I've been thinking lately about what actually keeps me balanced, as opposed to activities that I think should. I don't want to fall into prescriptive thinking about wellness - meditation is good, exercise is good, social connection is good - without paying attention to what specifically works for a given temperament.
This is my attempt at a personal audit. The activities below aren't aspirational. They're what most consistently move the needle on my mood and general mental state. Some are obvious, others I eventually realized over long periods of time. The list is unordered, and non-exhaustive.
Unstructured time
The main, overarching pattern for me. Probably the reason I'm freelance, the reason I became a father late-ish in life, and my hardest to manage, even though it's the most fruitful. I need open time that's unscheduled and unstructured to feel like my life is... mine. This counts for work as well as personal time. Any project that has an exploratory aspect throughout leaves me feeling way more balanced and energized, compared to something with a very strict process and timeline. After mulling over the draft for this paragraph for a few weeks, my general observation would actually be that I thrive with constraints but push back against structure.
Time with family and friends
I will group these under the umbrella of: Social moments that reminds me I have good friends and I'm part of a robust support network. I'm rather introverted – I'm lucky to have a core of people close enough to me, and known enough to me, that we can get together without ostensibly draining my social battery.
Playing music with people
I'm not much of a team sports person, but my way of, uh, communion if you will, is to play. Music is its own language outside of language, live and visceral, and I don't know of anything that feels like playing music with other people.
Meditation
I have an on-and-off relationship with meditation, though it definitely has a positive influence on my mood. During the periods in my life when I'm consistent with sitting, I'm much less prone to feeling disorganized and anxious. However, I have a hard time working out the causation vs correlation here. Falling off the wagon is a sign I'm not doing so good anymore, but as of writing this, I'm not clear if it's the falling off, or the doing worse that comes first.
Working out
To no one's surprise, exercise is good for you! I lean towards individual action sports, with my personal love being street trials. Think an almost-BMX, with lots of braking, balancing in place and climbing over stuff. I live in a northern country, so bicycle sports are out of the equation for almost half the year, during which I ideally do strength training 2-3x a week. Since I became a father, and personal time got very restricted, the gym outings are on hold and I go out for a run or bike ride when I can.
Art and writing
I find it an irritating contradiction that I have such high get-to-work inertia, while at the same time work produced is one of my straightest paths to feeling fulfilled. Art gets me to that place without the hurdle of matching my output to someone else's expectations. It gives me a process that defaults to exploration, and a pleasant, tangible outcome for my time spent.
I think I like my definition of what constitutes art and creativity to be very open, and it feels natural to me to include writing here, even if it's fact-based and dry (hello to you, reader of this very article). Writing allows me a more direct way of self-reflection. It also lets me exorcise whatever might be sticking to my mind, unresolved or waiting to be integrated.
Media & video games
Coop games with friends
I never tried Fortnite, WoW or LoL, but video games have nonetheless been a reliable third space for portions of my social circle. I'm writing this on a day my friend and my brothers are planning to play together in the evening. The genres we pick are mostly shooters with a coop element, and driving games with a chaotic/open element – Wreckfest, BeamNG.
Solo games
Games that ask some level of planning/organisation and methodical thinking are relaxing to me, especially if they're also open in some ways. I didn't dive into Factorio yet – early fatherhood and whatnot – but there's a broad category that includes Zachtronics games, multiplayer Minecraft (Tekkit!), some Civ-style games, city builders, etc. that fulfill my need for open exploration and tinkering. Some personal highlights, off the top of my mind:
Fiction on screen and in writing
My dose of escapism comes from reading – I like sci-fi and fantasy, but I think I more generally love good prose that lets me visit other people's imagination. While I've been on a local authors kick (French Québécois) the last 12-18 months, one of my north stars in fiction is Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea. From the opening chapter:
His father, the bronze-smith of the village, was a grim unspeaking man, and since Duny's six brothers were older than he by many years and went one by one from home to farm the land or sail the sea or work as smith in other towns of the Northward Vale, there was no one to bring the child up in tenderness. He grew wild, a thriving weed, a tall, quick boy, loud and proud and full of temper.
On screen, I'm currently enjoying what might become one of my favorite series, Empathie by Florence Longpré.
I was raised in an emotion-shy family, especially male role models, and fiction seems to be what helps me most to experience the full spectrum of emotions.
Patterns emerge
Going over the list, some themes seem to run across the spectrum of activities. Autonomy shows up everywhere – the need for unstructured time, creative work without external expectations, games that allow open exploration, sports that don't pit me against others, etc. Connection with others, in my case, gravitates around what I might call "quiet togetherness", with playing music together being its high-arousal equivalent. I clearly have a bone to pick with my relationship between structure and freedom, where I seem to need enough framework to feel grounded but start to fight that same structure the second I feel constrained.