The highs and fur-lows of life in lockdown
As a result of the Covid-19 global pandemic, the UK went into lockdown on 23 March 2020. After a few weeks of working from home, I was soon put on the Government’s furlough scheme from the start of April for an initial period of two months, which has since been extended to four months. The furlough scheme meant that while I was still employed, I was not allowed to work and would still be paid. On the face of it, four months off work where I would be paid sounds like the dream ticket for anyone. I was literally getting paid to not work, albeit I wasn’t allowed to leave the house. I am now coming towards the end of my third month of furlough and thought I’d share some of my thoughts on what has been a productive yet complicated journey so far.
The upside
I am normally the kind of person who struggles to spend even a weekend at home, so the prospect of being unable to leave the house (with the exception of grocery shopping) seemed quite daunting. In order to keep myself mentally stimulated I knew that I had to be organised and plan my time methodically. Initially, I created a detailed timetable, stating exactly how I was going to spend each day but I soon realised that this was perhaps too unrealistic. Instead, I gave myself six tasks that I would try and carry out every day. These were:
- Brush up on my legal knowledge: I work in the legal industry and although I would not be working over the next few months, I felt it was crucial that I kept up my legal knowledge during this period. I decided to read a chapter a day of my Property Law textbook from university and finished reading all forty-two chapters of it around mid-May. Whilst I felt that I didn’t necessarily take everything in, at least I was able to become better acquainted with some of the legal terminology and refresh my mind on some of the key concepts and processes involved in Property Law.
- Learn Chinese: As I write this, I am on my 101st consecutive day of learning Chinese. The Duo Lingo app is one that I would thoroughly recommend. It takes you through a series of different topics where you must progress through five stages to move on. The range of exercises mean that it does keep you engaged and I found that I was retaining far more vocabulary than I initially realised.
- Meditate: I started practicing meditation as a way of coping with stress when I was in law school but I’ve found it to be a useful tool generally. I use the Headspace app which contains a series of different themes allowing a more tailored and focused approach to meditation. During lockdown, I have completed a thirty-day course on self-esteem and have started a new Headspace Pro course to try and take my meditation to the next stage whereby there are fewer prompts involved in each guided meditation session.
- Play the piano: I purchased the sheet music for a collection of Ludovico Einaudi’s compositions a few years ago, mainly because I wanted to learn how to play one of his most famous pieces, Nuvole Bianche. On the face of it, it seemed like a fairly complex piece and I hadn’t read sheet music for a long time, so being able to master this piece seemed to be an appropriate challenge for me to overcome during lockdown. As I hadn’t used sheet music to learn a song for a number of years, I had doubts about my technical skill to play and lockdown gifted me the perfect opportunity to commit some time and dedication to this craft.
- Read: Despite studying English Literature at university, I feel that I have a greater passion for reading now than I did back then. Over lockdown, I have discovered a variety of enriching and thought-provoking texts but also rekindled an interest in books that I had previously read. Up until this point I have read Do No Harm by Henry Marsh, The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman, Normal People by Sally Rooney, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge, Siddhartha by Herman Hesse and have then revisited some of the texts that I studied in school such as The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Life of Pi by Yann Martel. Life of Pi, has now become one of my all-time favourite novels. I am now on book number twelve out of my annual target of twenty.
- Exercise: Just before lockdown, I had been attending high intensity interval training (HIIT) classes at my local gym and was really getting into my stride. I hadn’t really done much by way of home workouts before but I’ve found the Nike Training Club App as well as YouTube videos (in particular Rebecca Louise’s fitness channel) to be really effective tools. Additionally, my dad and I completed a thirty-day ab-challenge over the course of April and May. I have tried to dedicate at least half an hour to exercising every day and for the most part have kept up with this until now.
The fur-lows
The first couple of months of lockdown went far better than I ever could have expected. Generally, I think it is human nature for us to overlook the positive aspects of our lives and focus on the negatives, which is why I have made a concerted effort to highlight the ways in which I think I have bettered myself during lockdown through the six activities listed above. Whilst I have made progress, I think it is equally important that I reflect on the struggles of lockdown and some of the difficulties and emotional turbulence I have experienced during this time. The most prominent emotions I’ve had to contend with so far are a sense of apathy, overthinking, a lack of self-esteem, jealousy and loneliness.
Towards the end of May and the start of June, it became increasingly difficult to keep up my motivation. This was partly because I had started to complete a few of the targets I had set for myself. For example, I had finished reading my Property Law textbook and I had learnt how to play Nuvole Bianche on piano which meant that I had to find new activities or goals to fill this void. I found that even if I picked another law-related textbook to read or picked a new song to learn on the piano, I still didn’t have the same drive. I began to feel an overriding sense of apathy creep into my days as I questioned myself frequently as to what is the point in anything I was doing. Why am I learning Chinese? When am I ever going to use it? I am reading my law textbook but not retaining anything. I’m exercising every day but I am barely seeing a difference in how I look. What is the point? I began to question the purpose of everything I had done so far and more often than not deeming it all meaningless which made it a struggle for me to motivate myself to learn new things and challenge myself with the same resilience I had in the first two months.
During lockdown I have had all the time in the world to just think and this has become a tremendously destructive habit. Some days or nights, it is as if every embarrassing moment, misdemeanour or regret plays itself before my eyes in a never-ending slideshow of my worst memories. Moments of brilliance and success are fleeting but every negative memory seems to be seared into the deepest recesses of my mind for some reason and are more than ready to sporadically pop up over the course of lockdown. Meditation has taught me to try and stay in the present to combat the spiralling of negative thought but without any distractions and plenty of time for these thoughts to snowball, this becomes a more challenging task.
In the modern world that we live in, social media can be a thoroughly effective tool to keep in touch with friends and family, follow news stories and finding content that you enjoy based on your interests. I do however, believe social media can be a destructive tool in relation to mental health. People, including myself, tend to put the best versions of themselves on social media for the world to see and as a result, people naturally feel inclined to compare themselves to their peers. In lockdown, (where my phone tells me I’m spending an average of six hours on it per day) I was falling victim to this continuously. Any time I saw connection or friend achieving something or accomplishing something I would find myself feeling envious. Where normally I would be content, proud or supportive of my friends and their successes, I could not help noticing in myself that my knee-jerk reaction on several occasions was that of jealousy. I could not help but compare myself to them and align their successes with what I deemed to be my failures.
In unprecedented times, like the pandemic we are living through now, we have been strongly urged to keep ourselves in isolation. The modern-day miracles of Whatsapp, FaceTime, Zoom and Houseparty have enabled me to communicate with my circle of friends and family consistently throughout lockdown. It is outside of these moments however, where we are left alone with our thoughts, where loneliness can creep in. As good as it has been catching up with people consistently, seeing someone on a screen is not a replacement for seeing someone in person and this has become increasingly clear and has made lockdown life seem a far lonelier place.
Make the most of the situation
The Covid-19 pandemic has affected everyone in the world. We are all in the same boat and as such, even if we are not all together, the fact that everyone is facing similar struggles means that even if we are lonely, we are not alone. During this time, I’ve kept in touch with my friends and family regularly who have provided me with the following snippets of advice which have helped me to reframe the narrative during lockdown and aided me in getting through these challenging times:
- What is the alternative?
I mentioned above the apathy that I felt at times during this period. I have questioned myself as to the purpose of doing any of the activities mentioned. A friend of mine countered this apathy with a simple question: “What is the alternative?” What would I be doing but for these activities? I could just sit around, watch Netflix and do nothing all day but I feel that has the potential to be far more destructive. On the days where I feel I haven’t achieved much I still think to myself that it was better for me to fall short of doing these activities than to fall short of doing much less.
2. Go with the flow
Having decided that I would be doing these listed six activities per day, I found that on some days I just didn’t have the motivation to do them or I’d be doing them half-heartedly. On these days, I found that I would get very frustrated with myself for not accomplishing as much as I would have liked to. In telling a friend about these issues, she replied saying “go with the flow and see what you feel like doing each day”. There will be good days and inevitably there will be difficult days as well, but on those tough days I’m trying harder to not put too much pressure on myself.
3. Survival
“We have this pressure to do things and achieve things with the time off but this is a global pandemic, we’re trying to survive”, a friend wrote to me. This one once again reiterated the importance of not getting frustrated with yourself. Yes, by all means be productive, try new things, strive to be a better version of yourself but at the same time remember that this is just as much about survival than anything else and that we don’t need to succumb to any self-imposed pressure or standard of what is expected of us during this time. Do what you want to and do what you feel you need to do, to survive.
There will be ups and downs, but let’s try and stay positive and make the most of the situation at hand.
“That which is around me does not affect my mood; my mood affects that which is around me”. — The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein
