Practicing mindfulness and self-care when studying from home

Keeping an eye on your headspace and peace of mind is something that is super important, but often overlooked. However, when studying from home during uncertain times, it’s more important than ever to do all that you can to keep yourself in a good frame of mind so that you can study to the best of your ability.

These top tips will help you practice self care and mindfulness when studying from home, during a time when you need them the most.

Write it down

When you’re feeling a bit stressed, it can be very useful to write things down. It’s likely that you will have many things to think about at the moment and your thoughts may feel a little jumbled, that’s why writing things down matters. Getting your feelings out on paper can help you to understand them a little better and help you to re-organise your thoughts. Once your thoughts are a bit clearer, it’ll be much easier to focus on your studies and completing your work to the best of your ability.

It’s also important to write down your to-do list and any tasks you may have coming up, this can be related to both your study life and your personal life. When you’re at home it’s easy to fall into the trap of getting too comfortable and forgetting what tasks you need to do so keeping a list helps to jog your memory.

Use apps

Instead of spending hours scrolling through social media or your camera roll to put off doing that pesky piece of work you should be focusing on, why not set some time aside to use your phone, and swap the social media for wellbeing apps? Wellbeing apps can be anything from an app that helps you practice mindfulness to an app that helps you to get better at self-care.

Here’s our three favourite free well-being apps that will help you to keep in a good headspace whilst studying from home:

• The Calm app is great for meditation and has features to help you sleep better at night. Though this is a subscription service, the app includes many free resources for users without subscription.
• Headspace is another fantastic app for meditation and claims to improve focus by 14% in just ten days, which will come in very handy for your studies. In light of recent events, Headspace is offering further free meditations (without subscriptions) for users in their new section called 'Weathering the storm'.
• If you want to keep an eye on certain areas of your headspace, try out Meditopia. Meditopia has many different programmes which can help you work towards reducing stress, anxiety and insomnia.

Keep track of your emotions by using a mood tracker

Whilst studying at home you might feel quite a range of emotions, some you’re not that familiar with as in many cases, this point in time is a totally different experience.

It’s good to keep your moods in mind as they change on a day to day basis and you should take them into account when you’re planning your daily tasks.

That’s why using a mood tracker is useful, so that you can recognise when you’re feeling super productive and energetic to smash through your to-do list, and so that you can recognise the days when you’re feeling slightly anxious, down or less productive. This is important so that you can be a little more kind to yourself when it comes to setting expectations for yourself that day.

Here are 14 mood tracker apps for you to try out.

Be aware of services available to you

When studying from home, if you feel like you could do with talking to someone about your feelings, The Mind Charity offer a helpline service which you can ask them about anything including:

• where to get help near you
• mental health problems
• treatment options

There is also the option to try out the SilverCloud app. SilverCloud is a free online course to help you manage stress, anxiety and depression. You work through a series of topics selected by a therapist to address specific needs. The eight-week course is designed to be completed in your own time and at your own pace.

Although you may not need the help of the above apps and services, they're a good thing to keep in mind and to share with friends and peers who you think may benefit from them.

It’s easy to beat yourself up for many things when you’re at home studying alone, but it’s super important to try and be as kind to yourself as possible during this time. If you weren’t able to study as much as you’d have liked to one day, instead of feeling guilty and beating yourself up, try to set yourself a more achievable goal the following day. Not holding yourself to impossibly high standards and comparing yourself to others.

Check out our top tips for adapting to studying from home and also some music to help motivate you every single day!