Like everyone else’s, my life has been drastically affected by the COVID-19 outbreak. Along with almost everyone I know, I’ve been self-isolating and practicing social distancing full time, which hasn’t always been easy. Even though I’ve been extremely busy for the past six weeks, I’ve still found a few ways to make some use of my free time during the periods when I don’t have a lot of work. Here’s what I’ve been doing so far…
- Catching up on sleep
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Even though I do try to stay productive while I’m self isolating, I can’t deny that I’ve been sleeping a lot more than usual, especially during the weekends. Because of how busy my schedule was while I was living on campus, I wouldn’t always get a full eight hours. I used to have to nap a lot to make up for the sleep I missed at night, but thankfully that’s not a problem anymore! Being able to stay home and get an adequate amount of rest has felt extremely refreshing so far.
- Getting back into creative projects
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When I’m not busy with class, homework or co-op searches, I have a lot more time to revisit some activities that I really love doing in my free time, such as painting, sketching and writing. I especially love being able to paint in my free time because it helps me relax and makes the day go by much faster while still making me feel like I’m being productive. I also have time to try out new recipes, brainstorm article ideas and experiment with makeup whenever I feel like it.
- Practicing self care
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I feel like when you’re stuck at home for a long time, it’s important to be able to be productive while still managing to relax and take good care of yourself. The word self care can mean different things to different people. For me, it mostly consists of playing with or going on walks with my dog, journaling, listening to music, baking something delicious, or binge watching my favorite shows on Netflix. I’ve also started journaling pretty regularly to help pass the time and schedule my days a little more efficiently.
- Exercising
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As someone who’s involved in a rigorous physical activity (dance), I always tend to worry about getting out of shape if I take too long of a break, so I’ve generally tried to do some kind of physical activity every day. I definitely want to develop a routine where I’m stretching consistently, as well as doing any type of cardio workout like a run, bike ride, or online Zumba workout. A lot of professional dancers are also live streaming online ballet classes right now, so I’ve been trying to get in a few of those as well.
- Spending more time with my loved ones
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Ever since I came back from Drexel, I’ve had a lot more time to spend with my family. Even though I wasn’t feeling great about seeing the same three people every day for weeks on end, it’s been an interesting experience to connect with everyone back home. I’ve also been making sure to FaceTime my friends every day since I don’t get to actually see them in person and keep up with my long-distance friends on social media.
Overall, I have to say that I’ve been dealing with the lockdown on a much better level than I thought I would. It definitely took me a while to adjust to social distancing and self-isolation, as well as differentiating between work time and free time. On the other hand, it’s been a great opportunity for me to reorganize my priorities and hang on to a sense of security during everything that’s going on right now.
These past few months have been affected by circumstances that none of us could have seen coming. In the future, let’s hope that the coronavirus will be contained enough for everything to go back to normal, but in the meantime, we should all be taking advantage of the time we have to ourselves and making the most of it. Hopefully, this period will have been a learning experience for everyone, and we’ll come out of it knowing something new about ourselves.