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Ask HN: How do you work on your mental health?

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Ask HN: How do you work on your mental health?

#1

Post by Sakos »

In the spirit of the season (you know, new year, new goals, temporary motivation that might last 10-20 days), I'd like to ask what all of you are doing or would like to do to improve your mental health. Are there any particular things you've noticed work for you that have made a meaningful difference? Any new ideas that you've read about that you'd like to try?

Personally, I'm experimenting with the idea of automated personal/positive affirmations based on something I read in the book "Indistractable":

> For example, short text messages providing words of encouragement are effective at helping smokers quit. A metastudy of interventions form ten countries found that "the evidence provides unequivocal support for the efficacy of text messaging interventions to reduce smoking behavior.

Re: Ask HN: How do you work on your mental health?

#4

Post by MikeLumos »

Daily jogging, healthy diet, and meditation make the biggest difference to me.

The biggest change I'd like to make would be to defeat my social media and entertainment addiction - not even entirely, just contain it to a 2-hour window every evening. I keep failing at that, but there were weeks/months when I was successful, and it made an enormous difference, way more than I expected.

Re: Ask HN: How do you work on your mental health?

#5

Post by cyberpunk »

I can recommend trying out the "wim hof method" - he talks quite a lot of pseudoscience woo nonsense, but the daily cold exposure and breathwork have been extremely beneficial to me.

meditation, ashwaghanda and really working on improving your sleep quality are probably also good moves.

Re: Ask HN: How do you work on your mental health?

#8

Post by cj »

I'd recommend starting with identifying areas of your life that you want to actively work on improving. In other words, take an hour and zoom out to look at your life as a whole, and decide which areas of your life you want to zoom back in on to actively work on.

One format for doing this is "the wheel of life". There are lots of templates and online guides, but here's one place to start:

https://scottjeffrey.com/wheel-of-life/

I recommend this because people often set goals like "I want to start going to the gym" without connecting that to some larger vision for how you actually want your life to change as a result.

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