Why you shouldn’t be so hard on yourself for lacking “productivity” during lockdown

I have to be honest; when this lockdown started and I envisioned anything from a couple of weeks to a few months of being stuck indoors, I had big visions.

You’ll see this in a previous blog post, where I confidently wrote about 20 Ideas for Coping with the Quarantine - including ideas such as learning a language, learning to sew and knit, to cook, work on your business, build a blog…

I wasn’t the only one. After I posted that article, my news feed was hit will what felt that thousands of articles suggesting that people use their time at home productively, take on a new skill, start a new side-hustle, etc etc. One particularly striking meme that hit me one morning - I can’t seem to find it now - pointing out that Shakespeare wrote King Lear and Isaac Newton discovered calculus while they were at home during the plague. The suggestion was - what have you done, loser?

Well, Shakespeare was already rich, and Newton was already a massive social hermit. Plus those guys didn’t have Facebook. Or children.

This isn’t even to mention the fact that we are living in a completely different world, a very different society, from what those guys were living in - and that shaming people for not maximising their time on ‘productivity’ is pretty arrogant.

There seems to be a pandemic of smugness and moral high-ground going on right now. It started with shaming people who were still going outside during the lockdown, and continued with loud moral-outrage posts about people who were stockpiling toilet roll (which turns out to be NOT because people are stockpiling, but because being at home all day massively increases the amount of toilet roll people use - which supplies can’t keep up with!). Then came the smugness of “look at how much I’m getting done” and the well-intentioned, but ultimately quite patronising, lists of ways to make the most of this sudden wealth of free time.

But, as with a lot of advice, urging others to use their new-found solitary confinement to brush up on their French, write that new novel, or get really in shape, comes from a place of privilege. It could be the privilege of not having to worry about money - after all, those on furlough might be getting paid to “do nothing” right now, but as more and more news stories unfold about the recession we’re heading into, it can be hard not to start panicking about what kind of financial situation we’ll be in two, three months from now.

There’s other types of privilege to consider, too - maybe you’re lucky enough to be quarantining with a loving partner, or a really good set of friends. We should not discount the motivating effects of being able to “top up” on social contact, touch and love every day. For those who are at home in an unhappy or abusive relationship, this time at home can be a living hell. Just look at the figures at how rates of domestic increase have dramatically increased during lockdown.

For those who are isolating completely on their own, it can be pretty hard to motivate yourself to do anything - cooking seems a much greater chore when it’s just for yourself, so healthy, balanced meals might go out of the window. Community and social contact is one of the number one predictors for good physical AND mental wellbeing, and there’s only so much a Zoom conference call can do before a crushing sense of loneliness sets in.

We are also often talking from a place of mental health privilege when we suggest that others use their time at home productively. For those who were already struggling, or are facing a new encounter with, anxiety, depression, or any other mental health issue, it is already hard enough to try navigating the implications of a global pandemic and a recession coupled with the fallout of social isolation, without adding the pressure to ‘perform’ and ‘succeed’ on top of that.

I am saying all of this almost to atone for my previous post - as I have come to realise a fair few important things in the meantime.

Firstly - it is totally OK that you have not done anything ‘productive’ with your quarantine.

I think this funny 5-minute video by Youtube comedian Julie Nolke in which an anxious woman at home consults her (pretty drunk) Fairy Godmother for advice. As she puts it - why are you putting all this extra pressure on yourself to achieve right now? Your brain is trying to comprehend a global pandemic - why are you adding all of this extra stress onto yourself?

It’s my suspicion that this is a particularly challenging time for empathic perfectionists (like you?) for a couple of reasons:

1) Our Inner Critic is leaping around as if on crack, screaming “YES! You can no longer use “lack of time” as an excuse not to become a superachiever and win a Nobel Prize and save the world!”

2) As empaths (or highly sensitive people), we are deeply concerned for what is happening right now - for all the people suffering, for the planet. We feel the anxiety, the uncertainty, the loss of hope - which is why we have to take scrolling through social media in very small doses. So it’s very hard to focus on our own personal success and goals when we’re also trying to process the magnitude of what’s happening right now - is it really so easy to focus on learning a language and doing a kickboxing routine when there are millions of people suffering and dying?

(If this describes you, you may be interested in registering your interest for my upcoming online course, The Empaths’ Toolkit, which will help you set clear boundaries, deal with your inner perfectionism/critic, and stop yourself being totally overwhelmed by other people’s emotions - and also still be a nice person and make the world a better place).

Remember that while Shakespeare and Newton were doing their thing, the majority of people stayed at home, carrying on with their everyday lives.

We don’t all have to be extraordinary. Can you imagine a world full of Newtons and Shakespeares? How would you get food from the shops, clean water from your tap, or be able to walk down a clean street? I doubt either of them would have been deemed ‘key workers’ right now.

I’m a big fan of the way Mark Manson puts it: “We’re all, for the most part, pretty average people. It’s the extremes that get all of the publicity. We all kind of intuitively know this, but we rarely think and/or talk about it. The vast majority of us will never be truly exceptional at, well, anything. And that’s OK” (Source: In Defence of Being Average ).

We might find, in the middle of all this chaos, that what we want is not to ‘improve ourselves’, to boost our chances of future employability, or to learn a bunch of new skills just for the sake of it.

We might find that ploughing on with ‘Business as Usual” is NOT what we feel, deep down, is called for right now.

What if this exact drive to always be more, to achieve more, to be better, bigger, richer, sexier, is exactly what has been destroying our souls and our planet this entire time?

Shouldn’t we just…. stop? To stop and assess, and reflect, and look back on everything that has brought us up to this point again?

For those of us privileged and lucky enough to be able to stop and take stock… why is it so hard to take advantage of this time?

I suspect there are several reasons. One is that the lack of control over the current situation, the uncertainty, is so overwhelming that we need to find something to control. Working on ourselves, setting projects and tasks and goals, can help us feel more in control of our lives.

And this is OK. Creating a routine, injecting meaning into our lives and have something to work towards, is good. But beating yourself up when you don’t manage to tick everything off your list? I feel that speaks to a deeper anxiety; a projection of our inability to control the wider situation. So instead of crying because we can’t stop what’s happening globally, we focus all that pain and rage on ourselves for not managing to finish all 10 tasks on the list.

You may also be dealing with ‘privilege guilt’ — seeing all those healthcare workers risking their lives on the frontlines, realising that your job is not ‘essential’, may be filling you with a kind of existential anxiety. Maybe you feel that it’s an insult to them that you are sitting at home doing nothing. Maybe you feel that you owe it to them to use your free time productively.

So let’s take a look at what exactly we mean by ‘productive’.

The idea of “improving ourselves” during quarantine often looks suspiciously like making ourselves more pleasing to a capitalist society. Brushing up language skills — to boost the CV? Getting in shape — to look more like the ‘ideal shape’? Starting a side-business — to make more money?

All of these things work on the assumption that this is all just a temporary pause, and that things will go back to exactly how they were before in a few weeks.

But what if the world has changed irreversibly? What if we’re not going back to the same place we left?

And, if you truly stop and check in with yourself, do the goals you have set yourself really align with what your gut is telling you? Are they goals that YOU really want to achieve, or goals that you feel you ‘should’ be trying to achieve?

Psychology has shown time and time again that when we do things based on extrinsic motivation — e.g. to earn a reward, status, money, praise — we are far less likely to be committed to the goal, and far less likely to be happy, than when we do things based on intrinsic motivation, e.g. because we enjoy the activity itself or find the subject fascinating.

But it’s more complicated than that. The train (of infinite growth, capitalism etc) has been ploughing forward for years, hurtling faster and faster towards a cliff edge, and now the train has suddenly stopped and we are now left on the side of the tracks — stumbling around for balance. Just like the feeling of still swaying when you step off a boat — perhaps when we sit down, we still feel as if we’re hurtling forward.

Business as Usual, Infinite Growth, the Rat Race, whatever you want to call it — still lives inside our bodies. We’re so used to it that we don’t know how to stop. We’re addicted. The ‘programming’ of our industrial growth society is so deeply ingrained into us that the idea of stopping, staying still, of not constantly trying to be better, to achieve more, is deeply counter-intuitive for many of us.

I invite you, instead, to try and imagine a different type of world. A world where you are already good enough, just as you are. A world where, perhaps, you can still learn new languages and pursue hobbies, but because they are fun and interesting — not because you feel a deep, burning need to convince yourself that you are worthy of acceptance and love. Not because you feel that stepping off the treadmill means death.

For all of us privileged enough to be able to sit at home right now, not having to work or rush around or do anything much, I invite you to spend this time really reflecting on just what kind of life you really dream about. About the kind of world that we might be able to create where we don’t have to constantly fight our way up the ladder in order to gain a feeling of basic security or acceptance.

Maybe, just maybe, you throw away that to-do list and give yourself the gift of just existing. Yes, you might feel bored at first, but let the boredom come. Boredom often turns into energy to do and create, and you might just find that the things your soul is really calling you to do are completely different from the “self improvement” projects that you started off with.

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At the same time, maybe just sitting with the feelings is too much. I’ve been running a 30-day email course called Staying Grounded in Times of Crisis, which looks at how we can use mindfulness, emotional intelligence, psychology and a wealth of visualisation and writing exercises to connect to our deepest wisdom, strength and resilience. But then again, I’ve just spent this entire essay telling you not to take on new projects, so maybe don’t listen to me!