Cultivating Sanity in the Time of Pandemic
Many of us are not accustomed to the pandemic lifestyle. Here are some habits & activities that can allow these months of social distancing to be a time of re-centering and personal growth.
I’ve been noticing that different people in similar situations have been having vastly differing experiences handling the self-quarantining asked of us during this pandemic. As a service worker, my income has been nearly completely annihilated by the temporary shutdown of non-essential businesses and I normally spend a lot of time in coffee shops — yet I’m still having somewhat of a great time now, with so much ability to think deeply about things and pursue goals I wouldn’t normally be able to pursue.
So since we’re all going to be inside a lot for the next weeks and months, I wrote this post on things I’ve done that have helped me cultivate good indoor habits — behaviors I’ve developed over the years which are now probably contributing to my ability to enjoy my social distancing. I’m sharing them so that others can potentially draw from these things to help them get by and even thrive as our society-wide response to the pandemic plays itself out.
Digital Sanity
For these upcoming months when everything is uncertain, people are going to be posting on social media about their thoughts and feelings. Constantly becoming aware of these things without much in-person interaction will drain your emotional reserves rapidly, especially if you’re a highly-empathetic person or an extroverted person. These are a few ways to allow the digital devices to function as tools for you to use intentionally, rather than chains that restrict and encumber you.
Allow deep focus by putting the phone away
Once you’ve decided to do something, keep your phone 1) out of sight and 2) in a spot that requires getting up and moving in order to pick it up. Better yet, keep it in another room. One study found that for study participants, even having a smartphone on silent and face down, but visible causes cognitive impairment. This type of distraction makes your brain switch tasks constantly, which actually dumbs you down.
Add “friction” to increase your intentionality
Remove social media websites from your bookmarks and history, keep your phone out of reach, and delete apps for Facebook, Twitter, etc. Doing these things add what tech people call friction. Increased friction means that it takes more conscious effort to do something, making it harder to behave impulsively and reflexively which counters what these apps are training us to do — i.e. to open them often, and stay glued to them for a long time. In the case of visiting social media websites, don’t kid yourself that you’ll miss something important or that you won’t visit visit them. You will, but less frequently and more intentionally.
Decimate your notifications
Turn off all push notifications on your phone that don’t come from calling or messaging apps. If an app or a person can’t get your attention in the next 60 seconds, it’s fine. The only thing that’ll happen is your mind will focus and work better after a few weeks.
Make your news consumption intentional and limit your exposure to the CNN-style boy-who-cries-wolf-every-goddamn-hour breaking news
This means not getting most of your news from social media, because people self-select to share things that evoke strong emotions, which is going to be draining for you, and the things that the algorithms show you are probably selected for their emotional wow-factor, too. The thing that’ll help you understand the world and feel like it’s less completely out of control is context, something that mainstream news outlets love to forget.
If you do want to stay in touch with what’s happening in your community or the world, I’d recommend doing one or a few of the following things:
1) Use a podcast app and follow the news programs and non-news podcasts that interest you (my favorite is one called Podcast Addict; I know Stitcher is very popular, too). What you probably want is a limited number of news programs that follow breaking news, with far more newsy podcasts that discuss and analyze broader trends informing what’s happening and why it’s happening. Podcasts and programs that analyze the context of the news and broader trends will allow you to have a worldview that understands that things are really not as chaotic as they seem. You won’t miss the forest for the trees. Audio programs like The Daily by the New York Times, the Ezra Klein Show of Vox, and NPR’s Throughline are some of the top-tier shows that do this.
2) Use a newsfeed app and only select sources that are credible, but also look for a range of styles of writing, including blogs, op-eds, and think tanks that might lean this way or that way. This way, your news sources will all give you just one angle of a more complete picture of what the world might actually be like. I like Feedly because it allows me to pick specific feeds and file them into different categories. But if you don’t mind having less control and would rather pick topics that you’re interested in, instead of a bunch of specific sources, I’d recommend Flipboard. For the love of all that is good, don’t use Facebook as your primary news source.
3) Create a strategic delay in what you stay informed about. So much of what constitutes “news” these days is actually just soap opera drama that completely blows over and becomes irrelevant in 24 or 48 hours. For mental health purposes, it can be extremely useful to only consume media that is a recap of what actually stuck to the wall, so you avoid all the garbage drama and can direct your mental and emotional energies elsewhere — so subscribing to a Sunday newspaper or a newsy print magazine like The Nation can help with this. Analysis-heavy print magazines like The Atlantic and The Baffler are also amazing for context.
4) Completely avoid televised news sources like CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, and Fox. These channels function more as entertainment that play off your emotions (and that’s how they pick and create their programming) than actual informative news. More on this here.
Physical Health
With limited space and resources and gyms closed, it takes some thinking and intentional effort to create the habits that result in positive health and mental health outcomes. Here are some things that have really worked for me.
Focus on nutrition and cooking
This one is so simple, yet so often forgotten. You can only feel good if your body has the nutritional resources to do so. With the extra hours in the day, now’s a great time to learn how to cook healthy food in delicious ways.
Invest in a jump rope and look into circuit training
These things are super handy because you can use/ do them indoors, thus annihilating bad weather as an excuse for not exercising. This allowing you to get into a routine of exercising every day. You can jump rope inside, and as much as I just wrote about how terrible smartphones and apps are, I still use them sparingly as tools to serve me. I’ve used an high-intensity circuit training (HICT) app on and off for years, starting when I was backpacking around Southeast Asia and just needed some fitness routine, and I love it. It’s this one, but there are many 7-minute a day apps just like it.
I would put yoga on this list, but I know that the vast majority of people already have yoga on their to-do lists and yet most of us aren’t doing yoga by ourselves every day, are we? Starting by stretching will get you there eventually.
Cook, exercise, play games, and hang with the folks you live with
Do this regardless of if you even liked them before the pandemic, because humans are social and there’s wisdom in the Stephen Stills song, “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.” You’ll probably cook more and exercise more frequently if you agree to do so with the people you live with, whether they’re family, friends, or randos who happen to live in the same place.
Mental Health
Do something creative — build, grow, make, or fix something.
One thing I’ve noticed is that it’s very useful to have a multitude of activities at home, so that if something seems to get boring or tedious, there are plenty of other activities to switch to, without feeling trapped at home. Home then becomes a place of countless, lovable activities. Now is a great time to start the projects that seemed too time-consuming or do the things that always seemed awesome but would never generate income. For me, this includes writing more without trying to earn money from it, and cleaning and fixing a typewriter I’d bought about a year ago.
Read books — especially fiction — during the pandemic
A book is an easily-achievable mini-project, and it trains your brain to be focused. During times like these, when adventure and social interaction is highly limited, fiction will allow you to live vicariously through the stories of others. Fiction trains your brain to feel the experiences of others empathetically.
Make sure you’re exposed to the correct lighting
This is one that many people don’t think about, but it’s extremely important! As someone who has lived in a number of basement apartments while having the very late hours of being a bartender, I became very sensitive to having the correct types of lighting in my living spaces. By this, I mean that the rooms that you spend your evening hours in should have lights that are very warm and emit low amounts of high-frequency blue light. Blue light tells your body that it’s morning, and if you’re not getting much natural light early in the day, your diurnal cycle can get really messed up and you might sleep very badly and erratically. Here are some useful apps and programs that allow your devices to cut the blow light as the day progresses.
Call and video chat with people
These modes of communication are richer than texting, because there’s just more information in another person’s tone of voice, demeanor, body language, surroundings, facial expressions, etc. than there you’ll be able to access through just texting.
Fortitude of the Spirit
The point of all of this stuff is that the external world can seem crazy and unpredictable, to it’s important to develop a sense of personal calm. If you’re in a well-built, well-operated vessel, it won’t worry you too much to be in stormy seas. In fact, the stormy seas will make the operator of that vessel more capable and more experienced. These are a few of the deeper things that I’ve found have allowed me to maintain an inner calm and fortitude.
Stay away from intoxicants and addictive activities as much as possible
Boredom and isolation serve as a couple of the textbook conditions for developing and exacerbating addictions — whether that’s substance abuse, gaming, porn, gambling, etc. If we’re bored and anxious, the pleasure centers of our brains will be lazy and hungry for easy, fast dopamine fixes. The longer we can go without any low-quality, fast dopamine bursts that build dependency upon a substance or not-so-great activity, the more pleasure you’ll feel when you’re doing other things that are actually good for you. The idea is to ultimately get to the point where it’s possible to look at reality and oneself and feel very level about it. Not indifferent, and not not-displeased, but level-headed and realistic. After that, it becomes a lot clearer what one’s purpose is, and much more easy to follow through on that purpose.
Meditate
You don’t need an app to meditate. Really. Don’t download one. The idea that you need your smartphone to enable yourself to stop thinking about most of the stuff on your smartphone should seem problematic for obvious reasons. Just sit there and focus on your breathing. It’ll probably be tough at first and won’t “work” but that’s just fine. It takes time to develop any kind of skill and getting your brain acclimated to the “skill” of meditating is similar.
The method that works for me is just one of many, and won’t work for everyone but I’ll share it. My friend told me about it years ago.
Basically, I just sit there, focus on my breathing, concentrating on my solar plexus area. With eyes closed, I imagine looking out onto a peaceful ocean. Every time I have a thought about anything — How can I pay rent? Is this person upset with me? I should be writing more — I put those thoughts into boats and allow myself to hold the thought on the inhale. Then, on the exhale, I watch the boat, with that thought in it, go over the horizon. As thoughts keep coming in, they keep getting put in boats, and keep going over the horizon. Sometimes the same thought has to take a boat over the horizon about 5 times, and that’s fine. Sometimes this feels frustrating or takes a long while, but that’s ok. Eventually, there are no more boats, just the wind and the sea.
Finally, read or re-read those ancient, perplexing, mystical texts
Not kidding, they help immensely. Most of them have to do with coming to terms with the fact that the future is always uncertain and that our expectations — our hopes and fears — are always wrong. Not only that, but fears and hopes are the seeds of anxiety, sadness, and anger; those things being the products of expectations of the future that may not occur, or have not occurred. More importantly, and more difficult to accept, these texts and other tools — like psychedelics — have allowed me to accept without fear or anxiety that I will die eventually. They have allowed me to accept that all lives will end, and even that the world itself will be destroyed, but that is not a thing to be feared; each moment and entity is infinite and total, and I must do my duty in every single moment. My favorites for reflecting on these difficult truths are the Bhagavad Gita and any of the ancient Taoist texts, like the Tao-Te Ching, Chuang-Tse, and the I-Ching.
There’s a beautiful sci-fi-ish book by Ursula K. LeGuin titled The Lathe of Heaven. Interestingly, the title came from a mistranslation, albeit a serendipitous one, because it’s beautiful:
“Those whom heaven helps we call the sons of heaven. They do not learn this by learning. They do not work it by working. They do not reason it by using reason. To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven.”
— Chuang Tse: XXIII
Basically, all of what I’ve written is just how I taught re-acquaint myself with being a human, as my ancestors were hundreds and thousands of years ago. For all that modern civilization has offered us, it’s also allowed us so many specialized, ubiquitous technologies like smartphones, artificial light, distractions and conveniences so vast that we never have to move our bodies, and delicious but totally unhealthy foods that make our bodies and minds function like crap.
So as the pandemic worms its way through our societies and forces us to slow down and re-assess so many of the foundations of society and our individual lives, let’s re-learn how to be human together. We are, in fact, experiencing the intense and majestic churning of the Lathe of Heaven.
