Depending on the type of anxiety, I listen to either of two very specific songs on a loop until brain calms. The first is Zhou Shen's 和光同尘 for anxiety related to doing things - it's a song about people coming together to do very difficult things with a gently triumphant HE ending. For unspecific wall bouncing type of anstyness, I use 万象凡音's 与山记, in which every line of lyric is a new stroke that paints the quiet mountain scenery in soft, fond colours.
They're comfort 'reads' because the lyrics that do the trick just as much as their composition xD
Childhood favs like Little Women, The Secret Garden and King of Shadows are great for angry days. NIF's unedited first 8ish chapters as well - I call them the NIF Jianghu adjacent adventures. Being so distant from real life yet relatively unstressful make them great rabbitholes of escapism.
When really really sick, usually eyes and brain reject any and all work, so I listen to Yi Shi Si Zhou's novel audiodrama adaptations Little Mushroom (beautiful worldbuilding in sound) and Pretty Boy (MOST RELATABLE mc inner voice I have ever encountered in my life xD). It helps that there's not a lot of thinking necessary because these are very 'in the moment' types of stories, rather than having complex threads of scheming and plotting to keep track of.
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Depending on the type of anxiety, I listen to either of two very specific songs on a loop until brain calms. The first is Zhou Shen's 和光同尘 for anxiety related to doing things - it's a song about people coming together to do very difficult things with a gently triumphant HE ending. For unspecific wall bouncing type of anstyness, I use 万象凡音's 与山记, in which every line of lyric is a new stroke that paints the quiet mountain scenery in soft, fond colours.
They're comfort 'reads' because the lyrics that do the trick just as much as their composition xD
Childhood favs like Little Women, The Secret Garden and King of Shadows are great for angry days. NIF's unedited first 8ish chapters as well - I call them the NIF Jianghu adjacent adventures. Being so distant from real life yet relatively unstressful make them great rabbitholes of escapism.
When really really sick, usually eyes and brain reject any and all work, so I listen to Yi Shi Si Zhou's novel audiodrama adaptations Little Mushroom (beautiful worldbuilding in sound) and Pretty Boy (MOST RELATABLE mc inner voice I have ever encountered in my life xD). It helps that there's not a lot of thinking necessary because these are very 'in the moment' types of stories, rather than having complex threads of scheming and plotting to keep track of.