Clean out accumulated stress
The Hindu
Can we identify a deliberate process around a de-stressor and build it into our self-care system?
We are familiar with the concept of de-stressing, we have seen individuals choose ways to manage pressure, loss, conflict, and even just to pause from busyness and monotony. Many individuals have eventually found their calling — in performing art, individual sport, public speaking — within an interim of healing from trauma, loss, and life-changing events.
Frida Kahlo, one of the most accomplished Mexican artists of all time, began to paint while bedridden and recovering from a near-fatal accident. She was required to wear a full-body cast for three months. To kill time and alleviate pain, she began to paint and completed her first self-portrait the following year. "I paint myself because I am often alone and I am the subject I know best". This simple outlet to alleviate personal suffering led her to become one of the 20th century’s most iconic and impactful artists and champion of feminism.
It is well documented that many artists, painters, writers, and their craft revealed and gained prominence as they retreated into self, experiencing a need to withdraw from the clamour outside, and they discovered and explored their most intimate medium to express.
Closer home, my own experience of finding the urge to write, as an outlet and as a means to finetune ideas — in the midst of a life that felt rudderless — has brought beautiful rewards emotionally. I see my teenage son retreat to his music and guitar as a means to refresh and reset in the middle of stressful study schedules and pressure to perform.
However, let me flag that not every serendipitous outlet of expression becomes a calling, and nor does everyone find in it, a means to fame and livelihood. Moreover, neither is every creative habit born out of sorrow or pause-inducing life event. Yet, finding an outlet to cleanse accumulated stress, is a veritable lifeboat to surf the choppy ocean of life.
Let us assume each of us has a uniquely inherent process that we resort to, often subconsciously, as a means to unwind. Feeling rejuvenated at the other end of it is an outcome we recognise and hence return to, rather automatedly. Can we, then, identify a deliberate process around it and build it into our self-care system? A therapeutic process?
The beginning lies in watching ourselves closely. Simply becoming aware of times in the day when I resort to, perhaps, scrolling news or content. What is the kind of content I am usually drawn to? Is it fitness, fashion, music, current affairs, books, poetry, painting, or even running and building muscles in the gym? What is it that I love watching others do that tugs at my heart as “I wish I could too”? This is the stage of self-observation.