5 Steps To Improving Your Mindset During Quarantine
How many times have you heard someone lament over what a challenge it is to get off the couch and get work done in the past several months while being stuck at home? It’s so easy to get lost binge-watching shows and trying to forget the world around us for a bit but we all know deep down that it doesn’t feel good to do this. It leaves us in a shroud of a perpetual hangover. Let’s look at a few steps that you can take to drastically improve your mindset and how you are feeling during the quarantine.
Even if the restrictions have lifted wherever you are, using these tips will still help to enhance your mindset and your experience of life.
So read on and take note of what you need to improve upon.
1. USE your bliss station. 👩💻
A lot of us are struggling in part because productivity has bottomed out during the quarantine. It's difficult to get work done at home if you're not used to doing so and to add fuel to the fire, we're working online a lot more right now which is also a struggle if you don't have the right systems in place to master digital distractions.
A bliss station is your temple for deep work. It's a secluded place where you can be most productive. It should inspire creativity and focus.
Some people love the local coffee shop or library for this but as that's not an option for most of us still at this time, we have to manufacture our bliss stations at home. Download coffee shop sounds or play a movie with no sound in the background if you like to feel the company of other people around you. Or if your house is feeling too full right now, you can turn inward by repurposing a closet or using noise-cancelling headphones.
Creativity is a habit that we all can tap into if we create the right rituals and routines to produce more of it in our lives.
2. Keep a clean environment for focus. 🧹
If you're feeling frazzled in getting work done or just from feeling cooped up, a clean physical environment is linked to a clean mental space. To break through that ennui, tidy up your house or at least start with your work station to create more inspiration.
And if you hate cleaning, it only takes about 60 seconds of cleaning before your brain and body shift gears and it starts to lift your mood. So set your timer and start moving and you’ll be amazed at the shift in your mindset.
3. Get outside 🌲
Nature is incredibly refreshing physically, mentally, and emotionally. Fresh air and the chemicals in plants that produce fragrances have a calming effect and reduce stress and blood pressure.
Try to get outside every single day and you'll immensely change the way you are feeling very quickly.
Even going barefoot outside of wherever you are living for a few minutes will help to ground you more.
If you need music or a podcast to get you out the door and into the woods, I suggest at some point turning it off and just tuning in to the sounds of nature around you.
4. Start a mindfulness practice 🧘♂️
Now is the perfect time to start a mindfulness practice. Being at home and maybe secluded from other people makes it important to turn inward and tune into your feelings and emotions.
Learning how to meditate is the closest thing that we have to a superpower as humans. You can tie this into your daily walks outside or your gratitude practice if the idea of trying to clear your head of all thoughts is daunting. The real magic comes around 10 minutes per day of practice but consistency is much more important than outright length, so if all you can muster is four deep breaths to start, that's still great!
If you need a place to start with meditation, the Flow Academy free Challenge Week for Staying Healthy, Happy, and Stress-Free at-home includes several great meditations for getting started and getting through these tough times.
5. 3-Step Gratitude 🙏
Practicing gratitude is incredibly powerful for living more positively and generating optimism.
Now more than ever, we should be writing down our experiences and so I strongly encourage you to start a daily journal and just jot down some of your ideas or experiences through this pandemic.
While you don't need to write down the things you are grateful for, it can be a useful way to embody the feelings of gratitude deeper.
I find that doing a 3-step gratitude is the best way to create balance with the practice. A lot of the time if we do the same gratitude every time it will lose some of its emotional charge. Some people like to just think of their life's highlight reel, others treat gratitude as mindfulness and just focus on the present while a third group tends to visualize the future first and foremost and is always chasing a perceived endpoint instead of balancing the appreciation of the journey.
Combining Past, Present, and Future into your gratitude practice is a way to create more balance.
Start by pulling on a past peak experience. Let it fill you up with happiness and gratitude.
Use that energy to bring yourself into the present and focus on something small in your immediate environment that you can be grateful for.
Now visualize a future event or goal that you are looking forward to. You can even envision it having already been accomplished or experienced.
Using these mindset strategies can start to shift you towards more positivity and optimism. If it seems like a lot to ask for in one go, just start with whichever tip appeals to you the most and work on doing that one for a week or two. Once it feels easy to keep that one change in your routine, add in another step.
Remember that building a more resilient mindset doesn’t happen overnight and that this is about the long journey and not quick hacks. Take your time and be patient and wonderful things will start to happen for you.
Ready to take your performance to the next level? Register for the free webinar on How Will Peak Performance Change in “The New Normal?”
Building Your Bliss Station
Building Your Bliss Station
In Deep Work, Cal Newport talks about the necessity of your workspace for getting quality deep work done. Deep Work refers to the tasks that require ingenuity and creativity; the kinds of jobs that humans excel at that cannot be recreated and automated by robots and AI.
In his excellent book, Cal Newport talks about some of the giants of knowledge work over the past several centuries and how seriously they took their work by creating fortresses of solitude to do their work in.
Carl Jung built a cottage where he would retreat to for days and weeks on end to do his deep work. Similarly, Bill Gates leaves for a week each year to a cottage without connection to the outside world to do nothing but think about challenges and read.
Joseph Campbell called this the act of building your bliss station; Austin Kleon talks about this idea in his excellent book for creatives called Keep Going.
Building your bliss station means you’ve got a space that you keep sacred from non-work activities - you can get your deepest thinking and creation done. This means that ideally, it’s not in your living room or your bedroom.
Sometimes this can be challenging and unrealistic, especially when the whole family is at home right now. This is why technology can help us to bridge the gap between a bliss station and the realities of modern living.
Ideally, your bliss station is sacred and doesn't have to be converted depending on the time of day but do what you need to at this time to get your deep work done.
If you're looking to optimize your productivity at home and for the future at work, build yourself a standing desk or buy one. Standing to work helps to energize you, ergonomics are better if you're working at the right height. You will also find that you can get more work done by keeping your body more active than if you are sitting and slowly curving forward while bent over your computer screen day-after-day. Try it out for yourself and just see.
I recommend having a chair or something to sit on nearby so that you can alternate your position every once in a while because standing perfectly still isn't ideal either. I also started using an acupressure mat to stand on for a little bit of cushion but also to have something that stimulates me to keep moving and shifting weight throughout the day.
This excerpt was from an article on Performing Your Best While Working From Home on the Flow Academy