The COVID Diaries: Life on ICE

We're living in an Isolated and Confined Environment (ICE)! This has special meaning to me as a scientist who studied and trained groups living and working in ICE  (i.e. Antarctica, Outer Space, Aircraft Carriers, Drilling Rigs, Prisons) for 15 years. All of the teams who thrive in ICE do certain things well...and at least 10 of these can be applied to my own tiny ICE crew in COVID quarantine. 

1. Keep YOUR routines as much as possible. I don't make my bed or brush my hair normally every morning, so doing that in ICE isn't the secret to my success. However, I do have a morning routine feeding all the animals and looking over all my plants before heading off to work and I can still do that routine. The bottom line is that keeping as much of your existing routine intact as you can creates a small but lovely illusion of some stability and normalcy...but it has to be YOUR real routine and not some ideal routine you read about or were told about by some fitness or self-help guru. Keep it real, keep it you!

2. Focus on the social exchanges you do have and can control, and make them good (not perfect, but positive). Create a good culture, with positive traditions, in your own home or within your own virtual friend group. We're social animals and it helps if we keep fulfilling that biological drive to cooperate and communicate, even if we're introverts (the dose just varies). One of the most important social exchanges to get right is the use of humor. There are different styles of humor, but without getting into all of them and getting too technical about it, the best styles to use in a crisis or ICE environment are Affiliative Humor and Self-Enhancing Humor. Affiliative because it enhances relationships by letting everyone in on a positive joke. For example, exchanging puns or doing additive improv (like everyone co-writing a Quarantine SNL skit together Who's Line Is It Anyway? style). Self-enhancing because it involves accepting and laughing at life's absurdities, like how my "Apocolypse Costume" is really mismatched sweats covered in cat fur instead of Milla Jovovich's Resident Evil look.

3. Fight brain shrinkage! Yes, when your sensory stimuli are limited, your brain actually shrinks! While you don't likely have it as bad as an expeditioner in an all-white sterile isolation chamber, you still have fewer stimuli than your brain is accustomed to if you're staying at home. Use all the assets of your home's sensory variety. Sniff plants. Touch flowers and trees. Look at complex colors. Gaze at things up close and far away and in-between for a few seconds every single waking hour of the day. Taste a bit of a different dried spice from your cupboard each day. Use a different bath bomb. Whatever it takes to shake up your senses and keep your brain swole like a baller!

4. Create reasons to celebrate and celebrate all holidays too. In ICE, and in crisis, it is way to easy to focus on all the threats and things that could go wrong. Having something to celebrate and look forward to can help your brain and stress level reset. Expeditioners often invent holidays and goofy ways to celebrate existing holidays with whatever they have on hand just so they have something to celebrate every week. Some examples? Crazy hat Thursday dance party. Easter hula dancing competition, bonus cookies if you wear a costume. Bad coronavirus jokes for Cinco de Mayo night. Our 14-day stay-at-home anniversary dinner (save the Mac and Cheese special for it).

5. Leadership on ICE is not about authority and getting things done, it's about fairly distributing social support and trusting others to find a way to make things happen. Also, in ICE, everyone is a leader at one time or another. Leadership is situational and belongs to whoever is controlling the informational or social support at that moment. You must learn to accept five different answers to the same problem as long as the outcome is satisfactory and safe for all. Not everyone cleans to the same standard, but is it clean enough to eat off without salmonella happening? Then accept it and praise someone for getting it done.

6. Write down racing thoughts, let them sit a day or two, and then decide if you need to do anything about them. Often times, they will have resolved themselves. Small things seem like big things in a confined environment unless you give yourself some time for the emotion and anxiety to air out before you take action on them. Some successful ICE crews write all of their complaints and worries on a page, put them in an envelope, and meet to burn their envelops one night each week and eat cake or have a cocktail while they watch them burn together (no, you don't get to tell anyone what is in your envelope and you can't look in anyone else's either). The act of just writing down racing thoughts or worries, for some magical psychological reasons still not fully understood, lets your brain fully offload them.

7. Contrary to Antarctic Expeditioner's experience, you didn't sign up to go into ICE. However, unlike them, you DID sign up to go into ICE with your crewmates. Expeditioners who signed up with a spouse or sibling or parent, etc. usually faired a lot better than those who signed up on their own (assuming those couples weren't in the middle of an impending divorce or bitter existential fight). Your crewmates might be a nuisance, but they are also an emotional advantage if you remember to focus on each others' resilience and courage and do some basic mutual admiration every day.

8. Move around a little every hour. Do one yoga pose, or stretch one group of muscles, or walk around your living quarter in 3 circles, or have a dance. It's easy to get frozen up in ICE and then you stay that way because the more frozen up you let yourself get the better being too still feels.

9. Fifteen minutes a day of doing any art (besides drinking) keeps the batshit crazies away. You don't have to be good at it, and on the flip side, you don't have to be bad at it either (now may not be the time to pick up a new skill or habit if you're stressed). Just pick an art or craft that gives you a feeling of total absorption and flow -- you can just go all-in on it and create without worrying about anything else. It brings you joy for a moment. It can be playing spoons with your two-year-old on the kitchen floor to while your dog wails Itsy-Bitsy Spider off-key, or drawing stick figures on Post-It notes to cover a bathroom wall for everyone to read in there. Pretend you are the only art critic in the world and create something that makes you happy.

10. Sleep hygiene is even more important than brushing your teeth. It is very easy to mess up your circadian rhythm in ICE, and once that happens you are highly susceptible to depression, weight gain or loss, anxiety, and a whole other host of mental and physical hurts. Falling asleep with the TV on when your eyes become too heavy to hold opens seems like a good idea in ICE, but it isn't. Protect your bed for sleep and/ or sex only. Keep as close to a regular bedtime and wake time as humanly possible. Stay in bed for 8 hours. Bored and sleepless in bed? That's okay! Resting in the dark is the next best thing to sleeping (count the how long each breath takes you, focus on how your ribs feel expanding and contracting with your breath, and you may lull yourself from boredom to sleep). Keep the room at the right temperature for you. Make the bedding as comfortable as you can and make the room as dark as you can. It's your sleep cave and it may be the most effective vitamin in any one's arsenal.

11. And one for bonus... think about yourself as part of some great expedition now, because you are. This is history in the making. We're all astronauts riding this Earth into unexplored frontiers of human experience. We all belong to a greater culture of exploration, and the greater meaning within that will set you free even in ICE. There is a beauty in the experience, but you definitely have to hunt to find it.

An old adventure, in 2003, while studying teams on ICE.