Leisure Time Improves Your Mental Health
During 2018 to around mid-2019, several social campaigns which focusing on mental healthiness issue raising and providing us with wow-made facts, which said that stress level among youth increasing on three years back especially in case personal depression which drives to suicidal. As World Health Organizations (WHO) said that 4 out of 10 struggle with mental illness like anxiety and depression and one of the highest number is among adolescents and people on productive age. It is not a suprising number as we know we are living on a society which grows with more social complexity and force anyone to be conformed by complying everyone’s social standards without any rooms to be “true-self” or even break for a while. An example, have you ever felt on your daily routine you wake up in the morning, start your routine by deep diving on your social media feeds and starts self-comparing like we have nothing in the world? comparing live-standards that you perceive from your friend’s update.
People judges by its cover — a quote which repeatedly heard through our ears. As we know as this quote has been said, they are trying to tell us that set a judgment by appearance is the easiest to know more about someone’s personalities. In Indonesia, especially in my culture completely familiar with this term. There is an ancient javanese proverb — “Ajining raga ana ing busana” — a person’s character can be defined from how they dress. This is how javanese perceive on someone’s character. In a nutshell, someone being perceived by how they look or even literally how they dress. But the fact, the indicator of “good” or “bad” a person from the way we dress is being standardized by society. We are living long ago shaped by this concept and now we are getting more agile but most people still worry because their surroundings common value. As example, in my neighboorhood, a woman with hijab is always perceived as a good person rather than without one or when you find a man with torn-jeans defined as rebellious. After so many standards that society has been defined, somehow people start carrying the burden about how being accepted by society and society make a “fight” with the “bad” person that have labelled.
Beating Yourself Up by Doing Self-Comparison — Have you ever gone to a mall watching a peer of teenagers hanging out at TWG boutique sipping their teas and wondering “how makes them so rich?” or “how much money do they have?” or simply you open your IG stories and saw your friend’s updates travelling at a place abroad and starting questioning about how bad is our life going so far and make you feel burnout? have you? well, at the first place, self-comparison is a normal thing. We are a person who always need a measurement and looking up to someone’s achievement is the easiest way. So then, what’s make it so toxic? Let me ask some questions:
- Does the comparison you have done makes you think why you’re on this lower point right now?
- Does the comparison you have done makes you feel down and less-confidence?
- After you saw your friend’s achievement, Do you feel that you must be like them like completely do everything what they do?
If you got 3 yes, trust me, you need to shut your source down and stop processing those kind of things because your mind hasn’t steady enough. Self comparing is needed when you want to know about how far your things have been going and set your output. Use comparison as motivation to improve what actually matters. For analysis purposes, you can use self-comparing to know about your strengths and how to start your own goal based on maximizing what you have. But, self-comparing required mindfulness. You have to be wise enough to know the boundaries when you have to stop comparing and when you have to do self-comparing to analyzing yourself for good. At this point, process-oriented mindset need to be set out and the task you need just, focusing on yourself and find your menu.
Time to Leisure — Leisure time improves mental health and decreases depression (Ebrahimi, 2001; The USA fitness Center, 2002; Yousefi, 1981). Living in fast-paced world never been easy. All the standards has been determined therefore people need to fight and being competitive yet ambitious. Those are characters that Gen Z have, but those traits trigger to some mental problems. Anxiety and Stress-out leading out physical problems like sleep deprivation and lack of focus. When we are surrounded by those, Leisure time becomes a scarcity. Eventhough, Leisuring is the key. Leisuring is needed to find our mindfulness and decluttering the source of stress. By giving yourself free time, your mind would be focusing on yourself, treating as your inner-self as you are. One of leisure time you could do is doing physical activity and it is proven to reduce more stress among adolescents than sedentary activities. In my version, baking, reading, gardening while sniffing the smell of greeneries and listening to some Jazzy Lo-fi beats are my gems. Otherwise, it all back to your preference. As do you like, give yourself time to express who you are.
