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Healthy & Happy in Liberty Hill

Making time for self-care is especially important during these weeks of social distancing. The City of Liberty Hill will post a series of tips, focusing on one aspect of happiness and health each week.

Reading and writing can be useful therapeutic tools to gain clarity and make positive changes during difficult times. Journaling your thoughts allows your mind and emotions to roam free without fear of criticism, while reading allows an escape to clear negative emotions. Use these tips and tools to find meaning surrounding the circumstances of the coronavirus pandemic and identify areas to improve your outlook.

1. Get a Liberty Hill Public Library card to access electronic books during the stay-at-home order.  Text the library at (512) 675-2428 to sign up for a card and to get your card number and password. Then log in to the Liberty Hill Public Library Catalog to explore electronic books and other resources.

 

2. Choose a reading genre that helps you cope best. Select fiction books that allow you to escape into other worlds and put your life into perspective. Some great options from the New York Times Bestseller list include Where the Crawdad’s Sing by Delia Owens, The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, and Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate. Choose self-help books to put solitude and self-isolation into perspective, allowing you to think more constructively about our current situation. Read titles like Do Nothing by Celeste Headlee,  How To Do Nothing With Nobody All Alone By Yourself by Robert Paul Smith, and Silence: The Power of Quiet in a World Full of Noise by Thich Nhat Hanh.

 

3. Create a journaling schedule to write about specific topics on certain days. Aim to write 3 days a week for 20 minutes at a time without stopping to edit. Choose topics that will help you feel calmer, increase empathy, and problem solve any issues you may have encountered due to COVID-19. Some great options are:

    a) What do I know to be true that one year ago I didn’t?

    b) How can I detach or neutralize this emotion?

    c) What parts of nature do I most enjoy?

    d) Who is having a hard time and needs my help?

 

4. Try journaling apps. Use Reflecity for a daily happiness and gratitude journal. The Moodnotes app prompts you to track your moods to help identify triggers, develop healthier thinking habits, increase self-awareness, find new perspectives and pinpoint “thinking traps.” Woebot is a self-care app that utilizes cognitive behavior therapy tools to help you analyze situations using a chat format.

 

5. Join Liberty Hill blogger, Kristan Braziel, in documenting life changes due to COVID-19 through The Corona Chronicles Project. This will be a time-capsule of your life right here in Liberty Hill during this unprecedented time. You will document everything using self-guided prompts–recording thoughts, feelings, fears and revelations. The Corona Chronicles Project will serve as your story of living through this time. Your grandchildren will someday read what your bustling, busy life was like in the days before everything came to a crashing standstill. They’ll read about how you felt and how your work changed, how schools changed, and how long it took for some things to return to normal. They’ll see how some things were altered forever.

Katie Amsler
Author: Katie Amsler

City of Liberty Hill Director of Community Engagement & Communications

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