To make the Lockdown period (and beyond) work for your mental wellbeing, these three things are vital:
Purposeful Routine
Purposeful Projects
Plugged into Re-creating
If you have been struggling with days that seem to drag and are filled with a sense of monotony, here are three steps to shift that.
Firstly, create a purposeful routine to you day by creating a structure that gives you a helpful rhythm. Have regular times you wake up and go bed, and regular meal times (or break times) during the day.
Structure helps to communicate purpose; and it also breaks the day into smaller manageable pieces. For example, it is easier to think, “What will I do in next hour and half between morning tea and lunch”, than it is to think, “What am I going to do today?”
Secondly, build your time around purposeful projects. The project might be related to personal or professional development, organising areas of your life you haven’t gotten “around to”, or a hobby. In the article, Aaron has some great questions to help find what that project might be for you. Other questions that might help are, “At Christmas time, when you look back on this phase, how will you have wished you used this time?” Or, “When we are back into the hurry of life, what will you wish you had time to work on?” Or, “If you came out of this time feeling thankful for it, how would you have used it?”
Thirdly, consider, “What are the things that replenish you?”, and then schedule them into your day and week.
Do what you can, not what you can’t. Consider what you can do even if it isn’t “perfect”.
We are living with certain restrictions so it is important not to get fixated on what you wished you could do but just can’t right now.
Another key that is important here, is to make sure that what you do re-creates you and doesn’t just entertain you. It is easy to reach for social media or Netflix as part of our “downtime”, but these things can often entertain or merely distract us without actually re-creating or replenishing. So consider, what genuinely tops you up, and plug these into your daily rhythm.
And remember, this isn’t forever, this is just for now.
