How to Cultivate Mindfulness When Working from Home: Limits, Routines, & Self-Nourishment
Danielle Evans / WNW Member
Our homes are no longer just our sanctuaries, but our commutes, trains, cubicles, gyms, and restaurants. This quarantined time is causing us to rethink our choice of home, the comfort of our furniture, and the quality of our kitchenware. The buzz of the fridge suddenly carries more weight than ambient noise. Do we have enough eggs for the week? What doubles as butter once we run out? But this doesn’t mean we can’t cultivate peace here.
The hardest part of working from home, aside from the nagging existential dread, is the silence. And for those of us with a full house, this is a strictly metaphorical concept. Now professional distractions are housed strictly in our devices while everything else at home screams or whimpers for our attention. It is loud in here, too.
Crisis already holds a mirror to our faces, asking us to perform when we’re stressed, anxious, and fearful. Now that most of our routines are up in smoke, we need to create some stability within and without ourselves. How do we make space to stay informed while maintaining our mental health? We are stuck in a paradox, both physically distant from others while even more tethered to our devices. What’s more, the illusion is lifted: everyone now knows we are at home. This requires firmer boundaries around our time online, and how and where we choose to spend it.
“Our homes are no longer just our sanctuaries, but our commutes, trains, cubicles, gyms, and restaurants. This quarantined time is causing us to rethink our choice of home, the comfort of our furniture, and the quality of our kitchenware.”
Set Limits
Right now the world is screaming in three different volumes: global, community, and inner anxiety. All of these issues are important and require our care, but it’s impossible to engage with all three simultaneously. Personally, I’ve begun budgeting emotional energies so I make the most of my days and retain some sense of normalcy during this wild time. I spend my mornings and evenings meditating and chatting with friends and loved ones. This ensures I begin and end each day on a positive, meaningful note. I find myself circling themes of gratitude in these habits, which grounds me deeply in the present moment. Considering my reaction to this global trauma is to sleep more, these practices ensure I fall asleep quickly and stay down throughout the night.
I spend my mid-mornings and early evenings on my community management. I check in with colleagues and plan meetings. Armed with a strong cup of coffee or tea, I feel equipped to contribute to society. The social media crowd uses their phones to relax, so I feel comfortable edging into the evenings with light and fun professional participation. I’m poised to receive global awareness midday around lunch. This is when the press conferences hit, so I can watch the live breakdown or skim twitter for the latest updates. If I find myself moved to tears, I allow them to flow. This situation is hard, and we should let ourselves mourn.
That said, my communication habits have flipped between clients and friends; I am scheduling friends on my calendar while being looser with professional contacts. I have made more meetings to “catch-up” with my loved ones than ever before. The time is slotted because otherwise I’ll slip into the fog of “needing to contact someone” without remembering who or when. My business contacts are getting emails written at weird times from me, often past traditional work hours because my brain is firing at odd times due to the added pandemic stress. I’m now scheduling my emails to arrive early and sooner than when I wake up. This gives me time to adjust to the new normal, and I arrive at my inbox with answers to my pertinent questions.
“The illusion is lifted: everyone now knows we are at home. This requires firmer boundaries around our time online, and how and where we choose to spend it.”
Adapt your Routine
Mindfulness companies like Headspace have opened up free memberships for the next two months. My favorite meditation app, Insight Timer, now has entire practices for COVID-19 stress management. If meditation sounds foreign to you, try building a small playlist of 3-5 songs you find soothing and chill (the artist ironically known as .anxious. is a personal favorite of mine). Lay on your bed or floor, ideally somewhere soft and soothing. Draw back the curtains and open a window. Take a couple deep, slow breaths in and out through your nose and focus your attention on the bottoms of your feet. You’ll notice a tingle or tiny pricking sensations; this is your mind awakening to those sensors. Transfer that attention to the tops of your feet, then your shins, knees, thighs, hips, chest. Sweep that attention down your arms to your elbows, hands, and fingers. Imagine this energy as a slow moving liquid filling you with comfort, if that helps. Finish with the shoulders, neck and finally the top of your head. Congratulations, you’ve just done a basic body scan. The idea is to notice without changing the sensations in your physical being; once we recognize our bodies are dutifully functioning amidst chaos and uncertainty, our minds have permission to calm themselves.
Personal trainers and yoga studios are offering live streaming services, including Working Not Working. If livestreaming in your gym shorts isn’t for you, accounts like Omnis Fitness are creating adaptive workouts with videos and gifs for you to attempt on your own time. I personally prefer a yoga class on Prime. I also use free weights to keep myself feeling strong, and my work is highly kinetic. I spend more time twisted in knots between lights and my camera. There are so many ways to maintain health that don’t involve going outside.
Assign spaces in your house that serve different functions. My living room floor and Moroccan pouf is now my “remote office” when I’d prefer not to sit at my desk. I still prefer to eat on the couch and allow myself to work on “personal projects” for relaxation in the corner where the chaise arm meets the couch. Research and production work occurs in my home studio area and kitchen. My kitchen is the epicenter of experimentation, the height of exploration, so rarely is it truly clean. But the separation works for me, keeps the various corners of my life from converging into a messy soup in such a small bowl.
“Life is like water, always recalibrating to the size of the container. It’s important to remember that these are hardly normal times. They are the New Normal™, and we will have to cultivate mindfulness while inhabiting them.”
Invest in Self-Nourishment
I bought my third purchase of the month, a bag of roasted coffee, for delivery on four days ago. I am still fantasizing about it. Every time I take a video of a freshly baked loaf of bread, it looks like a car commercial. Self-nourishment will look differently for everyone, but for me, I am relishing my meals. Because my work is so tightly tied to the relationship and connections forged through food, I am enriching the relationship with myself. A month ago I lamented how much I hadn’t been cooking. Now I am making multiple meals, snacks, and beverages a day. I’m finding immense satisfaction in not only converting unlikely ingredients in my cupboard to novel dishes but sharing my discoveries virtually.
Self-nourishment can look like reading, learning an instrument, dancing, playing Animal Crossing. Enrichment isn’t a passive activity, but a low stake requirement for a high return of satisfaction. Even Netflix can be self-enriching, provided you leave the activity with knowledge. You’ll know when you’ve struck the correct chord because you won’t want to binge. Like a good meal, you will find the experience filling and meaningful.
Before all this happened, I walked my neighborhood with the brick-lined streets and peered past tree branches at the blue sky. A plane would fly overhead, and I’d wonder where it was heading. I cherished my cortado and seat by the window. Now I experience the same small pleasures in my home. I remember feeling like my life was small. Life is like water, always recalibrating to the size of the container. It’s important to remember that these are hardly normal times. They are the New Normal™, and we will have to cultivate mindfulness while inhabiting them. While the world screams, we can find serenity in our day to day. We can create whatever we need from our inner world and allow that energy to brighten our homes.
WNW Member Danielle Evans is an art director, lettering artist, speaker, and dimensional typographer. She’s worked with the likes of Disney, Target, the Guardian, PWC, (RED), McDonald’s, Aria, Condé Nast, Cadillac, and would love to work with you. Subscribe to her newsletter here.
Header Illustration by WNW Member Scott Balmer