Ask HN: What books, courses, practices helped your mental health last year?

Being responsible for a toddler is exhausting and helpful for getting me out of my head and into the present moment.

Listening to The Blindboy Podcast from the start has been invaluable in learning how to practice CBT (cognitive behavior therapy; in short, note: Action/trigger, Belief, Consequence/reaction; reflect and adjust). I relate to his experiences and find his solutions useful in my efforts to make more time after a stimulus to notice what I’m feeling and decide what to do.

Transactional Analysis is another useful tool to help shape my behavior. Do I feel like I’m in trouble? I’ll likely revert to Child state and thus make it easier for others to go Parent, when ideally we’re all Adult. When creating I seek the healthy side of the Child coin to immerse myself in the joy of play and the wonder of nature.

These and my counselor are just bumpers in the bowling alley as I get more practiced at owning and guiding my actions.

Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect, helped me identify some negative patterns around depending on others too much for happiness and working to put myself first.

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, overview of how PTSD forms and how to use break the patterns

The books I've chosen over the last year seem to unintentionally have had the common theme of survival under miserable situations. Man's search for meaning, Diary of Anne Frank, Alive!, When breath becomes air, and Blueprint for armageddon podcasts I-VI, are some of them. While providing strategies for living the day to day, they also provide valuable perspective and have made things seem just not so bad after all. Otherwise focus on sleep and exercise have been extremely important for managing what has been the most stressful year of my life.

I find that mental health is built upon a foundation of spiritual health. Meditation/mindfulness just happens to be the most universal form of spiritual health.

Spiritual health doesn't mean being religious or anything, it means being comfortable with who you are and how the universe is. You shouldn't be angry and resentful at the world. You shouldn't be always striving to be the best. Push yourself too hard and you break, which is paradoxically, very unproductive.

You need to be accepting with whatever comes. You can be homeless. You could lose a limb, your career, loved ones. It will hurt. It will require a lot of humility. But you acknowledge that the pain and suffering is a part of life. C'est la vie.

If you want a fixed goal, I'd say everyone has to come to the acceptance that they and everything they love will be gone. You'll die, what next?

All the mental health questions/advice: Forget it. Seek a therapist. Depends on your country of course. In Germany, you have the right to see a therapist and your health insurance pays for it.

Don't ask on HN to get bunch of self-help books and apps, always start with the deep work of seeking and working with a therapist for a year.

Tara Brach - Radical Acceptance was a game changer. Otherwise : trying to focus on having enough sleep (i.e. staying away from screen at night + enough exercise). Trying to put things into perspective (curiously reading history books helped me). Better organization of my time to be more focused on what really matter (check out Cal Newport books and newsletter). Hope this helps !

Mindfulness is useful. It’s not a panacea, but it can be a very useful tool.

Staying busy and having something to focus on. It is tempting to try to lay low and can seem even more challenging to start or plan something. Being active and engaged seem to be good for me.

10 day Vipassana (just recently opened back up)

Breakthrough for Men (Monterey, CA)

NVC

Gratitude journaling

Poetry

Physical exertion to exhaustion (running, hiking, backcountry splitboarding, etc)

Exercising consistently.

No kidding.

Better mental clarity and overall stamina, who doesnt want that.

The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

The Science of Well-Being course on Coursera

Dr. Gabor Mate books & lectures

On the Shortness of Life by Seneca

Meditation, cycling and kayaking.

indoor stationary bike