How do you know if you don’t have good mental health? I feel fine almost all the time.
You’d know, trust me
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.
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.
I allways read a bit before going to sleep. It helps with shutting down. My sleep improved a lot
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!
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”.
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… 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
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.
League of Legends /s
You joke, but sometimes I’ve had a crappy day and just wanna play some ARAMs.
Yeah, totally! The best answer so far!
Only (former) League players will understand.
That is indeed the correct abbreviation
But honestly, quiting such a toxic dumpster fire is really relaxing on your nerves.
Petting kitties.
Eating kitties…
… I mean, making stupid jokes nobody understand. It works for me at least.
We understand
Cooking, it is satisfying enjoying the fruits of your labor and with cooking you can get that satisfaction every day if you choose.
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.
This is not an everyone thing: I for one get no satisfaction from it.
totally agree, home cooking from a variety of fresh ingredients is great for your gut and mental health
Hard disagree. The process is fun, and everyone loves to eat, but the cleanup is drudgery at its basest form.
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.
I prefer to be the one doing the cleaning so I don’t have to feel limited in what or how I cook in order to be considerate to the person cleaning up, otherwise it adds an element of stress I don’t need and an artificial constraint.
My cats aren’t gonna do the dishes
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.
355/113
Close enough right?
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.
⌚
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.
It probably only costs like $10 to get a measured line professionally tattooed on your leg/thigh for reference.
Anything one meter long swinging on a pivot is a 1 meter pendulum no?
Strength training has such an incredible impact on your overall wellbeing everyone should incorporate it into their routine as much as possible
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.
Going on a walk regularly.
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
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.
talking to people. friends, strangers, idc. people seem too stiff these days and i think it keeps people lonely.
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.
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.
