up and coming home after dark. I was drinking upwards of 10 coffees per day plus loads of soft drinks. When I did get in I would watch series or movies late into the night. I gained weight and developed anxiety. I also began having migraines multiple times a week. Then I developed pericarditis. I lived like that for a long time. Just popping Xanax to get through the day.
Finally, I managed to see a neurologist who confirmed my migraines (unilateral acephalgic etc. etc.) and gave me a doctor’s note and strict instructions. The TL;DR of those instructions was: REST.
So, I gave in and admitted defeat. That was the first step.
Very quickly my stress levels dropped. It took a few months for the pericarditis to stop.
I stopped all caffeine and other stimulants. Stopped the Xanax. Energy levels exploded.
Step 2 was doing something with that energy. Something I hate with a deep passion: EXERCISE.
After almost 5 years of thinking my life would just be like that it only took 6 weeks for things to get back on track. I deflated and dropped from 108kg to 82kg.
You didn’t need to story, but everyone else here is right. Rest and moving your body helped. Mentally, I was even more creative. I was friendlier. I was even recommended to apply for a promotion.
If you need to decompress, I think sleep is the best. If the sandman ain’t visiting, then combine with movement and fresh air.
Just sleep longer.
6 hours is too short. 7.5 hours is OK. 9 hours is best in my case.I wish I could sleep even 6, ugh
Put on some music and sing your motherfucking heart out. 👍
This is always a good idea, but it’s an especially a good idea if you have a lot of energy that you can’t just will away or let go of. Sometimes when you can’t calm down or slow down, you can redirect and reframe that energy instead, until you’ve vented it out.
I have a few things I like to do! In no particular order:
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Make a pour over coffee. From measuring, grinding, pouring, and all, it takes 10 to 15 mins. It’s the perfect amount of time to make for a break for something. Then you get all the nice aromas, warm mug, and caffeine general helps stabilize my mood too.
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Walking or sitting outside! Gets the blood moving, change in air, sometimes you hear the birds or insects.
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Take a relaxing bath. You can go extra hard with bathbombs for fragrances and stuff too.
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Light candles, incense, dim lights, put on jazz or some other nice background music. Dim moods and calming smells and good sounds help bring good sensory experiences to block out any bad feelings.
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Lose myself in my instruments. Playing anything requires my focus and forces me to turn off my depression spiral thought patterns and focus on creating something wholesome and pure.
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Honestly, I smoke. Usually hookah, sometimes I’ll have a cigarette. I know it’s bad, but I want a good life, not a long one.
Quality over quantity. I feel that.
I do meditation. Not mindfulness because I need dissociation for my chronic pain management. I basically do a version that I altered to stay as disconnected from my body as possible and just focus on emotions and observing them.
I also use a yoga ball sometimes, helps me regulate as well
To manage chronic pain you might want to look into the app Curable, my therapist recommended it. It’s a very well-designed app, there’s also a free trial (it’s under $100 for a year). It helps you reprogram your nervous system, but it also feels very supportive. It’s like care and support whenever you need it. I highly recommended it. 👍
It sounds a bit iffy to me that app, ngl
You can’t cure what’s causes by a real physical disease causing dislocations in my body, I can’t reprogram my body into making my connective tissue actually work work. I can’t reprogram my brain into being cured as the name suggests
To me this app looks from a cursory glance like the type of stuff I get peddled by people who don’t believe in my disability and instead call all chronic pain “psychosomatic”. I know that mental health can cause physical symptoms including pain and worsen it. But that doesn’t mean all pain is psychosomatic.
If people like me are not careful with what they say to certain people I can be undiagnosed with my physical disease by a therapist who knows nothing of said disease
You’re right that when you said ‘chronic pain’ I assumed that it was more like the usual chronic pain that people experience today, this app would be helpful for that. I spoke too soon and didn’t have enough information about your condition, sorry. But I meant well, no need to get aggressive… But it’s also to manage pain in general (there’s a free trial if you want). And it’s an extremely well-designed app, like I said, recommended by a therapist, and it’s helped a lot of people including me. I never said that all pain is psychosomatic.
I like to dance. Sometimes it’s angry dancing, sometimes it’s happy dancing, but it helps me blow off steam and express emotions in a healthy way.
How do you dance? Do you look at music videos online and try to minic it, like in a Just Dance videogame? I’m very bad at dancing lol.
You don’t have to be good at dancing to dance, I’m definitely not!
Most of the time I just put on music that suits my mood and move however I feel. Getting into that flow state of just doing what comes naturally, not caring if I’m dancing well or look stupid is really helpful to me personally.
Honestly: Smoke weed. It helps chill me out.
My favorite is to smoke in the back yard with a little fire in my Solo Stove going. Preferably with marshmallows. I can zone out for hours out there. I live in town, but there is greenery along most of my fence, so it *feels *secluded even if it really isn’t. My neighbors have a new fountain they put in a little pond in their front yard, too, so I get to hear the water :)
Funny in literally midpoint in a walk at the moment… though I’ve paused to get my nails done as another source of calm.
I take a timed, twenty minute nap. Under the sheets. Undressed. And just let me mind wander wherever it wants. I’ve found that generally I don’t often fall asleep but am just on the cusp when the alarm goes off but I feel more rested from that than when I wake in the morning after a ‘full nights sleep’.
The absolute daily bare minumum: Drink 2 liters of water. Eat as little processed food as possible and as little sugar as possible. Yoga for 10 minutes. Intensive breathing meditation. Sleep for at least 6 hours a night and fall asleep before 11.
On top of that, walk, jog, or run 2 miles every day and read things to expand your mind.
I enjoy walks too!, i take my earbuds, listen to a podcast and just relax and i love it. I also enjoying sitting down and having some mate while using my laptop, usually checking youtube or other social media. Sometimes i also play a mobile game called i love hue, it’s a color based puzzle game and it’s really relaxing, similarly i have a coloring book with really intricate drawings and it helps me to relax.
Skate on my local bike trail and smoke weed
I do some breathing exercises using a colorful blob on the screen and do some journaling. I also do tarot readings to assess my energies for the day and to ground myself better since I’m an anxious person. I guess I should really get back into it because I’m getting really antsy these days
How does tarot reading actually work? Can you explain a little the process? Is it hard to learn?
Sorry for the late reply
I’ve been stuck in a reddit binge before Apollo dies.Anyway, every tarot practitioner views it differently. For me, it’s a way to connect with myself and the energies around me. It’s very grounding since it’s just another tool for me to assess my actions and possible outcomes. It’s not something that predicts your future per se. I avoid personal bias by evaluating whether the reading resonates with what I feel and what is objectively happening around me.In a nutshell, it’s a bunch of cards (78 cards) with different symbolisms and meanings. Pull as many as you need, interpret it based on the basic symbolisms and key words on your guide. Decide whether it resonates or not. Do it again as you please. It’s hard at first since there are a lot of cards but it just takes some practice to get better as with any other thing. Sometimes it takes me weeks before I grab my cards again, sometimes I need it on the daily.
Biggest thing for me is mindfulness in whatever I’m doing. It’s such a difference between “I am going to relax” and “I am staying busy relaxing to avoid processing my feelings”.
Usually a hot bath is my go-to. It’s helpful to have some music and quiet to ponder why I am compressed, what changes need to be made, or if I just need time to be allowed to feel.
Great points here. Sometimes I will go for a walk and then wonder, why don’t I feel any better? And it’s likely because that wasn’t what I actually needed.
It’s so, so easy to end up just scrolling through social media - fediverse included - or through youtube or whatever just because it fills your mind with bees so that you don’t think about your problems, rather than because it is actually what you’d most like to be doing.
The biggest thing I’m taking from the fracturing of the spaces like reddit and Twitter is to try and break myself out of that fog. Isolation during the pandemic really didn’t help those tendencies!
I switched from daily showers to daily baths about a year ago. It’s a great way to relax at the end of the day.
I alternate between the two depending on how much effort I want to do, but I think you never get too old for a bubble bath!
