This week to attain, maintain, or regain my sense of wellbeing...
...make a commitment to play everyday. It's true that all work and no play makes for a pretty dull time - it also means that we don't get a chance to properly wind down after something stressful. Life can't be all serious, sometimes we need a bit of silly. This week, spend some time everyday playing. You might spend five minutes seeing if you can still do knuckle-bones or an hour with a friend and a board-game or twenty minutes outside with a basketball or half an hour in the park on the swings. You might need to do a bit of prioritising and planning to make sure it actually happens. If you find it hard to think of something to play, make a list of things that you did to entertain yourself as a child and work your way through each of them. It could be tricky to fit a play in everyday, but you can do it if you have lots of different kinds of play, some that you can do in the space of five minutes and fit in at a busy time. Try to have times of play with another person, and other times it can be solitary play. The key is that there is a time of light-heartedness in your day. This week, no matter how you feel each day, make sure you get at least five minutes of play. Try to notice what things make you laugh or lift your mood even just for a moment and what things don't make any difference, so you can repeat the things that work for you.
Once you are comfortable with playing everyday, add 'Play Time' and a list of the things that worked for you to my Personal Coping Kete as a strategy for times of stress and distress. When you notice yourself having a low mood or starting to get stressed on a regular basis, engage with some play to inject some balance in your life and shift your mood for a little while. Playing won't change the bad things in your life, but it will give you a break from them so they don't dominate, and insert some lighthearted variation into your daily life that might make it easier to cope with and recover from the tough stuff. When things are stressful, we all need a bit of time to recover, and you can use play as a way to recover your energy levels when things are hard.
