Bored to death? How to maintain your sanity in this troubling time.
I was a front liner.
I was a front-liner in the battle against viruses. Not the Corona virus though.
Vaccine research was my day job before. I was dealing with one of the dangerous bacteria and viruses known to man.
The projects were funded by the U.S. government. (The Department of Defense, to be exact). This is the kind of work that it’s so secret, even myself don’t know what I was doing. And, If “I have to tell you, then I have to do this to you” kind of deal.
Working with virus wasn’t easy. It was very challenging to say the least. It was very stressful.
And I left that job years ago…
I was working in the lab all the time. In full PPE (like a NASA Astronaut), almost all day long. I was always in my feet. If not in the laboratory, I was reading technical reports.
To battle stress, our psychologist recommended to walk outside to smell the roses. Walk and talk to the trees.
It helped me.
Staying home the whole week is nothing compared to working with a full PPE. If I get bored because I can’t get to the mall, I always remember to do what our psychologist told us to do:
Walk outside and get fresh air. Talk to the trees.
I meditate. Meditation helps me calm down. Makes me less agitated.
MEDITATION
It was probably 10 years ago when I was first introduce to meditation. Since that I only miss a few in a year. It first started when I was listening to a lecture about Buddhism. Then the subject of meditation was introduced.
Curious, I studied more. Like every good student do, I went to Youtube and learned more. A guy named Jack Kornfield was credited to introduce meditation practice to the U.S.
Story goes that he went to Asia to study with the Buddhist. When he came back from Asia, the word meditation was not yet part of the American collective consciousness.
It took several years before American accepted meditation.
Meditation for stress reduction came to the U.S. via a doctor at the Massachusetts General Hospital. After studying meditation in Asia, he introduced the practice to reduce stress for people with cardiovascular diseases.
His director, worried about how sitting meditation will be viewed as an integrated part of the program, put the meditation classes at the basement of the building.
Today, meditation is backed up with science. But it took several years before it was accepted by the masses. Even Hollywood is in.
I remember a story of Kobe Bryant regarding his coach Phil Jackson. When Phil, the former coach of Chicago Bulls introduced meditation to the Lakers team with Shaquille O Neal, every one was rolling their eyes.
I was like that too. For several months, I was questioning the outcome. It’s a process that I don’t have a real or tangible result.
This changed one day when I was driving in Tampa. Coming from a small town in Florida, I was not used to driving in the chaotic city traffic. I was agitated by the traffic and was always looking ahead asking “what was causing the traffic.”
Then when I looked to my left, there was an abandoned train track. I don’t know what happen next but it made me aware that I was agitated. So, while deep in traffic, I prolonged my breathing and started to calm down.
What changed was my reaction to the traffic. I calmed down and put my mind to the people I was with in the car at the time: my wife and my 2-year old kid. I abandoned the agitated state and relax in the presence of my precious cargo.
Meditation worked.
You know what agitates you?
Scroll, scroll, scroll. Read. Scroll. Read. ….about Corona Virus!
….each of us scroll a distance of one empire state building a day. An entire Empire State Building.
It’s not healthy to be inundated by bad news.
So, I forced myself to be in a social media diet. I don’t watch the news much and I don’t scroll my phone more than 15 minutes a day.
My iPhone will ding me if I scroll past 15 minutes. Only 15 minutes a day.
What I did was went to the general settings of the phone and put a limit to my browsing on social media sites and emails.
If I reached my maximum in the the day, I’m notified. In this case, I don’t mindlessly read every post in the social media feed. As a result, I’m less worried about what’s going to happen next.
The digital diet lessens my stress level.
So, how do you cope?
