In normal everyday life, when you have a job or go to school, you have a schedule and a pace to your life. Because of COVID-19, your schedule has likely been severely disrupted and you are probably feeling a little lost.
People like routines. A few days on a beach at an all-inclusive resort without a schedule can be great, but after a few days, most people start to settle into a routine. They also start to get restless and bored, which is on the way to being depressed and anxious, so they start look for interesting things to do and make plans to participate in scheduled activities.
It’s okay to be unscheduled for a few days but after more than that you need to set up a routine in order to stay healthy.
The experience of astronauts and others living and working in isolation for extended periods of time tells us a lot about the importance of scheduling and goal setting for mental health. We have natural daily, weekly and monthly biological clocks and rhythms that keep us healthy. You stay set and on track by doing things like going to sleep at night and being active and outside (if possible) during the day. Maintaining something as simple as a regular sleep schedule can go a long way towards helping you manage stress.
On the other side, research on sensory deprivation, imprisonment, solitary confinement and even torture makes us aware of the psychological dangers of something as simple as chronic sleep disruption and time distortion. Keeping a relatively stable sleep/wake schedule may be the single most important thing you can if you are trying to stay healthy during COVID-19.
Like other animals, people like stability and predictability and we don’t like instability and uncertainty. A schedule helps us create stability and predictability in our daily and weekly lives even when things “out there” are unpredictable, uncertain and out of control.
Follow Mandela’s example
Long Walk to Freedom is an amazing story of resiliency and overcoming. Nelson Mandela survived his 27 years of imprisonment because he was an amazing person in all kinds of ways. One of the reasons he survived, even thrived, is because he maintained a very strict schedule and set goals.
For example, even when he was doing hard labour in a quarry, he maintained his strict routine for training for boxing. Hard labour is a brutal technique used to break prisoners down and dictate the terms of their existence. He used his routines as a way of reminding himself and his keepers that he remained connected to his previous life and that he was still in command of himself.
Through his intelligence, charm and dignified defiance, Mandela bent even the most brutal prison officials to his will, assumed leadership over his jailed comrades and became the master of his own prison. He included exercise, contemplation (gardening) and deliberate rest in his routine.
In terms of goal setting, one thing he did at some point was to decide to write his autobiography and then hiding the manuscript in his garden. While you may not be on Robben Island, and COVID-19 will not last 27 years, consider taking some inspiration him at this time.
