There’s no doubt about it, living in a pandemic world is not the same. Lockdowns across the world have led to us spending far more time indoors and we’ve lost a lot of self-care routines that we relied on for health. This could easily be a health detriment, but what if we flipped it for a purely positive and used this time to focus on our health?
I’ve been helping people with these challenges in my lockdown survival group here – but for now here are 5 positive things you can gain for your health and wellness because of lockdown.
1. YOU CAN CREATE SPACE
Prior to lockdown, there wasn’t a lot of space for most people. By space, we meantime that you have to really sit with yourself and to just BE. The funny thing is, sometimes being is not easier. Sometimes it can make us uncomfortable as it allows our niggling fears and stories to come forth. Sitting with yourself without distraction can allow us to see what is really going on with our health and lives and what we need to do to change it.
What we see a lot at Shift, is people filling their lives with ‘busyness’ to ignore what your heart truly desires.
Lucky for you, most of your distractions have now been stripped away in lockdown and you now have a beautiful opportunity to create more space in your life.
2. YOU CAN EXPAND YOUR HEALTHY COOKING REPERTOIRE
If you’ve always been too busy to cook healthy meals, or to make your lunch, or even to try new recipes, now is the time! Without that transit time to work you can now take your time and cook yourself something with far more nutrition than any takeaway meal could provide.
This is a really good time to focus on wholefood cooking, increasing your vegetable and fibre intake and cutting back on processed food and sugar. Doing this means you’ll exit lockdown with more energy and you may even drop a few pounds.
We have been sharing lots of healthy recipes in our lockdown survival group, so try one!
3. YOU CAN HARNESS YOUR CREATIVE SIDE
Hobbies… do you have any? Did you use to? As kids we had all kinds of interests, but what do you do just for fun? Do you do anything to harness your creativity? Being creative helps to bring us joy and also uses different parts of our brain. Always wanted to learn how to knit? How about learning to play the guitar? Or getting into arts and craft? Always wanted to write a book? Now is the time!
What if you could come out of lockdown with a new set of skills? How cool would that be!?
4. YOU CAN GET OUT OF YOUR HEAD AND INTO YOUR BODY
This is something that we should always be aspiring to, but lockdown is the perfect time to really create a practice that helps you to be more mindful, present and embodied. Meditation is something that really helps with this, and if we’re not in a rush to be here or there, we really don’t have an excuse do we? Try using the headspace app, or meditation zone, or even searching for meditations on Spotify. We’ve also been doing a daily meditation in our lockdown survival group.
Slow down, tune in and listen to what your body is telling you.
5. YOU CAN DECIDE WHAT IS REALLY IMPORTANT TO YOU
The most profound thing that may come out of lockdown is how you re-evaluate what is important to you. The significant changes that are occurring have forced us to literally cancel our current lives, clearing the flights, events and calendar items that we have created for ourselves.
This gives us a good opportunity to really think about how we want to live our lives. Was the old way filling our cup, or leaving us stressed and overwhelmed? Was the way you were existing sparking joy for you? If not, it may just be time to wipe the slate clean and create the life you really want, post lockdown. You deserve it.
