deepstash
Beta
How to Feel Better When You Don’t Know What’s Wrong
Feel-good activities
There are 2 types of feel-better activities:
- Those that immediately improve your mood, but often at the expense of overall well-being. Easy to start doing, and often hard to stop, they tend not to have long-term rewards.
- Those are activities that improve your well-being, and your mood too, but usually not right away. You never regret these activities and they take effort.
503 SAVES
This is a professional note extracted from an online article.
Read more efficiently
Save what inspires you
Remember anything
IDEA EXTRACTED FROM:
3
Key Ideas
The Fragility of Ordinary Life
Our modern lives are only made stable by a surprisingly fragile configuration of routines. When one or more parts is broken, problems appear everywhere. And even the most bland adjustment could throw things off.
When You Don't Know What's Wrong
Solving a problem is very difficult when its cause is hard to trace. You can’t isolate the trouble the same way you would dunk a leaky inner tube into a bathtub to see where the bubbles come out, for example.
What you can do is try to focus on better inputs: i.e, if you're struggling because of the pandemic and its social and health consequences, try pouring more vegetables, books, and exercise into the front end of the system, while reducing the intake of sugar, Netflix, and news.
Feel-good activities
There are 2 types of feel-better activities:
- Those that immediately improve your mood, but often at the expense of overall well-being. Easy to start doing, and often hard to stop, they tend not to have long-term rewards.
- Those are activities that improve your well-being, and your mood too, but usually not right away. You never regret these activities and they take effort.
SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
10
Key Ideas
Mindfulness and simple knowing
Mindfulness is the act of being aware of our present experience in real-time.
Normally people start processing inside their minds what they experience, creating perceptions. At its core, ...
One Medicine Many Cures
Mindfulness can be practised to:
- Manage pain, anxiety, stress, or mood swings.
- Provide the body and mind an oasis of calm in between a hectic lifestyle
- Reduce suffering, distress and trauma caused by pain and depression, along with the negative emotions that come with life-threatening diseases.
The Space Inside Us
Mindfulness opens up a space inside our minds that helps us respond to outside situations with ease, instead of just reacting impulsively.
We become aware and are able to detect our default setting, which is our ‘driven-doing mind’, and catch hold of it before any impulsive reaction is acted upon. It also helps us arrest our cycle of negative thoughts.
7 more ideas
4
Key Ideas
Action has the power to improve our low mood
We normally think our mind makes our body get into action, but the reverse is also true: Action has the power to improve our low mood.
When one is down in the dumps, even s...
The Depression Cycle
Depression can be distilled down into a problematic cycle due to reduced activity and low mood: when there is less activity, the person becomes withdrawn or isolated, and new opportunities become less likely, leading to a downward spiral.
Prolonged isolation and inactivity make previously enjoyable activities challenging or unappealing, making people withdraw further.
Behavioural Activation
The Behavioral Theory states that positive reinforcement acts as oxygen for the body/mind/soul, and makes the person break the cycle of negativity and depression.
The depression cycle of inactivity can be broken by Behavioural Activation which is an effective depression therapy in psychology. The depressed people are made to engage in activities they have stopped doing or are reluctant to do now.
one more idea
6
Key Ideas
The Prisoner's Dilemma
It is a famous thought experiment in Game Theory. Two prisoners in separate interrogation rooms have two options: to confess or to lie, and this can lead to three outcomes:
- If both c...
The Millennials Dilemma
The Prisoners Dilemma can be reimagined as a life-optimization matrix. When two people have some free time due to a time-saving technique, they can spend it either on leisure or further work. This can have three outcomes:
- Both individuals choose to work harder in their free time, remaining in a constant state of acceleration
- Both individuals choose to relax and chill out.
- One of them works harder and gets ahead, while the other relaxes and is left behind in the acceleration.
The Burnout Generation
Millennials are fast becoming the burnout generation, due to them treating free time as not leisure time, when they can relax and unwind, but as bonus time for them to work harder and up their game.
The hyperproductive, work-obsessed world is hell-bent to automate every to-do list item so that you can work more and create more to-do lists.
3 more ideas
4
Key Ideas
When good habits break down
It is easy to accumulate stuff, like unfiled papers and half-read books or unfinished projects. If left unattended, they can pile up and can spiral out of control. At some point, you can get fed up...
Clearing the mental desktop
There is a way to re-organize your unresolved thoughts and separate the important from the messy mental pile. In the quiet of the day, you sit down with a pencil and paper and ask yourself three questions.
- What am I anxious about?
- What am I upset about, and with whom?
- What am I currently feeling excited or ambitious about?
Fragments provide clues
When you ask what you're anxious about, you may not have a clear answer. You may have fragments of responses that may not make much sense by itself. For example, "I am anxious about floorboards. Book mess."
Record these answers as they will give a hint about the main sore points in the back of your mind.
one more idea
7
Key Ideas
Personal Or Core Values
They are what you consider most important in your life, literally what you “value. ” They are broad concepts that can be applied across a wide range of circumstances, as opposed to narrow answers t...
The Benefits Of Having a Core Value
- Having a core values list helps you make better decisions. The decisions you make come more quickly and efficiently than they would without it.
- Being unconscious of your core values makes you likely to keep repeating the same mistakes.
Creating a List Of Personal Values
The core values that are most valuable to each of us come from our own personal experience, not from being taught.
As you put them into practice you’ll get better at internalizing these values and they’ll express themselves subconsciously with smaller decisions, as well.
4 more ideas