Quarantine can feel heavy. It can feel lonely, isolating, and boring. Staying indoors and practicing physical distancing does not mean you need to cut off your social network and support system — I think a lot of us kind of forget that.
When you aren't allowed to meet up with friends, significant others, or other people who are close to your heart, it sometimes diverts your attention away from the fact that there are other ways we can stay connected without seeing these people in person. Facetime, especially group FaceTime, is such an easy way to stay in touch with your pals, and it is worth it to give them a call even though it "isn't the same" as being with them in person.
It is easy to let yourself fall into the quarantine-slump, as I like to call it, but it is just as easy to avoid doing this or to snap yourself out of it.
If you find yourself feeling unmotivated, start making your bed first thing in the morning if you aren't already doing it. It will get you up and going (around your house) for the day, and ideally prevent you from just getting right back into bed when you decide you don't feel like doing anything. Get up, get moving, and get your sh*t done (if you have sh*t to do, of course).
Another thing that makes a huge difference is getting dressed for the day. Even if you change into comfy clothes, at least get out of your PJs. If it's something you would do as part of your normal, daily routine in a normal world, do in quarantine too to maintain some sense of normalcy.
Try to go to sleep at a decent hour, even though it's easy to pull an all-nighter and think nothing of it. Get your eight hours of sleep, at a normal time, and wake up at a normal time. It won't fix all your problems, but it will help with some of them.
You can also use all your free time as a means of harnessing your creative side, especially because this is something a lot of us don't have time for when we are at work or school. Now that everything has been moved online, we all have a lot more time to do things we weren't able to before. Learn that instrument you've been wanting to learn. Learn that language you've been wanting to learn. Practice painting, or drawing, or embroidering. The outside world may be really different, but the Internet is still at our disposal just the same, and you can certainly find tutorials for any skill you want to take up.
One thing that I think might really be the most important option that quarantine presents to us is that we have months of time to work on ourselves and heal from things like breakups or friend breakups. You are no longer stuck in a school or on a campus where you see your ex everywhere you go, or your ex-best-friend, or the hookups that made your life a living hell. You are not longer forced to be around people that put a strain on your emotional wellbeing — this is something to seriously be grateful for, and make the most of. Don't pick up your phone and start texting and calling these people that you know are so toxic to you. If you feel the urge to do that, call a friend or family member instead and chat with them until you've distracted your mind.
You can heal, and you will heal, and this is a really good time to work on that.
All of this being said though, quarantine really doesn't have to be your most productive time, regardless of all the posts, websites, and articles that tell you to make the most of it in this way. If you have days where you're feeling down, that's OK. If you have days where you just can't bring yourself to get up, that's OK. If you have days where all you want is cookies, that's OK too. Just try to balance those days out with other days where you are productive- this way you can avoid falling into the aforementioned slump.
Quarantine is hard, but it doesn't have to make life feel so impossible.
