Heroes@Home: Transitioning from Your Life Running You to You Running Your Life

PART I
 
If COVID-19 has you staying home for prolonged periods, managing your time can be unnerving. Long spans of unstructured time can leave you feeling unmoored and restless. These feelings can slip into disorientation, malaise and hopelessness if not promptly and properly addressed.[1] Sometimes, we can feel as if we have lost our way.
 
Keep in mind; feelings of rootlessness are common during transitions like starting a family, beginning a new project or business, leaving a job for a career change, divorce, or retirement. Transitions prompt us to re-imagine our lives and our roles in society. COVID-19 presents societal upheaval – a type of transition from a public focus to a private focus. This transition, prompted by necessity, requires re-imaging our lives on many levels - from how we work to how we interact with one another.
 
We are accustomed to lives designed around societal structures, so COVID-19’s disruption is naturally perturbing. Normal routines are no longer sustainable; yet, routines are vital for a preserving our notions of purpose and progress. Routines provide a sense of coherence and continuity in our lives. Disruption indicates it is time to put on our design thinking caps to rethink our lives. If we want and expect different outcomes, we must reorganize our lives by creating structures and routines that serve our current realities going forward.
 
This is the first of two posts that address re-imaging our lives in light of the pandemic. In this article, we look at the importance of routines and norms, as well as start down the path toward reconsidering them in light of a designing new, not same old, life.  
 
The Importance of Routines – Norms
 
From birth, our lives and roles in society are organized and structured through behavioral norms formed and routinized by repetition and reinforcement (Hall & Trager, 1953). Norms become routines and institutionalized over time. Norms come from our families, communities, schools, and religious institutions through explicit and implicit rituals, rules, and behavioral expectations. These are our “roots” grounding us as we form our individual identities. Norms are also artifacts of societies that mold and delineate acceptable and unacceptable behavior at individual and group levels. They are the rhythm and cadence of cultures reverberating through our daily lives from the time we wake up to the time we go to sleep. Through these institutionalized expectations and behaviors, our time is structured, bounded, and evaluated – even judged. Norms provide us bonds and boundaries of our relationships, thus coherence and continuity in our lives.
 
As members of groups, communities, and organizations from an early age, many of us follow norms without much examination. We rarely question norms or institutions from which they emanate, particularly when we see shared benefits are generally accepted and they appear to be broadly beneficial to us individually. For example, most of us see the wisdom in traffic laws – predictable order and safety.
 
When we adopt norms, instead of reinventing or resisting them, we conserve rather than waste our time and energy. We can apply our energies elsewhere, possibly in creative and productive ways. When we assume group norms to be a member of a community, we tacitly consent to let others prescribe the use of our time and schedules to some extent. For example, we arrive, participate, and leave school, work, church, and community meetings at specific times. If we want a job, we show up for the interview on time. If we want to fly to Hawaii for vacation, we arrive at the gate at the scheduled departure time. If we do not comply, then we lose the opportunity and have to make other arrangements, which is often inconvenient and time consuming. Compliance has its benefits – saving time and effort. Compliance also imposes limitations on individual freedom and expression – laughing loudly in a library raises eyebrows and elicits a, “Shhhh!”
 
Norms represent our commitments and obligations to others, as well as ourselves. Adults often have the tightest of schedules to manage their work, family, church, and community obligations. The decision to start a family comes with a shift in prioritizing work and children from their birth to adulthood. Shuttling children to school, activities, appointments, and events becomes a full-time job in addition to a “real job”. Adults caught between caring for young children while also caring for aging parents feel squeezed by dueling needs for their time and attention. After a lifetime of obligations, it can feel like life is running you instead of you running your life. Life becomes regimented you go on autopilot as you check the boxes on your “to do list”.  
 
Before we know it, decades have flown without much acknowledgement of our own personal experience of life’s ups and downs, as well as nuances, because “tomorrow is another day”. For many, losing perspective of who we are becomes problematic when what we are is limited to what we do for others. We become vessels for the expectations, hopes, and dreams of others but not for ourselves. Becoming mentally and emotionally numb is a risk. Extreme doing at our own expense that sacrifices our well-being becomes burnout (Maslach, Jackson, Leiter, Schaufeli & Schwab, 1986). Loss of identity derived from one’s sense of purpose sometimes accompanies burnout.   
 
Burnout forces self-reflection when our life’s purpose becomes blurred. Hence, the adage to slow down so we can see we are human beings not merely human doings. Pausing our lives, as we are now during COVID-19, can be unsettling as we reflect upon the truism that, for many of us, our lives are steered by others more than we might like to acknowledge. We may not want to accept the imbalance going forward. In a way, this pause is a gift, and opportunity to stretch ourselves beyond our comfort zones. The question we must ask ourselves is, “Do you want to stay stuck or do you want to expand your zone?”
 
If you are looking to stretch beyond your comfort zone and re-imagine your life during this pandemic, Part II will explore how self-compassion and self-care underpin designing healthy,  sustainable routines as a hero at home. Until then, check out the Resources, especially Take Time for your Life by Richardson. Stay tuned! Part II will be posted on May 1.

[1] If you have a sense of hopelessness, contact a mental health professional promptly, or contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/
 
References:
Hall, E. T., & Trager, G. L. (1953). The analysis of culture. Washington, DC: American Council of Learned Societies. Retrieved from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED035325.pdf
 
Maslach, C., Jackson, S. E., Leiter, M. P., Schaufeli, W. B., & Schwab, R. L. (1986). Maslach burnout inventory (Vol. 21, pp. 3463-3464). Palo Alto, CA: Consulting psychologists press.

Resources:
Take Time for Your Life, Cheryl Richardson (1998)

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