Page 5 - Booklet -online

knowledge, contracted it. However, not long afterward, the gym did close. When that happened, I
started to feel like I did not have much of a reason to get up as early as I did before. Just a short while
after the gyms closed, I started getting up later and later with my latest wake up time being around
7:00 a.m.

In the beginning, not a lot was known about COVID, and
FIVE TIPS TO therefore, appropriate protective resources were not available to
START, RE-START, OR me. This, plus having to interact with and treat patients that tested
positive, in addition to seeing some of my co-workers contract
MAINTAIN YOUR
the virus, and have to be admitted into the ICU, made my life
FITNESS RHYTHM pretty stressful. It got to a point where I started to realize that
there was no end in sight to this and that things would only get
1. Drink a glass or worst.
bottle of water first thing in
the morning.
People that I worked with started quitting out of fear of
2. Engage in two contacting the virus. This meant that the workload for me and
minutes (20 seconds of each others who stayed, increased dramatically. Each morning, I took
exercise) of low-impact, a little more time to get out of bed and get out the door to work.
constant movement.
Eventually, I stopped focusing on my diet and began
3. Write down at stress eating, which led to significant weight gains. I stopped
least two things you’d liked playing chess in the mornings and eliminated my two-minute
to accomplish that day. morning workout routine. I stopped taking pride in how I looked
leaving the house. Shaving became the least of my worries. All the
4. Meditate for 5
minutes, envisioning yourself good habits I established for myself up to that point fell to the
accomplishing what you set wayside.
out to do that day, potential
obstacles you may encounter, For someone like myself--an optimist by nature and a
and resolutions to those glass half full kind of a person-- how would I proceed with this
obstacles. new way of life, this new norm filled with so much uncertainty
and potential danger, and with no end in sight?
5. Engage in some
mind stimulating activity (eg. One morning, about a month into the pandemic, I pulled
read, play on-line chess, use into the parking lot of my job and just sat in my car for about a
less dominant hand to half-hour. I reflected on everything that had happened up to that
perform a task) for 10 point. I realized that none of what had happened was within my
minutes. control. However, I also came to realize that while I was unable
to control the things happening around me, I could control how
I reacted to them. This realization would prove pivotal going
forward.

Sitting in my car that morning, for some reason, I remembered a movie from the late '90s
called Twister. At the end of the movie, the main characters were caught up in a massive tornado, but
they fastened themselves to a pipe embedded several feet into the ground. As the tornado is trying to

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