Once you have a schedule. Stop stressing over it.

Working out, work, practicing guitar, cooking, meditation, golf, and reading, have become a part of my daily life in the last two years. I never had an issue incorporating all of them into my routine because apart from work, I introduced all the other activities gradually and slowly. Even though I have a fixed schedule for all these activities, I sometimes used to get anxious. Not about the number of things I have been doing but just because of not keeping up with the boundaries set for the activities.

While I was going through COVID during the last two weeks, I stopped all the activities I've been performing in my day-to-day life for the last two years. But when I started to resume some of them, like cooking and work, I realized that I was in a different zone. The break because of COVID  made me realize that, while I was doing any activity I was thinking too much about the ones which I was scheduled to perform next. Even though I had calendar events and reminders set up, there was still a worry that I use to carry along with me. While playing guitar, I used to think about work. While working, I was thinking about cooking, and so on.

So, when I started working and cooking, I was noticing that I was no longer worried about anything that I had to do next, so because of that I was staying in a meditative state, all the time during the day. But that didn't last long. As a few days passed by, I again started to worry about what I'm going to next or how I'm going to do it.

But then I reminded myself of the meditative state that I was in due to COVID sickness. I wanted to get away from the brain fog and laziness that being sick brought but wanted to keep the peace and the meditative state. I was not using Instagram all that much. I would use it for 2-3 minutes, close it, and put my phone away. Even though that change in habit was because of sickness, but the lower consumption of social media, youtube, or any digital content, was giving me peace of mind.

Now that I know that the major contributing factor to my anxiety was excessive digital media consumption, and also letting my thoughts sway me away from the task at hand, I'll start to manage and change the quality of my mental state during weekdays. I have already talked about "you are not your thoughts" and I'll have to revisit my own blog post and start to be in a calmer state.

That's it for this blog post and if you feel that you've something to add to this or you have a different perspective then share it and discuss it on r/StoicHuman or go to the Reddit discussion post for this blog post linked down below.

Stay healthy, Stay safe!

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