Considering psycho-hygiene means to redistribute your energy wisely and keep balance between body and mind issues, between work and compensation in your everyday life.
Psycho-hygiene helps you clean yourself from mess, which causes stress and long-term discomfort in your body and mind. Although we have a plenty of “psycho-hygiene techniques”, psycho-hygiene is basically entire attitude to your life and time structure of your everyday well being. The main goal is basically reaching balance between aspects of our lives and daily activities. The aim of our articles is not giving you exhausting information, but to provide insight to get familiar with the topic and get inspiration how to integrate it in your praxis.
What can be included in the psychohygiene approach?
- considering balance between work, compensation and relaxation
- balance between rationality and creativity, function and expression
- physical well-being – healthy food, enough sleep, motion and compensation training
- psychical well being – anti-stress training, self-reflection, mindful approach
Psychohygiene helps you keep the motivation, life energy and prevent burnout. It is also much about rest from one-sided thinking and mental work, such as everyday practice. Doing psychohygiene does not mean not to have stress anymore. It helps you keep the stress and tension at bearable levels in which they do not ruin your work and life! Our well being requires certain level of balance of all our aspects. We have our brains as well as bodies. We have racionality as well as imagination. If you work just with your mind all days long, then you need to provide enough bodily compensation to yourself! Once you work just rationally, you need to take some time for creative and imaginative activities. In the following table, I will provide you couple of first examples for your daily regime. More tips will be coming in the next articles!
Try the first simple activity to find balance!
Considering WORK versus LEISURE TIME
This activity should provide you a simple self-reflection of how you distribute your time and energy and if you compensate your work well. It should also help you consider redistribution of your energy on a daily basis. So take a paper, pen and start!
1. Write a list of all your activities including both work and leisure activities you have done in the last day. To each of those, write down approximate duration, for which you have been doing this activity. For this purpose, to be objective to yourself, try to check yourself during the day and write down true time you are spending with particular activities.
2. Sort out all the written activities to following categories: 1. work, 2. leisure time.
3. Compare the categories, consider the activities. Look at how much time you give to your work and how much time you compensate it. Look at that, which activities prevail. Now look at all the “leisure time” activities. Consider between the activities that compensate your practice drill and those activities which serve as pure relaxation according to your opinion and try to sort them too. You may find out, that you spend majority of your free time on digital devices, which is absolutely not good for psycho-hygiene… You need not just to find the balance between the work and leisure time within the leisure time category by nature of your activities too!
Crucial in this point is, how certain activities truly serve you. Much of school duties, if you are learning on-line now, comes through computer. Most of a time, many students “relax” at digital devices, usually on Facebook or YouTube. If you are listening to music on YouTube to study new compositions or search for interesting performers and works, then it is a work activity more than a relaxation. If you just turn random videos on, than it is kind of a relaxation, which does not compensate your work well, because digital device consumes much of your energy, makes your brain exhausted, eyes getting worse, overwhelming your perception… Especially during the evening before sleep, due to “blue light” coming out from the screens, at least one hour before falling asleep, you should turn your device off! If you study on computer much, then leisure time on digital device is absolutely not suitable leisure time activity too! First, just look in general, how much time you spend on digital devices and what amount of this time is truly necessary…
The matter of compensation and leisure time is much about considering, how do we work and which activity makes true compensation to this work! If you play an instrument, then suitable compensation is stretching, going for a walk, yoga and any similar activity. Instead of being on Facebook for a long time, you can red some inspirative book. If you stay on computer much, try to write everything you can on a paper, avoid digital devices any time you can. If you work with our brain much, than good relaxation and compensation will be also activities such as cooking or creative activities, hand-making of stuff…
If you want to relax and you do not want to leave your instrument, then turn from learning modus to creative. Try to discover new ways of how to play your instrument, make your own music. You will be given more tips n the next articles!
4. Plan your activities for the next day. Consider better balance between categories. Find the time, which you can redistribute better for more useful activities. For example: If you gave much time to Facebook, but did not go for a walk at all, try to at least share the time for both or switch Facebook time for a walk time! It is clear, that you will probably not be able to totally change your habits, so try to make steps. Do not delete completely your digital leisure time, make it step by step… Try to keep your plan during the next day.
| previous day | next day | |
| WORK | practice – 2:30 hours school (computer) – 3 hours | practice – 3 hours school – 2:30 (+ anything that allows accomplish on the paper instead of computer) |
| total | 5:30 hours/ 3 hours computer | 5:30 hours/2hours computer |
| LEISURE | stretching, compensation, yoga – 30 minutes Facebook – 1:30 hours YouTube – 1 hour watching movie – 1:30 hours | stretching, compensation, yoga – 45 minutes walk – 1:15 hour (1 hour taken from”Facebook time”) Facebook – 30 minutes YouTube – 1 hour reading book – 1 hour (instead of movie) |
| total | 4:30 hours, 4 hours on digital, 30 minutes of motion | 4:30 hours, 2 hours of motion, 1:30 on digital, 1 hour reading |
5. In the evening, give yourself a feedback again, how did you balance your categories and make suggestions for other day!