- Exercise, exercise, exercise.
- Sleep quality. Look at all the sleep tips out there and make sure you are getting good sleep.
- Learn controlled breathing to help when tense. The 4-7-8 breathing when done properly and for 8 good breathes helps me a lot. Be sure to breathe with your stomach (diaphragm breathing) not your chest.
- Meditate (Headspace app, Calm app, Insight Timer, Oak)
- Improved diet, no caffiene, very little alcohol (one drink if out with people)
- Socialise more. Make sure to check in with friends in person and on the phone regularly. Social media doesn't count.
- Try new things, go new places. Meetup.com is great.
- I took up brazilian jiu-jitsu which has been awesome, ticks a lot of the above boxes.
- Look at Maslow's heirarchy of needs. Start at the bottom and start working on improvements for each thing. The world is great with lots of opportunity. If your feeling bad your first port of call is to look at what things your brain and body needs that you aren't getting right now and take action.
- Go and see a therapist and talk it out with someone. It helps a lot just to talk about it. Don't face this alone, there's no need to do that.
- The Youper app is pretty good too.
- Programming is amazing in that everything you need to learn is online and you can do it yourself. It just takes a lot of focus to stick with one thing and see it through. Like others I recommend having an idea for a fairly simple app, game, website whatever that you'd like to build. Pick a popular technology for building that type of thing and go with it.
If you want a rough idea of how popular something is, see how many questions for it have been posted on stackoverflow.com in the last week. https://stackoverflow.com/tags
Forget about being good or doing things the proper way. Just hack your project together little bit by little bit by googling and asking for help on websites like stackoverflow.com and forums. Just build something! It will probably be crappy but you'll learn a ton and be proud of the accomplishment.