Privilege of focus and mental health
Burnout. and burnout
Ever since covid-19 began, I began to toy with the flexibility of my work. Squeeze in some exercise here, do some cooking there, keep a healthy balance of everything.
Then I realize, I have lost it. The ability to have laser focus on things.
Messages coming in and my stubborn nature of clearing notifcations and constantly checking for it. I decided to mute all my notifications on work related chats and even then I find myself routinely checking them for updates.
Covid-19 has burnt me hard, despite enjoying the benefits of working from home. I found myself more mentally strained than physically strained. I was not able to focus on anything for a long time and often depend on dopamine created by social media to get the day going. To that end, it became that I have to stretch the day further to complete the tasks at hand. Be it personal tasks or work tasks, everything seems to be able to be pushed backwards.
Whats the price I paid for this? Sleep and book reading
In the past, when I was traveling to office for work:
- I often found time to focus reading books to get the journey to end rather quickly. This was something enjoyable because I get this really short spurts of focus that get me thinking throughout the day
- Discipline, I found it easy to follow a schedule to wake up and to report before a certain time, lets say a company stand up. Of course having one or two days to sleep in for a WFH is nice but when it becomes everyday it is a fierce struggle to wake up knowing that the consequence of not waking up is minimal. In the past workplace I even tried once calling into the meeting from my bed because I overworked so much the night before and I just could not leave my bed
- Exercise, I enjoyed lunch workouts with my ex-colleagues thoroughly, not only they were good influence on lifestyle habits, it was efficient socializing with effective work knowledge shared as well
Why mentioning this now?
I have totally lost my edge in reading books, it is extremely hard for me to finish reading a book, the focus often gets either broken or things get so busy that I could not really squeeze in some full focus time for it.
Entertainment are cheap and easy distractions. Hype following and FOMO is real. Examples like squid game, mass media just blast them in your face and the more you don’t want to find out about it, it just keep showing up everywhere. Radio, TV, news and social media, forcing you to conform to get some basic knowledge about it before losing context on conversations with colleagues and friends.
Luckily, the current company I am in conducted a session on mental health. Initially I was skeptical about it because of all the corporate bullshit I was hearing over the internet. Indeed some of the practices recommended by the course was practical and helpful. Without much guidance I was already following them naturally to cope with my internal struggles.
Practice
To commit to fixing my own focus issues, I decided to go on a fixed routine to see how much I can improve on maintaining a healthy lifestyle.
Some years ago, I commited to write book reviews on this platform to ensure I follow a good routine and get things done.
Now, I force myself to reserve slots at ActiveSG gyms to go for workouts even if I don’t feel like it. At the gym itself then I will manage my own expectations to get the workout done to also fix my lower back issue due to long time sitting at home.
I also want to write more to jot down these thoughts of mine, because constant thoughts not written on any where keeps me awake at night and I lose quality sleep because of this.
So if you are reading this, thanks for reading this far. This outlet of mine is necessary not just as a good mental habit but a way to practice and organize my thoughts better for me to look back in the coming years.
:)
Here’s some body statistics progress so far:
