“Avoid the news, it’s depressing.”
“Remember you’re not just working from home, you’re doing your best in a pandemic.”
“It’s okay not to be okay.”

As someone whose mental health is often very fragile, this advice hasn’t resonated with me. In fact, my mental health is the strongest it’s been in forever despite watching the news all every day (I believe in being prepared, and for the most part I connect to the facts of the pieces rather than the emotions).

There’s nothing super deep or revolutionary about the things in this post. I haven’t had an epiphany where I wake up every morning and run for five miles. I haven’t even started a new hobby during lockdown. But I’ve felt the least anxious and depressed I’ve been in years. Here are some reasons I think that’s the case.

01. Responsibility

Running a business is a huge responsibility. Looking after multiple critically ill cats is extra responsibility on top. Responsibility stresses me the f out. This is why I’m not married, don’t drive, and will never have kids.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my business, I love planning trips and hosting get-togethers, but those things are very much in my comfort zone.

Business often involves overcoming a series of never-ending obstacles. It’s a relief when you get through one, but you know there will be another new challenge to figure out just around the corner.

The pandemic is Someone Else’s Responsibility. Yes I have personal responsibility and ways I need to behave, but I’m not personally responsible for fixing the whole damn situation. I just do what I’m told (and add an extra 30% common sense to that).

Not having to figure out how to fix The Whole Damn Thing feels like a holiday. It feels like a weight’s been lifted off my shoulders rather than being added. It feels like I shoved a whole bunch of crap at someone, yelled “Your turn!” and ran away.

02. People-stress

I’m more of an animal person than a people person. This is an understatement, since I’m not in contact with any of my immediate family and my circle of friends is tight-knit these days. Beyond that, I find online interactions with people a lot easier and more fun. You’ll never get a call from me unless someone is literally on fire. Maybe not even then.

So lockdown has removed almost all my in-person people-stress. I’m not worrying about what people think, stressing about social commitments, or being touched against my will.

I hate being touched, except by guys I’m super super close to. Unfortunately, I’m also the kind of person people like to touch and find reasons to touch, whether it’s a hug or a hand on the back or whatever. I’m not sure why that is. But it makes the act of existing in and of itself very stressful.

Even situations that just require shaking hands with a stranger, I’m relieved to not have to do. I find any social interactions that aren’t words stressful to navigate.

03. Prior lockdown experience

Between the cats and the business, and spring last year when we were facing a difficult business situation because of a dodgy developer, we got used to never really leaving the house. Some days it was hard to find time to leave the room, let alone the house. So while it was a different reason for a lockdown, the principles were quite similar, other than we had people to call on for help if things got desperate, and we could still have supermarket food deliveries (even if it took six hours or two days to finish placing the order).

I’ve written more about this, my habit of bulk-buying in normal situations, and how going to Chernobyl unexpectedly prepared us for lockdown before in this post so I won’t repeat it again here. I’ll just leave it with: it’s easier the second time, and easier when everyone can relate because they’re in the same situation.

04. The bigger business picture

Very early on in lockdown, Joe got a text from his phone provider that basically said, “We’re really busy, don’t contact us.” Considering he hadn’t tried to contact them, it made us raise our eyebrows. Big businesses were not coping. Big businesses were not afraid to come out and say, “We’re really busy.” “We’ve removed these pages on our website and we’ve just left them as 404s so you can’t contact us or buy our service.” “We’re going to let you hang for a week without getting back to you.”

As a small business, with customers in – now – 46 countries (47 if you include the Isle of Man, which I personally don’t categorise as a country but apparently our CRM does) and a standard of replying to people As Soon As Humanly Possible, because otherwise people would leave us and go to the bigger companies, this was gobsmacking.

These big companies didn’t care about telling people to f off; in fact, they were actively saying it (pretty much). I don’t think it was the right thing to do, at all, but it made us feel like we were doing a lot better than we thought. Despite everything being a lot busier for us (definitely a nice problem to have), we’ve maintained as close to the same standard of service as possible. We haven’t removed our live chat like some other hosting companies have. I don’t think anyone has noticed any difference, or at least they shouldn’t have.

Added to this, people have a higher patience/expectation of things going wrong during a pandemic. At the beginning, a lot of people asked if we were still doing migrations, people generally seem to be expecting less or more tolerant, even though overall they are generally more stressed and sometimes grumpier.

05. Work stability

A lot of people are super worried and have had a lot of stresses around employment, working from home, adjusting to different workflows, worries of redundancy or having to take extra workloads on etc. I know we’re extremely lucky; I can’t imagine what it must have been like to have your whole life turned upside down overnight, especially with kids/other dependents and maybe even having the virus yourself.

From a money and economy perspective, the news and events of redundancies and shutdowns has been awful. For people who have kept their jobs, different rules, specific laws, arguments with employers, new ways of working and so on have all been really stressful for a lot of people. I’m lucky in that nothing has really changed for us in that respect. I’m extremely grateful that I don’t have to answer to an employer telling me what to do and where to be, when they’re very unlikely to have any health experience or qualifications. Some of the decisions seem weird to me, like hairdressers wearing a visor but no mask, which seems silly.

As work has been very stable/rapidly growing for us, it’s also helped in that being busy is a big distraction. I’m not trying to find ways to fill the time, I’m not bored. We can’t just not work if we don’t feel like it when we have nearly 2,000 people to help. So questions about tech stuff, blogging, and business stuff have been a great distraction. Other than a week near the beginning where I didn’t get much done, it’s been a lot easier to deal with this than when Sin and Halo died, which totally floored me for a long time.

06. Hope

One of the most important emotions, if not the most important, is hope. A lot of people right now are very worried about the future and aren’t looking too far ahead. Despite being a generally negative person, I’m looking beyond that to what’s coming after. Finding new joys in old things. Getting plans actioned. Going to new places and experiencing and buying new things. Levelling up.

Overall I’m looking forward to what the future brings, because we have a bunch of exciting plans. I feel like this is something unique to self-employment; when you’re employed, unless you have bonuses or commission, you can basically work out what you’ll earn for the rest of your life and work backwards (it’s a very depressing thing to do unless you know you have an old rich aunt who loves you or something I guess). When you’re self-employment, your earnings are potentially unlimited (assuming you make enough good decisions). You can definitely go either way with this, and a lot of people actively choose to have more free time over more money, and that’s okay. What’s important is you have long-term hope, and dreams/goals beyond just the short and medium term (this is easier said than done, and in my experience you have to do a lot of uncomfortable digging to find out what you really want).

Interestingly, I posted a comment on Facebook about how I didn’t want to come out of lockdown, and had a few comments from people saying they also found life a lot simpler and less stressful. Someone with fibromyalgia said a lot of their flare ups had really calmed down. So it’s not all bad news.

How’s your mental health been during lockdown?