Keeping a Household Healthy in a Pandemic

Keeping a Household Healthy in a Pandemic

In early 2020 everyone had an opinion about how to handle life in quarantine. As time dragged on and summer rolled around, though, it became increasingly difficult to discover how to stay safe and healthy throughout prolonged isolation. While masks and hand sanitizer are a good start, it’s become increasingly clear that further efforts must be taken by individuals themselves to maintain both the sanity and physical health of their households.

If you’re living in a household that is struggling through the pandemic, you don’t have to resign to a depressed, sedentary lifestyle for either you or your loved ones. Here are a few suggestions for sweet and simple ways to reclaim your family’s health throughout the pandemic. Read on for a few suggestions on keeping a household healthy in a pandemic.

Remember To Be a Team

First and foremost, it’s essential to remember that your family unit is a team. Protracted time together can make it difficult to remember that teamwork mentality, but in many ways, it’s the desire to survive and thrive together that serves as a lifeline to carry you through dark times.

It doesn’t matter if you’re cooking and cleaning together, playing family games, or simply giving each other a chance to talk, vent, and process their inner thoughts. However, it manifests; do what you can to maintain that team mentality each and every day.

Stay Squeaky Clean

Speaking of cleaning, while hand sanitizer can help when you’re out of the house, when you’re home, maintaining cleaned and sanitized surfaces remains a critical tool in combatting the spread of COVID-19. When it comes to protecting your household, in particular, it’s good to have a coronavirus cleaning schedule in place. 

In other words, along with the basics — e.g. vacuuming, sweeping, decluttering, wiping down counters — you also want to integrate a series of coronavirus-killing cleaning activities, such as:

• Wiping down door handles.
• Cleaning all kitchen surfaces that are regularly touched.
• Scouring the bathroom and laundry areas regularly.

All you need is a bucket, hot water, soap, rags, and some rubber gloves and you’re good to go. Encourage the whole family to get in on the endeavour or create a cleaning schedule with revolving responsibilities.

Take Steps to Maintain Mental Health

Mental health is the easiest thing to lose track of. Things like depression and anxiety feed into a discouraging cycle that can make it difficult to diagnose, let alone deal with, mental struggles. In order to either head off any mental concerns or stop existing ones from becoming worse, look for ways to maintain mental health such as:

• Encouraging times of meditation and prayer each day.
• Ensuring that everyone is getting proper quantities of sleep on a regular basis.
• Maximizing the amount of natural light exposure that you have in your home.
• Helping your family become aware of cognitive distortions that can subtly creep into your thinking over time.

Maintaining your family’s mental health and wellness is one of the primary battles in surviving a prolonged quarantine without breaking down completely.

Look for Group Exercise Opportunities

Another important activity that can help maintain both mental and physical health is exercising. Exercising releases endorphins that combat depression, minimize pain, and generally help you stay in good physical condition.

While you can exercise on your own, if you’re looking for ways to keep your entire household’s health intact, you can:

• Have dance parties.
• Go for a swim or a hike.
• Tend to a garden.
• Take the dog for a walk.
• Play pretend together.

There are plenty of ways to get everyone up and moving, and doing so can be a tremendous boon to your family’s health while everyone is in isolation.

Remember Self-Care

Finally, remember to think about yourself along with everyone else. It’s easy to prioritize those that you love in all situations, but if you can’t slow down and think about yourself from time to time, eventually you’re going to run out of steam.

In order to avoid this from happening, think of self-care activities that you can indulge in, either with others or on your own. For instance, you can:

• Watch a movie — others can join, but make sure it’s one that you picked.
• Take a bath — you can even throw in a bath bomb, just make sure you don’t use one that will clog the drain.
• Read a book — sometimes getting a little peace and quiet to read is all that you need, just don’t use the time to peruse social media.

There are literally endless ways that you can care for yourself. Obviously, it’s important to put others first, but once you’ve taken care of your responsibilities, always remember to carve out a little time for your own R&R.

Surviving a pandemic as an individual is tough. Doing it as a household can be even harder. However, if you band together, lean on each other’s strengths, and do your best to weather the current challenges as a household, you stand a much better chance of coming out of your current circumstances happy and healthy.