Here is a list of pursuits aside from bird-watching that are potent means of psychological hygiene:
- Embroidering;
- Knitting;
- Fishing;
- Hunting;
- Berry-picking;
- Mushroom-gathering;
- Walking in the woods (but without any music);
- Puzzles (but they’ve got to be real puzzles, not the online ones);
- Non-competitive chess (again, not online);
- Drumming;
- Stringing beads (non-commercially);
- Singing in a choir (again, not for money. All of this has to be done as a hobby and not for a living);
- Staring into a fire;
- Making a herbarium;
- Attending religious services.
And the cheapest of all: day-dreaming. This is a great and very accessible source of energy.
If you are gravitating towards any of these activities, this means you have very good instincts and a fair degree of psychological health. If not, try to explore some of them to see if you might like at least one.
Clarissa's Blog 
Drumming, puzzles, and fire-staring are among mine. I would add drawing & trying not to kill a few houseplants. Listening to music while not doing anything else is also good.
Since i don’t have fireplace firestaring gets difficult.
I do puzzles on line, so that is not good. It keeps me on line too much. But I just have to do them that way (crosswords and ken ken). I do one crypto-quip one on paper in the student rag.
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By this I mean: listen to music and only do that. Don’t have it on in the background.
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“By this I mean: listen to music and only do that. Don’t have it on in the background.”
– Exactly. It just loses all therapeutic effect when it’s a background to another activity.
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Incidentally, I find that having 8 hours of background music or television to be quite exhausting even if I’m not paying attention to it.
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Long walks on the hills outside the city are my favourite thing lately. Music is quite essential though. There was this awesome moment today when the road turned so I was facing the sun (which was visible for the first time in a month) and Pink Floyd’s “Set the controls to the heart of the sun” started playing. Snow, a flood of white light and rosehip bushes with branches and fruits entirely encased in the most transparent, crystalline ice I’ve seen.
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That was really nice, Stille. You are a hidden poet :-).
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So I’m trying to figure out what these activities all have in common besides promoting psychological hygiene.
I do have the habit of trying Scrabble puzzles in the free paper and I like walks outside on the beach when people tend not gather, but other that, I don’t do anything on the list.
Is it the opportunity not to multi-task which is restorative?
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The activities have to be inward-oriented. You stay alone with yourself (and ideally with nature) and concentrate on just one thing.
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And there is no direct communication with other people, no chatting. Chess players stay very silent. And choir singers don;t address each other. So, solitary activities.
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When I was a kid I did bead-stringing, but I gave it up by my teen years. I sometimes knit, last time I made a non-commercial looking handbag (handbags are either commercial-looking or very expensive where I live). Since I live close to the sea I walk a lot on the beach. It’s the North Sea, so the beach is not the typical fun beach but rather solitary. Besides these I create a board game for every Christmas – I didn’t do it last year though as it was the year when I migrated to another country and I had neither the time nor the materials, but I will make one for this year as the one from 2 years before went out of shape and we need something to play with at Christmas. I sometimes also do yoga (not in a yoga class but alone). I still have problems with my psychological health though, however these things help me a lot.
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I don’t do any of these activities myself. Unfortunately. But I do have my analyst. 🙂
Plus writing a blog is massively therapeutic.
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I have an old childhood habit that I love to do for mental hygiene and self-care: Working with air-drying clay. My favourite when I was little was making monsters, dragons, and other beasts, today, I mostly make flowers.
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Clay is very good.
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You could take up firestaring.
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I’m planning to do exactly that after I submit the final grades.
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I dabble in pottery at the local rec center and over the year I’ve heard dozens of people say that they consider messing around with clay a form of therapy. Origami and gardening are also great in this regard.
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umm – over the years
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“Origami and gardening are also great in this regard.”
– Yes, definitely. These are great. Origami is a brilliant idea.
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running on beach
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zP0gWiqWs5w
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I prefer to build things, usually useful things, as my kind of mental cleansing …
Usually it’s useful electronics, hence my long rant about Radio Shack.
Soldering, however, is not hygienic at all, especially when it comes to nasty rosin flux. They still sell lead core solder wire in the US as well — so much for RoHS at Radio Shack.
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If you live in a sufficiently old city (otherwise the city plan is too obvious to enjoyably navigate), you can try walking in a direction from work or school you usually don’t take, and then trying to get back home without retracing your steps, by a new route.
It runs a genuine risk of getting you hopelessly lost, but it’s a good way to make friends with a city.
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Unfortunately, my town is too tiny for that. But I have tried a similar experiment in the local forest and it was great fun. 🙂
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Hiking, nature photography, birdwatching, visiting “Shaw’s Garden” (Missouri Botanical Garden) are favorite outdoor relaxation activities. Listening to opera is a favorite indoor activity and also a way to stay alert on long drives to Ohio. Sudoku and variant puzzles are also relaxing but don’t feed the spirit much.
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