7 Childhood Activities To Unwind and Relax Your Mind
Quite a lot of takeaways from childhood. Who would have ever thought?
(The introduction is exceptionally long, so scroll down if you just want to read about the 7 activities)
Introduction
Ah, the good old glory days of childhood! How fond and memorable they are. You ambled out of home without a care in the world. You felt nothing but the warmth of the sun on your head and the wind in your hair as the vitality of youth coursed through your veins. You plodded, pranced, and marched your way out of class as the last bell rang, and you were inside the school bus in a jiffy already playing hand cricket with your friends.
Come evening time, and you couldn’t wait to feel the exuberance of the outdoors after completing your homework. A tune on your lips, and the wind in your hair were all you needed to feel complete. A game of cricket and running around the neighbourhood with friends definitely helped, but they were in no way prerequisites to having fun.
Admit it. You’ve had fun even on the days no one came to play and all you did was cycle around the colony for 2 hours watching the world go by.
But then came adulthood. You had numbers to show at the office. You had ladders to climb, people to impress, bids to win and projects to be delivered. All that came with loads of anxiety and stress, and somewhere along the way, your lost your connection with the person who graduated college and was a week into their first job.
Your new friends became cigarettes, junk food, coffee, sex, and alcohol. In fact, some of these became part of your staple diet. Some of us can’t even fathom beginning our day without our favourite stimulant of choice now. Some of us pour ourselves a drink every day after getting back from work. And some others make it a point to drink and party every single weekend.
Funny how we did perfectly fine without all these addictions all throughout our lives, and all of a sudden, they’re necessities??
The old friends didn’t seem attractive anymore: Fresh air, a playground, loads of time, running, cycling, cricket, football. These guys totally paled in comparison to the kind of highs the new guys offered. But little did you know that all these “highs”, would eventually lead to floor level lows as well. Some of them quite deadly, if I might add. Soul crushing targets, tight deadlines, constant travel, migraines, depression, hangovers, acid reflux, palpitations, and headaches. These were the sidekicks of your new friends who only got introduced to you later.
Work would tire you out so much that sometimes you’d spend an entire weekend lazing around at home, having absolutely no inclination to go out and interact with the outside world. Listening to people talk itself feels like a big drain on precious mental resources now.
So you did what any self believing executive with his/her head in the right place would. You left your new friends behind and started searching for real ones. Those who wouldn’t stab you in the back or surprise you with their nasty sidekicks. You signed up for running, swimming, cycling, marathons, triathlons, and hiking expeditions. You practiced Yoga and meditation daily, along with the occasional Zumba and spin class thrown in for good measure.
But after a while, even they ceased to be the tranquil release they once were from your daily stressors and started becoming “fitness goals” in themselves. They became part of your daily tasks that had to be checked off your to-do list. You carried the regret of a missed early morning run to the end of the day and cursed under your breath on the commuter rail back home for missing it. You felt compelled not to drink that sugar-loaded fancy drink (not calling it coffee, relax coffee aficionados) from Starbucks which would literally nullify a week’s worth of training, but couldn’t as you had to sit down with a client for a presentation and win them over. You couldn’t attend your friend’s midnight birthday bash as your marathon was only a few weeks away and you didn’t want to let all that good training go to waste just for the sake of one party.
You couldn’t hang out with your usual friends anymore as they were more into late nights than early evenings. Your new friends became Acai bowls and the birds in the 6AM sky. Your new ‘retail therapy’ became purchasing running and fitness accessories. Not that you needed it. Running was therapeutic by itself. Your new “big ticket expenses” were race registrations and costly gear.
But your fitness career only took you so far before the reality of corporate world caught up to you and reigned in that obsession for the outdoors. New work came. New projects which required your undivided attention, which took up entire days and nights and didn’t let you be human at all. You cranked out as much as you possibly could under the midnight oil to impress corporate so that you could have your life back.
You outsourced all menial tasks to maids, cooks, cleaners and drivers. But even after all that, you still needed a release. Because after all, you’re still human. Luckily, there’s plenty of childhood activities that have been lying in plain sight, which offer us as much therapy and the chance to unwind as much as our adult ones. We’ve just been too busy to notice.
Here they are:
Reading
No, not a non-fiction piece about work, productivity, and how to “Win friends and Influence People”. But a story book. A fiction novel.
It has to be the very same thing from childhood. A fiction novel with a plot; the characters, the story line, the twists and turns and all that. That’s the kind of stuff that completely removes the evil clutches of a work life, allowing you to be completed engrossed with it and forget the passing of time. Reading fiction is therapeutic and healing as you’re not rushing to finish it like a work deliverable. You’re doing it for its own sake. This is known as the flow state.
Every chapter leaves you with a cliffhanger making you thirst for more. You can’t wait to turn over to the next page and find out whos behind all those gruesome murders around town. This is what the infant brain truly enjoys. It makes you feel like you’re IN the story. No amount of Netflix or movies with friends can keep you engrossed and hooked to a story the way a crime thriller can.
You magically enter the authors world and get engaged with his/her thought process. What could possibly beat that?
Colouring
Don’t act surprised. Just give this one a try as an adult. You’ll be astounded by the results!
When we’re kids, we mainly do things out of habit or instruction and are not invested in those activities consciously. We do them because we know we’re going to get something in return. You complete this colouring book, you can go to play. You finish your homework, you can watch cartoons. You finish rehearsing for your play, you can go for a movie. And so on, and so forth.
But did it ever occur to you as to how differently these activities impact our brains when we’re wholeheartedly invested in them and do them for their own sake as adults?
When you’re engaged in colouring, your brain enters the flow state as you’re wholly invested in the activity. This not only reduces stress, relieves anxiety, and calms a restless mind, but also improves your focus and concentration.
Listening to music
Remember the days when those mp3 players and ipods first came out? You listened to music for fun back then. It felt so novel, so special and therapeutic, an autotelic activity that could be enjoyed all on its own. Does anyone even listen to music as a primary activity nowadays? Music is always viewed as an accompaniment to something else nowadays, isn’t it? The Oregano and chilli flakes to your pizza if you will. You’re either driving, studying, in the shower, scrolling social media, working, or doing anything else.
So lets backtrack a bit. Put on your favourite tracks, sit on your balcony, rooftop, garden, backyard, lake view, or wherever and chill with the song itself. Pay attention to finest details of the song and not just the lyrics. You should be able to make out all the instruments used and how often they appear in the song. Don’t listen to it for the sake of unwinding, but because you want to. Put on a song that matches your current mood, preferably of an artist you like, so that thoughts about changing the song don’t occur, disturbing your flow. Even better, load up all your favourite songs into a playlist and then listen to that.
You should preferably use some other device for this and not your phone as the urge to check notifications is always there. And besides, you could also get a call at anytime. So throw that connivance somewhere in the corner, and use any other device lying around, like an mp3 or ‘portable music player’ as its called nowadays and get mentally sucked in by the trance of the music.
A good time to listen to music with utmost concentration would be bedtime. Listen to the songs attentively and sharply as possible until you feel sleepy. Then just doze off to it. A lot of distractions internal as well as external will come and go which is perfectly normal. Take as many steps as you can to block them out. You’ll feel like changing the song, skipping one for the next, or even fast forwarding it. Don’t give in to these urges. Put on a playlist of your choice and just fling that device to the other end of the room if you’ve got wireless earphones. Use noise cancellation headphones if you live in a noisy household to block out as much noise as you can. Lock your door and ask your roommates, family members, or partner not to disturb you for the next hour.
Gaming
Just like listening to music, you shouldn’t be doing anything else while gaming. You’ve got to be hundred percent focussed and fixated on the game. And definitely no online gaming, because those are round based rather than plot based, increasing your chances of quitting midway.
Remember games like GTA, NFS, and super mario? You were hooked to those games for hours together because of the extremely strong story lines they presented, which commanded your rapt undivided attention. This kept you hooked to it with the constantly evolving achievement-reward cycle.
You never knew when mornings turned into afternoons and when evenings turned into night. Such was the immersive nature of these games that allowed you to live in a world all of your own.
This point from the web explains my point well:
“Many people enjoy being able to engross themselves in a well-crafted story and complete missions and enjoy interacting with other characters at their leisure.
Single-player games also do not suffer from issues that arise with multiplayer games. These include online latency (otherwise known as lags) as well as the different personalities that you might encounter on the internet, including trolls. Many single-player games also benefit from not having the costs associated with multiplayer gaming, like yearly subscriptions for online multiplayer services.”
While online multiplayer games do come with a socialization aspect, more often than not, that socialization tends to break your flow and remind you of the time of day. When you’re wholeheartedly invested in single-player games with missions, theres nothing of that sort. You keep going at it, trying to complete one mission after another, with nothing or no one to break your concentration in between. There’s basically no one to remind you of the time of day.
Which is exactly the reason why these single-player games with difficult missions were so addictive back in childhood, something you just couldn’t put down. It almost had a spirit like grasp on you, preventing you from going out and playing with your friends on certain days. I vividly remember those days I’d be hollered out for a game of cricket while gaming, and I’d yell back that I’d be out in 5 minutes. But the next thing I know, it’s completely dark outside and all my friends are already on their way back home after their games.
Getting out in the sun
As adults, we know what wonders sunshine does for the body and mind. It boosts our mood, helps our bodies make that essential vitamin D, and also helps with a good nights rest. So this must be practiced exactly the way it was in childhood. Go for a stroll outside on a day when there isn’t a single cloud in the sky, where you can directly feel the warmth of the sun on your skin for hours together.
Combine this with a sport which makes you sweat for additional benefits.
Playing a sport
Like I mentioned above and in the introduction, there was nothing more healing and restorative back in childhood than a good old game of football out in the sun with friends for hours together. All your worries and anxieties (not that we had many back then) totally faded away into the background, and the only thing you focussed on was the game.
The good news is you can achieve the very same kind of freedom with sports even as an adult. But it has to be non-competitive just like it was back then. So find a playground near you and get some of your buddies together for game, or just find someone already playing there and join them.
After all, wasn’t that how it was always done back in the day?
Watching cartoons
If you’re a 90’s kid, you know that cartoons were the end-all be-all of life for you once upon a time. You’d get back from school and plonk yourself on the couch in front of the TV without even changing your uniform. That’s the kind of attention cartoons command when we’re little at least. Ever noticed how no adult could disturb you as you watched them? That’s because you were so engrossed with them, and unknowingly mastered the flow state right there in childhood. It’s also the reason why they’re so calming, soothing, and destressing. And they work even for our adult lives.
So go ahead and unwind with some cartoons.
Conclusion
New and novel methods to unwind and relax are being invented every single day. But our treasured childhood activities remain to be some of the best ways to relax, rejuvenate, and deal with the emotional and mental toll of modern day adulting.
What’s your favourite mindfullness activity to relax and unwind? Do let me know in the comments bar to the side.
Disclaimer: This advice is not prescriptive in nature. It is only suggestive and should be treated likewise. Do consult your physician/therapist/psychologist for any lifestyle related mental health issues you may be facing.
