To survive a long-haul flight, distractions are so useful that with the exception of Spirit, all airlines I’ve flown provide them in some form. Some of these are as basic as in-flight magazines or music, but longer flights tend to include movies, games, or even an outlet for one’s own device. This is a practical decision on the part of the airlines: pleasantly distracted passengers just cause less trouble, in general, than grumpy, bored passengers. In our long-haul flight of social distancing, we need them too.
Of course, just like on an airplane we must remain alert to important information. Don’t be that person who tries to take a stroll down the aisle while the plane is bucking and the attendants have retreated to their jump seats; use common sense. If the government says to avoid going to the grocery store and pharmacy, definitely don’t go holding house parties either. Also, unlike on an airplane, most of us still have our regular occupations to consider—work, school, and taking care of the household’s needs. None of these important things should be neglected. When rightly chosen and used, though, distractions help pass the time, keep the mind occupied, and add a nice dose of anesthetic to a very uncomfortable situation. By their very nature, long periods of time without a notion of how to fill them make people a bit crazy. There’s a reason why solitary confinement is considered cruel, and why sailors on long voyages were known to experience the original cabin fever. Time does strange things when there is nothing to fill it and no structure to make sense of it. If we have no useful task to fill it with, we need to find a way to fill the time to stay sane. Two hours of silently staring into the void does not pass quite as quickly as two hours doing almost anything else. I believe that a part of why children get bored faster than adults is that we have more years of experience in our brains to occupy our thoughts when external activity ceases. They simply have less mental furniture to play with because they haven’t had as much time to collect it. Adulthood’s crowded mental landscape comes with its own problems, of course: overthinking everything can legitimately make things worse. When flying, thinking too hard about the fact that there’s a mile of empty space between you and the ground with only invisible forces holding you aloft is a great way to induce a messy panic attack. Right now, thinking too hard about how easily the virus can be transmitted through entirely symptomless carriers can have a similar effect. Just acknowledge and respect these things in brief, and move on without dwelling on them too much. The beauty of the matter is that if your brain is busy doing one thing, it’s less likely to waste its energy panicking about something else. Keeping your mind occupied is critical right now, whether it’s with the practical stuff of life or a distraction—anything to keep worry, fear, and panic at bay. If you are busy thinking about your game, movie, craft project, book, exercise routine, pot on the stove, pet, child, musical piece, or job, you have less room in your head to worry. Choose your weapon wisely, though: if you’re cruising along cheerfully through a TV series and they dump an episode involving a pandemic on you, just skip it. If your thoughts about your children or job turn into fears of losing said children or job, take a deep breath and refocus on the present tasks of raising your children and doing your job. If you are blessed with either, there is plenty to think about in the process of getting things done without dwelling in the fear zone. One of the most basic elements in treating the worst cases of depression is getting the person to the point where there’s enough pleasure to balance out the pain—without resorting to something that creates more pain over time (like drugs, overeating, overspending, acting out sexually, etc.). While pleasure isn’t the end goal of life, we all need just enough of it to balance out the pains and discomforts of life to keep going. In this way, healthy distractions are like anesthetic. They help us survive the pain of life’s complexities. Just like anesthetic, the dose needs to be carefully adjusted to circumstances—you need some to get by, but you can’t be under ALL the time or you’ll never wake up. But you do need some. For this reason, try to choose the sorts of distractions that actually make you feel good for having spent time on them. Cheerfully roughhousing with one’s kids or playing with one’s pets tends to create a more satisfactory kind of pleasure than binge-watching something alone. Building and creating something tangible can be more delightful than just filling the time with something passive. Once when I was in a hospital, the other patients and I spent more time coloring and talking than watching TV even though it was constantly available, because it just made us, well, happier than watching TV. Try a few things to find what works for you. It will take time to get the right “dose” and it will require adjusting along the way. As you learn and adapt, you’ll find the time go by faster and maybe, just maybe, whenever we all re-emerge into public life, you’ll be in a better mood, too.
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AuthorJillian Lutes is the youth pastor at West Covina Hills Seventh-day Adventist Church. Archives
May 2020
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