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.
The Libby app with most public libraries is really good!
I allways read a bit before going to sleep. It helps with shutting down. My sleep improved a lot
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.
Implement the golden rule: cooks don’t clean.
My cats aren’t gonna do the dishes
I prefer to be the one doing the cleaning so I don’t have to feel limited in what or how I cook in other to be considerate to the person cleaning up, otherwise it adds an element of stress I don’t need and an artificial constraint.
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.
totally agree, home cooking from a variety of fresh ingredients is great for your gut and mental health
Cooking can be fun, but it’s also a chore. It means
- finding 14 meals a week (sure you can have the same meal twice, but you still need to prepare that)
- making sure that your mealplan is at least a bit balanced
- groceries
- cooking
- dishes
And you do that every week of your life. I get it that cooking can be fun, but not the everyday cooking you need to do to survive.
I tend to cook larger meals and I’m not opposed to just chucking shit in a slow cooker to make a stew thing. I generally cook (complexly) three times a week. On Sundays we usually make something to last a few days (especially as my partner suffers from migraines) and we keep emergency meal stuff around like sausages to pan fry for a simple dinner.
I, personally, don’t really count pan frying some frozen perogies, eggs, or sausage as a “hobby” cook - that’s just ten minutes on auto pilot to achieve sustenance… so I guess my personal suggestion for fun cookery is to start with one big meal a week and step up from there as you’re comfortable. There are plenty of great recipes that you can cook a bunch of then enjoy over the next few days.
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.
Petting kitties.
Eating kitties…
… I mean, making stupid jokes nobody understand. It works for me at least.
We understand
Yoga/mobility/flexibility of some sort. Counteract the repetitive, static positions many of us hold during work hours.
Plus that post class bliss is absolutely wonderful! I love yoga in its many forms.
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.
I know you didn’t really mean it literally but just to reiterate as others have done for other suggestions in this thread, this is very much an “if it works for you” sort of thing and definitely shouldn’t be mandatory. I fucking hate gardening with a passion, I want absolutely nothing to do with it, though it’s clearly very beneficial to others.
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
Succulents are the answer! They thrive on neglect and look so cool and alien. I love them.
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.
talking to people. friends, strangers, idc. people seem too stiff these days and i think it keeps people lonely.
Weightlifting has done wonders for mine. I don’t even go super hard with it, just an adjustable dumbell set and bench at home a few times a week.
How is training routine like?
If you have any recommendations or suggestions for a beginner, could you please share them?
https://old.reddit.com/r/Fitness/comments/2e79y4/dumbbell_ppl_proposed_alternative_to_dumbbell/
This is pretty close to what I started with. Starting out focus on getting your form correct and staying consistent over pushing tons of weight.
Thank you
Cooking and working out. Proper nutrition and taking care of your body make a huge difference, along with reading.
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.
Daily walks are so simple but getting out does wonders
I agree, especially if it’s not in a built up area. There definitely something about being able to see the horizon.
Even if it’s inner city, getting out and being around a different energy than being alone in the apartment is so helpful. It’s difficult to get moving though
Making the absolute best possible pizza you can, it’s an obsession and sometimes it’s actively stressful which you’d think would be bad for mental health but it’s just the right level of stress and frustration and reward and relaxation and well, pizza, that it’s something that the more I get in to it the more even the most unnecessary extra effort to get only the slightest improvement of the texture or the taste will seem worth it. I also really love trying to emulate ones that I’ve had and loved so there’s kind of an end goal in so far as I can test if I think I’ve replicated or exceeded a standard I’ve set from my favourite pizza place. Doing it this way also opens you up to all the different existing styles you can try and then try to recreate. You could also invent your own if you’re creative enough. You can spend big on fun equipment but you don’t even have to because part of the fun is figuring out the smartest ways to achieve similarity of results with the resources at your disposal. I like making lots of notes to try something subtly different next time.
Whatever else is going on, I’m always in that zone when making pizza. The only problem with it is that it’s a bit impractical. The best pizza tends to be at least a 24 hour long affair with dough made in the morning ready for that night so when you’re super busy at work it’s not easy to fit a good pizza day in there with all the effort and mess involved but when you can, all feels right with the world.
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.
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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.
I saved your comment to respond later once I got my words together.
I really appreciate your comment, seriously. But I never thought of it as a hobby, I thought of it as an obligation, to understand time, as best as possible anyways.
At age 9, I had just recently gotten my first glasses. I was left home alone for like a half hour, and I just stared at their analog clock. After 5 minutes, counting the ticks and watching the dials, I just understood it. Never even had to ask an adult.
I always thought of it as an obligation of education that I somehow missed before I got glasses.
I never once thought of it as a hobby before you described it that way.
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355/113
Close enough right?
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?
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.
