The great indoors

Thanks to the spread of COVID-19, people across the state are discovering that they have an unexpected amount of free time and fewer options to fill it. Staying home means staying home, which is apparently new territory for a lot of people.

Don't worry though. I'm here to help.

As something of an expert of staying home, I've put together some tips to help you get through the long evenings that you used to fill by "going places" and "doing things."

1. Decide what to do, or don't. Either way kills time.

So you're home for the evening. There's nowhere to go, so you've got to make your own fun.

The good news is that you have so many options. There's that book you've been meaning to read. There's that TV series you've been meaning to watch. The video game you haven't played yet. The project you haven't had time to start. This is a great time to do any of those things.

The bad news is that you have so many options, and option paralysis is a real thing. As anybody that's ever tried to watch something on Netflix knows, it's all too easy to spend ample amounts of time just scrolling through the library looking for something to watch.

This same phenomenon can apply at multiple levels. After all, your time is precious and you don't want to waste it by spending it on an unworthy endeavor. An hour or two spent fiddling with your social media while the background processes of your mind tries to decide what to do is time well spent. Or, at least, it's time spent. Which was the point to begin with.

Time marches on at the same rate whether you've cracked open that book or watched that video of the people rescuing a stuck animal. And then watched it again with the sound on.

2. Walk out to the kitchen, look in the fridge, decide you're not hungry enough to make anything, and return to whatever it was you were doing.

Staying inside all the time doesn't offer many opportunities for exercise. Well, it does actually. If you really wanted, you could use this time to do as many sit-ups, pushups, and squats as your body can manage so that you'll be fitter and leaner when it's time to return to the outside world.

You won't though. If you were capable of that kind of self-discipline then gyms wouldn't exist. Still, it's important to stretch your legs once in a while between gaming sessions or television binges.

So get up and move around. Walk over to the fridge and look inside. You're not hungry right now, but it doesn't hurt to check. If you're feeling really ambitious you can also take a detour over to the pantry and have a look in there.

Keep in mind that, be it the fridge or the cupboard, you already know what's in there. After all, you bought the groceries and put them in there. It's not like the Keebler Elves snuck in and stocked your shelves with surprise cookies while you weren't looking.

The point of this exercise, and I'm using the term generously here, isn't really about finding food or even about taking a mental inventory of what you have in stock for future meals. It's more about reminding your legs that they do still have a function while at the same time giving you the opportunity to tell yourself that you passed up an opportunity to make yourself something to eat. You could have heated up some leftovers or picked up that bag of chips. Instead, you did the responsible thing by pouring a glass of water and going back to whatever it was that you were doing.

Doing this won't reduce the calories you bring in later when you eventually decide to eat an entire frozen pizza, but it'll make you feel a little better about it.

3. Try (and fail) to maintain a normal sleep schedule.

After you've spent two or three hours dinking around deciding what to do, broken up by a couple fruitless trips into the kitchen of course, it's time to buckle down and start something.

Of course at this point the sun has gone down and you should consider getting ready for bed, but that impulse will be overridden by your newfound sense of focus. One more episode of that show, or one more attempt at that level, or one more chapter in that book. After all, you'll eventually get tired on your own and go to bed at the appropriate time. Right?

No. Of course you won't. Once you're in the zone, the hours will fly by before you know it. Had you started earlier in the evening you might have noticed this before 2 a.m. But you didn't, and now you're left deciding if it's worth it to try to catch a few hours of shut-eye or to just power on through.

The problem is that you're not even tired. Had you had a normal day's worth of physical activity, your body would make the decision of when to sleep for you. When you start dropping the book on your face, it's time to turn off the light and go to bed.

Unfortunately, you've eaten enough calories to run a marathon but haven't actually moved more than 30 feet at a time all day. Meanwhile, that video game has put you into a Zen-like state that seems to supersede the normal passage of time. At least for a while.

Don't worry, you'll start to feel it just as the sun comes up. Fortunately, you don't have anywhere to go in the morning anyway.

Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and is kind of uncomfortable with how little exaggeration is in this column.