Self Care vs. Self Harm Under Quarantine

As you’ve probably heard, there’s a global pandemic going on right now. This means a lot of awful, shitty things, but one of the aspects of it that people are talking about the most is quarantine and isolation. In many parts of the world (including Washington State, where I live), people are currently required to stay in their homes for anything not absolutely necessary. Schools are closing down; businesses are either firing their employees or having them work from home. In short, hundreds of millions of people across the globe are going to spend an indefinite amount of time trapped in their house with nothing to do.

As this ramps up, you’ve probably seen two kinds of online posts and tweets flying around:

The first contains a list of all of the “productive” things you could do during quarantine (write a novel, redecorate your house, learn a new language, etc etc etc) and implores you to find something big and important to do instead of just laying around in your pajamas on your computer all day.

The second have come about as a direct response to the first and attempt to counter the idea that you’re required to do something “productive” with your time. They say that there’s nothing wrong with just laying around and doing nothing for the entirety of the quarantine — and that doing those things is, in fact, self care.

I believe the best option is somewhere in the middle.

I’m currently in my early 20s and I’ve been dealing with mental illness for nearly as long as I can remember. Although it was entirely self-inflicted in my case, I have a lot of experience with laying in the house all day doing absolutely nothing. And the thing about doing that is that it makes you feel like garbage. In my experience, if you do nothing but lay in bed in your pajamas idly playing video games or scrolling social media, it will take an incredible toll on your mental health. This has the possibility to be particularly dangerous in a time when people are required to hole up all day; particularly when, on top of that, there’s the immeasurable stress of a world-wide pandemic going on.

I’ve been involved in online social media since I was a freshman in high school. And I’m very familiar with the second kind of post — while the exact wording is unique to this situation, the intent behind it has been around for years. “Don’t let anybody tell you that you should improve your mental health! Doing absolutely nothing is self-care!” As I’ve been seeing these new posts roll in, they sit like a rock in the pit of my stomach because I’m seeing a resurgence of the same rhetoric that played a large role in making my mental health struggles a thousand times worse when I was at a particularly vulnerable point in my life.

That being said, the second kind of post does have some grains of truth in it — you shouldn’t feel the need to do something world-changing and incredible just because you’re at home now. In that, we can see how the first kind of post isn’t great on its own, either.

So how do we find a solid middle ground? We need to take the good parts of both and combine them into one. What are the good, truthful parts of each side?

Well, from the first one, we can take “you shouldn’t lay around doing nothing all day”. That much I heartily agree with. Trust me — laying around and doing absolutely nothing is terrible for your mental health and you will feel awful if you do that.

And from the second one, we can take “you don’t have to do something important and life-changing.” No, you don’t have to write a novel or paint a masterpiece or learn a new language. If you want to, go for it! But you’re under no obligation to. And we can take the underlying intent of the message: “you’re allowed to practice self care under quarantine”. That message, in and of itself, is good. The bad part is that so many of the posts proclaiming that cross the line from “self care” to “self harm”.

What does this look like in practice, then? Well, that’s actually very personal — every person is unique, so what works for me might not work for you (and vice versa). But, as a starting place, I’m going to give you some recommendations and guidelines that I’ve used to improve and maintain my mental health over the years. Some of them won’t seem helpful to you. Some of them may not even be possible for you. But, if a suggestion would be at all possible for you to do, I’d like to ask you to try doing it at least a few times.

(Quick note: I’m not a mental health professional by any means and none of this should be taken as clinical advice! This is just me, someone who’s struggled with mental illness for a long time, trying to let you know what’s worked for me).

Limit the Time You Spend in Bed

I want to take a moment off the bat to acknowledge that, for many people, this isn’t physically possible. If you’re bed-bound, please don’t feel as if I’m trying to say you’re doing something wrong or like I’m trying to pressure you to do something that would be harmful for you! If you’re physically incapable of leaving bed or if you have another disability/illness that requires you spend all or most of your time there, this isn’t directed at you.

For the rest of us, I highly recommend limiting how much time you spend in bed. Not just “get out of bed at some point” — set the maximum amount of time you want to spend in bed when you wake up and stick to it. (Personally, even on my days off, I try to get out of bed within half an hour of waking up). I don’t care if you leave the bed and go straight to the couch; you just really, really should be getting out of bed as soon as you can. Our beds are where we sleep and where we relax at the end of the day. If you stay in bed, it’s much, much harder to switch your brain from “I’m relaxing and not doing anything” mode into “maybe I should do at least one thing today” mode.

If you can’t leave your bed for whatever reason, try to lift up the blinds and even open the windows if the weather is nice enough. If you can’t do that, at least turn on the lights — speaking from experience, few things make you feel as bad as laying in bed in the dark all day. In addition to the general mental toll it takes, laying in bed in the dark is a great way to completely fuck up your sleep schedule. If it’s dark 24/7, it becomes dangerously easy for your sleep schedule to slip further and further until you’re staying up far later than you ever wanted to.

Get Dressed Every Day

A fun fact about me is that, even prior to this, I’ve actually been working from home — I’m a remote worker for a podcasting company. And one of the things that I’ve held myself to very firmly the entire time I’ve worked from home (and even before that) is that I get dressed every single day, even if I’m not going to leave the house.

Pajamas are very, very comfy. It’s what they’re designed for. And the temptation to stay in them all day can be overwhelming. But changing into regular clothes is actually very, very important. When you change into your clothes, you’re telling your brain “okay, we’re done being in bed now, we’re going to do other things”. It’s a small change, but I’ve found that it makes a huge difference in how well I’m able to do things throughout my day.

Plus, if you get tempted throughout the day to get back in bed, this can help you resist the temptation. Personally, I hate getting in bed with all of my clothes on; when I’m dressed for the day, the temptation to get right back in bed nearly disappears. (Nearly.)

Make a Schedule and Stick To It

If you’re the kind of person who thrives on spontaneity and hates rigid schedules, you probably rolled your eyes at that and thought “yeah, no thanks”. But hear me out: I’m not saying “You have to plot out every second of every day and do the exact same thing every day for the foreseeable future”. All I’m saying is that you should pick a time to wake up, a time to get out of bed, and a time to go to sleep, then stick to those as best you can every day. If there’s a particular project you’re working on or something else that you’re trying to make sure you do every day, you can build in time for that if you want (it doesn’t have to be “I’ll do X at this specific time every day” — it can just be “I’m going to spend an hour every day doing X”).

This has two purposes:

1. Setting a specific time to wake up, get out of bed, and then get back into bed helps make sure you don’t spend all day in bed
2. Making a dedicated chunk of your day your “I’m doing things now” hours and then keeping that up consistently makes it a lot easier to do things every day

Speaking of doing things…

Do Something Once a Day

This is intentionally vague. Your “something” might be very different from my “something”. I’m talking about anything that isn’t just mindlessly scrolling through your social media feed or watching a movie — something that requires active participation. This could mean…

• Knitting
• Painting or drawing
• Working with clay
• Embroidering
• Reading a book (I know this seems similar to watching a movie, but — in my personal experience — it’s something that requires more active participation than just watching a movie or TV show)
• Walking (at least in my city, people are still allowed to walk around outside as long as they stay six feet apart; check out the guidelines for your city to be safe)
• Writing (yes, fanfiction counts!)
• Cooking

Or anything else that you have to actively do! And, please note: you can do these things while you have a movie or TV show on in the background (personally, I like knitting or playing around in Photoshop while I watch TV) — my point here isn’t “you’re not allowed to watch TV”, it’s “you should do things besides just watching TV”.

Keep Yourself & Your Space Clean

This is, in my experience, one of the most important ones. It’s hard to feel good mentally if you feel like garbage physically. I know that there’s plenty of mental illnesses that can make hygiene really, really hard. But when you’re mentally ill, keeping everything around you clean (including yourself) is even more important — trust me when I say that sitting in a dirty house having not showered in five days is going to make you feel absolutely terrible.

You might be saying “but there’s no way I can clean my entire house right now or shower every day, I know that I can’t do that”. That’s okay! Find little things you can do instead. If you can’t do the dishes, at least gather all of the dirty dishes out of your bedroom and put them in the sink. If you can’t shower, at least brush your hair and put on deodorant. If you can’t clean your entire house, at least pick up all of the garbage and throw away that take out container from three weeks ago. If you start trying to clean just one little thing, something amazing might even happen: you may find yourself suddenly able to clean a lot more than you were expecting.

For a lot of people with particularly disabilities or mental illnesses, the hardest part of doing things is getting started — especially when trying to do a huge task that can seem monumental or even impossible. One of the best ways I’ve found to deal with this is breaking things into small tasks and giving yourself permission to only do one at a time. If you’ve been sitting on the couch all day, “I need to clean my entire house” can seem so intimidating that it stops you from starting at all. But “I’m going to pick up all of the garbage in the living room” is a lot less intimidating and a lot easier to start.

And then, once you’ve done that, doing other things can come a lot more easily. You might think “well, I just got all of the garbage in the living room; now I have a garbage bag in my hand and I’m standing up, so I might as well get the trash in my bedroom, too”. And then that leads to “well, I’m picking up trash in the bedroom, so I might as well move all the dirty clothes to the hamper”, which can lead to laundry, which can lead to dishes, which can keep snowballing until you’ve gotten so much more done than if your initial goal was “I need to clean the entire house right now”.

And yeah, maybe that won’t happen. Maybe you’ll only end up picking up the garbage in the living room. But if you bring the mess in your house from 100% to 80%, isn’t that still progress?

My final tip for this section: after you get your house clean, maintaining that cleanliness can seem just as intimidating as the initial cleaning. The thing I’ve found most helpful is to make sure that you’re cleaning up little messes as they occur instead of letting them pile up until, suddenly, your entire house is filthy. As soon as you finish using a dish, take a minute to rinse it off and put it in the dishwasher; that way, you won’t find yourself facing a sink piled high with dirty dishes that’s going to take half an hour to get through. When you finish drinking that can of soda or eating that take-out, take the garbage straight to the garbage can instead of leaving it on the floor or the counter. If you’re cooking, put up every ingredient as soon as you’re done using it so that you don’t have a bunch of things to put away all at once when all you want to do is sit down and eat.

Cleaning your entire house at once is a huge task that can be daunting to even the most neurotypical of us and nearly impossible for those of us struggling with mental illness. But if you take it piece by piece, it won’t get to the point of being a giant mess, and you’ll find it much easier to deal with.

Get Some Sunlight & Fresh Air

This one is so important. At the very least, if at all possible, you should be opening the blinds/curtains in your house every day. When possible, open the windows, too. If it’s nice enough, try to get outside, even if you can’t be out for very long — sit on your front porch, take your dog for a walk, anything to get you out of your house for even a few minutes. In addition to being good for your mental health in general, doing this will help you to feel less cooped up and make quarantine seem less terrible.

Talk to Another Person

This one is particularly important if you live alone. Humans are social creatures — we aren’t meant to hole up all day not speaking to anyone. Try to talk to another person at least once a day. If possible, try to talk to them over a video or phone call; if you’re deaf and know a sign language, try to do a video call with someone who speaks your language. Textual communication is great, but hearing another person’s voice or seeing their face is even better for you.

Those are most of my self care tips, packaged up into one neat and tidy article. The final tip I have is this: please don’t fall into the trap of thinking “I can’t do this perfectly, so I might as well not do it at all”. If you can’t clean your entire house, clean as much as you can. If you can’t draw a beautiful portrait, doodle on some scrap paper. If you can’t change into clothes, get out of bed anyway and sit on the couch in your pajamas. Despite what perfectionists may tell you, doing something at 50% is better than doing it at 0%. Sure, getting to 100% is a great goal, but guess what? It’s a lot easier to get to 100% from 50% than from 0%. If you can’t do all of this, do what you can.

At the beginning of this article, we discussed two kinds of posts: those that say “you must do something amazing” and those that say “you don’t have to do anything at all”. The second kind of post will tell you that doing nothing all day is self care. I have to disagree. See, a few years ago, some intense suicidal ideation brought me to an outpatient mental health program. One day, one of the doctors there started talking about self care. As they listed examples of self care, I was surprised to see things like “getting dressed every day”, “getting out of bed every morning”, and “doing chores”.

Current online vernacular has taught us that self care is defined as “anything that feels good in the moment”. The doctor there defined it instead as “anything that will make you feel good long-term”. Cleaning your house may suck while you’re doing it, but it is a form of self care; you’ll feel a lot better in a clean house than a dirty one. This distinction may seem small, but it becomes particularly apparent when people claim that things like letting your house get dirty, staying in bed all day, and never leaving your house are self care. While those things may feel good in the moment, they’re going to feel awful long term. And doing something that feels good immediately but is damaging long-term isn’t self care — it’s self harm.