How Do You Keep Yourself Busy During The Day?

Upon restarting therapy today, my therapist and I were discussing ways for me to try to keep myself busy during the day since I am not working at the moment so that I don’t have too much downtime to get lost in my head and start overthinking every detail of my life. For me, being stuck in my head with too much time to think often effects my mental health in negative ways.

My therapist and I talked about cleaning, coloring, going for walks, and reading or blogging. But that’s about as far as I got on ideas. I try to get out of bed before 10am daily but it gets hard to do most days when I don’t have anything planned or going on. It makes me sometimes feel like what’s the point of getting out of bed when there ain’t shit to do but clean? There’s always something for me to clean in my apartment but I need other things to do to since I can only clean so much before getting sick of it and feeling lousy about having nothing to do but clean.

I would love to find some new ideas of tasks or activities that I could try to do during the day to fill up some of my time. I would love to be able to have some sort of structure during the day until I start working again.

It took me a very long time to get on a decent sleep and wake schedule and I don’t want my lack of daily activities to cause me to start going to bed in the early hours of the morning and waking up in the late afternoon like I used to do. And I feel like in order to keep a good sleep and wake cycle, I need to have something to do to entertain my days so I don’t want to sleep all day or lay in bed all day binge-watching Netflix or Hulu.

If anyone has any advice for me or any activities to suggest, comments or emails are greatly appreciated!

It has always been hard for me to form some kind of routine or structure when I am in between jobs. Some days I will pace around my apartment completely restless and unsure of what I should or could be doing for hours at a time. I hate feeling restless because it triggers my anxiety and often time makes me feel very irritable and cranky.

My finances are limited right now, so I also can’t just take up lessons or classes of some kind unless they are cheap or free. I also don’t have my own vehicle and rely on rides to get places.

The only other thing that I thought of that could fill up some of my time would be to start writing for websites again that don’t require a fancy college degree to write for them. But writing again may require more time than I can actually commit to since I am going to be starting my search for a new job within the next month or two. I just need help finding ways to fill up some of my time until I start the search and land a new job.

Thank you in advance!