6 Tips for Keeping Your Mental Health in New Normal

As the world, we are going through a period of extraordinary times. During these times, we need to talk about the effects of this epidemic on our mental health as much as we talk about its effects on our social welfare, financial status, and physical health.

According to a recent study published in the Lancet Psychiatry Journal in the UK, increased social isolation, loneliness, health anxiety, stress and economic crisis have created a tremendous effect in people’s mental health. If precautions are not taken to protect mental health, a significant increase is expected in consequences such as increased alcohol consumption, drug addiction, gambling, cyberbullying or deterioration of relationships as well as mental health problems such as anxiety and depression.

In this process which we cannot clearly predict how long it will take, in order to protect our mental health, we want to share with you some suggestions based on scientific data.

1. Take care of your physical health more than usual

The first condition to keep mental health is to take care of our physical health. There is a lot of scientific research on the positive effects of eating healthy food, moving as much as possible during the day — exercises at home — , doing breathing exercises, meditation, avoiding alcoholic beverages, consuming enough water and getting enough sleep at night on our brain functions.

Tip: Meditopia mobile app can be a useful tool for meditation.

2. Create a new daily routine and stick to your routine

Maintaining a regular schedule for our daily routines is much more important for our mental health than we might think. For example, it is possible to spend the day more efficiently by setting up an alarm, waking up at the time you wake up every day, starting the day with breakfast, working and taking a break during the day, eating, taking time for the activities we enjoy.

New responsibilities that you have to deal with during this period — home affairs, children’s lessons, needs, etc. — may require you to create new routines. It would be wise to contact your manager and teammates and make a new planning for all your new routine needs.

Tip: Don’t forget to add regular short breaks to your daily plans. If you work from home or continue your education from home, you can use the pomodoro technique, which offers 25 minutes of work and 5 minutes of short breaks.

3. Limit your screen times, choose your news sources

According to a recent study published in the Jama Journal, it turned out that there is a very strong relationship between the time we spent on a screen and risk of suffering from depression. In this period, we need to be careful not to spend excessive times on TV and phone screens.

News on COVID-19, which we constantly receive from various media channels, can raise our concerns about our health, too. Limiting the use of social media, which is a platform where you can be exposed to fake news, will have significant positive effects on your mental health. You can refer to credible sources of information such as the World Health Organization (WHO) web site.

Tip: When you wake up in the morning, instead of checking your social media first, try planning your day while having a breakfast and have short walk .

You will be surprised to see the difference between the way your day begins.

4. Set your daily and weekly priorities

Having goals and to-do lists is a great tool to increase motivation in these days. Defining your weekly goals with your teammates and making your own daily schedule accordingly will make you to get focused easier.

Tip: You can use digital agendas to make your planning easier and effectively manage your time. You can use Coda, a tool that you can use to increase productivity of you and your team by making collaborative planning.

5. Stay in touch

Staying at home should not necessarily turn into a social isolation process. Take time every day to make virtual connections with your friends and family using FaceTime, Whatsapp or other apps. At the same time, staying in touch with your teammates, in these days which we are missing our lunchtime routines and coffee breaks, will help you feel that you are part of the team. You can organize virtual lunch with your team.

Instead of sharing frustrating news during your communications, you can share suggestions about how this process can be more productive, mental health, TV series, or playlists that can be listened to while working. Having frequent communication with your team and knowing that you are not alone in this new normal will help you to keep your morale and motivation high.

Tip: Tools such as Slack, Teams, Google Meet will help you to save time for instant communication with our teams. While working on a project with your team, you can brainstorm online with tools like Mural.

6. Reward Yourself

Giving yourself small rewards at the end of an efficient day will contribute to your inner motivation. Also remember that there may be days when you feel that it is inefficient, accept that every day cannot be the same.

At the end of the day, it will be good for you to drink a cup of tea or a glass of your favorite wine or watch a few episodes of your favorite show. You can make a good start to your weekend by organizing online happy hour activities with your teammates on Fridays.

Finally, we must say that it is mostly under our control to keep our mental health and motivation. It is of course normal to experience feeling like depression worry about our health, and worry about our loved ones in these days which we are exposed to negative news every day.

Many pandemics have been encountered in the history of the world and millions of people have been affected. Remember, in the process of the big plague epidemic, while everyone was waiting for the outbreak at home, Newton came up with important theories and discoveries.. It is not possible to change the new normal, but it is possible to get out of this process by protecting or even strengthening our mental health while discovering ourselves even better.