Did You Achieve Your Lockdown Goals?
Our lives have been on pause for 2 years. Instead of going out with friends, travelling around the world, or enjoying a simple pint in a pub. We’ve stayed in our houses, watching Netflix, baking banana bread, and trying to master zoom. I must admit, it’s not how I planned my 21st and 22nd years of my life to go - and if I’m 100% honest, i’m debating lying about my age when we return to normality.
At the start of lockdown many of us advocated for this forced time at home to be used for good. That we should use this time to be creative and productive and hopefully come out of COVID as better people. I was one of them, this time last year I planned to lose weight (I did), quite smoking (I did), and find a voice for this little blog of mine (I did). My quarantine resolutions helped me feel on top of the world as the world crumbled. but unfortunately they didn’t stay longer than a few months. I returned to work and I snacked my way through the day, my final few weeks before moving to London were so stressful I picked up another packet of cigarettes and as time has passed my creativity has gone down the pan. I feel like I’ve had a lockdown burnout of some sorts. The thing is, we’re so close to the first stage of lockdown lifting here in the UK and everyone is looking forward to the moment they sit in a beer garden again and sip cider in the pouring rain. I feel a bit miffed that I couldn’t maintain my goals for more than six months.
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Living in London feels like a motivator to get back into the habits again, to exercise regularly as I’m the only non-fitness freak in the office, to quite smoking because £14 is way to much money for lung cancer, and to get back into writing daily for my blog. The thing is with goal setting, you can’t plan beyond your means, it simply won’t happen if you plan to run your own marketing agency before the age of 25 or find your six pack before teatime.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that even though you didn’t get chance to achieve or maintain your quarantine resolutions. That doesn’t mean you’ll never achieve them. Work hard, plan scrupulously, and stay focused. Then you might be able to look back at this time with fonder memories, you can see it as the time you started growing rather than the time you pushed yourself too hard, too quickly.