5 Tips To Be Mentally Strong During Quarantine
COVID-19 has had a profound impact on us all. From being in quarantine from a few weeks, to a few months, our mental strength, resilience, and pressure to still deliver exceptional performances from home (all while balancing the space with our spouse, family, kids and more) can be quite the challenge. Yet, there are several tips I’d like to share with you in order to help you tame your mindset during these tough and challenging times.
Let’s get to it!
#1 Develop Your Routine
What does your routine look like? Are you planning your day ahead of time - or are you getting dragged through your day? Quarantine life has effects on all of us. Master your day before your day manhandles you with to-do’s, phone calls, emails, and the plethora of other things that can come up at any time. Be proactive with your day and not reactive to it. Start your day by writing the biggest tasks you want to accomplish the night before in a journal and wake up earlier to get them done.
Whether it’s a morning workout, or finishing that blog post, big project, or other large task you have to get done, you want to get the biggest, most time consuming things done as early in your day as possible. This will allow you to ride the wave of momentum throughout the rest of your day and smaller tasks will now seem easier to accomplish.
If you also spend 5-10 minutes the night before writing out how you want your day to go with what you have to get done, you’ll be planting those ideas into your subconscious which will make you motivated to get them done. Trust me. If you tell your brain, “I’m going to get up at 5:30 AM and go for a run,” then getting up at 5:30 AM and going for a run will be that much easier.
Develop your routine. Whether it’s working out, journaling, meditating, praying, working, lunch, dinner, time with your spouse, reading, or being productive, if you take the time to craft your tomorrow, your tomorrow will be infinitely better because you’ve taken the time to develop your routine. It takes 21 days to create a habit and 66 days to break one. Think about that for a second.
#2 Eat Super Healthy
Garbage in, garbage out. 90% of the synapses made in your brain are first developed in your gut. And you know what matters? Gut health. If you have a healthy gut biome, you’re crafting and creating healthy synapses. It’s nothing knew that our guts are known as our, ‘Second brains’ so why are people filling them with trash, garbage and other harmful things to our body?
When you take the time to fill your body with proper nutrients, vegetables, and hydrate properly, you’ll be profoundly surprised that after a week you’ll be feeling better, have more energy, and will be focused and stronger for longer.
Stay away from the booze, sugar, shit foods, and other useless calories that are doing nothing for your body except stressing it out. When you eat excess sugar, carbohydrates, or filling your body with toxins, it’s like setting off an internal fire alarm that puts your body under chronic stress. How many times do you think you can do that before your mental alertness, resilience and more begin to suffer? This is especially important to note during quarantine.
Opt for what your body needs, instead of grabbing the most highly processed foods in the grocery store. If you really listen to your body deeply, you’ll know what it craves most. Think, read labels, and understand what you’re putting in your body. This is especially important during quarantine!
#3 Workout Your Mind & Body
So, you’re living 90% of your current existence at home….are you working out? Meditating? Learning new things? It can be challenging having your home as your gym, office, place of relaxation, where you eat, sleep, entertain yourself and more - but sometimes the only way through something is through it. That’s why you’ve got to both find ways to exercise your body and your mind.
Fitness is important and should be done daily. Whether that is through 10-minutes of yoga, or doing a body weight workout outside in your yard or in your bedroom. You must find ways to sweat and stretch your body. This will cause the release of feel-good endorphins that will spike your mood and relieve stress.
Same goes for meditation. Have you ever meditated before - or are you brand new to it? Taking the time to focus on your breathing and to empty your mind for 10-20 minutes can have a profound impact on your health, especially during quarantine. Go on YouTube and search for, ‘10-minute meditation’ and find one that works for you. Do this as a daily habit and slow down your brain during these tumultuous times so you can better focus on the tasks at hand. Focus, observe, listen, let go of all the stress, negative thoughts and more. This isn’t the cure for everything, but done daily, it will take the edge off.
Trust me.
#4 Re-Wire Your Brain
As I mentioned above, 90% of the synapses in your brain are first formed in your gut. Your gut health is extremely important to your brain health, but knowing that these synapses are directly formed by what you put into your body is only the first step. After these synapses are made, they are transported through your circulatory system (heart) and then eventually go into your brain to form new connections to hold new thoughts, experiences, patterns, routines and more throughout your life!
As you begin a new routine, you MUST understand that re-wiring your brain to accept your new reality is paramount. To do this, you must also understand that getting dragged through your day can cause a lot of feathers to ruffle. This is typically caused be you being reactive to your own emotions (no bueno!). What you must do to re-wire your brain is understand that instead of going with that ‘Gut’ reaction you might first have, understand it’s really a three-step process. First, you must understand your gut, then your heart, and finally make the logical choice with your brain.…without the baggage of going on your emotional choice or reaction. Going with your gut is like tossing a coin. It’s always 50/50. Never believe someone that says, “I’m going with my gut on this one,” because they’re just tossing it up. When you use the trifecta of your gut (physiological self), your heart (emotional self), and your brain (logical self), you are more apt to make smarter decisions with more awareness.
Finally, knowing and understanding that your conscious brain is really only responsible for about 5-10% of the thoughts and actions you do on a daily basis is really important. Re-wiring your subconscious brain is all about the operating system. It performs as you command it. Therefore, what you put into your brain before bedtime is really important to how you’re going to wake up tomorrow and how you’ll perform at those things. Plant the ideas in your subconscious and go on and get after it!
#5 Dead Time vs. Alive Time
One of the coolest concepts I read about recently was about, ‘Dead Time,’ vs. ‘Alive Time.’ Dead time can simply be put into the category of Netflix, scrolling through dating apps, social media feeds, and not really nourishing any part of your brain or body. It is the seconds of responses you have to phone notifications, buzzes, and other useless things such as watching reality TV. Now, don’t get me wrong….we all need a little bit of downtime (Dead Time), right? Yes, that’s so true, but we also need to be highly conscious of what we’re doing and how much of it we are really wasting. The key is to be conscious of it - and not to spend any more time than absolutely necessary for when we could be working on ourselves, our business, our lives!
Just because we are in quarantine doesn’t really give us more time to waste…on the contrary, we should be more conscious of how much MORE time we have. The lack of commute, more time with family, friends (virtually) and more. We have MORE time than ever to get things done. This is the concept of ‘Alive Time’ first shared by Ryan Holiday, one of my favorite authors. Keep this in mind as you progress through the day. Are you using time wisely? Efficiently? Or spending more ‘Dead Time’ than you’d care to admit?
Only you know the answer.
Anyway, I hope a few of these tips helps. As always, give me a shout or leave a comment and let me know what you think. Looking forward to working together at some point through coaching, monthly retainers, or more.
~ Cam // info@ckcollective.co // 617.866.9573