Five Ways to Relax During Quarantine

by | Apr 20, 2020 | Articles | 2 comments

I thought a good blog post this week would be on how to unwind—not just during our current era of quarantine and “social distancing,” but on any day off. What my wife calls a holiday. That could be any time, right?

I’ve been running so hard lately, I’ve barely had anything like a day off for months. But I recognize how serious of a situation we’re in here, and even wrote about it recently in my Self-Care for Creatives post. Some of those same self-care recommendations are duplicated below, but hey—you can never hear these too many times.

  1. Exercise – If you’re not athletic at all, it might sound counterintuitive to you when I say, Exercise to unwind. But scientists and artistic types both agree that sufficient exercise is critical to long-term health. That means using exercise for stress reduction. I walked up and down my stairs for a good half hour today, so there you go.
  2. Meditate – I started meditating way before I knew David Lynch had been promoting it for years. I try to do at least 15 minutes of silent meditation every night before bed. (Well, I play the sounds of the ocean, which helps me tune out my tinnitus.) Now, that’s not a huge time commitment, but the benefits are tremendous.
  3. Eat right – I know, I sound like your mother, right? Well, I am a vegetarian, but I also love sweets. So I’m not saying you have to be a total health nut. But if you eat lots of healthy foods, and not much that’s bad for you, your stress levels can go down naturally—especially when you combine eating right with exercise, sufficient hydration, etc.
  4. Reading for pleasure – It’s amazing to me how many times I speak with a fellow entrepreneur and find out he or she never reads for pleasure. Business folks read business books, stock market news, blah blah blah…but nothing for fun. Of course, as a writer and one-time English major, I find this almost inexplicable. But I also do recommend things to them—including fiction. My own novels can be found here.
  5. Everything else – So a list of five will hardly be all-inclusive. Thus I thought I’d best save the kitchen sink category for last. Whatever you love to do for recreation—movies, crossword puzzles, listening to music—give yourself time for some of that on your holiday, and during this coronavirus era, too. I don’t mean just “official” holidays, either. I mean those Sundays coming up that you usually reserve for laundry and cleaning. Take a week off. Nobody cares if your floor is a little dirty. Seriously.

What about you? What are your favorite stress busters? I’d love to hear from you in the comments section.

Vaccine Follies: How My Second Shot Got Delayed and Why I Freaked Out A Little

Most of my blog posts are related to books and marketing, as you probably know if you’re here. But periodically this blog serves the purpose of a journal, and I write about what’s on my mind—and throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s been a lot. The virus, the...
punches

Roll With The Punches, Baby!

Today is just one of those Mondays. I got a letter from the IRS that said they "believe there's a miscalculation" in my return. So that big $300 refund I was planning on receiving? Fuhgeddaboutit. But hey, at least I don't owe them anything, and they're not auditing...
track

Back on Track With a Work-In-Progress

Last week’s unusually short blog post was entitled Closed for Maintenance: Me. Between my busy freelance schedule and other commitments, I didn’t have time for myself, much less for the blog (which is, after all, an unpaid avocation). Today's post is about getting...
manuscript

Top Five Things to Check Before You Turn Your Manuscript Over

This week's blog post is for my writer friends. Everyone has a checklist of things they know they need to consider before publishing. When it comes time to turn that manuscript into a book, it's all too easy to get caught up in marketing considerations or thoughts of...
Whizzers

Talking About A Metaphysical Work

On July 21st, I launched my fifth full-length work of fiction, Whizzers. I spent years working on about the first 30% of the novel, then burned through the remaining 70% from late 2018 through March 2019.So now it's the thing on the front burner. When I finished my...
political

Navigating the Murky Waters of Political Correctness

“If you don't have a sense of humor, it just isn't funny.”  —Wavy Gravy   When it comes to political correctness, I’m not convinced we should go back to the “good old days.” I mean, do we really want to go back to calling someone born to an unwed mother a...
service

What’s It All About, Anyway?

As far as service goes, it can take the form of a million things. To do service, you don't have to be a doctor working in the slums for free, or become a social worker. Your position in life and what you do doesn't matter as much as how you do what you do. —Elisabeth...
perils

Instafreebie and The Perils of Evil

Most of you who read this blog know that I'm not a big one on writing about the perils of evil...at least not at the same level as the serial killers or the kings of genocide. Sure, I've got some pretty bad people in my books: Johnny, the doper and rapist in Brothers'...
robot

More Thoughts On Robot Writers and The Tech Dystopia

A couple of months ago, I wrote a blog post here called When Will the Robot Overlords Replace Us? Apparently, I’m fairly obsessed with this stuff, because every time I come here and empty my brain, it seems to come up again. Today is no different. Part of the reason,...
COVID-19

We’re Doing This To Ourselves—And It’s Hard to Comprehend

​As the COVID-19 crisis grinds on and on, I’ve become increasingly motivated to write about it…for a number of reasons. First, we’re all thinking about it, so I might as well address it here. Second, I’ve sort of avoided writing about it in some previous blog posts,...
self-promotion

What’s The Problem With Shameless Self-Promotion?

While I still find it somewhat hard to believe, I've been on Twitter for almost eight years. I know this not only because Twitter shows Joined March 2015 on my profile but also because, even if they eliminate that feature, I use a tracker called Who Unfollowed Me? If...
MLK

MLK Day 2023

Here’s wishing everyone a safe, sane Martin Luther King Jr. Day. For many of us, today is always something of a day of mourning: not only mourning the loss of a great civil rights leader, but also mourning the turn our great nation seemed to take in recent years....

Twitter Tips for Authors in 2023

If you follow my blog, you probably connected with me via Twitter, whether you’re a fellow author or not. In 2020, I wrote a post about Twitter for fellow writers that got a good response. Three years later, the landscape has changed, but some Twitter best practices...
rails

Going Off The Rails (But Not On A Crazy Train)

Last April, I wrote a blog post called Back on Track With a Work-In-Progress. Part of that post was to talk about the difference between a “plotter” and a “pantser” (and to describe myself as a hybrid of the two, a “plantser”). Another, less obvious motive, was to...
French

Those Tricky French Authors and Their Obsessions

Today’s blog post was originally going to be Write Whatever the @#$% You Want, Pt. III. However, after seeing parts I and II lined up, I decided to call an audible and make it something less repetitive. Somehow the SEO gods have gotten into my head. As I’ve mentioned...
scared

Write Whatever the @#$% You Want, Pt. II

In last week’s post, I mentioned a pretty well-known author who has publicly reported his publisher “wouldn’t touch” a new release, in part because a character in his novel referred to herself as “fat.” I heard this story on a podcast, and I remember thinking, “Wait...
censorship

Write Whatever the @#$% You Want

I’ve been stewing on this for a while. It’s been brewing for quite a while. I could probably write a song about it (how about a rap?), but I don’t think I will. This is more of a blog post topic, and it might even deserve a series. And that’s the title and topic of...
gratitude

Should Every Month Be Gratitude Month?

When I was a kid, I loved Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz. I read it daily and collected nearly every paperback volume of the cartoon, so I could see what I’d missed since the comic strip’s inception in 1950.  Certain things stuck: quotes like “happiness is a warm puppy”...
robot

More Thoughts On Robot Writers and The Tech Dystopia

A couple of months ago, I wrote a blog post here called When Will the Robot Overlords Replace Us? Apparently, I’m fairly obsessed with this stuff, because every time I come here and empty my brain, it seems to come up again. Today is no different. Part of the reason,...