Improve Your Groove

Routines and productivity continue to hold upmost importance in the maintenance of our mental health and wellness; yet these two important factors tend to be so easily overlooked in the face of challenges or chaos. When change or disorganization take place in life, it is all too easy to get swept off our feet, often not knowing how to get back up or even start walking in the same way that we did before the change happened.

When we think of productivity, we are not just talking about work productivity; we are talking about anything productive that we do as humans. Productivity can include activities such as making lunch, cleaning the house, completing an invigorating workout, finishing a scrapbook project, building something outside, and more. When we lose the sense of productivity or doing something meaningful, we often start to participate in negative self-talk, we may begin to feel poorly about ourselves and how we’re spending our time and we may start to feel a lack of meaning in our day-to-day activities. With all these new feelings circling, it can be easy to feel down and worry can creep in. As we start to feel down, it becomes easier and easier to become less productive and our routines can further suffer. When chaos or change take place, our routines are challenged or changed.

Routines are what help us stay healthy and maintain productivity in a variety of different parts of our lives. They are comfortable. Routines help us know what to expect and feel less fear and anxiety about what may happen during our day. Think about walking into let’s say a lecture one day; as you enter, you may be thinking about where you want to sit or if you’re anything like me, you sit in the last seat that’s available because you were late for the lecture! Anyway, if the lecture spans over the next few days, you will find yourself, as well as others around you, naturally gravitating toward the same seats you were in prior. This is because we are creatures of habit; habits make up routine. Therefore, when someone challenges those routines, it’s natural to feel uncomfortable and a little bit disorganized. When the instructor comes in on day five and asks you all to sit in a new place, if you took time to look at the faces around you, then you may have noticed discomfort or even a slight bit of anxiety spreading through the room as people become uncomfortable about leaving the people that were sitting next to them that they’ve now gotten to know or have been writing notes to during the lecture. Some may begin to feel more uncomfortable while introducing themselves to new people around them and everything appears just a little chaotic at the moment. Now if you take this situation to a bigger life scale, then you have yourself where we are now.

With all of the shut downs and social distancing that is taking place, our routines and habits have been rocked! For those of us that can’t work, we may not even have routines anymore. Everything throughout the day is just kind of melting together. We may have lots of downtime, our houses may be cleaner than they ever have been, and our dogs well-walked. For those of us that can still go into the office or place of work because of the essential nature of our job, we are now either bombarded with an excessive amount of people buying toilet paper such as the grocery cashier which is outside of the norm, or we are at the office now sitting exactly 6 feet away from the nearest person possibly not even talking to them for fear of making contact. Many of us feel a bit more isolated, fearful, and alone, even if we won’t admit it or acknowledge it. Even as consumers going into the grocery store, you may notice that people go out of their way to walk out and around you; they may back down an aisle as they see you coming, and God forbid any of us make eye contact for fear of connecting; if we connect we might really see what’s going on and allow those feelings to enter, which is even scarier. So, we all shut each other out and go through this unstable, disorganized routine feeling uncomfortable and overall a little discombobulated. Some of us hoping that it’ll be temporary and the end is in sight, others thinking that the light is not yet appearing at the end of the tunnel.

I am here to encourage you to begin establishing a routine for yourself. Yes, as Gary Allan says “Every storm runs out of rain;” but right now it’s raining and we need to learn to dance in it, and if not dance, at least walk in a straight line. So, this week I challenge you to make a routine out of whatever you have going on right now. For some of you that may be work, for some of you it may not be, but take a look at your day-to-day activities. Start by taking a look at your roles. Are you a mom, a dad, sister, friend, worker, homemaker? What responsibilities come along with each of those roles? Of those responsibilities, which ones are you still able to carry out given the current situation? Once outlining those responsibilities how can you put those into a routine that is balanced? How do we balance essentials with non-essentials, work with rest? How do we find stability in what we have right now? None of us know when this is going to end; it could be an hour from now or longer. With that said, we need not to focus on how long this change may take place but instead learning to embrace the change and create routines and stability within what we have. In this way, we create organization and comfort in what is going on in our life.