COVID19 hit all of us: Business owners, employees, moms, and children. We got through different phases. The phase where everyone was motivated to stay fit, eat healthily, be productive, and extremely effective. Then the phase when we all lost interest, lowkey demotivated and right now we just try to survive.
During this survival mode, I just want to remind all of the ladies out there reading these lines with a glass of Chardonnay, It's okay to fail and it's okay not to feel motivated. I just want to remind everyone of the power of pausing.
You don't have to eat healthy today, you don't want to work out or pinch yourself at the desk to stay focused.
The power of pausing is underestimated and few people know how to pause. Pausing doesn't mean stopping everything you do for a full week or being extremely carefree about everything. It's about pausing your mind and body for an hour or maybe a day. We all need that.
So here are a few things you can try to pause
Close your computer and stay away from your phone for an hour and try to write about 5 things you feel grateful for. My list was:
I'm grateful to have my parents and sister healthy alive and well.
I'm grateful to be graduated during these hard times.
I'm grateful to have hobbies to work on while I feel like losing my mind.
I'm grateful to be a multilingual person who is able to follow world news and to learn about what's to come.
I'm grateful to have friends that I didn't lose connection during the pandemic and able to spend time with them online.
Plan for an hour. What you can do with those things you hold in your hands. Be creative. Those plans will be the actions you will take when you feel like burning out. For example:
Stop being a founder for a sec and search for a review paper about a trendy topic academically and read carefully with highlighting.
Just fight to pick a movie and enjoy it with your loved ones.
Start a new song ( I just started Sonatina in G-Beethoven)
Do your shopping list and order things for your plans if it requires any kind of equipment.
It's time to restart. Don't overwhelm yourself with this like any other thing. This is a thing that you will work on when you feel like you are in survival mode and you don't feel any joy.
I hope my method of staying sane during hard times will help you as much as it helped me. Mental health is one of the things we don't give attention to. We don't listen to the signs our body gives. We need to give the attention it requires.
Stay safe people.
Pausing is great. It’s really important to stop before you get overwhelmed. Take some time to breathe and do something else - great examples above, though I can’t see your lists - and when you’re ready coming back to the task at hand.