Healthy Habits During Quarantine
The home isolation imposed by the Coronavirus pandemic has changed the lives of much of the world’s population. And he did it to such an extent that it became really difficult to maintain healthy habits during quarantine.
On the one hand, our habits have undergone a disruption. Our schedules have inevitably changed because we are forced to stay indoors all day. At the same time, since we don’t go out often, our exposure to sunlight and our movements are limited.
The availability of food is no less important. The limitations in terms of economic flows are affecting the supply of fruit and vegetables, for example. Not to mention that maybe we shop only once a week and we manage to create a menu with what we have.
Maintaining healthy habits during quarantine therefore becomes a titanic undertaking, whether we live alone or with other people. There is a component of stress that is not visible and that is mostly made up of the fear of getting sick. In this article, we present some guidelines to help you maintain healthy habits during quarantine.
Tips for maintaining healthy habits during quarantine
Maintain social relationships through electronic devices
Social relationships are fundamental for the human being. Consequently, a healthy habit during isolation is to keep communication open with others, whether at home or outside, by taking advantage of technological mechanisms.
Video calls, instant messaging and applications for organizing video conferences are allies that can help us. We must not perceive them as enemies, quite the contrary . The feeling of being in company as we go through the crisis can make our quarantine more tolerable.
Protect eye health
Due to teleworking or the point just addressed, screen time increased during quarantine. This can negatively affect the health of our eyes, so we need to be cautious.
A healthy habit in quarantine is the acquisition of preventive measures, such as adjusting the brightness of the screens so that they do not create a reflection of artificial light or on the windows. Adequate brightness tires our eyes less and allows them to be opened and closed often.
Excessive use of the screen leads to limited eyelid movement, which complicates lubrication of the eyeball. In turn, this results in dry eye syndrome. This is not a minor pathology, given that if prolonged over time it can worsen.
A good tip is to implement the 20-20-20 rule of ophthalmologists, who suggest resting your sight every 20 minutes, for about 20 seconds, looking at a distance of 6 meters (20 feet in the Anglo-Saxon metric system). This habit applies to both adults and children.
Caring for your skin is one of the healthy habits during quarantine
By staying indoors for a long time and without exposing ourselves to the sun, our skin does not receive the proper dose of sunlight. This results in less vitamin D production.
The health of bones and kidneys and the vitality of the skin depend on vitamin D. Under normal conditions, the body uses the ultraviolet rays of solar radiation to produce active and functional vitamin D with its benefits.
The quarantine takes away any possibility of going out, but it is still healthy to seek the sunlight. If we have a courtyard, we have to plan short exhibitions there; the same goes for the balcony. In case you don’t have either option, an alternative is to spend some time facing the window.
If you have a moisturizer, apply it even if you think you don’t need it. We might think that staying indoors protects the skin, but certainly a closed environment contains dangerous toxins for the skin, such as perfumes, cleaning products and vapors that come from the kitchen.
Manage stress
The pandemic is a stressful situation in itself . We are afraid of what we do not know, of not being able to calculate how long the isolation will last and what are the chances of getting sick.
Part of managing stress is establishing a routine that helps our circadian rhythm. This routine cannot fail to include the hours of sleep, which we should try not to alter, although the days flow differently due to isolation.
It is also healthy to moderate our use of information. We may feel overly nervous just waiting for the positive cases and the number of deaths to be counted. Furthermore, there are several fake news and clichés that we must know how to recognize.
We can maintain healthy habits during the quarantine
It seems to be a particularly complicated task, but maintaining healthy habits during isolation is possible. We need to get organized and understand that this is a temporary measure. The quarantine will not last forever and life will continue afterwards, so it is important to stay healthy at all times.
