Friday open thread: recapturing the vibe
Feb. 7th, 2025 05:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12I feel certain that I've used this or something similar as a prompt, but given my current circumstances, I'm going to use it again. This morning I woke up with rolling anxiety which continued throughout the morning. I know what caused it (my bad brain feelings are always situational and it's always very easy to identify the trigger), and that's for me to work on in the longer term, but it took me an abnormally long time to come back to a sense of equilibrium. Hence the prompt:
What small, effective things do you do to improve a bad mood?
Everything I do in these situations falls under three (sometimes overlapping) categories: concrete action, physical movement, physical and/or mental decluttering.
What I did today was break several big work tasks into smaller pieces, and physically write them down in my bullet journal, along with a big life admin task. The act of writing things down with clear deadlines (and then crossing them off when done) is a big way for me to lighten the mental load.
The other surefire trick is one I learnt from my mother, whose solution to all distressing emotions is to go for a walk. If the weather is bad — as it was today — I replace it with yoga. My yoga teacher has a number of classes designed for stress and anxiety, but I find they don't work so well for me, because they have an emphasis on holding undemanding poses for a long period of time, and I need something tricky with which to distract my mind. Therefore, I tend to pick classes that have more of a flow to them, or tricky balancing poses, etc.
Finally, I did a bunch of cleaning and reorganising in the house — just half an hour cleaning the bathrooms, and another fifteen minutes or so reorganising my bedroom drawers — and I felt a million times better.
What about you?
What small, effective things do you do to improve a bad mood?
Everything I do in these situations falls under three (sometimes overlapping) categories: concrete action, physical movement, physical and/or mental decluttering.
What I did today was break several big work tasks into smaller pieces, and physically write them down in my bullet journal, along with a big life admin task. The act of writing things down with clear deadlines (and then crossing them off when done) is a big way for me to lighten the mental load.
The other surefire trick is one I learnt from my mother, whose solution to all distressing emotions is to go for a walk. If the weather is bad — as it was today — I replace it with yoga. My yoga teacher has a number of classes designed for stress and anxiety, but I find they don't work so well for me, because they have an emphasis on holding undemanding poses for a long period of time, and I need something tricky with which to distract my mind. Therefore, I tend to pick classes that have more of a flow to them, or tricky balancing poses, etc.
Finally, I did a bunch of cleaning and reorganising in the house — just half an hour cleaning the bathrooms, and another fifteen minutes or so reorganising my bedroom drawers — and I felt a million times better.
What about you?
no subject
Date: 2025-02-08 12:26 am (UTC)Have a cup of tea.
Do something useful but not needing any creativity. For me that's working on the Audiofic Archive, posting podfics.
Re-read a favourite fanfic.
no subject
Date: 2025-02-08 03:18 pm (UTC)'Useful but not needing any creativity' is probably why I clean things in these circumstances, I suspect.