This is the second last video in the series. Well, at least unless you request more, in which we'll get to in the next video. But this one is where I'm going to try to actually bring together a lot of things we were talking about, and give you some real clear recommendations, I guess, about dealing with isolation. But of course, dealing with your anxieties more generally, which is the purpose of this whole course, of course. So let's jump right in. So we're going to reconnect to some of the things we talked about before. So one of them is, remember that from the extreme isolation studies, the prisoner situation, we said that their whole loss of structure and human interactions can lead them to lose a sense of purpose in self. So that's going to be part of the recommendation, which is, when you go to an isolation environment or just the fact that your life no matter what has probably changed in some way, you need to reestablish some structure. For those of us in isolation, we could be in some form of this for a long time. So let's start with the very basics, which is here. Try to wake up at a specific time and go to bed at a specific time, eat your meals at the same times roughly each day, and try to eat healthy food. If you can schedule the rest of your day, not necessarily your week day, sorry, schedule your weekday, not necessarily your weekend. You can keep weekends being free and open, we like a little bit of that. But for the week days, trying to schedule a little bit. Let me just give you one other context to think about this in. There's psychological results or research that suggests that people who have dogs tend to be emotionally more balanced, mentally healthier, happier. When they dug into that research, one of the core reasons why seems to be that dogs like a structured, predictable day, and they force us into that. Our dogs know when they want to go for walks, our dogs know when they want their food, our dogs know when it's evening treat time, etc, they know when they wanted to go to bed. They are most happy when life happens in a very consistent way, and so they pull us there and they pull us towards happiness when they do. So that notion to keep your system synchronized and working in a certain way. If you don't do this, by the way, you will have trouble sleeping. But if you wake up at the same time and go to bed at the same time, you'll sleep more quickly and better. Eating meals, you want to try to eat good, nutritious food just to keep ourselves at our physical strongest all the time. That schedule just helps push us through our day and give it a certain structure. So let me take that a step further and bring together some of the things we've been talking about. This is not like any recommended structure, this is just an example that takes into account some of the things we've talked through. So imagine you start your day with a dog walk. Luckily, we're still allowed to get outside. So maybe you don't have a dog, but maybe you should still start your day with a walk and get some fresh air, of course. Stay, the specified distance away from other people, but get that fresh air. If you want to make this a jog instead, so much better. Get some aerobic activity going there. That would be fantastic. I put plus guided relaxation. I'm just going to throw this in every now and then. But I think morning might be a great time to remind yourself of what relaxation feels like, and put that in the back of your mind so that throughout the day if you feel anxiety building, you can practice just invoking that relaxation on your own. So good to imagine, just re-establish what that place feels like so you can get back there quick. At certain points of your day, so I have one at 9:00 here, you're probably going to want a news update. You want to learn the latest information, that's perfectly reasonable. But then again, do it in a specified way for a specified time. Then if you can follow it with a palette cleanser, some other silly little mindless show that'll pull your mind away from the news. So get your information and then try to get your mind somewhere else. Maybe then you have an exercise playtime, preferably aerobic, again, if you can. This is especially if you have kids and you're trying to structure the day with kids, maybe you have a time that's playtime so that they're not asking you to play all day. You say, no, no, you know when we play. We have 10 o'clock playtime and four o'clock karaoke time or whatever. That can help you impose different ways of being at different times. So for example, maybe 11:00, if you don't personally have work to do, maybe this is when you do homeschooling with your kids. If you have work to do, and you can work from home, maybe this is when you do some work. By the way, let me generally say for those people who can work just as well at home and for whom this virus has not reduced their amount of work, they're almost the easiest because they can continue their work. They have ways to fill their day that give it purpose and give it meaning. For the rest of us, even if there's a little of that we can do, if we do a little of that each day and if we don't have work, this is where I will recommend some other ideas. So specifically, I'm going to recommend online learning. We'll talk about that in just a moment. But you can have a period of day when you do that. Then you have your lunch, then maybe have another news update, then maybe you have more learning, work time, homeschooling time, etc. Maybe you budget a point new day for social outreach. Maybe you literally say between 3:00 and 4:00, I'm going to connect with people, I'm going to have a few little social connections. Or maybe you do a half an hour of that at different points in your day. Two or three points where you purposefully connect with somebody. If you can purposefully connect with somebody who you think might be lonely, all the better. You know I love karaoke, I throw that in at 4:00. Five o'clock dinner. Then into the night, more distraction perhaps, more guided relaxation, perhaps take another hit of that during the day, and maybe just trying to spend quality time with your spouse, your family, whoever you are with. If you're not with anyone, if you're on your own, again, more of that social outreach. The more you are on your own, the more you should be doing the social outreach. So I hope when you look at this now, you're seeing this in a different way. You're seeing the news updates, they produce anxiety, but I want the information, but here are these other things I can do that either distract my mind or actually have a positive effect like the singing or the aerobic activity. Just filling my day and having a structure to it, helps me know what to do with myself as I go through the day. That's very helpful as well. So that structure where you're bringing in the elements we talked about is what I highly recommend. A couple of things to maximize things. So making the most of social outreach. So I've talked about these guys before, let me bring them up. There are different ways to socially outreach. Given what we've said, let me highlight the following. What you really want to be doing is connecting on an emotional level. This is not a time for texts and emojis. Sorry, emoji makers. This is the time for someone to actually hear the quality of your voice, to actually see your face when you're speaking, and if possible, see your body when you're speaking. This isn't about surface level social connection. "Hey, how you doing?" "Fine." It's more like, "How are you feeling? Really how are you doing? What do you find the most challenging? Are you getting through the day okay? What are the tough times of day for you? Are you doing anything cool? Maybe you're doing some things that I could think about doing in my life to help me deal with this too." So it's easy for us to talk to one another now, we all have the same issues, we all know mostly the same information, and we're thinking about the same stuff. So feel free to talk about it. Yes, talking about COVID will produce some threatening anxiety, but it also is going to create that social connection, that emotional bond that helps us dissipate our personal stress and anxiety, and makes us feel it's more of a group thing. So that's my first thing with these social interactions. Try to go deeper and try to get to that emotional connectedness because that's where the mojo is. That's where the most healing power of it is. So yeah, make sure you have those, if you're feeling lonely, if you're feeling whatever, try to get more social outreach going on. We think of the obvious ways to directly connect with somebody, and that's true. I'm wont to give you this other subtle, different notion. There's times when you can combine good things. So let me talk about another good thing, but come back to the social outreach. So here's another good thing. So often we say things like, "If I only had the time, I would learn to play electric guitar. If only I had the time, I would learn to do whatever." It doesn't matter what those things are. If you have the time now, and especially if you're looking at that schedule and saying, "I don't know what I would put in my daily schedule." Well, find something. So let me mention a few things to you. These are all online platforms offering free learning experiences. So Coursera and edX are the two big ones. This course, of course, is on Coursera, so you found Coursera already, but any of these platforms, you can go on and search topics. So if you want to know more about astronomy, there is some great professor who has got a great course to teach you about astronomy just waiting for you. If you want to know about music production, anything you want to know about, you'd like to learn more about, you can do that. You can even upgrade your skills in some cases. So maybe this is a time when you learn some new skills, when you are back to the workplace, you can say, "By the way, while I was away, I've accomplished these. I have earned these certificates, and I've bettered myself professionally." That really does a lot for your soul. We need purpose, and so our work lives often give us purpose in a regular way. But if we lose that, well, we need something else. We need to wake up thinking there's something important to accomplish today. For me, by the way, creating this course did all that for me. It's that do something, that we're all hearing. Here's something I can do. Then I wake up in the morning, and I think about what I want to accomplish. If I do that, by the end of the day, then I feel good about myself. That is a very important kind of vibe. So yeah, these platforms will let you learn about just about anything. YouTube, if you want to go on to YouTube, you can find some 12-year-old in Australia who will teach you how to play guitar or drums or whatever you might want to know, just about everything you might want to learn better is on YouTube. Maybe your digital skills, maybe you'd like to learn Excel better, or maybe you'd really like to learn how to use some of these video conferencing technologies better. That's a great one because it involves social interactions. By the way, let me also say that these learning communities, I use the word learning community. When you joined a course, let's say in Coursera, as I hope you've discovered now. Yes, you get access to the course, but there's also a whole other community of learners going through that course with you. So if you're thinking, "Man, I'd like to socially connect with somebody, but I don't know who and I don't know what I'd talk about." Well, go to the discussion forum of this course, start talking about something, connect with somebody, get a conversation going. They're there. They're all interested in the same topic. So you can actually run with that topic. When I bring back to that social connectedness, this is a way you can feel like you're accomplishing something while also getting access to a community that you can use to work on your social connectedness. Look for those double wins. If you can get those double or triple wins, if you can find a community that makes you laugh while you're accomplishing something fantastic, that's the triple win scenario that we should be looking for. Cool. Final point here, and I just want you to think about this a little bit in spirit of a positive side of losing something. So I want you to think about your normal pre-COVID life. In your normal pre-COVID life, a big part of what we do is our professional life. If you're like most families, it might be both parents, it could be a single parent family where that single parent always trying to work to bring money in, or two-parent households where both parents are working. In those sorts of situations, it's almost like the best time of your life is spent at work when your most awake, most aware, most interaction, and then by the time you get home at night, you're tired. So your interactions with your kids and your loved ones might not be as rich as they could otherwise be because you're just mellowing out at the end of the day. Then the next morning, of course, you're getting all ready to get back in your professional life. Should that professional life be gone or reduced? Yes. That's a little hard. Yes, that is part of who we are and we will feel the loss of that. But it's a good opportunity to maybe reinvest some of our most alert, most cool time in our family and in our significant others. So maybe in this picture here, it's a question of learning with your children, and they might have to teach you some before you can teach them some, which makes it a really fun interaction. If you guys are solving problems together, let's figure out what you're supposed to do in this algebra thing. I don't remember my algebra, but let's figure it out and learn it together. What a quality experience to have with your child. Sometimes your child might figure stuff out before you do. That's very good for their self confidence, that'll make them feel really good. So often, there's things alike to that where we teachers are the ones spending this quality time with their children. Well, good time for us to do it. Or maybe with our significant others, we just say, "Well, what can we do? Well, we can occasionally take walks outside. So let's take walks together in interesting places. We haven't done that for a while. Maybe we bring a little picnic with us where we can the two of us sit somewhere and have a picnic. We wouldn't normally do that in our normal life because we wouldn't have the time or inclination, but we do now." Again, a lot of this is about taking a situation like being isolated, which you could view in very negative terms. But if you do, it's going to eat at your soul. Or you can look to the positive, look to the bright side and try to make the most of this. It's time when you can accomplish something, time when you can reconnect with your family and with your larger social network. That's the real positive way to use this. So I want to highlight all that. Is that we're are? It could be at this one. I can't remember if there's another slide. Let's find out together. No. I'll come back here. All right. So that's it for this video. I just have one more left. I've really said most of what I can think of to tell you right now to help you out. So I have one more where I just bring it all together. That's it. So let's do that one. I will see you there. I really hope some of this is having a positive impact on you and your family. So I'll see you in that last video. Bye.