A Subtle Mindset Shift to Improve Your Pandemic Life

Goodbye ‘Great Pause’. Hello ‘Great Halftime’.

Millions (Billions?) of people treat this pandemic as The Great Pause and expect mostly a return to normal at some point in the future. A pause is akin to a vacation, and that’s been observed through increased alcohol consumption and decreased physical activity. That might be ok for a four-day weekend or your standard two-week winter break, but what will our mental and physical health look like after a two-year pause? There are plausible scenarios that this pandemic will continue into 2022.

In the rosiest scenario, the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are approved and smoothly rolled out over the next 12 months. By the end of the year, the U.S. achieves herd immunity, after which the virus struggles to find susceptible hosts. — Ed Yong (The Atlantic).

This is not a film. This is your life.

When you pause a film halfway through to get food or go to the bathroom, you know that the act of pausing does not affect the storyline in the second half of the film.

We know that is not the case with the pandemic. There is no returning to normal, only a new normal.

I want to propose a different way of treating this pandemic:
The Great Halftime.

When a basketball game pauses for halftime, how each team spends their break has an immense effect on the second half of the game. The team recalibrates its strategy according to what they have observed from the first half. When halftime is over, teams resume playing with newfound intention.

Your home is your pandemic halftime locker room. There will be no return to normal, but we will be out of the locker room at some point in the next few years. What would you do if you had a halftime in your life? How would you recalibrate your habits to increase your odds of a successful second half?

The choice is yours.