Now is not the best time for anyone around the world to travel and explore new places. The situation with Covid-19 is not only scary because of virus itself, it takes away a control of our lives and brings a lot of worries and anxiety. Also, social distancing and necessity being in quarantine affect mental health a lot.
As a person who lives with depression I’m aware of this topic, and try to not only to keep an eye on my condition, but also make preventive actions.
I wanna share my tips of coping with this stress. I hope it will be useful, even though it will work not for everybody.
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Have a schedule and stick to it. Even if you work from home or if don’t work during the quarantine, try to make a schedule of a day and stick to it (at least, waking up and going to bed approximately at the same time every day). Familiar routine will help our body and mind to go through stress.
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Sport exercises. For me it sounds boring and exhausting, but with the lack of activity outside house we become rusty very often. I don’t like sport, but push myself to at least 10 minutes body’s warm up couple of times a week. Surprisingly, I feel better every time afterwards. And there are plenty of free online videos.
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Eat less or more healthy. I know, now we have more time to watch movies and eat something fat and tasty with it. We have more time to cook and eat more, it’s calming in such difficult times. We can wake up later on mornings, so, we are seduced to drink alcohol more often… But let’s try to stay reasonable and not to become over weighted or alcohol addicted after quarantine.
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Make art. If you already have some art hobby, it’s great! If not - you can find one and enjoy it! There is a lot of positive energy in a process of creating something, expressing yourself. 4 months ago I started to play ukulele, sing and create songs to deal with depression. And now it’s great tome to improve my skills. I highly recommend to try ukulele, if you are looking for a hobby. It’s easy, cheap and brings a lot of joy. But you can do anything, for example, write or draw a quarantine diary.
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Watch horror movies against anxiety (if it helps you). I read an article, that horror movies can help people to deal with a lot of fear and anxiety. It work for me, I saw a lot of movies about epidemy and made my list of the best ones. Somehow, living the worst case scenarios from the movies helped me to cope with situation in reality.
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Give attention to your beloved ones. I’m so happy to have more capacity for my wife and cat, even though, cat is very surprised that we hang out at home so much.https://youtu.be/mVK68nXSqQ4
Stay healthy!
