Stress and Unwinding

I recently noticed that every time I have some downtime - be it a long weekend or a two week holiday - I end up getting sick with coughs and colds. I also feel tired a lot. Not only is this inconvenient, it can severely impact my enjoyment of my time off or even prevent me from going to things I was looking forward to. I decided that I need to get better at relaxing and unwinding so that my body doesn’t force me to do it in the least enjoyable way (from my bed sniffling and coughing).

I’ve been thinking about some of my habits and behaviours and how I can try to change them to get some more rest and hopefully improve my health a little bit.

Stop Taking my Phone Everywhere

I, like many millenials and zoomers, am glued to my phone. Every time I have a sense of curiosity I am straight to google. Every time I am bored or in an awkward situation I scroll Mastodon. I’ll often sit and ‘doomscroll’ on my phone at home rather than doing something relaxing.

So the solution I’ve come up with is to set up a “charging corner” in my house and to leave my phone there when I’m home unless I have a specific reason not to. That way it’s a pain to get to and that might just be the friction I need to think to myself “wait why am I reaching for my phone?” rather than regaining consciousness an hour later having achieved nothing.

I take a lot of notes in Logseq, so it might be a bit challenging not having my phone with me. Therefore, I’ve got an old tablet which I’ve installed Logseq on and very little else in order to make it as unappealing to my dopamine-addicted brain as possible.

Stop Trying to be Productive All the Time!

I struggle to disconnect from the feeling that I always need to be busy or productive. I rarely allow myself more than an hour or so a day of time to truly relax because I feel guilty that I’m not doing something useful or that if I don’t do the thing it’ll never get done. This is a complex one that’s deeply engrained into my psyche, so it’s going to take a multipronged attack I think.

I need to try to enforce time-boxing for project work outside work hours. I book meetings with myself at work to get things done, so I could book some meetings with myself during evenings and weekends in which to get nothing done. Or, if I want to do some project work I could set limits and alarm clocks to make sure that I don’t spend all of my downtime doing something that might feel “fun” but isn’t particularly regenerative.

Meditation

I am already a big fan of Headspace, and I’ve been doing their exercises most days for a couple of years to help me go to sleep at night. I want to try and get a morning breathing exercise in as well and maybe make more use of the ap during the day too where appropriate.

I’m quite empathic and passionate about what I do and get very emotionally invested in my work and wanting my friends, family and work colleagues to succeed. If I’m going through a crisis of some description I often find myself ruminating and worrying about it, even when it’s not helpful (no point worrying about that difficult conversation you’ve got pencilled in for Monday whilst you’re out for lunch with your wife on Saturday).

Exercise and Diet

If you read any book or article about mental or physical health diet and exercise always come up. I can’t say my diet is particularly good - we try to cook fresh meals from Pinch of Nom most nights but often order takeaway if we’re tired or have had a rough day at work. We recently started HelloFresh which is slightly more expensive than buying groceries the ’normal’ way but significantly cheaper than eating out or buying takeaway. The ingredients come pre-measured and sometimes pre-prepared so I consider it a bit of a cooking ‘hack’. If we save money and eat more healthily by not buying dinner out as much, then I’m happy to keep it up for a bit.

In terms of exercise, I try to do a 20-25 minute walk every day. However, we also recently got free access to Hussle gyms via our work, so I’ve taken up swimming again. In both cases, I find it an excellent opportunity to get some headspace. Perhaps more so swimming because I can’t even take my phone and listen to podcasts or music. I’m also planning to start cycling to work now that we moved offices much closer to my house.

Summary

I guess the point of this post was to talk openly about some of the stuff I’m trying out to help me with my health and general welfare, possibly with the intention to inspire others but mainly as a way to hold myself to account. I’ll try and do a review post about how I got on in a few months time. Hopefully next time I go on holiday I won’t get poorly!