The past year has been surreal. Young people have found their lives turned on its head. The challenges to the health and wellbeing of young people have been enormous. Many avenues to exercise such as team sports, group classes and even going to the gym are no longer open to young people. It can be very easy for young people to lose their way in terms of their health and wellbeing, but given how stressful and uncertain the world is, adding to the anxiety with an unhealthy lifestyle is potentially a disastrous recipe for the mental health of young people.
In this blog I will attempt to give some tips both from my own experience and using online resources to give advice on how to stay healthy both physically and mentally during a level 5 lockdown. I will focus on how technology such as wearable trackers (ex. Fitbits) and free apps can help you to maintain a healthy lifestyle while being isolated.
Nutrition
One of the most important aspects of nutrition is ensuring that you stick to a routine with your meals. A useful asset is the Gov.ie eating well publication from Healthy Ireland. They recommend having regular meals times and restriction consumption to three meals daily along with two snacks. With the routine of commuting or set times for evening activities it can be easy to lose your routine and fall into bad habits, I can attest to this personally. The benefit of sticking with meal routines is twofold. Firstly, it eases cravings and stops binging and snacking on unhealthy foods. But also, set mealtimes help aid peak function of the digestive system. If you eat meals at inconsistent and irregular time it can cause the stomach to be over worked and may result in indigestion and bloating. So, if at all possible, try and maintain your routine and keep consistent mealtimes.
From my personal experience during the first lock down in particular I found myself indulging in some comfort eating to deal with increased anxiety from the uncertainty surrounding the pandemic and all the restrictions that it brought. While this is okay if it is done infrequently lockdowns are at least for the next few weeks and comfort eating will only exacerbate the anxiety in the long term. While it is important to treat yourself in particular when outlets for fun such as attending concerts, sporting events, or socialising in pubs and nightclubs have been taken away it is important that they remain a treat. Try to keep your treats infrequent so that you appreciate them but do not rely on them. One method I find useful is to set a certain day or evening where you can have a treat, I find this motivates me to stay healthy on the other days. This works for me but experiment to find the most positive method for you.
Useful Nutrition Resources
https://www.gov.ie/en/publication/e15e3-eating-well/#make-a-plan
Sleep
Closely linked with having a set food routine is having a consistent sleeping pattern. Sleep is an often-overlooked part of healthy living, but it is extremely vital. Good sleep helps maintain wait, improve concentration and productivity, reduce stress, and improve over wellbeing. There are many ways to help improve your sleep and luckily due to improved technology it is now relatively easy to monitor your sleep. Firstly, lets start with ways of improving your sleep. You have probably heard this before but one of the main culprits for hurting our sleep is our screen time, especially late at night. The blue light emitted from television, mobile phones, tablet, and laptops screens are a stimulant for our body, they trick our body into believing it is daytime even if it is the time that we should be sleeping. I know that it can be very hard to stay away from screens at the best of times and the fact that our only way of socialising with friends within level 5 guidelines is to do it via technology it only becomes more difficult. However, there are small steps we can make to improve this. If you find yourself consuming content via your phone or laptop late at night, then perhaps consider consuming it in audio form via a podcast. In an ideal world you would not consume any content at night and would instead focus on unwinding but changing from a visual medium to audio (particularly if it at low volume) can be a good step in the right direction. Another small step that is easy to implement is utilising the very clever ‘nightshift’ mode which is available on iPhone, similar modes are available on most laptops and smartphones. This creates an orange tint in the screen and greatly reduces the blue light emitted. It is a good way to reduce your blue light without really changing your behaviour and should help you get to sleep quicker.
Sleep technology is relatively new and is now widely available. If you are lucky enough to have a wearable technology such as a Fitbit or an Apple Watch this are incredibly useful for tracking your sleep. If you wear a Fitbit as you sleep for example, it can track your total hours of sleep, time spent awake, in REM stage, light sleep or deep sleep. It also gives you an overall sleep score. I find this score to be very effective as it brings out my competitive side, I find myself wanting to beat my own sleep score and the sleep score of my friends and family. Healthy competition such as this is a great way to stay on track not only for sleep but for exercise. If you do not have a wearable device, there are plenty of free apps on your smartphone to track sleeps.
Free Sleep Trackers
- Bedtime on Clock app for IOS devices
- Sleep Cycle App https://apps.apple.com/ie/app/sleep-cycle-sleep-tracker/id320606217
- Sleep Time App https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sleep-time-cycle-alarm-timer/id555564825
- Pillow App https://apps.apple.com/ie/app/pillow-automatic-sleep-tracker/id878691772
Exercising Alone
Perhaps the aspect of our health that has changed the most since the pandemic began is the way in which we exercise. Methods of exercise which would often be perceived as social exercise such as team sports and gym classes are now prohibited. It can be really difficult to stay motivated and find ways of exercising alone which suit you. I will preface this advice by saying, there is no concrete method which will guarantee success, so it is important to find methods that suit you and help you to achieve what you want to achieve, be that a 22-minute 5km run, or just consistency getting out for a walk to clear your head. Good exercise is relative to your starting level and where you want to get to.
For me, one of the best ways of motivating myself is to try exercise is to do something that I like, or at the very least something I do not dislike strongly. So, if you prefer running than doing press ups, sit ups and weights than maybe go for a run, if you would prefer to kick a ball off a wall, skip, do yoga or Pilates or maybe go for a long walk then do that. A pandemic is not an ideal time to become fitter, so do not be too hard on yourself, just work on what you find most enjoyable and then gradually try to improve on it. One phrase I heard which stuck with me is ‘the worst type of action is inaction’. Do not let perfect be the enemy of good. If your exercise plan is getting you to move more and be more active than what you were doing, then it is working. It may not be perfect, but it is working.
Similar to sleep, one method I find very helpful to maintaining levels of exercising while alone is to track it. Again, a wearable tracker such as a Fitbit is fantastic for this as you can set step targets and the device will set you reminders if you have been inactive. The targets are particularly effective for me as again it makes me competitive with myself and allows me to see progress that I am making towards daily targets. Other apps which are free and useful are Strava and under armour map my run. These use the GPS on your phone to track and time runs and/or walks. You can then share these with friends and post messages of encouragement or give kudos to your friends for their activity. This is a way of filling the void caused by lack of collective exercise and is a good way of keep yourself motivated and seeing positive feedback for your efforts while being forced to exercise alone.
Useful Resources for Exercising alone
Summary
In summary while COVID has turned life as we know it on its head there are still some simple steps we can do to improve our physical and mental health. By keeping a routine for both our diet and sleep we can improve our overall wellbeing. To help with this if we can use improved technology available through wearable trackers such as Fitbits or smartphone apps you can measure your progress, help yourself to improve and compare results with friends to keep yourself motivated and go through both good and bad days together.
Adapting to life in a pandemic has been a challenge to all of us. For further advice, why not check out more blogs from Living La Vida Lock-Down
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