With a global pandemic in full swing, many of us are now social distancing to help flatten the curve. This involves spending much more time at home, away from friends and with very little to do. While this boredom can overtake your life, we at VP Legacies are here to help you live a more connected and engaged life no matter the circumstance. We hope this guide will show you that staying engaged isn’t a daunting task.
Here are some activities to help stay engaged when home alone:
Practice mindfulness
While at home and with fewer distractions, one key thing to begin or continue practicing is mindfulness. Be more connected to one’s awareness, thoughts, and feelings. This is important as we go through immense change, and there are many stressors in our day to day life.
Here are a few ways to stay engaged at home and practice mindfulness:
Take an online course
There are many online courses that are free or inexpensive. MOOC platforms such as Coursera or Udemy cover hundreds of different topics ranging from programming to woodworking. These courses involve live video lectures, a community forum for interaction with other participants, and are self-paced.
Need a break from building your new dresser? Try VP Legacies’ Personal Connection 101 course to work on yourself instead. This course is all about building deep and meaningful personal connections with just about anyone in your life, from friends and co-workers to even strangers. There’s no better way to feel engaged than to strengthen your relationships with others when you can’t be physically near them.
Meditate
Meditation can do wonders in calming oneself and reducing anxiety. It can also help with remaining focused while working from home. There are apps such as Calm and Headspace that offer free and paid plans. They provide guided meditation programs, specific meditation routines for scenarios such as when one feels stressed, and plenty of informative articles.
Write down your thoughts
One of the best ways to personally connect and reflect on one’s life is to write down your thoughts. There are multiple methods to doing this ranging from scrapbooking all the way to bullet journaling. The specific method doesn’t matter but what’s important is taking some time to reflect on what happened during the day and how it made one feel. This is a great way to process emotions during this difficult and stressful time.
Related: How to Build a Strong Relationship with Yourself
Stay connected
A major challenge with social distancing is remaining connected to our community. Luckily, technology can help here for us to stay engaged and feel a sense of belonging though we are all at home.
Let’s take a look at some ways to stay connected below:
Talk to friends on the phone
Take time to reach out to friends and family. Schedule time with the time where everyone can hop on conferencing tools such as Zoom and engage in a video chat online. This is a great way to mimic what used to be a casual meetup at a bar. A good practice to get into is setting recurring schedules where friends and family can get together and catch up.
Communicate through chat
We often overlook the daily conversations that would happen while we’re in the office or out and about. This can still be achieved while practicing social distancing and staying home by using tools such as Slack, Whatsapp, and Messenger to continuously stay in touch with friends and family. Create chat groups on these platforms and add those in your network to them.
Host a virtual watch party
Virtual watch parties are a great way to stay connected and engaged with friends while social distancing. There are Chrome extensions such as Netflix Party that allow one to watch the same movie concurrently with friends and not worry about making sure everyone syncs at the same time. Add to the fun by introducing drinking games and other fun activities to the mix. There are even popular party games that can be done remotely by participants such as Jackbox TV.
Related: Social Distancing: Today’s Pandemic and Loneliness Epidemic
Read magazines/news
Getting back into reading magazines and news pieces helps with staying abreast on the latest developments in the community while at home. It can get easy to disconnect from society while at home and reading the news whether online or via having mail delivered is the best way to stay informed. We’d prefer you kept things digital and utilize subscriptions such as New York Times to help with social distancing.
Get creative
Creativity is a powerful way to set the mind free and quash any stress and anxiety. It also let’s one reconnect with their passions and feel more fulfilled in their day to day life. Let’s take a look at how below:
Go back to an old hobby
Many times our life is super busy with the daily grind of heading into the office followed by dinners with friends and various other activities. While at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, you will have a lot more free time to pick up old hobbies. In our regular life, we forego these simple hobbies for more exciting and communal ones. Now’s a good time to reconnect to those ones liked from back in the day.
Pick up a new one
If all the old hobbies were outdoors and infeasible to do now, dive into new activities one can do at home such as crafting, painting, or embarking on a side-hustle such as creating an e-commerce shop. There are many online classes that can help one pick up new hobbies. Some of which even ship the necessary materials to your door. When it comes to more physically active hobbies, pick up activities such as calisthenics or yoga which can be done at home. There are even studios hosting virtual live-streamed yoga lessons like Gaia.
Related: What is the Personal Connection Crisis?
Conclusion
Being in lockdown and not knowing when things are going to go back to normal can be stressful. It’s hard to stay focused on your friends, your hobbies and your work when you can’t stop wondering about your family’s safety and the future of the economy. It’s important to stay engaged during these times so we frankly don’t go stir crazy from watching YouTube videos all day with our cat.
It’s important to stay motivated at work, keep yourself occupied, and strengthen personal connections with your friends, family, and co-workers. It may seem like a crazy time to build personal connections when you can’t be face-to-face with people, but VP Legacies’ online course on Personal Connection shows you that you don’t need physical proximity to become closer to someone. In fact, during these times is when your connection can grow even stronger.