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!
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.
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.
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.
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'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 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.
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.
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.
talking to people. friends, strangers, idc. people seem too stiff these days and i think it keeps people lonely.
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
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.
Cooking and working out. Proper nutrition and taking care of your body make a huge difference, along with reading.
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.
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.
Disc golf is the sport for nerdy kids who never liked sports. And even if you're absolutely terrible, you get to take a nice walk in the park or the woods. Most courses are free to play, and you really only need one disc to have a good time. Strongly recommend for those who know they aren't active enough but have no interest in going to the gym.
You gotta be careful though. My best friend tried to take a girl out on a discgolf date once. She said "no thanks discgolf is a gateway drug to marijuana. " and she might be right.
If you're interested in that, it will probably be available, yeah.
But if you're not, there are plenty of non-stoners who play too.
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.
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.
Playing an instrument, like a guitar. It's great being able to play, but it takes time to learn it.
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.
Bird-watching is very relaxing and surprisingly engaging. You get to know your local birds as individuals with personalities. It's pretty neat.
Slightly more active, but not by much, raising native bees is low effort and it can be enjoyable to watch the bees go about their business in your garden or yard, assuming you have flowers. In fact, once you get the bees, you might become more interested in gardening because you need to get some nice flowers for the bees, naturally.
Hobby? I dunno, but habit? Meditation.
Strength training has such an incredible impact on your overall wellbeing everyone should incorporate it into their routine as much as possible
Wax Sealing. You heat up colorful wax in a spoon over a tea light, pour it on a marble slab and then stamp cool designs into it. It is fun to experiment with different mixes, pouring techniques, etc and is very relaxing. Plus, when you are done, you have lots of cool seals. I have a bucket full of them and I like to just sit an go through them.
There is a youtube channel called 'melts' that makes really nice wax sealing videos with no talking.
Chess. I think it's saved my mental health over the last year.
How did you get into playing?
It was on holiday. There was a set at the place we were staying and the kids wanted to know how to play. I knew how the pieces moved, but not a lot else. I started to look up "chess strategies" and things, thinking I might find a few tips. Instead I found an addiction!
2 years later of daily studying and I've finally made it to "beginner" level.
How do you know if you don't have good mental health? I feel fine almost all the time.
You’d know, trust me
As a very stable genius, I completely agree with this.
In much the same way that almost no one has perfect physical health, almost no one has perfect mental health.
You don't need to be a complete wreck to be able to benefit from paying attention to your mental wellness.
Eating well, regular exercise, mindfulness, forgiveness, good sleep practices are all worth practicing whether you feel unwell or not.
I do those things by default. Only have one body, I like it to be healthy.
Photography maybe, you go on walks and travel, forces you to observe the world around you.
If anyone struggles with plenty of ego identification and unhelpful destructive thoughts I recommend meditating. 30-day guest pass https://dynamic.wakingup.com/guestpass/SC13AF7E5
You can also ask a support for a 1 year for free when you ccan't afford it.
Cycling has been a massive boon to my health, both mental and otherwise. It's such a fun way to get around, and just so happens to be great exercise in the process.
It’s always great to accomplish things. Sports, arts, DIY, learning new skills, it doesn’t matter as long as you can feel proud of yourself afterwards.
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.
Sex. It can be really enjoyable, it's a good workout, and you get to meet new people.
@return2ozma Checking your smartphone less often
Cocaine and good wine and sex and honesty
I've only tried cocaine once but I thought it was super over rated yet worryingly moreish, would only recommend if you're rich.
Went from drunk to sober (wasted my beer) and woke up with my head feeling like a spike had been driven through it. 4/10
With some chocolate
