Podcast 304: Staying Sane During COVID-19

COVID-19 is impacting all of us in one way or another. That’s why we’ll cover some simple tips to keep your sanity.

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Show Transcription:

Eric Worral: (00:00)
Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of RentPrep for Landlords. This is episode #304 and today we’re going to be talking about things you can do to stay sane and stay busy during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Voice Over: (00:17)
Welcome to The RentPrep for Landlords Podcast. And now your host Eric Worral!

Eric Worral: (00:20)
Well, I hope everybody’s doing all right out there. I know it’s been an absolutely crazy week and you know what, last week felt like a crazy week too. And I feel like the craziest, just backing on top of crazy personally you know, me and my family are doing fine, we’re healthy, which is most important and we’re both working from home and kept our kids out of daycare. So it’s a full house and definitely an adjustment trying to work while you have two little ones under the age of three home with you.

Eric Worral: (00:48)
But we’re getting by and we know there’s a lot of people that are in much tougher situations than that. So not too much to complain about. But what I wanted to talk about today were ways that maybe you might be able to get involved or engaged with your community, your neighborhood, or even just trying to stay sane in your own home. Just a few ideas to run by you guys. One of the first things that’s been really helpful is I, in my particular neighborhood, we have a community. We have a Facebook community for the people in the neighborhood. So we happen to have like a, it’s kinda this loosely based home or HOA but really it’s like $20 a year and we get together and we have picnics and stuff like that, but we have this cool Facebook group that’s been helpful for connecting with people in our local community here, only about 400 houses.

Eric Worral: (01:35)
So it’s not huge. And one of the things we started doing is a social distancing happy hour. So we’ve done two of these, actually. We did one on Friday and we did one on Sunday. Neighbors would get out and like, you know, in the road and y’all driveways keep by six, 10 feet of distance. And just have a beer or cocktail and talk with each other. Just to kind of have some interaction which I think has been nice. And one of the nice things that’s come out of that too is just kind of a little bit better perspective on what other people are dealing with, what they’re going through because of this. Had a neighbor explained that his business that he owns, he’s an employee of it. So he the way he’s, you know, set it up tax-wise as he’s an employee and he’s been paying unemployment insurance for 30 years and because he’s the owner of the business, he cannot collect unemployment when the if he doesn’t get income.

Eric Worral: (02:28)
And right now his business, which involves like taking headshots for companies, which nobody’s going to spend money on marketing for headshots right now. And plus his whole entire studio was shut down. It was an office building and the office buildings said, you can’t come in. So he’s out of work, out of cash for however long. Who knows, I can’t take on employment. And you know, I a, you hear something like that and you kind of look at your own situation and you realize like, well, you know, it’s it’s not, it’s not so bad. It could be worse kind of thing. You know? And the Facebook group though and my community has been super helpful. If it’s something that you’re interested in, maybe it’s something you could set up and even try to, you know, grow within your own local neighborhood.

Eric Worral: (03:13)
The social distancing happy hour has been great. We’ve been doing chalk walk where people in the neighborhood had been drawing encouraging messages on the driveway. Usually, you know, people with young kids have been putting that out there. I thought that was pretty cool to see. And I also think there’s a bunch of things that you can kind of work on right now. So one of the things I was researching here is from health.com. The article is 8 Things to Do at Home While Social Distancing to Keep Your Sanity. Number one, shut off the news. Definitely important. Right? I started having actually yesterday it was kind of in a funk and I think part of it was you know, just getting too much news and going out for a walk. I got a park not too far from my house and just went for about a 40-minute walk.

Eric Worral: (04:01)
I just felt a lot more clear-headed when I got back home. So taking those kind of breaks from the world I think are definitely helpful. Which leads us into their next point. And health.com here says, move around as much as possible. Cell phone or isolating doesn’t mean sitting on around on the couch all day. All right, so like, I know I went on to YouTube two days ago and just searched you know, parent, toddler workouts and I found this like ridiculous workout where like, you work out with your kid, which, you know, had mixed results. And my son’s like by 35 pounds. And doing like squats while I’m holding them and pushing them into the air was not that fun for my legs, especially muscles that I don’t normally work out. But he enjoyed it. You know, kinda got the blood flowing.

Eric Worral: (04:47)
All those things are good. A knockout, some to do’s on your list. If you’re anything like me, I’m sure you have a lot of little nagging house projects, things that you could do. I’ve got some trim that I know needs to be caulked and painted, so probably get to that at some point. But you know, it’s a, it’s a good time to do that. Learn a new skill is the next thing on here. If you’re at all interested in digital marketing which is the space that I play in. There’s a lot of providers and services right now that are offering free courses. So courses that they used to charge 500, 750 bucks for a one that comes to mind is I use a tool called Ahrefs, ahrefs.com. It’s a tool that is meant for content marketing and being able to create content and have it show up on Google and being in things like that.

Eric Worral: (05:40)
Well, they have like a $750 course that they’re just giving away for free that I’ve actually gone through the course and it’s excellent. So if you wanted to learn content marketing like there’s a free course that would normally be 750 bucks, it’s free and there’s a bunch of courses like this that are the same, reach out to people outside of your social. It’s a good time for sure. You can you know, you’ve got so many ways to video chat with people. Maybe it’s even, you know, you can go on LinkedIn or places like that and make new connections or maybe loose connections and connect with people. The next tip on here is to create a workspace if you’re working from home. So it says die. You don’t have to get into your finest outfits, but shower, change your clothes and act as if you’re going to interact with other people.

Eric Worral: (06:22)
This helps give a sense of normalcy in a time where things are definitely not normal. I’ve heard this reiterated online quite a bit. Like, don’t wear pajamas all day, like get dressed if you’re staying home, you know, at least get dressed, take a shower. It’s just probably all advice that I could definitely take right now as I feel like I’ve probably been wearing the same hoodie and sweat pants for a couple of days here. But what are you gonna do and then indulge in your favorite self-care routines. So he says, everyone says, I would meditate if I had the time and now they really do. What else do we have on here? It’s saying, yeah, if you’re, if there’s certain things that you’ve been pushing off for a self-care, now is a great time to do that. Another tip here, follow positivity on social media.

Eric Worral: (07:05)
If you’re going to be on social media a bunch, it’s pretty easy. You know, you can curate it however you want. I’m a bigger fan of Reddit because you can just pick the communities that you want to be involved in. And you can just, you know, they have stuff on there where it can just be like happy images, you know, like, I don’t know if that’s an actual subreddit, but there’s a definitely subreddits and things like that that you can just look at that, you know, are filled with positivity and don’t have news and that kind of thing. I know like for yesterday when I was growing on my walk, I started listening to a podcast just cause, you know, I like listening to a podcast while I walk and it’s talking about my, you know, the Coronavirus and you know, I was like, I just turned it off and I just took a walk.

Eric Worral: (07:45)
It was quiet and just gave myself a chance to just clear my head. And it was really helpful. So I hope that you guys are kind of taking those moments to just kind of work on some self-care. If you are finding yourself kind of cooped up or having a pretty different lifestyle. It’s hard to imagine that you’re not, you know, I think everyone’s got a little bit of a different lifestyle going on right now. But just take notice make sure you’re taking time to take care of yourself. And, you know, perhaps this could be an opportunity to if you can learn a new skill kinda create a new direction in your life with this forced change. But I think I’ve got a couple crying kids in the other room, so coming to wrap it up and see what’s going on out there. And I hope you guys are doing all right. And yeah, I wish you the best. And I look forward to catching up with you guys next week. All right. Take care.