My tips for staying healthy while social distancing

The coronavirus pandemic is a stressful time for everyone. If you’re working or studying from home, it’s easy to let your health slip down in your list of priorities. We all have assignments to do or impending exams to study for, so we might put all our focus on them, as well as trying to keep up with the latest coronavirus developments in a 24-hour news cycle. However, looking after your health is so important, particularly during this time.

Here’s some tips on how to be healthy whilst social distancing which I’ve found useful.

Prepare your breakfast the night before

Starting off the day with a good breakfast will set you off to have a productive day, no matter what being productive means for you at this time. Overnight oats are a great option as it’s quick and easy to prepare when you’re tired after a long day. Get a container and place chopped up fruit, yoghurt and 40g of porridge oats, layering them until you get to the top. Place it in the fridge overnight and the next morning you’ve got a tasty breakfast to look forward to!

Plan your lunches and dinners in advance

Writing down your meals for the next day will help you to resist snacking on unhealthy food all the time. You might even use this extra time to learn to cook a new meal or two! Of course, everyone deserves a treat and you should never feel bad for enjoying chocolate or whatever treats you like. Healthy eating will help you feel better in the long term, and you’ll be glad for it when this strange time finally passes.

Go for walks

For those of us who are social distancing, government guidelines say that it’s safe for us to go on walks. You should maintain a 2 metre distance from those you don’t live with to be safe. If you get up early in the morning and go for a walk before you start working, there’ll be much less people around. Walking is a great way to stretch your legs and get your heart rate up, and it’s accessible for most people.

In times like this, it’s difficult to reach those 10,000 steps a day, but any activity is great for our physical and mental wellbeing. You can listen to music or podcasts while on your walk too. It may be best to stay away from news based podcasts at the minute, and listen to something light-hearted instead. For example, Doireann Garrihy’s Laughs of Your Life is an easy listen with great stories.

YouTube home workouts

For some people it’s very hard to feel motivated to exercise when your gym has closed down, but YouTube has countless amazing workouts, whether you have 10 minutes or an hour to spare. FitnessBlender is an amazing resource; the trainers Kelli and Daniel are very motivating and kind, just encouraging you to do the best workout you can. Other good trainers are Popsugar Fitness, which has every kind of workout you can think of, and Blogilates with excellent and quick pilates workouts. Perhaps you and a friend could arrange to use the same workout videos at the same time and motivate each other from afar.

Get a good nights sleep

It can be very difficult to wind down lately, especially with the constant news updates from around the world. You might want to ban social media at night time, and leave your phone far away from your bed so you’re not tempted to check it first thing in the morning.

Journaling is a great way to document and release all your thoughts from the day, as is reading a good book. Being alert and getting up early the next day will make you feel so much better.

There’s so much about this pandemic that we can’t control, but we do have a say in looking after ourselves. We should try to keep things as normal as we can, as we don’t know how long we’ll have to social distance for. When all of this is over, we’ll be glad that we took small steps to better our health.