For those of us who work in an office, the structure of our working day is often, to some extent, predetermined. In essence, our office hours. The rest of the day, we are free to do with as we please. However, with lockdown requiring us to work from home and furlough completely eliminating our ability to do any work relating to our jobs, our standard routine is for the time being, absent. We have all heard the term that we are "creatures of habit". Well, our habits stem from our routines. Think about it, you may eat at 7:30 am because you have to leave for work at 8 am. You may not have a set lunch, but how often do you have your lunch at the same time each day? Does your workout routine revolve around office hours? Whatever the answer is the chances are that our work commitments influence a lot of our habits.
My work schedule has disappeared, and along with it, as has my routine. I am therefore nowhere near as productive as usual despite having more time to prioritise the things I want to do. I am free to read more books, work on my blog or even speak to people I can learn from because guess what, they also have more free time. Simply put, the more time I have the less I am getting done. I feel like I have fast-forwarded to my twilight years because I don't know about you, but I have often been told that your “retirement years are the busiest of your life”. All this despite being retired, no longer bound to the 9 till 5.
By having a routine, I am simply trying to provide myself with something that has been somewhat taken away due to the lockdown – control. I have had to come to terms with just what I can’t control, but more importantly what I can. I can’t control my time outdoors, where I go and who I interact with. However, I can still maintain control over how I spend my day, what I do during my day and when I do things during my day.
Focusing on what I can control has led me to identify three things that are important to my mental health regarding my routine. Due to their significance and impact on my mental wellbeing, they have therefore become the skeleton, the non-negotiables of my daily routine. The rest of the body that makes up my day is subject to change. If you can think of a better analogy, please let me know. This one works for me, but I reckon it could definitely be put more eloquently.
Pursuing with this unique imagery, the three aspects of my day that make up the skeleton are:
1. the time I wake up,
2. the times I eat,
3. the times that I exercise.
The rest of my schedule that makes up the body of my routine is subject to change day by day depending on what I want to get done. The only restrictive rules I have set myself here are that I must:
1. select these errands/tasks/chores the day before,
2. Be realistic, set myself a manageable workload.
An example schedule can be seen below. It is simply an excel template that I have amended to my own requirements. I have also colour coded it, yellow refers to the skeleton of the routine (my non-negotiables, green ticks off the errands I have completed and the red indicates additional tasks I have not completed.
The fact that as humans we need exercise, sleep and food does help to naturally provide a skeleton to the routine and this can obviously be adjusted to suit an individual’s personal needs. Understanding just what influences your mood positively and negatively could help to identify the non-negotiables that help to maintain a stable and more positive mental state during this testing time. At this moment in time, an individual’s mental health is being tested in different ways than we are necessarily used to. The last thing I want to do to mine is subject it to further testing with the addition of a negative view of my own physique.
By managing my exercise and my meals -through intermittent fasting, which will be discussed in a future post- I may not leave this lockdown beach-bound with my rippling 6 pack but I certainly won't be complaining that COVID-19 resulted in my winter bulk extending into a surplus of summer calories. I may lose certain strength that has been built in the gym but I will replace it with an adaptation where I am conditioned to bodyweight exercise and a greater understanding of the world as my gym rather than being at the beck and call of the ever-busy squat rack.
Finally, to make sure I stick to the exercise and the eating schedule I have to make sure my day begins consistently, and this means a (semi) early start. I know personally, an early rise instantaneously makes me feel more productive. The rationale here is that even if I do nothing, I have given myself the opportunity. If I needed to get anything done, well I have given myself the best possible chance of allowing myself the time required to do so. The later I get up, the more I feel that I am behind, at a disadvantage, having to play catch up. Forever lamenting the fact that “I could’ve finished painting the living room”, “cleaned the kitchen” or “spoken to my best mate who is in lockdown alone”, if I had simply provided myself with the time to do so.
Although our routines may differ, I do believe we all have our own non-negotiables. The things we know will help us through this time and may even allow us some form of self-improvement during this testing and quite frankly almost unimaginable set of circumstances. If you have significant family ties, it could be communication with your loved ones. If you are an advocate of mindfulness, the non-negotiable that may get you out of bed regularly, could be meditation.
I truly believe that having a routine benefits our mental health. As you can see, there can be limited rigid structure, but that minimal structure will allow us to add in the things we often wish we were doing, but never usually set aside the time to do. This form of purpose and progress could have a significant impact on our mental health and let’s face it, for potentially the first, maybe the only time in our lives, we can’t use the excuse that we are just too busy.
Please let me know your thoughts and if you have any questions or would like to create your own routine with some assistance from myself, get in touch through email, Instagram, LinkedIn…. whatever form of communication you are most comfortable with.
In the next post, I will discuss methods that you can experiment with to potentially find your own way to stick to your routine.
Stay Safe.
Lee.
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