Living alone is a rollercoaster – you’ll experience the high of being a responsible and capable adult, but you’ll also at times feel the loneliest you’ve ever felt. Here are some survival tips for days when you’re feeling a lot.
Moving out of your home to make a life for yourself is something that we’ve all been taught is a sign of peak adulthood. With no one else around to tell you what to do, living alone must be the height of luxury and freedom… right? Not so fast.
Having the freedom to do what you want anytime is a double-edged sword. After all, if you don’t do your chores, your genius-dometic-engineer of a parent or sibling can’t swoop in to pick up the slack. If you don’t do it, it simply will not get done. This is why living alone really shows you what you’re made of – the things you’re good and bad at, the things you need to learn to be a functional adult, etc. But when you’re feeling so down that even simply getting out of bed feels like a herculean task, what can you do?
Related: Feel Your Feels: Accepting Your Allness with Hyacinth Callado
PREPARE FOR BATTLE
One of the first things you tend to neglect when living alone, whether because you’ve found yourself in a blaze of hyperfocused productivity or the complete opposite, is your eating habits. And, let’s be so for real: the number of times you’ve felt like you hated the world and the world hated you back only to realize that that feeling disappeared the moment you drank water or ate your first meal of the day is probably larger than you’d like to admit. Especially when you’re feeling down, you will either completely lose your appetite or simply find the task of preparing yourself something to eat too troublesome.
@bigtimemaca I DO THIS SO OFTEN #song #eating #food #emotions #personal #mentalhealth #house #edm #beats ♬ original sound – Max Castillo
So please go eat something! Getting takeout isn’t something to be ashamed about. If you’re trying to keep costs down, make sure to stock up on easy-to-prepare or instant foods on your next grocery trip. Not the healthiest, but sometimes the path to healthy involves days where cup noodles save you. Another thing that can prevent you from preparing meals is the thought of having to deal with the stack of dishes that takes three whole business days to clean. That’s what disposable plates and utensils are for. Not the best for the environment, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.
@violet.cooks Sundried tomato DBS! #dbs #beans #densebeansalad #mealprep ♬ Wes Anderson-esque Cute Acoustic – Kenji Ueda
If you’re trying to turn over a healthier, more eco-friendly leaf, then meal prepping is a great way to keep ready-to-eat food on hand while managing your budget. The key is to take advantage of those days when you’re feeling extra productive. Your future self will thank you for it.
STAY FRESH
Our physical surroundings – the things we feel in our body and the things we see in our immediate vicinity – all have a direct impact on our mood. Clutter can make our minds feel cluttered, and feeling sticky and gross can make us feel sluggish and unable to move. So cleanliness and hygiene can definitely improve your mood.
You don’t have to do a full apartment deep-clean. Even putting away a couple of things here and there can help make your surroundings and your feelings a bit lighter. If taking a shower feels like too much at the moment, even just brushing your teeth, washing your face, or brushing your hair, and putting on a fresh set of clothes can make a huge difference. If you want to take it up a notch, you can even dress in your nice going-out clothes – doesn’t matter if you aren’t planning on leaving your house. Though we as a society might be better off trying not to place so much emphasis on our physical appearance, we have to admit that when we think we look good, we feel good.
STAY CONNECTED
Nobody self-isolates quite like the overachiever who’s so fiercely independent that they decided to move out as soon as they could, amirite? And living alone only makes the temptation to cut off from the rest of the world that much stronger – especially considering that: if you’re so independent that you would be bold enough to try living alone, then you probably also suffer from the pride of not having to rely on others to take care of yourself. But we humans are social creatures, which means… [cries in introvert]
Reach out to your friends and family – they love you and want to be there for you. After all, you would drop everything if your bestie really needed you, right? Why is it so hard to believe they would do the same for you? If you’re feeling too shy or proud to admit that you need their emotional support, you can always just ask to hang out without anything attached to it. If you don’t have the energy to leave your home, Zoom and other video calling apps can finally come in handy. Even a simple DM or meme to let them know you’re thinking about them can elicit a response that can dramatically improve your mood.
@peppermcs hugs 🤗 #fyp ♬ original sound – Raihann
ACKNOWLEDGE SMALL WINS
One of the ways that living alone can change the way you view your own productivity is that you start to develop routines for getting chores done that make them almost invisible to you. So you’re actually doing way more than you think at any given moment. So on days when you find your task list has looked the same for days, and you feel like a horrible person because of it, it can help lighten your mood to focus on what you have actually accomplished.
Change or improvement doesn’t have to be this grandiose thing in order to be valid. Little improvements here and there can and should be added to your list of wins. After all, small things add up quickly (gastadors can relate).
DON’T BE TOO HARD ON YOURSELF
The most important thing to remember when living alone is that: you must be kind to yourself. Especially because your support system is now something you do not have ready access to, and especially because you spend so much of your time alone, you have to learn to be okay with yourself. This is true regardless of whether you live alone.
Also a friendly reminder to all workaholics out there: nothing in nature operates at 100% all of the time. It’s simply not physically possible. So if you wouldn’t expect someone else to be like this, why curse yourself with that same impossible expectation? Give yourself some grace on days when you simply can’t with anything. We all have them.
@americanbaron We’ve got to work on work-life-balance, and by work, I mean less work, more life. #worklifebalance #corporatelife #job #corporateamerica ♬ original sound – Baron Ryan
Continue reading: When Your Friends No Longer See You As the “Main Friend”
