Have you ever had a life wake-up call?

[ThaVirus]

My most recent wake-up call was a lot lower stakes than a lot of what I’m reading here.

Near the beginning of COVID, I fell into a routine that was starting to make me unhappy. Typical day was wake up, work from home, go to the gym, go home, eat, watch some TV, go to sleep. I was probably getting like 45 seconds of outdoors time each day, just from the walk to and from my car to go to the gym. Spending all day every day in boxes was ****ing with my spirit and I could feel it.

Personally, I’ve never struggled with mental health issues and I would consider myself a very positive, happy person, but my mom definitely did. I remember she’d spend four days straight pulling 12s in the factory, then spend the next three days in her room watching TV/movies in the dark. She was the type to put a blanket over her window to make it extra dark too.

I suppose there’s a greater debate on the root cause of mental health issues like depression but in my opinion, you’ve gotta give yourself a fighting chance with your lifestyle choices. I was nowhere near clinically depressed but I was certainly unfulfilled in a major way so I made the effort to get some outdoors time each day (as well as upping my fruit/veggie intake with a daily smoothie for lunch).

It’s crazy the effect a simple 15-30 minutes being active in the sunlight has on my psyche.

[GloryDayz]

The first time I swam out of a submarine through an escape trunk in the middle of the night gave me a WTF moment of pause. It was a brief moment but that, "I volunteered to do this" thought flashed through my mind...