Hey guys! It’s Aby! The other half of Aby and Eby downtime talk! This week I want to focus on RELAXATION.
Personally I struggle with relaxing. The pressure put on me by my family, friends and teachers, makes it difficult to take a moment for myself. I’m lucky to even manage to sleep at night with all the pent up stress I have. Relaxation is key to enjoying the few minutes of down time us teens do have.
The key to relaxation is knowing what you like and don’t like. I generally dislike cooking because it’s definitely not one of my talents that I was gifted with. It’s pretty bad, so bad that I manage to mess up cooking spaghetti. So cooking isn’t something that is relaxing to me thus I don’t cook to relax. But something that I LOVE is typing (AKA why I’m here!) Sometimes I’ll take 20 to 30 minutes of downtime to just sit and write.
Once you found your thing, you have to take time for yourself. It doesn’t matter if you have something you love if you don’t take the time to enjoy it. Sometimes it is a s simple as treating myself or hanging out with someone who helps distract me. Being around people that I know will help me destress no matter how bad everything else is helps me a lot. Another thing that works for me is rewarding myself with a dessert after I finish my homework and before I go to soccer. It helps give me time to relax in between events.
One of my problems is that I focus on one thing and worry about all the ways it could go wrong. If its school work it helps if I just decide that I don’t care anymore, and suddenly I don’t care about how the outcome looks. I just know that I completed the assignment. It actually helps a lot. But when it comes to more personal matters it helps to know that whatever it is that I’m worried about won’t matter in a day, week, month or year. My dad says , “Eventually, no matter how bad it is everyone will forget it ever happened,” and it helps get me though times when I find myself getting to anxious.
Leave me a comment if you have ways to relax you want to share. And remember two simple words: #dailydowntime
—Aby
