Resisting the Urge to Crash

I think we all need a little break at appropriate times in the middle of our often hectic, demanding, and stressful days.  Knowing that we'll have a time at the end of each day to rest and sleep some may not be enough: not only are midday short naps a good idea (if feasible) but it's good to just take a break from whatever you are doing by engaging in things like simply sitting still, taking a short walk, or reading a book.  And then jumping back into the "fray".  But all too often, as I look back on my life and old habits, I have had a tendency to reach a point when I felt like just crashing and withdrawing from everything instead of taking things in stride and taking reasonable breaks.  Now when I was at work on my job, I had enough self-discipline and a work ethic to plow on through the shift in spite of my feelings.  But once off from work, I tended to crash...plop down in front of the TV, get loaded up on food, and vegetate for hours on end.  That's not healthy.

I think that excessive alcohol use, as well as drug abuse, are symptoms of crashing, where the user is hiding from his or her often difficult life behind chemically mind-altering substances.  But you don't have to be on anything to "crash", or even to become an inveterate couch potato.  Crashing is a negative, unhealthy state of mind which presumes that one is "entitled" to give up on the world as a passive-aggressive form of response.  I know all of this, yet the temptation is always there for me to withdraw into a more comfortable environment, removed from demands for me to be responsible for my own life and address problems which are sometimes troublesome but which need to be resolved...