@return2ozma Checking your smartphone less often
I’d say anything creative, something which pushes the mind to focus on generating new ideas instead of just running through the same old ones - this worked for me, at least, as rumination and catastrophising have been stapled to my noggin my entire life.
To be more specific, painting, building stuff with Legos, drawing, writing poetry, composing songs, whittling, woodworking, stuff like that.
Another important aspect (at least from personal experience, ymmv) is keeping the hobby a hobby - what I mean by this is not falling into the trap of perfectionism or productivity with it, keeping it light and fun. I now strongly believe that the brain needs something “inconsequential” on which to chew if only to remind it that not every stimulus it receives is do-or-die.
Keep a hobby a hobby, yes! Don’t try and monetize it! You will kill all the joy you once felt for that hobby.
Jigsaw puzzles. Start with a couple of hundreds of pieces and then go with the ones of thousands. Also gardening, but you need to have a garden or enough space to have plants inside your home.
Going on a walk regularly.
… Where there is greenery. It’s scientifically proven to improve mental wellbeing if you see greenery just 20 minutes a day.
I was just coming in here to say walking in nature or hiking. 🙂
Although I do also get some benefit in driving through nature too.
a little bit of exercise is amazing for mental health. just half an hour, 2 or 3 times a week makes a massive difference
Reading. It doesn’t have to be much, but occasionally filling idle moments with a few pages read instead of doom scrolling social media can do wonders. It did for me at least.
Doing this actually got me back into reading. Started with Manhwa (Solo Leveling) and that spiraled into reading books such as Midnight library, Before Coffee Gets Cold, The Words We keep and now “1984”.
Installing an ereader app (ReadEra) helped me so much with this. I always have my phone with me anyways, and tapping the ereader app instead of Instagram takes away so many barriers.
I allways read a bit before going to sleep. It helps with shutting down. My sleep improved a lot
The Libby app with most public libraries is really good!
Cooking, it is satisfying enjoying the fruits of your labor and with cooking you can get that satisfaction every day if you choose.
This is not an everyone thing: I for one get no satisfaction from it.
Hard disagree. The process is fun, and everyone loves to eat, but the cleanup is drudgery at its basest form.
Tidy as you go. Don’t see it as a separate task. Tidying up is part of the cooking process.
That’s what I do - I clean as I cook because I’ve got ADHD and I will never conquer a big pile of dirty cookware… clean one at a time so it’s never an imposing task.
Implement the golden rule: cooks don’t clean.
My cats aren’t gonna do the dishes
totally agree, home cooking from a variety of fresh ingredients is great for your gut and mental health
Petting kitties.
Eating kitties…
… I mean, making stupid jokes nobody understand. It works for me at least.
We understand
I need to feel productive. Be it a programming project or woodworking. Just creating something new instead of maintenance like oil changes and mowing the lawn. Creating something new.
Also, take a walk in the forest. Get out on the water. Both are great therapy to disconnect from the mental todo-list of things going on around the house.
Renting a paddleboard and just chilling on a lake on a sunny day. It really is a kind of heaven.
I’m a huge advocate of gardening. It gets you outdoors and active, gives a sense of achievement, you learn and improve over time, it’s popular enough that you can get involved in a community, if you’re growing veg it promotes healthy eating.
It should be mandatory.
You dont seem to know this but its been shown that dirt actually has bacteria in it that have natural anti-depressant properties on humans. So you gardening and digging in the dirt is literally making u happier.
You… sound like my mother. She’s an incredible woman, but christ, no I’m not gonna go climb a tree right now and chop off the top branches, I’m in the middle of a Minetest marathon
House plants bro. It’s a game where the goal is not killing them.
I have a bamboo plant that seems to thrive on my neglect
Yoga/mobility/flexibility of some sort. Counteract the repetitive, static positions many of us hold during work hours.
talking to people. friends, strangers, idc. people seem too stiff these days and i think it keeps people lonely.
It depends a lot on the person, but it always does me good to do something tactile after working all day on a computer. Cooking, baking, sketching, woodworking, Legos, hiking, that kind of thing. I’ve noticed it really helps me ground and be mindful.
Lets all try beekeeping, it will teach you to:
- look
- observe
- think
- take your time
- gets you out doors
- and gets food for the table
I would love to try, seems like a pretty hefty investment to get involved though.
You could do like I’ve done–raise native bees. I don’t know where you are, but in my area, mason bees and leafcutter bees are both native, solitary species. This means that they don’t create hives but rather nest in holes/tubes. There’s no queen. No honey. Very little work compared to keeping honeybees and better for the environment (assuming honeybees are not native to your area).
As a bonus, if you grow any plants, they make great pollinators. And when you first get the bees and they emerge from their cocoons, they are tiny and adorable and a joy to watch. They’re also very passive and almost never sting.
There’s not gonna be a proper answer that applies to everyone. For myself, riding BMX flatland, riding unicycles, carving wood, learning survival skills, keeping time…
… keeping time?
Check my username. I’ve been partly obsessed with keeping accurate track of time since I learned to read an analog clock at age 9.
By age 12, I started learning the exact times of the school bells. By age 15, I learned how to rebuild digital watches, and even replace the quartz crystal with a more accurate one.
By age 17 I was rebuilding mechanical self-winding wristwatches, and also learning to overclock computers.
Edit: For extra clarity, I also now know how to tune the firing order on an ICE engine, no matter how many cylinders. I also know how to time a VCR and tune a guitar.
I’m 42 years old now.
Sounds like you should pursue a career at NIST so your hobby can align with a profession. They’re all about keeping track of time to extreme precision with atomic and optical clocks.
355/113
Close enough right?
Interesting hobby. Iirc Einstein had his breakthrough trying to sync timepieces.
Also, a 1 meter pendulum swings at a rate of once per second. Handy info to know if all the clocks shut down, like in a survivalist situation or natural disaster.
Ah yes, because in an Apocalypse I’m gonna have a 1 meter pendulum handy.
Anything one meter long swinging on a pivot is a 1 meter pendulum no?
It probably only costs like $10 to get a measured line professionally tattooed on your leg/thigh for reference.
Whatever hobby you enjoy, avoid its online community as much as possible. It’s a great way to see negativity and arguing, which we all know constant negativity and discourse is fantastic for our collective mental health.
It’s also a good way to never actually getting the ball rolling on a new hobby, and instead obsessively research what the “correct” way of doing xyz is and then be too overwhelmed by all the opinions to actually get started yourself.
Not for everything! I find that hobbies which are based around nature tends to have very welcoming and helpful communities online. Gardening, bird watching, hydroponics, that sort of thing.
