What strategies do you use to maintain your health and well-being?
Health and well-being today, huh? Well, I can tell you what I don’t do, and that is simply this: I don’t do what I don’t want to do. And I try to drink enough water. Plus I take a multivitamin every day now.
After years of doing so much of what I had to do whether I wanted to or not…cough, cough life of a teacher cough, I now have the luxury of doing things because I want to do them and when I want to do them.
To be fair, I can only do them before 8 am and after 5 pm Monday-Friday. Outside of those work hours, I just do what I want. If I want to sit in the backyard and read a book, I do. If I want to sit on the couch and knit/crochet while I watch a movie I’ve seen almost literally a thousand times, I do. Of course, I do eventually run out of clean underwear and that’s when I have to do laundry even though it’s the bane of my existence because it’s never done.
Doing things that I like to do is actually really good for preventing anxiety and protecting my mental health. A couple Novembers ago, during my first semester of grad school, I became intensely stressed that month. The semester was coming to a close and there were a lot of big projects due at the end of the month, plus I was still a classroom teacher with all the extra duties I was accustomed to. My “mentor” had promised that if I went to grad school, I could let go of some of those “extras”. That was false. She was hardcore serious that nobody know that I was in grad school and what our plan was and if I backed out of the things I usually did, people would get suspicious. Yeah, that was a bad month. And at the end of it, when the inevitable break down happened, I realized that it took such an emotional toll on me because that whole month, I had very little down time. Most of my “free” time was spent working on either my day job work or my grad school work. There was no relaxation. There was no mental break in front of the t.v. with a yarn project. I realized then just how important that kind of thing is for me.
My job now doesn’t require after-hours work, well, not usually. This summer program I supervise took a lot of extra time at the beginning before I really got into a groove with getting things done. Because my work day truly ends when I leave the office, I can partake in whatever activities I choose when I get home. Maybe that’s why I’ve been in such a good mood lately.
That’s a long winded way of saying I am fiercely protective of my mental health and the best thing I can do for it sometimes, is being lazy or just doing stuff I enjoy. It lowers the stress and anxiety and is just really good for me (plus the water and daily multivitamin).
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