Important tips:
- As these times may feel a bit isolating, it’s important to keep in touch with your team-mates, gym friends and people who can keep your motivations high and provide a level of social support.
- Organise your time so that you can create a new routine. Creating a daily/weekly/monthly calendar might help you to stick to your exercising goals.
- Staying inside can induce boredom. Boredom can feel melancholic and pave way for unwanted behaviours such as increased food intake. However, boredom, when used well, can pave way for a lot of creativity[1]. For example: more time to learn how to prepare, and experiment with, food to be on top of your nutrition game (tips: follow some nutrition pages, take a nutrition course, get in touch with nutritionists providing online support, get an online membership with a well-established nutrition company etc.).
- Keep in mind the WHY[2] of doing exercise/sport. Knowing the reason why you engage in physical activity is the best tool to keep your identified/integrative extrinsic and intrinsic motivation levels[3] high and provide a sustainable approach towards physical activity engagement.
- Times like these can prove to be tough. However, it’s these times that through, acceptance, patience and resilience, provide the best path for self-learning and self-growth.
We, as Maltese, should all feel privileged that we live in a country where the authorities are genuinely keeping each individuals’ quality of life and health as top priorities to make such a transition the smoothest possible. As a result, indirectly allowing us to see the positive that is coming out of it:
- Worth of genuine human interaction,
- More time to focus on things we ‘parked’
- Getting in touch with our own inner selves
- Slowing down from the automatic hectic pace of life
- A golden chance to work on our weaknesses
- Trying new things
- Global humanity connection (for once the enemy is a non-human entity)
- Better environmental outcomes
With this in mind, we should ensure that a continuation of self-care processes, such as physical activity engagement, takes place to prolong one’s life as much as possible, as the future looks more promising than our past J .
[1] Spencer, J. (2018). The Gift of Boredom. Educational Leadership, 76(4), 12-17.
[2] Frankl, V. E. (2004). Man’s Search For Meaning: The classic tribute to hope from the Holocaust. Random House.
[3] Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American psychologist, 55(1), 68.
Bernice Sant is a Performance Psychologist and a keen fitness and sport enthusiast who’s in her final stage of a Professional Doctorate in Sport and Exercise Psychology. Her research and interest focuses on areas relating to anxiety, resilience, physical activity motivation and behaviour, self-reflection, existentialism, mindfulness, nutrition, behaviour change and sport injury rehabilitation.