Now I’ll focus on practical advise:
- gym every day. No excuses. If you don’t know what to do or lack motivation- get a personal trainer.
- besides gym pick an active “hobby”. Cycling, rollerblading, running, skiing, surfing etc. You need self-supporting way to spend time outdoors. Again: do seek instruction.
- learn to play music. It is very healing and rewarding. Also frustrating and hard. Guess what? Take classes. Joining (community) school is great. Getting into local band is amazing. Most importantly here: you do not need to talk to these people. Same goes for drawing studio.
- professional education. Maybe you always wanted to be CPA?
- deep and challenging activities: sailing, diving, flying, mountaineering etc
- checklist reading, movie watching
- study textbooks
- systematic traveling
- volunteer
- build things with your hands and give them away
- learn to recognize your emotional state and how it changes.
My “qualifications”: I was single for ~10+10 years.
Do you people even go to the gym at all?
You need time to recover. Between 3 to 5 days is the most you can humanly do. And that's if you vary your exercises as suggested by a (good) personal trainer. Any more than that and you're just asking for overtraining syndrome. Doubly so if you're nearly 40.
Edit: after seeing the replies here the answer is obviously not. Don't take advice from internet strangers if you don't want to hurt yourselves kids.
This doesn't take into account that your body requires rest, and I don't know how op thinks you can combine this with an active sport like skiing, or something creative like music. You will be drained already from the gym.
I don't really have the time for gym but going feels so good so I can see why someone who does have the time might go 7 days a week.
Thats easy if you have no responsibility
I'd say start with 2x a week, and 2 very important points - start gently since by description body isn't used to working out so it may take many weeks for it to grow connective tissue to handle new load; and start with a coach who will not push you like many love to do, but give you a gradual introduction and help avoid beginner's mistakes and injuries.
The main point is to not make every workout a hated chore that must be done, since such motivation won't last very long and subconsciousness will easily find ways to start avoiding that. Everybody I knew that subscribed to such regime from 0 and wanted to be pushed hard gave up in few months. Such a mindset is reserved further down the line, for specific types of personalities and not an universally good approach.
Once some form of affinity if not outright love for workouts and feeling/effects after forms, and routine sets in, find other sports. Don't just do gym mindlessly every day unless that's the only choice of activity... its rather sad use of all that gained potential when there are so many better, more fun & rewarding activities. Do group sports if you like them (I personally don't), and/or join groups of people doing such activities (ie hiking club must be almost everywhere, its such a basic and great thing).
Some 15 years ago I started ie organizing climbing sessions out of loneliness in similar situation as yours and amount of friends and women that entered my life in short period was non-trivial. Thats further down the line, but just a group similarly-minded people are already a massive boost. Be yourself, find your new hobbies or better passions, and this hard period will be over.
Do NOT spend most of your free time in front of screen, playing games or other rather toxic activities. They will make all negative things worse since its a very lonely hobby despite being in contact with many folks (multiplayer, singleplayer is even worse).
I lift four times a week. Two days a week I do intense cardio. One day a week I do something low impact like yoga or a treadmill incline walk. "Active recovery" is not a new concept.
The principle is to be active - treadmill, rowing machine, elliptical, etc on days you're not lifting weights are perfectly reasonable expectation after a few months of adaptation period. You don't have to go to the gym of course, you can do all those activities at home with some very cheap and easy to obtain equipment like rubber bands and/or TRX, but the point I think OP was trying to make is to create opportunities for social interactions.
On days I miss workouts I feel much more groggy and tired, so working out over the years became a necessity which I don't really need to find motivation to do. If you feel bored and tired, try to couple workouts with audiobooks or podcasts, that helps to make the experience more enjoyable and even productive at times.
(I'm nearing 42, working out most of my life 5 days a week at least)
A daily 40 minutes on an exercise bike, rowing machine, or treadmill doesn't seem excessive.
I'm personally happiest on two heavy lifting days with snatch, cleans and front squats, and then just lots of walking, handstands and some empty barbell work at home on other days.
I've tried to go harder, but doing heavy snatches 4x/week just exhausts me without increasing strength.
But then I do a cut, and maintain, its only like 20 minutes lifting per week.
Anyway, you are basically repeating broscience. Or maybe after lifting for 14 years, I can handle it.
But also, you can do cardio everyday, that said, I only do 1 hard cardio day per week.
Martial arts usually have physical and technique days alternated, same goes for bouldering, and I imagine many other forms of exercise.
Do I feel better? Yes. Was it hard first 2 weeks? Yes, I had even to resort to painkillers.
I think the best for people who sit a lot are core, mobility and back exercises. Huge motivation for me when I finally started prioritizing back on machines and progressed on all other things and finally look like I go to gym :)
30min resistance and 30min "Jeffing" (called the run-walk method, run-walk-run).
Saturdays since I have more time 1:30hr resistance, 1hr-2hr cycling outside.
Eating healthy is also important, cook for yourself always. Meal prepping saves so much money.
I think time is also against me and life is moving quickly that if I don't spend everyday on body and mind its a wasted day.
Every gym I see in socal is always busy. Bonus, you start to see "regulars" and have someone to say hello to.
Incredible irony here and exactly what I was thinking as I read your comment. Get them internet points, kid!
Your focus should not be in improving yourself and being the best you can be. It's about getting to know yourself better.
What is it that you enjoy. And if you don't know, now's the time to find out. Maybe it's going to the gym, maybe it's finding a great breakfast place. Sitting there, having breakfast, being around other people.
Finding activities that you enjoy doing outdoors, bonus points.
You've already done the first step in asking for advice. Even though it might sound neglectible, that's a great achievement. So many people suffer from depression and have a hard time to take this first step. Congratulations!
Get out there try things, learn who you are. Maybe there's this thing that you always wanted to do places you always wanted to see. Now is the best time to do it. And if there's no such thing, you've been given a great list of things to try.
Best luck to you in this new phase of life!
Strong disagree. It's a different kind of hard. People can handle hard. Running a marathon is hard but a million do so every year for no reason other than maybe it's hard.
The difference between taking care of kids and having a family is that it's meaningful and to most deeply satisfying. Sure there are some people that don't get any satisfaction, but I think it's fair to say that it's not the typical experience across every Western culture.
Let's stop pretending everything is morally equivalent. "I'm raising an autistic child to be a functional member of society", "oh that's nothing! I just mad Diamond II with 61% win rate over 200 games in League!"
I don't know what "being with the wrong person" means. There is no "right" or "wrong" person as the world doesn't revolve around you. If you're actually in an abusive relationship, you should get out obviously. But what's the alternative? Drifting. Emptiness. No purpose or companionship. Spending the rest of your lives with pets asking for life hacks on how to manage boredom. Video games, netflix, personal indulgence and self gratification, medication.
This is going to be weirdly controversial on this forum but is advice I would give to my children: most people should aim to do what we've been biologically evolved to do, namely find companionship and love w/ someone and raise a family. If you're an outlier and you have a shot of sending someone to Mars, sure, go all in on that, but for nearly everyone else, this is your best chance for a fulfilling meaningful life.
> I don't know what "being with the wrong person" means. There is no "right" or "wrong" person as the world doesn't revolve around you.
Ho boy. Listen, I was married for 6 years, separated / divorced for 5 years, and now have been married for 10 years. You have no idea what kind of hell those last few years of the first marriage were. I had no idea until I'd been separated for a year, and gotten back to some sense of normalcy. I can't even describe to you what it's like to live in a house where you're emotionally wounded continually, or to realize the best you can hope from an attempt at a "date" is "it didn't explode".
One of the problems my ex and I had getting help was that people just couldn't seem to understand how bad it was. We'd describe something, people would say, "Oh yeah, marriage is hard, it will get better." Well no; our marriage was way worse, and it never got better.
The second marriage is so different. It's the kind of hard you're talking about -- we put in effort, it pays off. We argue, then we sort things out. We're not like some movie romance, but we're fundamentally a team. Some part of it is certainly "I learned something"; but a big part of it was definitely "It wasn't all me".
ETA: And, apparently, my ex has now been married to someone else for 11 years. Again, I'm sure she learned something from the disaster of our marriage that helped her in her second one. But I can't help but think there was something more than that: something difference in personality between myself and her current husband, such that she and I couldn't work things out but the two of them can.
Congratulations.
I was in two different relationships where my partner was trying to destroy me. One literally tried to murder me.
Being alone is so much better than that, it's not even close.
so yeah, your take is controversial, but not why you think
You misunderstood the point. The GP isn’t saying you shouldn’t do that. They’re saying that if you find yourself in the position where you don’t have mutual love for one another, the relationship could be worse for the both of you than if you were both alone.
> I don't know what "being with the wrong person" means. There is no "right" or "wrong" person as the world doesn't revolve around you.
It’s subjective. As is love itself.
I hope you’ll find a different way to support your kids if they ever get in a dark and lonely place.
A bicycle, on the other hand... a thing of beauty.
My top advice would be to get an in-person job, even that means less money or moving, or just pivoting to a new industry. Even better find a job where people are your business so you're not pinning everything on socializing with co-workers. The people I know who are like this do jobs where they have to meet/find customers, coordinate people and teams, do on-site projects, etc. They are energized and fulfilled by these interactions even if the job itself isn't that important to them.
It's still hard to do sometimes, like in stronger depressive episodes. But it's way easier than gym at least for me.
For me, the gym has a gym energy, kinda intimidating. There's lots of people and everyone is wearing hadphones, you don't know where to look at, you have to wait for equipment, share equipment, etc. I don't like personally.
Get a personal trainer or try signing up with a CrossFit gym or another gym that has coached classes. You need form instruction, and you need to take it slow.
For me, my mental health and physical health are tied directly to each other and this was the single best thing I did for myself in my late 30s.
OP complains about dreadful 60 hours and not about being too busy. I can relate.
