In the first week of lockdown, being at home either sitting on my chair or lying on my bed for the whole entire day had made me lack the motivation to put in the effort to try and improve my physical, social and mental wellness. It was a pretty new situation for me, and I didn’t feel like wanting to do anything new as I didn’t know what was going to happen next, and was overall very confused with the whole situation.

During P.E class, as it was remote learning, I had the choice to choose what physical activity I would do during that period. Due to my lack of motivation, I tended to choose workouts that weren’t challenging and something that would need very minimum effort. I would have days with bursts of energy, and on those days I would do too challenging workouts that would tire me out, resulting in a cycle of one energized day leading to a longer unmotivated period – This continued for around the first 3 weeks of the circuit breaker. During these 3 weeks, every subject required projects, homework, and tests to be submitted at a very fast pace which was one of the factors that influenced my mental well being and motivation for my physical wellbeing.

However, I started planning out my days taking into account the importance of having a balance of physical, mental, and social wellbeing for P.E, where I would take note of activities I did on a Padlet – updating it every day for 3 weeks and reflecting at the end of each week. This really helped me to give me the motivation to get back into having a routine to workout more regularly, but it also made me feel more productive and organized throughout the week. In the second week, I was able to see how much I did the week before, which acted as the fuel to make me want to continue as I wanted to see that progress at the end. It reminded me to start doing things that helped with my mental wellness, such as reading books which I haven’t done in a while, and spending more time with my family – something I didn’t have a chance to do before the lockdown as my brother was abroad in University while my dad would go on business trips regularly.

IMG_2467 This lockdown made me realize that all aspects of wellness connect to each other, and each aspect helps to boost one another. In the 2nd week of logging my wellness, I started to challenge myself to a workout challenge. In the first week, I could see the difference it made not only physically, but also mentally – it gave me more energy during the day and I was able to get better sleep which made my mood better in the morning. I also realized that being in touch with nature is very important to refresh myself from being inside and sitting down for a very long period of time. On rare occasions, I went out with my mum to go for a walk. At first, I really didn’t understand the reason why I had to as I would only think of the negative consequences, but once I did, seeing actual people other than my family in real life and feeling the wind blow on me that wasn’t from the AC had me realize the importance of being in touch with nature for my mental wellness.

Overall, this lockdown helped me understand the benefit of physical exercise, spending time with my family, and nature – most things that I took for granted before.