I’ve not had a good day today. The kids have been shits, my wife has winged at me for not doing something I have already done, I’m hot, tired and stressed from work and fed up of not having a good nights sleep due to my 3 year old waking us up in the middle of the night constantly.
I want to rage at something but I can’t leave the house. I have access to a gaming PC, PS5 and all the movies the streaming services have to offer, my wife isn’t home so it’s just me and a couple of kids who should be asleep in the next hour or two.
I need some catharsis, what would you do?
Mad music on headphones, drop to the ground and blast through pushups to failure as fast as I can.
Follow that up with a walk until resting heart rate is back to normal and steady.
Honestly I usually ride my bicycle someplace but unless you have a stationary bike that doesn’t sound workable (and I’m not sure a stationary bike would work anyway, I think actually leaving the building is a necessary part of the equation).
I have, however, gotten a lot of mileage out of smashing ice with one of those wooden cocktail ice smashing mallets. When you make crushed ice for fancy cocktails you put the ice in a little canvas bag and beat it with a wooden mallet. It’s destructive, but in a harmless way.
Just don’t do like I did the other week and go to slam the bathroom door, underestimate the degree to which your home’s doors are made of paper mache, and accidentally knock a hole in the door. :( I can confirm this does not make you less mad.
Doom. Go play Doom. Don’t pick hardest difficulty, don’t pick easiest difficulty. Smash your way through some demons with a killer fucking soundtrack.
EDIT: Doom 2016 is the one I was referring to. Great lore, but you don’t have to slog through cutscenes and the lore doesn’t get in your way when mowing down crowds of angry monsters.
Agreed. Keep the difficulty hard enough to keep your mind from wandering, but not so difficult that it makes you angrier.
Go for a workout. Get active in some way. Whenever I’m all wound up from work or social life and I just have no patience I go for a run or go to the gym. It expends the excess energy AND gives my brain the good chemicals. It also gives some time to think and process what you’re feeling while your physical body is occupied.
Take a walk
Or
Go sit in my backyard alone.
Mind if I join you in your backyard as well?
Take a walk and listen to an album you’ve been meaning to get to. When you get back, take a shower and light some incense. Then just kick back brew some tea and play a cozy game for an hour or three.
My go to is just screaming
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Put in some ear buds (to avoid waking the kids) and blast Metallica or your favorite heavy music.
This is more preventative than something that would help you now, but try to practice gratitude/active appreciation. It’s a bit of a slog to start, but once you get in the habit you’ll feel overall more positive and more directly in control of how you feel at times like this.
Basically, take time a few times throughout the day to acknowledge something you’re thankful for or are enjoying, and then say or murmur it out loud to solidify it. Sunny weather or a crisp morning? Feel good about it for a second or two. Those headphones your relative or friend got you as a gift sound banging? Mentally thank them for it.
This is one of the few therapeutic practices that have a universally positive impact on mental health and outlook, and it’s definitely served me well in general as well as in very similar circumstances to what you’re dealing with.
Accept the fact that life doesn’t always (actually, never) goes as planned or is easy. Them think about how much your life works suck of all the people who angered you today were not in your life (you have to think past the initial “I can do whatever I want” phase and into the “I’m an adult whose only purpose in life is to survive because of instinct”).
Then hug those kids before bed, tell them you love them, ask them if tomorrow they well try to do better if you promise to do the same (whatever the did, this is generic).
When your wife comes home, greet her with a clean kitchen and a glass of water with cucumber in it or something, tell her the kids settled down and you got to relax for a bit, and ask her how things went.
Go outside for a walk or run. Take a couple of deep breaths for like 5 minutes. Listen to your favorite music. And then remember: this too, shall pass.
Random workout-anything to get moving. Stretching, Push ups, yoga, calisthenics, dancing, run outside if you can. It is weirdly relaxing.
I’d put my headphones on and listen to something loud.
I usually don’t fuck my friend Angry, we play cards
