Community

What You Should Definitely Not Do During Lockdown

When the first wave of the pandemic hit, you probably thought lockdown was a temporary thing, so you mostly preoccupied yourself with figuring out what to do with the sudden abundance of free time. You’ve probably developed some questionable habits to cope with the situation, but now that it’s been more than a year since the pandemic started, you’ve either adjusted to the new normal already or you still find yourself  drifting aimlessly through life. Either is acceptable since there is no instruction manual on how to cope with a pandemic, but with another lockdown underway, here’s a short guide on what you should definitely not do during lockdown. 

Note: the examples stated in this article should not be taken too seriously. They’re not necessarily do’s and don’ts because they’re only meant to poke fun at real-life experiences.

1. Turn your home into a jungle

Quarantine has definitely awakened the plantita/plantito in some of us. You might have started as someone who can’t even keep a single plant alive, but now you might have a moderate sized collection or a full-blown garden. However, before buying another plant, stop and consider if you still have space for them. Do you live in a place with a yard or a balcony? Or do you still have a surface indoors that’s not covered in leaves? If your home is slowly starting to resemble a jungle, then you should probably stop buying plants.

Photo from Pebble Magazine

2. Attend Zoom meetings in your pajamas

The good thing about online classes and the work from home set-up is that you don’t have to spring out of bed at the crack of dawn to make sure you arrive at your school or your workplace on time. Now you can just spring out of bed 5 minutes before your Zoom meeting without brushing your hair or changing out of your pajamas. This is fine if your camera is off for the whole meeting, but you’ll never know when the host would ask you to turn it on. It’s safer to make sure you’re presentable before joining a Zoom meeting, but on the bright side, you don’t have to change out of your pajama pants because no one will see that anyway. 

3. Sit on the couch or in front of your desk all day

Now that we’re back to the work from home set-up/no going out policy, it might be easy for you to transform into a couch potato or sit in front of your desk all day, hunched over your laptop in the dark like a little gremlin. Then you wonder why you have back pains that make you feel like you’re 80 years old. If you want to remain youthful and scoliosis-free, stop working every few minutes to make sure you’re not suffering from the Shrimp On A Chair Syndrome.

Photo from Pinterest

 

4. Open a supermarket

This is partially a joke. You can open a supermarket anytime you want; it’s actually a great business idea. What’s not ok is when you hoard so much groceries to the point where you look like you’re about to open a supermarket. It’s not practical, since fresh food might won’t last long in the fridge and might go bad if you don’t cook it immediately. You can’t spend the entire lockdown on an instant noodles diet either unless you want salt to replace your blood sugar.

5. Mess up your sleeping pattern

At the beginning of quarantine, you were probably among the people who were joking about how they didn’t know what time or day it was. You probably also said goodbye to a reasonable sleep pattern, which was fine, since a lot of responsibilities were getting cancelled left and right, and you were free to do whatever you want with your time. But now that more than a year has already passed, your Adult Responsibilities ™ have probably come back to haunt you, so you can’t still be living in Easter Standard Time.


6. Become TOO obsessed with productivity

So far, there are two conflicting messages when it comes to coping with the pandemic. On one hand, there are people saying it’s acceptable to slack off because we’re all in the middle of a crisis, but on the other hand, there are also people saying you should be more productive than usual because you have more time on your hands. While being a couch potato won’t exactly make you feel good, being productive every hour of the day is only going to stress you out. So go ahead and scroll through your phone (productively) or bake cookies (productively) because self-care can be productive too.

7. Go overboard with your home gym

Staying fit is important even during a pandemic, but you have to make sure that you’re going to commit to working out regularly before building a home gym. But even if you’re committed, you still have to choose your equipment wisely because you’re not likely going to use every single one. They’re just going to collect dust somewhere inside your home or guilt-trip you while you’re watching Netflix.

Photo from Chicago Athlete

 

8. Throw away your quarantine pass

We know that it’s cathartic to have a “punitin ang sedula” moment with your quarantine pass–you even did it already when the first lockdown was lifted, thinking that you’ll never need it again. But experience has proven that quarantine passes are going to come back every once in a while, so you should know better by now and not throw them away.

Photo from Pinoy Kollektor

Related Posts

Leave a Reply