Retired teacher

I consider myself an active and social person, who prefers to spend as much of my precious free time as possible outside. During the global pandemic, we were all deprived of the possibility to freely choose where to go, what to do and with who to meet. This meant that we were restricted to stay at home and be separated from community. For me it was utmost stressful and hard to cope with. Today I want to share with you what helped me to stay mentally healthy and happy during those times.

I got the virus at the beginning of the first wave of corona. When all the activity centres, most of the work in the offices, shops, or other places where you could meet a lot of people got closed because of the quarantine, our sport group members from the gym and the coach discussed about creating remote training. And that is how I began to do sports at my home. Having an active lifestyle always helped me to go through laziness and especially hard emotional moments. Sports was a „perfect getaway“ from negative emotions and thoughts about how corona impacts our lives and create negative consequences. 

Of course, it was not enough to have only one activity, it is understandable that your body needs to rest from trainings. I think that having relaxing hobbies also helps to deal with quarantine and the negative impact that it creates. It is important to mention, that imagining landscapes or other objects that you can notice in nature and painting them on canvas with acrylics had helped me a lot while coping with quarantine and all the consequences that it brought to our everyday lives. Visualising calm objects, creating individual, unusual, or real landscapes and reflecting them in real life from our imagination strengthens our emotional, psychological status. Having these two hobbies helped me to improve, encourage myself and stay in the positive state of mind.

Telling my corona story is not intricate for me. I am glad that I was able to concentrate on my favourite activities. Because of my activities, when I was sick it was not challenging to deal with corona and be alone by myself at home.