How to take advantage of lockdown before it's over

COVID 19 has put most of the world under lockdown, and while this entire situation had, and still has, so many negative aspects, yet we can see some points worth taking advantage of. One of them is the time we have available now.

Even if you are still working from home, you still have more time available than before.

For instance, you are not spending time on commuting daily or some neither showering and changing before having to start a day.

And what are you doing with this newfound time?

A couple of minutes a day are enough to start an exercise routine, make a healthy and calm meal, have quality family time, or perhaps learn a new skill.

But instead, we are waiting for quarantine to be over, so our lives can go back to normal and then to, maybe, start doing some of those things.

We prefer to procrastinate instead of building better habits.

Why do we procrastinate?

We are aware that we are procrastinating and also that this is a bad idea, but we do it anyway.

Procrastination is the action of delaying or postponing something, and it tends to be a lot easy.

It's easy to put something else as a high priority (not judging their importance here), to "do it later" or solely to lack of self-discipline in some areas of your life.

This tendency can be from an identity style or self-consciousness.

An article from The New York Times has experts putting procrastination as an "emotion regulation problem" instead of a "time management problem," it is due to something unpleasant related to the task.

Procrastination is also related to perfectionism. Some people want to do things perfectly and are so afraid of failure that they tend to push it until the last moment.

It is also associated with overplanning and over-researching, like a study from the Deakin University's School of Psychology showed.

And don't fool yourself: procrastination is a serious issue!

It often leads to a high level of stress, anxiety, guilt, depression, loss of personal productivity, low self-esteem, social disapproval, and even some health issues as chronic illness, hypertension, and cardiovascular diseases.

If it's not taken seriously, it can affect many levels of both your personal and work life, and you will keep adding fuel to this circle of further procrastination.

So, why should we want to break the procrastination circle and build better habits?

I recently heard that taking control of your habits is shaping your own destiny. I think that says a lot about why you should want to build better habits.

You want to be successful, you want to have time time for your family friends, you want to be balanced in your work life, you want to he healthy. You want to be better.

But for it to happen your habits needs to be as positive as possible.

This is not about perfection, think of it as a pathway for a better life.

Your habits also have an important part in achieving your goals. Habits make action automatic, they help you to be persistent and to always be a step closer to your goal.

Who wouldn't want that?

Don't wait for quarantine do be over - start today, or even better: start right now!

The truth is you can't do everything, but you can do anything.

Even if you can't achieve all your goals you can still do great thing, just need to take the first step.

First of all you need to have in mind what you want to do, what habits you want to create and what goal do you want to achieve - but remember not to take much time on that and procrastinate from the beginning!

In addition, have in mind the things that motivates you to it.

Related to that is also the fact that you need to keep it simple, the perfect moment will take forever, and to start small, not overloading yourself.

You can also practice mindfulness and meditation, they help strengthening the area of the brain responsible for the emotions, willpower and decision-making.

About the action of building habits itself, its is a combination of 3 things: trigger, routine and reward.

You need to set a cue for it to start, make this a routine and find some way of rewarding yourself after it.

It's also important to set boundaries for your actions, both to do and to not do, this is really good to help you stay on focus and don't overdo.

Also, set your environment to help you, take off things that may trigger bad habits and make it easier to start on your good ones.

And don't be too hard on yourself if you fail or don't seem to be going anywhere, just start again and remember that a lot of time is needed when making full progress.

In those moments, it may be really helpful if you are keeping track of what you are doing and review this too see if it's working or if you might need to do some changes.

The best part of all of it? It gets easier with time and even when quarantine is over and you have to go back to your old life, the habits you've build will continue with you - and you will see that yes, you have time for them.