It’s happening yet again—another period of isolation, disconnectedness, and mundanity. The initial desire to be at home, in your familiar room, turns into dread as a happy place starts to feel constricting and claustrophobic. As we spend our days sitting for hours on end in front of a blue-light screen, it becomes all too easy to give in to feelings of listlessness. The repetitive daily routine university students have become all-too-accustomed to becomes a burden, and in turn, motivation for anything and everything flags. For university students especially, the feeling of uncertainty about academic circumstances coupled with abnormal studying hours in the same, unchanging environment may become overwhelming.
It doesn’t, however, have to be this way. These three principles I followed helped me get through the pandemic lockdowns and come out as a better version of myself.
Become Comfortable With Solitude
While seemingly dismissive, this principle holds significant merit. Welcoming the newfound time to yourself may be challenging or tedious for some, but learning to acclimate yourself to your inner thoughts and your environment offers a major opportunity for reflection, curiosity, and observation to blossom. A book, Flow, written by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, documents this concept beautifully. Here is a particular quote from the book:
“To overcome the anxieties and depressions of contemporary life, individuals must become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to herself. She has to develop the ability to find enjoyment and purpose regardless of external circumstances.”
Enjoyment and purpose can be derived from anywhere, whether from your ideas and thoughts or your immediate surroundings. Give your curiosity and intellect space to emerge. You may find yourself discovering and appreciating the nuances of a new genre of music after hearing a particular instrument in a song, learning the workings of a particular cutting-edge technology after seeing it on the news, or optimizing and challenging your current beliefs in deep self-reflection.
Beginning a Journey of Change
Perhaps you derive enjoyment instead from tangible action or have decided to make a concrete change after some self-reflection. Picking up a new hobby and mastering it, beginning a physical fitness journey, or challenging yourself to venture into a new academic subject are perfect examples to consider. If you have identified something during your self-reflection that you are passionate about, the work and dedication needed to achieve results will come naturally to you.
However, don’t feel like you have to boil the ocean with the journey you decide to embark on. It isn’t necessary nor appropriate to feel like you must become an entrepreneur, author, or bodybuilder if you’re overwhelmed. Break down the goal into bite-sized pieces—starting with a meeting with a friend about an idea, reading 10 pages of a book, or going for a long walk is more than enough to set you up for success.
Evaluate and Incentivize
A successful setup depends on your consistency in execution to nourish initiative into results; a few key ways to do this are through evaluation and incentivization. Author James Clear covers these concepts in his book Atomic Habits through what he calls “habit tracking” and “reinforcement” (using an immediate reward to increase the rate of a desired behaviour).
Evaluating or tracking habits is a great way to resolve the issue of being unable to identify immediate progress. You may decide to keep a record of the number of days in a row you read 10 pages of a book or count how many people you’ve talked to about a business idea. Be careful, though, about placing excessive weight on numerics—realizing your vocabulary has expanded from reading or receiving a new opportunity from a business talk is equally valid.
You should also incentivize and reinforce consistency because there will be days where it’s hard to continue. Consider, for instance, putting a dollar towards buying a new jacket you want each time you work out. Incremental rewards push you to perform the action more and more. The rewards need not be material, either. Treating yourself to leisure time, for example, can be similarly desirable—the goal is to make it increasingly satisfying to adhere to your journey.
Be sufficiently critical about your methods; everyone approaches challenges differently. Establish a set of principles that works for you and makes the pandemic bearable. Along the way, you might find enjoyment and happiness in places you never thought possible.