I used to play guitar and then stopped (long explanation). But recently I've been hearing about beneficial effects of music, and also the fact that I have not one but two guitars taking space in my room has been making me consider picking it up again. The problem is, the ways I know to do guitar aren't actually very helpful. First, the beneficial ways I've heard about include just playing whatever and zoning out. I don't know how to do that. When I played it was either doing exercises or learning songs, and those can be mechanical, but generally at least after half an hour of focused practice, and that's too much time for what I want to be a relaxing distraction.

There's also motivation. Generally, exercise books come with the assumption that you want to become an amazing player, which sort of involves hours of daily practice. And with learning songs, just strumming chords feels unsatisfying, but more complicated arrangements, again, require hours of focused practice.

In addition to that, there's barre chords, which I put up with in my previous mindset, but from my current point of view they don't help things because they can be painful and annoying because of how easily they go wrong and destroy your tone with buzzing, etc.

Any advice? Ideally I think I'd like to find a way where guitar would be akin to a quick videogame session except maybe instead of exciting you it relaxes you.