Some of you are busier than ever right now. The changes and disruptions are giving you extra work, having your kids home is demanding an enormous amount of your attention, and, students, you are having to study extra hard on your own in the absence of face-to-face study groups for finals.
It may not feel like it, but right now, you’re the lucky ones. You’re too busily focused on the task at hand to let your mind wander at random to its various anxieties or to nervously check the news every five minutes. To this group, all I have to say about keeping your mind occupied is this: Keep it balanced. Don’t forget you need to stop to eat, sleep, exercise, and breathe every once in a while. We’ll talk more about that stuff in coming days. The group this article is really about are those who suddenly find an awful lot of time on their hands that they’re not used to. I’m talking about the students who are home on vacation, the recent telecommuters who no longer have hours of their day eaten up with driving (yay!), and especially those who live alone and usually deal with it by being out and about with others. For my fellow Seventh-day Adventists, this group includes almost all of us every Sabbath in the near future, so I will address that in an article of its own later on. Depending on your personality and circumstances, this extra time will either feel amazing or terrible at first. Under ordinary conditions, our culture values busyness at the expense of a lot of important things like health, family time, deep relationships, and intentional spirituality. On the other hand, we’re so used to being busy all the time that many of us have not learned healthy ways of dealing with our minds when they are not constantly bombarded by information from external sources. Even worse, a good many of us have never disciplined ourselves to shut off those external sources when that information is unnecessarily stressing us out. Let’s address the second problem first: keeping the news running in the background 24/7 right now is not good for your health. You need current information to adapt appropriately, but televised or radio news has a built-in quest to keep you constantly tuned in. Thinking about all of it all the time, knowing you cannot fix it, is a waste of the body’s stress responses and can cause real harm by wearing down your immune system. You need to protect some real estate in your brain for things that are not COVID-19, not just because some of those things legitimately need attention—your friends and family, for instance—but because your mind needs enough rest from the constant blaring to make rational choices in response to the situation. The hoarding we’re seeing is not a rational response, but a simple function of the brain operating at its most stressed-out level, trying to regain a sense of control by shifting into fight-or-flight mode. Instead of bombarding yourself with all of this all the time, turn the TV and radio off and just check the news online every few hours. That’s enough to give you the big picture, and if something that affects your school or your job happens, your school or your job will tell you about it in due time. Plus, reading the news instead of watching it or listening to it cuts down on some of the emotionally charged nature of broadcast news. You’ve seen enough empty shelves in real life at this point; you don’t need to watch hours of footage about it. As for filling up the empty time, take a few moments to consider what you always wished you had time to do and have never been able to get around to. Exercise more? You may not be able to get to the gym, but you can go on runs outside when the weather’s nice, pace in your living room, or do push-ups anywhere. Read more? You now have time to do it. Take up a time-consuming hobby like crocheting or cooking from scratch? As long as you can find and afford the supplies, now’s your chance. In the ordinary course of life, we all put things off to attend to whatever is most urgent. Now that much of the urgent busyness of life is suspended, this is an incredible opportunity to think about and do all those things you’ve been putting off—and that will be our subject for tomorrow.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorJillian Lutes is the youth pastor at West Covina Hills Seventh-day Adventist Church. Archives
May 2020
Categories |