Week five of the lockdown – maybe you’ve settled into a routine which is okay for now, or you might have worked from home before the lockdown in which case the changes aren’t quite so dramatic. However, you might be in the ‘home working is a complete nightmare’ camp, with confined space, two adults and any number of children vying for that one space to work, play and go to virtual school, with no end in sight.
If this is you, articles about hobbies you can take up or activities you can all do together in small spaces may have lost their appeal. These were probably done in week one with some enthusiasm, but the prospect of making another raffia mat might have you sinking further into gloom.
You may have had to get up at 5am to do some work before the children wake up. Once they are all up, you find you are constantly interrupted because they need help or have already lost interest in their project of the moment, and as you try to make that important zoom call, they start jumping on you and pulling faces at the camera. Who wanted that contract that was 12 months in the making anyway?
But even in this increasingly common scenario, there are techniques which can really help you achieve a level of calm and sanity. There are no magic bullets, but in our series of films about Keeping Well at Work, Occupational Psychologist Emily Hutchinson, who is full of excellent insights and advice, talks about our ability to cope through choosing what we notice and what we don’t. She cites Viktor Frankl, Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist who was a Holocaust survivor and wrote the best seller ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’.
He stresses the importance of having choice in the quest to survive. It may seem unlikely that someone in a concentration camp has much choice over anything that happens to them – but he points out that there are many things you can choose to see or not see every day. You can notice a beautiful blue sky or a tree which is starting to grow green shoots. You can choose not to see the smoke rising from mass crematorium chambers. You can focus on a small act of kindness and block out acts of horror. This was a route to survival for Frankl.
On a far less dramatic scale, we can choose to notice a beautiful day, a lovely comment or a work of art from our offspring and ignore the slide into domestic chaos which may accompany our new routines.
It is an opportunity to focus on what is really important to us and sift out the things which don’t really matter.
From all of us at TeamDoctor, have a good week and if it all feels too much, just focus on the good stuff!
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