How I Deal With Stress
Music, video games, soda, writing, and more.
I have talked a lot about a variety of subjects around self-care: how to do it if you’re stressed or depressed, how to build a ladder on a bad day, how to practice mindfulness and self-compassion, and how to avoid the mental illness tax. In all of those articles, I discuss a lot of things that you can do to take care of yourself.
I also talk periodically about things that I do — that mindfulness article is about a hobby I’ve picked up, and I’ve written about my ukulele and my obsession with Animal Crossing and D&D. That said, I don’t know that I’ve written about the various things that I personally do to take care of myself in one place. Today, thanks to this week’s Write Here prompts, I will be doing just that.
It is a good time for me to talk about my own personal self-care, as life has gone haywire in the past few weeks. It feels like everything has been slipping away lately, with work being hectic and weekends but a few fleeting days of rest before I go back to the grind. On top of everything, the pandemic is ramping back up thanks to the Delta variant and a slowdown in vaccination rates, so that won’t be over anytime soon.
So, what do I do to cope with stress and take care of myself?
Let’s start with video games. I still play Animal Crossing pretty much every day, as I have for the past 18 months. It’s a fun grounding exercise, as the game is incredibly relaxing and slow-paced. I have also picked up a game called Hollow Knight, which is a game that focuses on platforming and exploration to find power-ups and fight bosses (a type generally referred to as “Metroidvania”).
Generally, I will take between 30 minutes and a few hours to play these games, usually with a can of soda as a sugary treat. Coke has become my soda of choice, although I typically only drink a single can per day if that. I have associated it with calm and relaxation, so sometimes the mere act of drinking it makes me calm down.
I still play my ukulele from time to time, usually once or twice a week to keep up my skills. It’s fun, and I enjoy plucking away at it, even though I’m not the best and probably never will be. That’s not the point anyway — the point is to have fun, and that’s what I do.
I haven’t carved many spoons (or anything else) lately, and I need to give that another go. It was a good mindfulness exercise, so picking up my tools again would be nice.
As always, I write for fun as well as for work, and that is always nice. Taking time to write stuff like this helps me detox from the technical writing that is my job. Not all of it gets published, but that’s okay too — it’s nice to have some things that are just for me.
Other than that, I have a lot of random self-care things — food, relaxing with my partner on the couch, cuddling her (or a stuffed animal if she’s not available), petting my cats, and a variety of other small, seemingly-insignificant things that make me feel good nonetheless.
Life is difficult right now in a lot of ways. Work is busy, the world is on fire, and nothing seems fine. All I can do is take care of myself in the best ways I know how. I write, I play video games, I spend time cuddling the various cute things in my life, and I do my best to not stress out about current events.
Honestly, that’s all I really can do. Hopefully, it’s enough for now.
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Here are some other things I’ve written:
