Just like your body needs a balanced diet, your mind calls for a balanced experience. We’ve all heard the expression that “all work and no play makes Jack (or is it Joe?) a dull boy.”
This means that the pursuits that energise you and make you feel better afterwards are not just good for your body, they’re nourishing to your mind. But in contrast, there are also things that drain you. The activities that make you feel tense and stressed afterwards are draining to your soul. To have excellent mental health, you need the things you do to be more nourishing and less draining in your day to day life.
I have discovered a neat little exercise to assess how much of your current life is spent on nourishing vs draining undertakings. You can find it in Dr Matt Lewis’s “Overcome Social Anxiety and Shyness”.
This is how it goes.
Think of your typical week and write down the activities that you do regularly. So, your week might look like this:
Cooking
Shopping
Job
Reading
Playing Tennis
Drinking with friends etc
Now, look at your list and think how each activity makes you feel during and afterwards. If you feel tense, stressed and drained afterwards, mark it as D for draining. If you feel energized, calm and relaxed afterwards, mark it as N for nourishing. Take your time reflecting on every item in the list.
When you are done, look at how many Ns and Ds you have. If you have way more Ds than Ns, then you are not following a healthy diet for your mind. Obviously, it would be in your interest to remove as many Ds as possible and increase the Ns.
Unfortunately, you live in the real world. (Well, I hope you do!) You probably won’t be able to remove all of the draining activities, at least not immediately. For example, if your job is draining and you spend 5 days a week in that job, you need to consider either changing jobs, reducing the hours or changing your perspective. I must admit, I’m not very good with changing perspective. I would always go for the change of job. Needless to say, this purging of the drainer will take time. And you may never be able to be completely rid of it.
Ideally you want to see your week dotted with nourishing activities.
One bonus of doing this exercise is that you may discover that the activities that you thought were doing you good were in fact draining you. For example, I thought that playing tennis was a recreational activity for me. But as I thought carefully, I realised it always made me tense and emotionally drained afterwards. It wasn’t giving me the stress-releasing result I was looking for. Since I don’t have any specific goal for it other than getting a bit of exercise and learning a new skill, I think I can safely drop it and replace it with something truly nourishing.
This exercise helps you to balance your life as well as finding out what is truly nourishing you. Since there is only one you in the whole world, you may find that what genuinely nourishes you is what other people may find draining and vice versa. For example, you may find walking with friends draining while other people probably would find it relaxing.
Since our tastes tend to change with age, it’s worth repeating this exercise every 3 to 6 months. You never know what draining activities will have sneaked into your life over the last few months.
Good luck.