This past week was a little rough, as the reality of not seeing older family members with chronic health conditions that places them at high risk continues to sink in. It’s hard not to know when we’ll get the opportunity to be a regular part of one another’s lives.
The experience sapped my motivation. When I conducted a post-game review of the week, here are a few items worth adding to a daily checklist that made a discernible difference in getting me back on track:
- Practice focus
- Leave the house
- Exercise
- Start each day with a momentum-generating small victory
- Constrain screen time
- Share your bread and circus
- Stretch your brain
- Enjoy one quality social connection from out of the home.
Let’s explore each in more detail.
Practice focus. During residency, I had one gentle patient with mental health challenges who came into our emergency department daily. I tried to change what became routine by learning something new about him on each visit – how many siblings did he have? What careers had he tried in the past? Where was he born? What did this particular tattoo signify? This practice of focused attention helped me stay attuned to subtle changes, allowing me to notice a dental infection on one visit before it became a major problem.
You can transform a routine walk in your neighborhood with a different lens by spending one day paying attention to flowers, another paying attention to birds you encounter, yet another by noticing the different rooftops or seeing if you can characterize architectural crazes in your area. Focus is a muscle you can strengthen and then apply to other endeavors.
Leave the house. Even when you are trapped in a comfortably gilded cage, it elevates your mood to take a walk around the neighborhood.
Exercise. Those endorphins may be the only high we get for a while. And if you are a parent, you’ve probably crossed the threshold from the time when you could bank on passive fitness to the era where only active fitness will maintain your health.
Start each day with a momentum-generating small victory. I love cycling early in the morning before anyone is on the road, but it’s a hassle to motivate to do it. If I can muster the energy to do that first hard thing, the benefit of thinking of myself as someone who is capable of doing hard things sustains me for the rest of the day.
Constrain screen time. My daughter has kept me honest on this one – we point out when the virtual world is taking up too much of our time, and it brings us back to spending time in the real one.
Share your bread and circus. Caesar used to say the people needed only a little food and entertainment, or “bread and circus” to stay happy. Although he meant it as a way of distracting them to maintain his political power, he was insightful about our need for distraction. As a family, we spend 60-90 minutes before bedtime watching a show together. It’s like sharing a brain dessert with the family (and just like other types of dessert, we need to make sure we don’t overdo it).
Stretch your brain. Once a week, I go over geography with the rest of the family because it’s something different than what we do regularly. It’s a treat, and suddenly stories in the news make sense when you can grasp where nations reside relative to one another. MotE and I are part of a monthly book club where ages have ranged from 40s-90s and we love the perspectives we get from our fellow book club members. That tent I recently picked up needed some repairs, so after watching a couple of youtube videos, SotE and I made a splint for a cracking tent pole. Each new skill makes us feel slightly more comfortable trying new things we arent’ already good at.
Enjoy one quality social connection from out of the home. I adore my family, but I sometimes need to vent to a friend about what’s going on, or take a break from them by letting a friend vent to me. One daily phone call to family, friends, or even sending a long email can fulfill this need.
I’m going to experiment with checking off as many items as I can when I feel the funk setting in. Let me know if you have other tips that have worked for you!