What do you do to cheer yourself up ?

When I've been horrifically depressed I took a roll of toilet paper and wrapped the dog in it. It made me laugh until I cried. Dog was like "guess this is life now".

Sometimes I tell myself "since I'm gloomy anyway, might as well do some housework". And then the house looks nicer and it helps.

In complete honesty, I spend money. Another more specific avenue is dining out for a nice meal.

Help someone else

Alcohol. Yes, I know it ain't right.

I braid my hair into pigtails. I can't explain it, but everyone is nicer to me when I wear my hair like that.

Vaping copious amounts of marijuana. Its the only thing that takes the edge off and silences the voices that point out the hellhole we live in.

Usually smoke weed and play a game, or play bass guitar. Weed does well to prevent me from dwelling on things because it shortens my attention span. Games allow me to escape, and not much keeps me in the moment as much as playing music does, to do it right you must live in the moment, so it helps.

That being said, this is all escapism, which makes me feel better, but never solves any of the things I might be anxious about.

I wander. I can walk to a Boston subway stop in about 35 minutes. I often just hop on a train and get off at a random stop and just explore.

I'm literally on a train right now for this very purpose.

I play my guitar! That usually cheers me up quite a bit! Lately I've gotten into building models so that has helped a lot too!

Anything that forces me to change what I think about and pay attention to. Video games, driving, ATV rides, etc.

Also just learning to understand (within reason) that things you can’t control don’t deserve a lot of your mental capacity. No reason to worry about it, because you can’t do anything to change the outcome.

Bike ride outdoors. Stationary bike doesn't boost mood for me, only actually biking through space does it.

Fix the problem. Not easy

Beer

It's easy to get up and march down the street. At the end of the hood are dozens of acres with natural sand trails and a creek.

Or, I throw a kayak or canoe on the truck on get on the water.

Eat too much chocolate. Drink too much beer.

Self-care always makes me feel better. I prepare something nice to drink–tea, wine, beer, depending on my mood—and a tasty snack, then put on one of my favourite audiobooks or TV shows and treat myself to a hot bath or foot bath with a relaxing bath essence.

Listen to music! Especially something that makes me dance, like 90s house music.

I do my job! I’m an Uber driver and I always feel fantastic about four or five hours into a shift.

I like to sink time into games like rimworld, CDDA, sims, and the princess maker series. (2 is my fave)

CDDA is free too. https://cataclysmdda.org/

Chatting with a close friend

If my mental/social energy is low:

Weed generally puts a halt to whatever ruminations are buzzing around my head and lifts me up a bit, then order a kebab and play some roguelike games for a few hours

If my mental/social energy is high:

Drop into a few of my group chats and see if anyone wants to hang out, maybe go to a pub or play some games

I recently got into making desserts. I end up with something I can be proud of, get to share sweets with my friends & family and satisfy my sweet tooth all at once. With $10 worth of ingredients and zero experience you can whip up a basic batch of fudge in less than 15 minutes and put pretty much anything else you want into there.

I don't think I ever managed to do that.

TL;DR: Occupy myself with something

At best I can just have a fake conversation in my head. Sometimes I also listen to taxi drivers with SDR. I can only pick up 2 companies, unfortunately. Fortunately though, they are just 0.15MHz apart, so I can listen on to both at once.
One of them even routes phone calls over their radios, so I can hear those as well.

But it's usually boring. Just on new year 2022/2023 one of the 3 companies' drivers were greeting each other. That was nice. Yes, 3, there used to be 3 of them I could listen to.
Actually, even before I had SDR I could listen to one on VHF because they were overlapping with FM Broadcast band. But that wasn't the most pleasant experience. With regular radio I had no squelch option and picking NFM with WFM receiver I had to have volume fairly high. The result of that was faint voice followed by absolutely loud static.

Of course, it would be better to listen to hams. That would be far more interesting. But so far I only managed to pick up the end of 2 contacts on 2m. I don't have much luck. HF is basically unusable where I am due to RFI.
The only stuff I can pick up is chinese AM radio stations, CW (but I've been too lazy to learn morse...), FT8, and the Russian-Ukrainian pirates around 7055kHz.

I don't know how to monitor the 2m band automatically. If I know the specific frequency, in SDR++ I can just set up squelch and turn on recording with "Ignore silence". But obviously that will also not allow me to listen to a real-time conversation because all silence is cut out.

Yeah, sorry, I got off-topic.

I can also play with random stuff in Termux on my phone. Right now I need to update nginx which will require also re-compiling the fancyindex dynamic module. I also want to try setting up Jellyfin and NextCloud in proot at some point.
I also want to download the 110GB Wikipedia ZIM archive and serve that with kiwix-serve after I free up enough storage, currently occupied by DVD ISO files and satellite signal baseband recordings. (Yes, on my phone.)
Of course this isn't always without larger issues.
During one math class I took out my phone from the pocket, because it was starting to get too hot, only to find it stuck in bootloop. I forced it off and tried to boot it up. Thankfully, that worked this time. I found the internal storage nearly full. It seems when I forced it into recovery to turn it off, magically 17MB were freed which allowed it to boot up. Otherwise I'd need to fully reset it, most likely. I can't access the data from recovery, and that's good from security perspective.

What happened? NGINX error log filled up the storage. I am too dumb to properly manage that, so...

error_log /dev/null;

Eating something, drinking some water, getting as much sun as possible without getting burnt. Those three will take care of most of it to be honest with you.

Make something. Get somewhere with lots of quiet and trees. Bundle up in jammies and read.

Talk with close friends, draw, sleep, eat delicious food

Toons. Vidya games. Choons. I guess card games on computers too. Old electronics. Going outside and touching grass. Simping over Europe (as a Moroccan who despises Morocco). Sleeping. Collecting literally anything I could think of. Ponies no, I abandoned those long ago.

I go on the internet and say dumb stuff to strangers... Sometimes it works and sometimes it makes them feel bad too.

Depending on the situation. Simplified, obviously:

• If I can actively do something about it immediately or soon enough “<myname>, you know, you can do it and it will really help you”.

• If it is more on emotional basis “<myname>, I love you / you are important / I know it hurts / I understand — what would you like to do?” saying this type of stuff often and since I can remember, made me respond automatically, whether it is something simple like “I would really like to have an almond ice cream today” or “I am watching the movie tonight / going for a walk” etc or more advanced like “I will do X, Y and Z — in this order”. Having a self-checkup as a tool is really helpful.

• If it is a more complex situation — firstly comes a quick energy level check, followed by looking for the simplest part of the problem as a hook to get the ball rolling or a solid rest (passive or active) to restart the system.

• If it is a really overwhelming / prolonged thing, any form of contact / consultation, either with partner, family, friend or a professional.

Drug abuse.

Depending on the reason I'm feeling crappy, watch a comedy movie/series/video, listen to upbeat music, or play video games.

pizza with anchovies, olives and capers.

Talk to a stranger. At the park, at the bus stop, at the dog park. Doesn't matter what we talk about, it just feels good to connect and it takes my mind off my own bullshit.

Roll around on the ground

Watch an episode of a comedy show

Take a shower and eat a good meal

Pretty much always food and a funny show snd a long walk/run/bike ride.

Will tell you when I find out.

One things I do sometimes is listen to "Everyday Sunshine" by Fishbone

John Mellencamp covers this

"I want you to dance naked and I want to join you"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKrcvol1NsM

:)

Weed. I mean lots of weed. Weed as far as the eye can see.