In this video, CGP Grey talks about self-isolation during the pandemic in the metaphor of a spaceship: We all left earth in tiny spaceships (apartments) where we isolate ourselves until we can return to earth, adhering to a simple mission:

“Return better than you left.”

Spaceship You

The generator

The core generator of the spaceship is your health: physical and mental. To maintain the ship, the generator must spin. The mental and physical halves of the generator are parts of a whole: accelerating one accelerates the other. Momentum makes pushing easier.

“If the core is low, prime with the physical half. It has sturdier grups.”

Physical exertion can help bring brains down to a baseline.

The Four Stations

In times before the pandemic, our life and our mental state were influenced a lot by the physical location we were at. Vacations for relaxing, offices for working, couch for…couching. In lieu of these spaces, we have to create stations on the spaceship.

1. Exercise Station

Create this simplest station first. Start with bodyweight exercises. From now on, every time you cross the border of this station, you exercise.

Exercise is non-optional.

2. Sleep Station

Create, respect, and sanctify the sleep station boundaries as where you go to sleep - only. Eating, using your phone or similar degrades the station. If you can’t fall asleep in 30 minutes, leave. This is the Sleep Station, not the Staying-Awake-Worrying-Station.

You must get a handle on sleep.

Without conscious control, you will drift into a random sleep schedule, which weakens the core.

3. Recreation Station (or Couch)

Make sure to focus on entertainment you enjoy instead of irradiating yourself with anxiety from the news or sub-par TV shows. Give entertainment your full attention. It’s also a good spot for having communicator coffee chats.

The Recreation Station is the most likely to spread out.

4. Creation Station

This station is for your work, research, learning, practice, or anything else that creates. Use it to improve skills and become better, thus keeping the mental half of the reactor in top shape.

Just like Sleep, keep this station hygienic. Don’t watch YouTube videos here, you have a station for that. Don’t even eat here.

Complete the mission

There will be setbacks on this mission because change is hard. If that happens, focus back on one core thing:

Keep the core spinning.