Activities to Help You Face the COVID Wall

We’ve hit a wall with COVID-19. After quarantining for over a year, most of us are getting tired. Research indicates that novelty could qualify as a basic psychological need, and novelty is something we’re severely lacking as we sit on our couches watching Netflix for the 96th week in a row. 

An interest in novel stimuli begins in infancy, with infants showing an interest in patterns that differ from what they’ve seen before. As adults, we try new things just for the sake of novelty. For instance, we purchase a new shampoo brand even while we’re satisfied with our current product just because we want to try something new. Novelty improves our well-being, but just changing our hair products probably isn’t going to be sufficient to make up for the time we’ve been locked indoors during quarantine. 

Take an Online Vacation

If you feel a strong desire to get on a plane and fly to another country right now, I feel you. 

• The Drive & Listen site gives you the experience of driving around cities across the world, from Buenos Aires to Budapest, while listening to radio stations from your chosen city. The driving video is surprisingly high-definition and really gives the feeling of driving down the city streets, especially when street noises are turned on. 

• Take a virtual tour. Want to go to Disney World? YouTube channel Virtual WDW offers videos of Disney rides like Frozen Ever After or Tower of Terror. If you want to travel outside of the U.S., another option is a virtual walk through the catacombs of Paris, an underground eighteenth century cemetery that includes an ossuary, or room where the bones of the dead are stacked upon each other. If that’s too spooky, the Guggenheim Museum offers virtual tours for large groups and images of their collection online.  

• Geoguessr zooms you into a random location in the world and has you guess where you are. You can use Geoguessr Free for free all day long, which gives you a 2D panorama of a location from all over the world, or play Geoguessr Classic for $1.99 per month for a 360 degree Google Maps view. It’s unexpectedly difficult to figure out where in the world you could be!  

Learn a New Skill

Learning a new skill is a double dose of psychological satisfaction because according to research, setting and meeting goals is another strong source of happiness. 

An easy one I’ve tried recently is candle making, which only requires the following materials (I ordered from Amazon): 

• Double boiler

• Soy wax

• Jars (I used an 8 ounce jar)

• Candle wicks

• Essential oil (any fragrance you prefer!)

• Candle color blocks (optional)

For an 8 ounce jar, I melted 1.5 cups of wax in the double boiler by placing it on top of a pot of heated water. Once the wax was melted, I stirred in small amounts of the color block (I used a little bit of red to create pink) until the desired color was achieved, then removed the pot from heat and added essential oil for fragrance. I then placed the wick in the center of the candle jar, balanced against a pencil to keep it centered, and poured the melted wax into the jar. Wait a couple hours and voila, candle!

Spa Day

How often are you chilling out and pampering yourself? Probably not enough. Oftentimes we’re searching for happiness when tranquility might be more accessible. Indulge your senses on a calm night in. Some suggested activities:

• Light a candle

• Make a cup of tea (my favorite is green tea with sage leaves, honey, and a lemon slice)

• Wash your face and put on a moisturizing facemask

• Listen to relaxing music with the sound of rain in the background (on a computer, put on your music and then pull up a tab of rain sounds in YouTube)

• Paint your nails

• Take a bubble bath (with a book!)

Date Night

So you might be stuck at home, but you can pretend you’re not. If you have a significant other (or even if you don’t), consider going out...by staying in. Order takeout and eat it with the lights off and candles lit. Go to the fake club by setting up string lights, putting on a playlist of your favorite music and dance! When you’re done, take an ASMR taxi ride back home...from your home. 

Game Day

Socialization is one of the best ways to get your daily dose of novelty. Your friends are strange and unpredictable and that’s the best thing about them. There is an array of online games for groups of friends to play together, even beyond the popular Among Us. I recommend downloading Discord, a free platform where you and your friends can video chat and stream games you’re playing for cases where you and your friends all want to see the same screen. Below are some of my favorite suggestions for online games to play with a group of friends:

1. Longwave is free to play for 2+ players. This is a game that gives you a point on a scale, like unimportant to important, plain to fancy, or bad movie to good movie, and asks you to give an answer that falls at that same point on the scale. Your teammates will see your answer and guess where the scalepoint is. 

2. Codenames is another free online game for 4+ players. In this game, you’re given 25 words, some of which are words for your team. The Spymasters for each team must give a single-word clue that hints at as many of your team’s words as possible. Is ‘water’ more similar to ‘pool’ and ‘whale’ or ‘pool’ and ‘ice’?

3. Jackbox Party Pack games are available for download on Steam for $25-30, and they’re worth the money. Each pack comes with around five games. Jackbox Party Pack 7, the most recent in the series, includes Talking Points, a game where you have to come up with a TED talk on the fly based on random slide images; Champ’d Up, where you and your friends draw your own champions and then battle them; and Quiplash 3 (pictured above), where you answer sassy prompts with your funniest (or stupidest) jokes. 

Quarantine is a lot to handle, but it won’t last forever. In the meantime, we can keep finding novel experiences online and at home. 

Sources:

1. file:///C:/Users/kk3rp/Downloads/Novelty-Variety%20MS_preprint%20(1).pdf

2. https://dictionary.apa.org/novelty