Daily Habits to Improve Mental Health
When I more or less got off social media, I made some changes, many of which relate to daily habits that I do before the day starts. Learn how 30 minutes of reading, understanding your why, and going to church can improve mental health.
scott cunningham
Economist by day, Wiccan wordsmith by night. Merging the mystic & mundane in the world of causal inference. Author of books on both spirituality & econometrics.
-
When I more or less got off social media, I made some changes, many of which relate to daily habits that I do before the day starts. One of those is 30 min daily of reading. I've read 9 books so far, which has felt great, and my mental health is calmer and peaceful 1/
— scott cunningham (@causalinf) March 21, 2023 -
No more chatter from the online world inside me. I've shifted my socializing efforts entirely to other avenues, partly within my Dept, partly with the girls more intensively at the margin, partly with trying to raise a large share of stray cats and possums in my neighborhood
— scott cunningham (@causalinf) March 21, 2023 -
Partly by finally finding a new church -- a Pentecostal one in the Church of God in Christ denomination that's three blocks from me, which has been one of the ongoing new joys for me. It's super small, maybe 20 total, 95% of them are elderly women who sing in the choir.
— scott cunningham (@causalinf) March 21, 2023 -
They call me now "Brother Scott" and "Brother Cunningham" from the pulpit. The moment that happened, I was like "Well, looks like I'm never leaving this place. You had me at Brother Scott." This church allowed me find a workaround of my baggage, which took some creative thinking.
— scott cunningham (@causalinf) March 21, 2023 -
But to the books. I'm now reading Huck Finn. And let me just tell you something. A hot take as they say. I absolutely hate it. I do not remember hating this book. I'm not going to tell my dad, who has Parkinsons, that I hate one of his favorite books.
— scott cunningham (@causalinf) March 21, 2023 -
But I keep waiting on me to like it, and I'm 150 pages in, and not liking it. But I don't get points for reading the books; I get points for finishing them, and I am keeping a spreadsheet. My favorite books so far this semester have been:
— scott cunningham (@causalinf) March 21, 2023 -
1) The Race Between Education and Tech by Goldin and Katz. We are reading it in my "Issues in Economics" class and not surprisingly, it's phenomenal.
— scott cunningham (@causalinf) March 21, 2023
2) Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success by Aramitzky and @leah_boustan . Loved it, as did students. -
3) Hold Me Tight: 7 Conversations for a Lifetime of Love by Sue Johnson. It's about "adult romantic love" and attachment theory (Bowlby's work applied to adults). Very powerful book which I quote from at the start of each podcast.
— scott cunningham (@causalinf) March 21, 2023 -
4) Dark Matter by Blake Crouch, a popular book, science fiction. Read it in two days. Don't want to spoil it by describing it, but loved it. It was my first book of the year, so it could be it got some sort of primacy advantage since I was bereft from not reading in a while.
— scott cunningham (@causalinf) March 21, 2023 -
And now I will once again log out and delete the Twitter password I created moments ago to post my podcast. Need to muscle through a half hour of tedious reading Huck Finn.
— scott cunningham (@causalinf) March 21, 2023