What Your Future Quarantine Self Really Wants You To Know
Edition #58
Today marks over 4 months since Alex and I have been quarantined. And not just sheltering-in-place: quarantined. No takeout, no delivery. No coffee pickups. No grocery store runs. No socially-distanced visits.
Most people in the US are entering their third month of quarantine right now. Since I’m about two months ahead of everyone else on the timetable, I started thinking: what did I learn in the painful third and fourth month that might help you to avoid that pain in your own life? Maybe it’s a blessing that I went through this earlier, so I can be a sort of time-traveler sharing what’s coming if you follow my blunders?!
As it turned out, I did learn something important and powerful, something that I wish I had known. Entropy is a son of a gun. And it will get you if you’re not careful.
I was strong and resilient for my first two months of quarantine. I had the firm resolve that this was not going to hurt me, my goals, or my passions, no sir! And then, about two months in, something happened. My resilience started to waver, my habits started to falter, and I slid inexorably into a downward spiral (learn more about the science of spirals here).
A downward spiral happens when we start to make choices that nudge us in the wrong direction repeatedly, until suddenly, we find ourselves in a situation that seemed unfathomable (unhealthy, unhappy, dissatisfied, or engaging in other unproductive behaviors.) For me, it looked like: not sleeping, working every minute of the day, not exercising, irritable, and exhausted.
This tendency toward downward spirals is the norm, not the exception, because of something called entropy.
Entropy is the natural tendency for things to slowly become disordered, chaotic and break down over time. Entropy is the default state of our mind and consciousness. (If you’ve ever stopped to meditate, you know it’s complete chaos in there.) To be happy, and to make a difference in the world, we have to fight entropy: we are at our best when we are taking control of ourselves and our minds through pursuits like setting goals, spending time with others, and consciously directing our minds.
To fight entropy, you need to exert a lot of energy in a concentrated direction. Think of a beautiful home garden: to stay organized and tidy and bountiful, it needs constant tending and care. So too do your life, your mind, and your relationships. This is why we humans do things like set goals and buy bullet journals and go to yoga and become craftspeople and hike mountains — we are each fighting entropy in our own way.
Fighting entropy in the best of times is hard. Fighting in a pandemic is beyond hard. Life is full of so many more challenges than usual, leaving us with less energy to expend on our positive pursuits like pursuing our goals and dreams, keeping ourselves healthy and strong, and investing in our well-being.
This two mark month is a double whammy, because by now, any novelty is long gone, the end feels impossibly far away, and there’s little relief on the landscape. This is the moment where it feels a lot easier to just give in to the entropy and let it do its thing.
This has also been made so much worse by the urgent, extreme chaos that we’re all facing in our personal and our work lives (let alone what’s happening in the extreme chaos of our society). For the first two months of quarantine, absolutely everything was new, urgent, and important. Navigating these new challenges left little room for thoughtful consideration of what was actually good for you or me, because we were all essentially in a global fight-or-flight panic moment. This, of course, further depleted our energy from fighting off entropy and therefore maintaining our well-being and happiness.
But now, we need to face the reality that what’s happening to us right now is longer the exception, but the rule. This has been going on long enough that we cannot continue to make excuses or continue to frequently push ourselves past what is bearable in our daily lives. We cannot let exceptional circumstances be our rule and bully their way into being our first, middle, and last priorities, leaving our own well-being nowhere to be found on the list.
If you’re sitting there thinking, ‘well, this is awfully bleak’, I do have good news: there is a way out of the crevasse. It sounds so impossibly easy, so impossibly stupid, that you might brush it aside, even though it’s the single most reliable way to fight entropy.
Set the smallest possible goal for yourself and celebrate the hell out of yourself if you achieve it.
Here’s my smallest possible goal, so laughably small that I’m embarrassed to admit it: I set a goal to walk to the end of the block and back (and honestly, some days I didn’t make it!) But slowly, over the course of a few days, I started to feel a bit better. My walks got a little bit longer. I added in some slightly harder workouts. Then, my sleep improved, my energy returned, and I became so much less stressed. All of a sudden, with one tiny action, I found myself in a positive upward spiral.
If you’re struggling with this, here’s my challenge for you for this week:
Choose one small goal for the week — something so small that you almost feel silly or embarrassed at how small it is
Right now, identify one step that would take you closer to that goal (in the example of a going for a walk, it would ‘put my shoes on’)
Then, at some point this week, follow through on your small goal. And see how it makes you feel. I am willing to bet that it will shift your direction around. It might just be the thing that gets you out of this two-month pandemic rut.
Let me know if you try the challenge and how it goes, and reach out if you have any questions or feedback!
This piece was originally published in The New Happy newsletter. Want more advice on happiness and living a meaningful life? You can sign up below!