Covid has radically changed our way of life in the city. Consequently, also our relationship with the city has changed.
If you were willing to pay more for a down-town rent or to buy a small apartment to live in the city, would you do the same today?
Data on home purchases in Belgium show that people during the pandemic wanted to buy or rent properties in the countryside, where homes are cheaper and bigger. Nature is a source of energy that can help us in difficult times such as those of Covid.
If being able to have a quick aperitif after work, to go out for dinner in the evening without having to travel too many kilometres, or going to the cinema or a concert, justified the fact of living in small apartments, where you are exposed to not always easy coexistence with the neighbours and outside noise and traffic, is this still the case now?
Cities during the pandemic have turned into places to mainly work and sleep. Maybe you started asking yourself, what kind of life is it?
If you were able to go to work during the pandemic, didn’t you have the impression of living in the office? If, on the other hand, you have always worked from remote, don’t you think that you have been experiencing difficulty in finding work-life balance?
With the rules of lockdown even using public transport was a problem, due to the fear of contagion. We started to do shopping close to home.
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Staying at home all the time and respecting the rules of lockdown have caused spreading of anxiety in a worrying way. In fact, it has been proven that living in the city makes you feel more isolated, even if the opposite would seem to be true.
For a long time we have been deprived of our need and desire for sociability, our walks have been reduced to the tour of the neighbourhood to fulfil our daily commitment to take 6000 steps or not to forget the challenge of staying healthy despite everything.
Things as common as eating with friends or colleagues, going to the cinema or shopping, have turned into extraordinary things.
Is that why living in the countryside has perhaps become more popular? Would spending less on a house with a garden and nature nearby make you change your mind about living in the city?
As I was saying before, we have not been taught to take good care of ourselves. We put often aside our well-being. How many times have your parents told you to look well after the others or do things for the others? How many times, on the other hands, have you been told that you must also take care of yourself?
The way you look after yourselves is a kind of extension of what you have learned from your parents, teachers or caregivers.
For a very young person this may seem exaggerated, as some basic principles of self-esteem are taught in schools today. Some parents also try to instil some self-care virtues in their children.
However, for an adult or elderly person, taking care of themselves well and being truly respectful of themselves is not always something they have consciously internalized. In the past, it was not so easy to find someone who could help you cultivate a certain self-love without it being considered selfish.
In fact, this is precisely the basis: self-love, not to be confused with narcissism or egocentrism. To better understand this concept, we can first imagine what we do when we really love someone: we seek their happiness, we help them, we try to make them feel good, and we accept them as they are, with all their imperfections and qualities. Actually, looking well after yourself means really accepting yourself for who you are.
Becoming kind towards yourself, means understand yourself, especially when you face failures and mistakes.
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That attitude can be a great ally. You can challenge yourselves in a healthy way, taking into account your possibilities, your desires, and not the desires that others have for you.
The use of language is very important to achieve the goal of taking good care of yourself. It is common, and to some extent normal, that on some occasions you speak “badly” to yourself, you do it unconsciously. You cannot talk to yourself always in a loving way, as you could enter into toxic positivity (when a positive attitude is used to mask negative emotions, namely pretending that all is well when it is not).
However, you must not use words that hurt yourself. Nobody insults those who truly love, right? Talking to yourself and thinking badly about some personal aspects (physical or mental), and constantly reiterating it, can in the end make you really believe it.
Taking care of yourself is essential. This implies developing a healthier and more suitable lifestyle. Sleeping and resting enough hours, for example, as well as eating well based on our weight, age and lifestyle, not abusing alcohol or tobacco, are all ways to take care of yourself. Taking time to relax, reconnect with what you really like to do, keep your hobbies, follow your passions and interact with people who bring you something positive in your life means being respectful of yourself.
You have thought – and rethought – if you locked the door when you went out? Are you on the street and you wonder if you turned off the light; or the gas? This is not as serious as it looks like. Moreover, you are not the only person it happens to. The thoughts that come to your mind are normal; they are not obsessions … yet.
Thoughts don’t turn into obsession overnight. At first, they are imperceptible, then they grow, but they don’t seem so serious to you; when you start having problems at work, in the family, with friends, you may have developed an obsession. Recognizing the degree of frequency and intensity is crucial to avoid that one of your recurring thoughts starts to be harmful.
If you don’t get major problems in your daily life, you can let your recurring thoughts flow and unlock them with relaxation techniques, and by becoming aware of their cause.
Imagine a grandmother lighting a candle in the Church so that her grandson succeeds the exam. Or the songs you hum in your brain and can’t get rid of them. Or the cultures that pray to get some rain. They are examples of small obsessions that do not harm anyone or give problems in everyday life. Therefore, in similar cases, you do not need to take actions.
However, there are other kinds of thoughts that trap the mind in a vicious circuit and catch your attention very often. They are called OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder).
There are some tricks you can use to keep them under control.
Let’s see some of them.
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If, for example, you wash your hands too often, try to actually count how many times you’ve washed them. Then, think about the absurdity of doing it so often because washing your hands well once should be enough, and doing it twice should reassure you that they are really clean.
If your fear is to get infected on the public transport, because you touch knobs, bars, doors, use gloves every time you take them or take a hydro-alcoholic gel with you to be used as soon as you get off (very useful also during Covid times).
The important thing is to be able to rationalize your recurring thoughts and find solutions to control them. If you really cannot manage to do it, however, you should consult a professional (doctor, psychologist, coach) who can help you keep your thoughts from becoming obsessions.
Also be aware that genetics can be a cause of your recurring thoughts. If you are very emotional and have difficulty controlling your impulses, you are somewhat predisposed. Exposure to obsessive models in the family, which transmit the values of order, norms, not making mistakes, can also be a cause. Highly demanding, perfectionist, rigid, excessively ordered, inflexible and reluctant to delegate tasks personalities are also more prone to developing OCD.
Recurring thoughts are normal until they become fixations. In addition, remember that most of the things that worry us never happen. Try to notice it and let me know.
The society we live in often leads us to reverse priorities and put work first. This can negatively affects our quality of life and physical, mental and emotional health.
According to researches carried out in France, physical suffering related to work affects 3.1% of women and 1.4% of men, but according to some experts, the figures are higher. The international classification of diseases identifies burn-out as a work-related phenomenon but in reality work is not the only cause.
With the cost of living constantly rising, we are likely to work longer hours to earn a salary that allows us to provide for our own needs and those of our family. Because of this, many elements of our private life are put aside.
We spend many hours working, reducing the time to eat, to rest, to be with the family, and we do not realize how much this can harm us.
While most of us cannot afford to leave their job, a balance must be found between work and private life to prevent stress from building up in a worrying way.
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In this period of forced tele-working, it is even more difficult to put boundaries between work and private life. For this reason, many governments have been drafting directives that establish the right to “disconnect”. We need to have the time to do sports, to walk, to take care of our dear ones, to follow our passions or simply to rest.
More and more people suffer from stress, feel exhausted, have problems with nutrition, addictions, or relationship difficulties, and all that because of the long working days, which do not leave us the time to do activities for our well-being.
If you feel you are in one of those situations, know that no salary is worth your health, no job is worth the wear and tear that comes from working days that annihilate your energy and happiness.
If you have no other alternatives to the work you are currently doing, find something positive to balance your life, because otherwise, there may come a time when you will start making mistakes at work and your overall performance will suffer. Start looking for another job but put your health in the first place, because if you get ill it may take a long time to recover.
Your job is an important part of your life, but it is not your life. There is much more: family,health, and friends. Do not allow work to take up all the space in your mind and body, taking the joy away from you.
Remember always taking care of yourself first, because this is the only way you can live a better life.
You finish the chore tasks of the day in an hour and you dedicate yourself to kill the time you have left to complete your workday. You might ask your boss something more to do, but you would rather go out. If they need you, they will call you.
It sounds like an enviable plan, but as soon as you have posted something on social media, searched for the best book deals to buy, and eaten a sandwich, you wish the call would come. It does not come, and you realize that you have already become chronically bored, and you feel undervalued. It is not normal.
This type of boredom is called by specialists bore-out syndrome. According to psychologists, this boredom can be as damaging as overwork exhaustion, the best-known burnout syndrome. We tend to think that a bored employee will take the opportunity to pay more attention to performing a certain task, but this is not often the case. According to a study by the University of Lancashire (England), bored people actually perform poorly at work and make more mistakes.
Of course, to avoid getting involved in the source of their boredom, people with this syndrome tend to be distracted by social media and may even develop an addiction. Food, alcohol, and tobacco are great candidates to fill in your time.
It is important to distinguish normal, even healthy, boredom from constant and chronic boredom that ends up making you feel useless. Chronic boredom can generate profound anxiety and can negatively affect all aspects of life, from private and family life to social life.
We already know that, usually, the things that bore us are the same things that we do not like. This lowers the levels of motivation and involvement, the levels of responsibility and makes you adopt a passive attitude. You are procrastinating. However, there is more.
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To begin with, know that getting bored during the working day does not depend on the type of work you do, but on the type of interests you have. You can have the best job, even be the boss, but feel deeply bored and undervalued. In other words, working on something that does not match your education or experience, and that does not allow you to develop professionally, is a time bomb. Other causes of demotivation are also lack of communication with others, carrying out monotonous tasks that do not represent any kind of challenge and having a definite contract.
All of these factors increase when you have no other choice than taking a whatever job, or you cannot afford to change your current job. The situation is getting worse in these times due to the economic downturn caused by the pandemic. People in that situation, run a much higher risk of boredom and exhaustion because they do something they know from the start that they do not like. Their only motivation is financial and over the years this becomes hard to bear. It is extremely serious because people spend about 33% of their day at work, and sometimes even more.
To limit the damages you could try finding small motivations that could be incorporated into your work. The idea would be about making each day meaningful and interesting. Communicating interest and commitment to superiors by developing new tasks could also help. Finding an exciting activity to bond downtime at work would be interesting but sometimes impossible to do. In those cases, you could, for example, move it to immediately after working hours.
If despite this, your motivation does not increase, it might be better to look for another job that best suites you, something you could do while keeping your current job. Indeed, it would not be wise to replace the anxiety generated by the lack of motivation at work with the one arising from being unemployed. You could consider a part-time job or volunteering activities if you have enough resources to live on.
There is a direct relationship between ageing, physical, and mental activity. People who adopt a sedentary and passive lifestyle after retirement accelerate their ageing process. Lack of movement diminishes the body’s responsiveness and few social relationships inhibit intellectual abilities.
If we add also loneliness, the ageing process accelerates. Spending the day without stimuli other than television or cell phone, without seeing anyone or going out can cause you to lose motivation to take care of yourself and your health. Many of the illnesses we attribute to age are not due to age.
On the other hand, an active and purposeful person (a person with a purpose of life – ikigai) keeps connections and maintains healthy habits.
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Therefore, to keep fit, why don’t you follow those three tips coming from Japan?
1. Give yourself a goal for your next birthday. For example, you may decide to practise some moderate physical activity every day to lose weight and reach that goal by your birthday. In addition, sport promotes the production of endorphins, the hormones of happiness.
2. Reconnect with nature. Practice shinrin yoku at least once a week, or immersion in a forest recommended by Japanese doctors to promote longevity. Furthermore, this practice can also protect you from diseases because the proximity to plants strengthen the immune system.
3. Be grateful. In the same way that an attitude of complaining and constant anger increases the level of cortisol (the stress hormone), an attitude of gratitude towards life and the people around us, promotes serenity and the joy of living.
Remember that life expectancy is statistically high in our Western societies. Most likely, you still have two good decades of “useful” life left after retirement that you could fill with meaning and activity.
Ageing with care is an art. The third age, which I prefer to call third youth, can become an opportunity to be able to love you more and take better care of yourself. Find something you enjoy doing or that you can attach an immediate reward to, and involve friends to add the lovely component of socializing.
The blow the pandemic has been giving us is clear. Even in the same city, restrictions force us to select who we want to see and who we don’t. A difficult decision, but it can have a positive side: selecting those friendships that contribute most to our well-being.
This selection could be actually a good thing. It has been studied that qualitative relationships are limited. And in the current context, we cannot expect the number of friends we have to be the same as before. The pandemic is teaching us to prioritize and truly care for the people we consider important. This is an improvement that compensates for a possible loss.
But how to choose? The answer is not that difficult. If we think carefully, we realize that the people we have stopped seeing are mainly those people we have never seen regularly (for example, the colleagues we only met at work). This situation shows clearly who we must meet in favour of those with whom we want to meet. What makes a friendship satisfactory is presence and dedication.
Studies conducted define the four characteristics of authentic friendship: trust, sincerity, fidelity and reciprocity. When you lose one of these pillars, you may want to say goodbye to your friend.
But the pandemic has not only made us stop seeing some people, it has also made us fight with some others. We are all more anxious and stressed. Also the fact of wearing the mask incorrectly could trigger a conflict. When this happens, it is advisable to stop relationships until the tension fades away. We already have to endure all what the pandemic entails that we don’t need to add any more stress.
For friends who have passed the “selection”, it is time to find time and space to share with them to interact without distractions and have a relaxing chat. Looking into each other’s eyes when we speak, taking care of the posture of our body, using appropriate tone and words, are only some elements of an effective communication also among friends..
Maintaining and caring for our good friendships can also improve our health and increase our ability to bear stress.
To have a full and healthy life, we should spend more time with friends, albeit only in a virtual way for the time being. With the difficulties caused by the pandemic we must find new ways to relate to each other, and continue to invest time in finding new subjects of conversation, for example talking about a series that you are watching, being on platforms to carry out online activities together, or having a drink together on a video call.
I have been receiving Miguel’s emails for some time, cannot really say how long. Recently, I received this article in my mail box that perfectly matches with the purpose of my blog. Actually Miguel, also published a video, in case you prefer watching to reading. Enjoy it!
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Humans have a natural tendency to gravitate towards negative thinking.
We could assume that tendency is there because it gave our ancestors a small survival advantage.
Those that were happy-go-lucky optimists got eaten by wolves.
Those that were pessimists and hoping for the worst didn’t get eaten as much.
So here we are today with a lizard brain primed to expect the worst.
Although there might be an evolutionary advantage to being pessimistic, living your life pestered by gloomy doomy thoughts is no fun.
The truth is today we live in a much more safe environment than hundreds of thousands of years ago.
It’s very rare for people to succumb to hungry tooth sabre tigers and such.
Yet, we live in a constant state of alert and fear triggered in part by nature only exacerbated by the news and social media.
So how do we escape negative thoughts?
Besides recreational drugs, alcohol, mindless social media binging, and meditation, I dare to propose a new way to lead happier mental lives.
You could think of this method as a thought experiment, a new mental model to deal with pessimistic thinking.
I call it the thought landscape.
Disclaimer: if you have trouble using your imagination or suffer from aphantasia, it won’t be easy to implement this approach.
The concept is quite simple to understand but tricky to master.
It goes like this:
A: There is a large number of thoughts we can have (negative, positive, neutral)
B: However, at any given instant, we can only think of one thing.
C: We can choose what we think at any given instant (focus)
D: Therefore, we can choose to substitute any current thought with any other available thought from A.
These are vast assumptions so let me elaborate a bit on each point.
A: This one everyone should agree. The number of thoughts a human can have is between 0 and Many. Many could be thousands or millions, a lot.
If you have a working brain, A should always be many. 0 is only for dead people.
B: This could be debated. However, we could safely assume that we can only hold one thought at a time. Thinking two thoughts simultaneously is not possible. I.e., you cannot think blue or black simultaneously (“Bluk” is not a colour!)
C: This could be more debatable, but If I tell you to think of a white elephant, usually you’ll think of a white elephant, not of a purple platypus. So you were able to change your thinking deliberately.
D: If the three statements above hold true, then it has to be true that we can control what we think at any given moment.
And if D is true, then it is good news for all of us!
This means that thinking negatively is, for the most part, a choice.
So, if you catch yourself stuck on negative thinking, now you know it’s because you chose to do so.
Great, and then what?
Then you can discard that thought, take a step back and look at what other thoughts are available from A.
The goal of taking this imaginary step back is to gain a new perspective.
Is to gain some altitude and contemplate which other thoughts you could choose from.
In A., we established that there could be many other thoughts you could have.
The range of available thoughts is what I call the thought landscape.
Like a physical landscape, you’ll see valleys and hills.
Photo by Claudio Testa on Unsplash
Now that you’ve momentarily elevated yourself over your thought landscape, it’s time to choose.
What other thoughts do you see that you could choose to think next?
Let me give you a concrete example of how this would play out for me.
So here I am, thinking I’m not good enough, smart enough, that people suck, that the pandemic sucks, that politicians are hypocrites, etc.
I’m feeling like shit. This is no fun. Then I realize I can choose what to think.
I take a step back and look at what other thoughts are currently available across my thought landscape.
In the beginning, it’s hard to see past a few meters because all the negative thoughts are fighting for attention, clouding my vision.
I try to rise a bit higher, past the dark fog.
I know there are other thoughts across the dark valley of shitty thoughts.
There you go… I see some light.
About 2 km away, I see a couple of green hills peeking through the clouds.
I take a closer look.
I see my family on one of them.
They love me. I feel happy to know they are alive and they love me.
I see food. Yum! I can see I have plenty of food, and I can afford more if I need to.
That makes me happy.
Another hill. Wow! I’m relatively healthy. How lucky I am! I can still walk, play sports, dance, use my body. My hands work… I can build things!
Another hill further away.
I see people in need. People whose lives I could make better. It makes me happy I could help other people. That’s important.
This exercise took only a couple of minutes, and my outlook has completely changed.
I feel gratitude. I feel alive. I feel happy.
My thought landscape is full of wonderful thoughts to choose from.
I don’t want to discriminate against negative thoughts. I just don’t want them to dictate how I feel 90% of the time.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t remember a single day of my life where I didn’t have a moment where my mind wasn’t imprisoned by negative thinking.
Negative thinking is inevitable. It’s there for our survival. We just need to learn how to keep it at bay.
The thought landscape will always offer you plenty of alternative thoughts, equally or even more valid than the negative thoughts you currently hold in your mind.
It is undeniable that the restrictions imposed by the ongoing pandemic have drastically changed our habits and our lifestyle. There is no doubt that the stress produced by uncertainty, prohibitions and lockdowns, whether partial or total, have prompted us to search for distractions that can give us some relief. As Ovid said, human beings seek what is forbidden and desire what is denied them.
There is a thread that links excessive behaviors (drinking too much, smoking too much, overeating, spending too much time on the computer or watching television) to stress.
Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash
Clearly, the pandemic puts our desires on hold and it is normal to wish for what cannot be done. Only when we go back to a more or less normal life and our desires will be satisfied, our lives will be brighter. The pursuit of pleasure is an absolutely human behaviour, there is nothing to worry about.
Our brain identifies and reinforces beneficial behaviours such as eating well, socializing, having fun. This complex reward circuit that generates pleasure is the result of the evolution that guarantees our survival, that orients us in daily life and that keeps us going on. The more we can produce dopamine (the pleasure and reward hormone), the more we can generate pleasant sensations in a natural way. As a consequence, we would not need to adopt excessive behaviours that can lead to addictions.
However, the situation we have been experiencing for about a year has affected and affects motivation and self-control. We are no longer able to generate pleasant sensations and situations naturally and we have to look for different means to improve our life condition. The sudden lack of dopamine results in a short circuit of pleasant sensations which then pushes us to seek pleasure in another way.
It is important to be careful that these behaviours do not turn into addictions. Luckily, few people drive themselves to the point of becoming addicted to new harmful habits.
To prevent addiction it is necessary to put in place strategies that favour self-control, especially anti-stress strategies. Practising physical exercise, walking in the nature, trying not to isolate yourself but to maintain contact even remotely, are just some suggestions.
We all know someone who complains about not sleeping or sleeping badly. In Europe, about one third of the adult population has difficulty falling asleep and between 10% and 15% suffer from chronic insomnia. I myself have suffered from insomnia for a long time. This is a problem that can have various causes (from the excessive use of digital devices that emit blue light – computers, tablets, TVs, etc. – to biological issues). One of the causes may also be the obsession with sleeping well.
What is this obsession? It is a phenomenon called orthosomnia (from the Greek ortho, “perfect”, and from the Latin somnia, “rest”) and, according to experts, although it is not yet considered a disorder, it is getting increasingly common. It consists in continually recurring thoughts, that I call “circular thoughts”, namely thoughts that enter a vicious circle precisely because they are always the same and recur all the time. The main causes of these thoughts are, guess what, stress and anxiety. Not being able to sleep, your mind does not stop thinking about the same things over and over (hence circular thoughts, i.e. thoughts that come back).
If you suffer from insomnia, even if not severe, it would be good to do a complete sleep study (polysomnography) to find an effective solution. I had this test. I was in a sleep clinic for one night, with electrodes attached all over the body including, of course, the head. I have found that, during my sleeping time, Alpha waves (the brain waves typical of the awaking period) intrude from time to time.
The obvious solution would be to try eliminating or at least reducing stress. I know, it’s not easy. Therefore, I propose that you try the following five tips.
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Learn to breathe well and deeply by practising a discipline such as Yoga, Pilates or meditation.
Create a relaxing environment. A quiet home is the key to a restful night. If you have trouble falling asleep, keep your bedroom clean and clear of unnecessary items, tidy up the things you have left lying around and you will see that you will have a more peaceful night.
Use essential oils that are particularly suitable for inducing sleep, such as lavender or chamomile.
Create a playlist to help you relax and fall asleep.
Try using Bach Flowers and melatonin. White Chestnut against circular thoughts and Rescue Sleep to help you fall asleep. I used them for several months, then gradually I stopped and now I suffer much less from thoughts that come back and I also sleep much better. At the moment I use only melatonin and I think it is a good solution for my insomnia.
Crisbie Coach 