This has been an extraordinarily tough time for every human being alive right now. I have been blessed with the ability to work from home during this time, to have thankfully remained employed and productive, and I have actively tried to use this time and this experience to improve my mental and physical health. Reflecting on my behaviors and the lessons I’ve learned from them over these past three months, I wanted to share what I discovered and what my approach has been in the hopes that someone will gain some value.
Step 1: Meditate At Least Once Every Day
Meditation has been the cornerstone of how I have successfully dealt with the anxiety and fears that have come from sheltering in place. Meditation has saved my life, my sanity, and my happiness. I have been practicing Transcendental Meditation twice a day for 20 minutes for about three years now. I wake up and the first thing I do is to sit up, get up, and meditate.
If you are new to meditation and considering adopting the behavior, I’d recommend beginning with Focused Attention Meditation because it’s the most easily accessible and there are great apps out there to help you. Start with 5 minutes and build up to whatever makes you feel best intending to become fully aware of your interior emotional landscape because it is the engine of our reality, the arena where our emotions battle to determine whether happiness or sorrow wins the day.
The human species is facing an unprecedented crisis of anxiety, rage, apathy, and the traumas associated with these emotions are stacking up inside us by the second like negative emotional banking transactions. We must find a way to equalize this balance and meditation is the single greatest gift you can give yourself every day of your life. Here is a pro tip: Meditation should never feel like work and the prime directive of TM Meditation is to, “Take it easy and take it as it comes.”
Only by consistently going inward with patience every day, will we each gather the strength and wisdom necessary to combat the traumas we carry inside of us and release them so we may gather the spiritual strength we need to overcome the tribulations we are each going to face together over the next several months.
CLICK HERE to read my Medium article on the benefits of learning Transcendental Meditation.
Step 2: Treat Your Body In A Way That Is 80% Comfortable & 20% Uncomfortable & Then Adjust As You See Fit
Get Physical
This was hard for me until the Shelter In Place order came down in Ohio, where I live. I traveled quite a bit for my job and a significant portion of my professional life was focused on the logistics of that travel, airline schedules, packing and unpacking, hotels and conference rooms. But when all of that went away, I found that I had extra time and I chose to fill it with exercise.
I was blessed to have been able to invest in a Peloton bike and it was hands down the best exercise equipment purchase I’ve ever made, indeed the best investment in my physical health that I’ve made. Now, three months later and I just hit 60+ consecutive days of activity across cycling classes, strength training, yoga, meditations, and stretching and I’m down 15 pounds and feel stronger and healthier than I have in 20 years.
One of the techniques I used to compound physical activity was to hook it to my morning meditation and establish an empowering 90 minutes filled with activity that helps me grow physically, spiritually, and mentally every day. My body and mind became addicted to this behavior over two months and now it’s pretty easy to move past the reservations and hesitations I sometimes have after waking and considering moving to meditate and exercise.
Eat To Live But Don’t Forget To Live
I am a big fan of mail-order nutrition; it has worked well for my busy family, where three of us hold full-time jobs. Daily Harvest has been amazing for easy to make nutrition-filled smoothies and Hello Fresh for healthy and easy to prepare meals. We’ve combined these services with a weekly grocery pickup that is socially distanced and responsible, and the results have been to minimize our health risk while maximizing our nutrition and it has paid off to the benefit of everyone’s health at my house.
I still allow myself a daily treat of some kind, homemade ice cream, a candy bar, something to remind me that I’m still alive. And once a week, I go out and pick up food of some kind for lunch, remaining socially distanced and responsible, of course. I’m not trying to be Tony Horton here, but I’ve found that balancing nutrition with the joy of eating foods that give me pleasure is very reasonable behavior and keeps me motivated to continue these other healthier behaviors.
Step 3: Turn Facebook Into A Photo Album & Dial Down All Political News & Opinions From Social Media
Last year, I murdered my personal Facebook account and it wasn’t easy to walk away from 500 people that I’d collected into a digital menagerie over twelve years of social networking. After the Mueller Report came out last year, I accepted that the very act of looking at my Facebook feed was doing damage to my country and my mental health. Facebook as a business model is established on micro-targeting specific segments of users with information to induce outrage, which through digital transubstantiation turns into engagement and Return On Investment for the advertising dollars they are paid. But the real cost is human joy. Without proper fact-checking and moral leadership, any platform will become a cesspool of misinformation and just a general all-around bad way to spend one’s time.
So, I unfriended everyone but my ten closest family members and friends and then I muted them. After that, I unfollowed every page and group that I didn’t personally need to organize efforts around my non-profit and professional work. And now, every day, when I receive that daily alert for the Facebook digest of all the posts I made every year that day, I manually go through and delete every post that isn’t a photo of someone I love, or an event or place that I care about and which makes me smile when I see it. I have nearly completed this year-long project of turning Facebook into the photo album it always should have been, and it turns out to have been one of the best decisions I could have made to maintain my pursuit of happiness.
I also went through Twitter and performed a major culling, throttling the information channels that I process daily. I follow writers and artists and a few journalists whose work I trust. And I follow my friends but mute them if bullshit starts flowing my way. I wouldn’t drink polluted water, so why would I ingest information that has been polluted with algorithmic outrage into my brain on the daily? I don’t anymore.
I also don’t click on the crazy conspiracy links that my friends still text me from time to time and I subscribed to Apple News+, where I can read articles from accredited sources, written by professional journalists, without a comment section to be found. I love my friends dearly, but I am responsible for my mental health and I wouldn’t take a pill someone handed me and told me to take either. Which brings me to…
…How I now treat the information that I ingest as carefully as I do prescription medication. Taking too much of the wrong medicine can poison one’s body to the point of death, just like taking in too much of the wrong information can poison one’s mind and soul, to the point of moral corruption hidden within the disguise of self-righteousness. This all leads to hubris, which I consider to be the deadliest sin.
Step 4: Read As Many Books As You Can. Listen To Great Music. Watch Films & Television Shows That Move You To Develop & Exercise Empathy
After my social networking detox, I found that I was starved for information. I kept picking up my phone and found that deeply addicted part of myself wanting to jump right back into that river of outrage. My online life after Facebook felt muted and sepia-toned. And then, like the starving man who looks around him to find nature’s bounty growing from the ground, I realized that I was surrounded by incredible information in the form of these strange rectangular objects with words printed throughout to allow me to journey through countless narratives and the wildest fantasies. My books were still here for me, sitting patiently on my shelf like a knowing grandparent and they have been wonderful companions in this time of sometimes border-line solipsistic isolation.
Books truly are amazing objects, useful only in how we change in relationship to them. A book will not change in any factor other than physical wear and tear as we read them and yet our entire worldview can be completely different when we are done engaging with them. No tweet has ever accomplished what even the most boring book can do in our hands.
I love vinyl records, holding the artwork in both hands while I read in wide format what the musicians want me to see, while I listen to what they want me to hear. I walk to my records like a king walks to his banquet table and my ears feast on different genres and voices every day. Right now, I’m on a huge Jazz kick and my work and my reading sessions have been set to the soundtracks of greats like Chet Baker, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, Gil Evans, Stanley Turrentine, Dexter Gordon, and dozens more. Music continues to be a revelation in my life and to honor that, I started up a daily album appreciation post series on Instagram, where I write short posts with photos of the records on my turntable that day. I’m starting with the soundtracks that matter to me and from there I will move into the Hip Hop that made me see a world beyond my petty white boy suburban borders as a teenager and young man in the 1990s.
Finally, watch great films, the ones that help you play out the dramas of our lives through multiple characters and situations, all from the safety of our television. In these days of being locked in, it is even more important that our minds explore distant spaces within our most intimate places and great film and television allows us to do just that.
Let Art save your soul, while you protect and build your body and mind.
Step 5: Smile At Everyone You See
It gets easier, this new kind of living alone together, at least that’s what I’ve been telling myself lately. It might be a lie, but it’s a lie for a worthy cause, which is our future together as responsible citizens committed to the Common Good. There are forces in this world that want to tear that Common Good from the fabric of society, even though it is baked into the structure of every social philosophy and religion that human beings have ever constructed in the effort to maintain order in a world where we are physically unprepared to survive long without relying on each other for assistance. These pressures and the strength in the group is what forced our species to create society twelve thousand years ago, to begin with, once we settled down, started growing crops and invented the concept of Property along with the need to defend it.
In a great irony, it turns out that we need each other much more than we need ourselves. There are moments in life when the flimsy barrier that separates one person’s existence from another’s breaks down in the moment, where we realize that I and that other person are one, in the truest sense. It doesn’t happen a lot but it only needs to happen once for a soul to realize its reflection shining out from inside another person.
When you smile at another person, a genuine smile without malice or suspicion, this is your soul acknowledging itself as a localized manifestation of that which is universal and unchanging. Smiling at strangers is the very small ripple in the kinetic motion of society that can eventually become an incredibly powerful wave of social justice that then flows into History.
These are five steps that have helped me become a better person during the past several months. If they help you put some things into perspective, that makes me happy. If not, I wish you well with a smile, smile, smile.
