Distraction therapy: stress management (London)

When I’m stressed out about something, my mind dwells on the source of the stress, thinking about it over and over all day and all night, tossing and turning in bed.  

The mental anguish is bad enough, but when it starts messing up my biological system as well (bad tummy is the most common), I have to find a strategy for not suffering a breakdown, physical and/or mental.

Switch your focus:  onto other people

Some people do meditation.  I cannot sit still, so I go out instead: 

*to do people’s gardening, 

*to shop and cook for old ladies, 

*to massage bad backs/shoulders and migraines (for free).

Before I know it, another day has gone: that is another depression-free day, another day of not thinking about my stress.

Switch your focus:  onto a pleasurable activity

When I have to stay at home, I will do crossword puzzles, being the knowledge nerd that I am.  

They say that we shouldn’t stimulate the brain before bedtime.  

For a knowledge nerd like me, doing crossword puzzles is such an enjoyable thing — taking me into a completely different world, shutting out the outside world, learning things — that it relaxes me totally.

Switch your focus:  onto an external input

I leave BBC Radio 4 on all the time I’m home.  

It covers a wide and interesting range of topics — all very well-researched, reported / presented.  Some of them are so funny and clever (e.g., Just A Minute; The News Quiz; The Unbelievable Truth — just to name three off the top of my head) that I’m actually laughing out loud.

Distraction aside, the knowledge nerd in me gets a huge sense of achievement tapping into their work: weeks, if not months, of research, all potted up into (mostly) half-hour offerings.  Saves me a lot of time, as I’m a slow reader.

Radio 4 becomes World Service at 1am, so I can carry on being distracted throughout the night.  I place the radio by my pillow and have the volume at a level just loud enough to keep my brain distracted, but not so loud as to stop me from falling asleep (very often, if not always, within a few minutes).

   

What comes out of the set shuts out everything else in my brain.  I can even fall asleep in the middle of a fun programme like a quiz game.

I used to wake up in the middle of the night and immediately feel a sense of despair, feeling terribly alone in this world.  Waking up to a World Service programme distracts my brain enough so that it doesn’t even get a chance to be overcome by despondency.  I sometimes listen to it, which means I glean news and developments — political, cultural, scientific.  Often, though, I fall asleep again within no time at all.  

So it’s a very effective baby-sitter for my stressed-out brain, not only pushing out the horrible thoughts, but topping it up with knowledge too.  

More than two birds with the one stone, I’d say.

(London, 1996–present)