How to keep your Mental Health in Check during Pandemic times

During this pandemic, since many of us are working from within homes, it is quite natural that we would slip into fatigue easily. It can become daunting at times to maintain a healthy work-life balance, but with practice and patience, one could habituate themselves to rejuvenating hobbies and past-times that would aid the busting of stress. Here are 7 tips to alleviate stress, particularly the one arising out of work:

Journal Thoughts:

For those of us who are creative, writing stories or poems might come to us naturally during such uncertain times. But even otherwise, writing down our thoughts could help us capture our conflicted emotions and inner turbulences better, and then we could liberate ourselves from the need of keeping track of all our convoluted thoughts and emotions fresh in our minds throughout the day, once we care to pen them on paper.

Read Also: How Prepared Are We To Deal With A Person Seeking Support For Mental Health Issues?

Watch Movies:

This is a great time to watch films with family and explore new genres, build new tastes. A movie-watching experience is an effective means to spend time with family and relax. All those films you had been saving for a later date, the time has finally come to unpack and exhaust it all.

Check your News Consumption:

It is important to stay abreast with the latest social, economic or political developments across the world. But keeping track of everything can be exhausting at the same time, and get onto your nerves. Perhaps cutting down on news consumption for stretches of days or restricting the intake to only a few days within a week would not be such a bad idea. There is too much going on in the world that is messed up, and while being able to ignore it is a sign of privilege, there is not always much that you can do to change the world. So, on some days, perhaps taking the backseat from the activist version of yourself could be a smart way to detox.

Reach Out to Friends and Family:

It is now more important, than ever before, to call your loved ones regularly. You never know who is going through what, and loneliness could have hit different people in unfathomable amount of ways. Social distancing should not result in emotional distancing. Call your acquaintances and relatives from whom you seem to have lost touch lately. In times like these, there could be a lot in common between you and them to bond over. We all need support-systems to function, and it is particularly on the days when you feel the most that you have hardly got it all together, that you could rely on the support, assurance and comfort of that cherished friend whom you have lately drew apart from, for uncontrollable reasons.

Read Also: Kim Kardashian West Addresses Husband Kanye West’s Mental Health

Introspect Priorities:

Now could be the time for you to put your life-goals into focus, in terms of career, education, relationships, friends, family, health and other things. During our run-off-the-mill kind of days, we seldom get time to pause and reflect over our decisions and ambitions in the longer run. So maybe now is the time to put a pause on the mindless run, and ask yourself honestly, whether you like the direction into which your life is heading at. You might gain new insights about your hopes and dream during these times, when there is less of the noise and clamour from the outside world to distract you from listening to your inner voice.

Read a Book?

Since how long have you been telling yourself that you want to kickstart the hobby of reading into your life again? You have finally hit the moment when all your internal excuses have dried out. Pick up that novel that you had your eyes hesitantly set at since so long, but lacked the mental space to devour for some or the other reason until before the lockdown.

Read Also: Our Collective Response to a Young Actor’s Suicide Reveals Our Poor Understanding of Mental Health

Cook and clean together:

It is highly important that we divide the chores of cooking, cleaning and organising things in the house at least somewhat equitably. Google a recipe and cook a new dish today with your family. There is ample of time to experiment and moan over failures, or to rejoice the tiny, unexpected successes emanating out of your culinary adventures. You could then use the skills and insights learnt during this period later and forever ahead in your life, for household management is a basic life-skill, and not merely an art.

Read Also: Don’t Let Your Mental Health Suffer For The Sake Of Keeping Others Happy

Finding such everyday getaways to spend time in relaxation and rejuvenation could help you escape the drudgery of those days when life seems to have been reduced to an endless amount of emails that you are shooting out to the world during work!

Vidhi Bubna is a contributor at SheThePeople.TV