After 14 months predicting what the ‘new normal’ will be, there are now glimmers of old normality returning; and whilst some are jumping headlong into every lift of restrictions, others are more hesitant.
It’s understandable that some of us will struggle to come out of being locked down and have to readjust to new routines and social expectations, but what seems to have come as a surprise is that this rebalancing is exhausting.
Recently, Rachel Rossiter tweeted that for someone whose ‘life flows with established patterns based on the school year’ having this taken away has created an ‘unsettled equilibrium’. This clearly resonated even beyond education as followers replied with how the sudden shift from regular life to the home office and no social reprieve had messed with their natural order of things.
My theory is that we’ve had to shift where we have our monotony because we’re not getting it where we normally do. There’s been so much change in the parts of life that have pattern (like school), where we’d normally do the ‘new’, on-a whim stuff to break the monotony (like going for a meal or weekend away) we have created a new, unfulfilling, monotony through never ending Netflix.
In their book ‘Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard‘, Chip and Dan Heath discuss research that shows ‘self-control is an exhaustible resource’ and when we ask people to change things, we’re asking them to alter behaviours that have become automatic. Change involves conscious self-control of new behaviours and if this self-control is exhausted it’s harder to think creatively, inhibit impulses and ‘persist in the face of frustration and failure’. They conclude this section of the book by saying: ‘Change is hard because people wear themselves out. […] What looks like laziness is often exhaustion.’
Whilst they are discussing change in terms of personal goals or at an organisation level, it’s not a huge leap to see how this relates to the past year. Covid has meant adapting to some serious changes. Some of these were massive and happened very quickly but there have been other, smaller, ongoing changes that seem relentless. We have coped with this by reducing change where we can; to avoid exhaustion, we’ve shifted where we experience change.
We’ve created a new pattern to our lives and probably dealt as well as we have with social freedoms being taken away because that’s where we’ve been able to reduce old ‘change’ to enable processing of the enforced changes. We’ve developed a new monotony but because it isn’t in the right place it doesn’t feel right and doesn’t quite do the trick. It’s hard to come out of lockdown because there’s still too much change going on; what we feel is internal resistance to un-lockdown may actually be fatigue to change.
Whilst schools are starting to get back to the regular pattern of things, we’re still not ‘normal’ and as we enter a time of year that always comes with changes, this year the prospect of change may be more exhausting. As people’s capacity for change varies, plans for the new year may be causing additional anxiety. Whether this is roles or colleagues changing, new management, or the drip-feed-trailing of changes as a big surprise to look forward to; leaders need to bear in mind that what looks like laziness or resistance to change, could actually be exhaustion.
People want security and that’s even more likely at the moment. We crave security – something to fall back on when we’ve tried something new. In ‘Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking‘, Susan Cain discusses the idea of ‘restorative niches’ as a place to go to ‘return to your true self’. For introverts like me this can be taking my break away from other people, working in solitude at 6am on a Saturday, or scheduling down-time after socially demanding events. Everyone will be dealing with changes to their lives differently and getting back to the normal of going out, hugging, road trips and holidays is what many of us crave, but after so much uncertainty, more uncertainty of change takes more of a toll and we can help ourselves by identifying where we will find our own restorative niche, and where we can support those around us to access theirs.
Our safe structure and pattern of life has changed. And it hasn’t just changed and stuck there, it’s shifted and twisted. We’ve gone along with it because we have to but it’s exhausting and all we want more than ever is a pause. Breathing space to get used to a rhythm – either the old one or a new one; but a regular one. We need to work out where we fit into the new pattern so we can get back to doing those nice, random things that take us away from the monotony, and enable us to do the monotony really well.
Impression That I Get 