Hello, hello, hello, everyone!!! How are you?
I hope you and your family are all staying well.
Today I would like to discuss my daily routine during the lockdown – although I think it’s not just me who has found this situation a bit challenging.
When all this was starting, two weeks before the actual lockdown (when we were struggling to find toilet paper and flower haha), I started to become very anxious and scared – seeing the situation in Spain and the difficulties I would find to get back to Gibraltar, as my flight was from Birmingham to Malaga (Spain) and then travel by car to Gib.
It became very hard to focus on assignments and daily tasks. I couldn’t stop the thoughts coming into my head. This was just happening because of the unknown. I didn’t quite understand what was happening. And it became very hard to differentiate the reality from imagination.
Obviously, I slowly adapted to the current situation, and I would like to share things that made me feel better and kept me going (especially to complete assignments).
- I was trying to keep myself distracted with movies and series. This helped me stop the thoughts. I was watching all the Marvel movies, I started watching Gossip Girl again, and any other random movie on Netflix and Disney Plus.
- I was cooking more often as I had more time and it was something that always made me feel relaxed.
- I carried on setting alarms to wake me up in the mornings. Although at the beginning I was unable to wake up (waking up at midday most days), now I am waking up quite early and without an alarm (9-10am). I strongly think that having a time to wake up helps loads for starting a new routine.
- In terms of going back to assignments, I must say that this was a big challenge for me. I found a thousand excuses to not do them. Then I started to watch motivation videos on YouTube as soon as I woke up. I must say that it helped me loads to recover a bit of focus. I am still nervous because it’s been many days already not knowing when this will be over, but I am much more in control than at the beginning. Below is one of the videos that I was watching – I hope it will help you too.
- Most importantly, I was not allowing myself to question or overthink. If I had certain tasks to complete, I would just get on with them without any pause. I realised that at the beginning I was struggling to wake up because as soon as I was opening my eyes, I was thinking there was no point in getting up and living the same day as yesterday, and with this mentality I was pushing myself down (I was acting like a turtle). Therefore, I decided to not overthink or question what if, and do a bit every day to get things done and feel less stress.
“All it takes is faith and trust.” – Peter Pan, Walt Disney.
R.A.