I Know What To Do To Be Happy

I have been feeling pretty down today, for various reasons. I’m fairly convinced a big part of it is that I haven’t been able to run for the last 5 days, which is my usual escape from my own head. While attempting to occupy myself enough this evening in order to stave off the ensuing blues, I remembered something that I have known for a while now, but easily forget - I know what to do to be happy. They are things that are simple not easy - exercise (obviously not an option right now), read, write or talk to someone I trust about how I’m feeling, sleep, take a shower, meditate. For whatever reason, when I don’t feel great, none of those options seem especially tempting, and the dopamine releases of food or video games seems a lot more tempting, but those quick hits are incredibly fleeting and inevitably I can never get enough to actually make me feel better. As always, it’s frustrating that the intuitive things to reach for at times like these are the ones that will likely do more damage than good, and I still have some work to do to reprogram my brain accordingly.