Whenever we feel an inner emptiness, when someone or something is missing from our life, we feel the urgent need to immediately fill it the gap with something else. We often fill in with work, worries, responsibilities, but very often with material things. These things and stuff are often completely useless and only contribute to our innes restlessness. It is so hard for us to accept the emptiness in our lives – free space, free time that helps us breathe and give ourselves a moment to relax. This flight after filling the gaps, is due very often to the difficulty of coping with what’s missing in our life, with the loss.

We need to be able to accept these goals, to get accustomed with some losses from our life and not to hurry to fill in what is remaining. Even though it is a loss, we might be happy because there is so much room to build something new and we need to remain open for what is not defined yet. For the potential that might appear. That gives us great freedom to do and to be. When our schedule is overloaded and there is no time available for thinking about what might be, we miss the opportunity to discover and to explore, to learn new things and to develop ourselves. I have heard at some point in time the idea that during the pandemic, people found themselves stuck in the house, with a lot of free time not knowing how to fill it and how to stay with themselves. Maybe it’s true for some cases, but let’s not forget the ones who had to juggle between several roles simultaneously.

Even though the idea of working from home is giving us the the apparent feeling that we have more time for ourselves, we find ourselves very often in the situation of not finding time for taking care of us. On the contrary – our tendency is to do more and more, to work more, to assume more household, to worry more for what we could have done better or different. Time for ourselves remains on the last place from our lists, because we want to take advantage of every second in order to solve other tasks, to reach other results. If we find ourselves we some free time, instead of following the tendency to fill it with other tasks and responsibilities, we should take profit of it and block it for relaxation.

Now more than ever, we need to plan our free time, to make sure that we recharge our batteries because we are at highest risk to suffer from burn out. Instead of trying to complete the gaps of prepandemic social life with more work, we should take care of ourselves, not to lose the contact with others and to pay attention more to our self-care. More than ever we need to have a discipline of personal care, to allocate time for this and to find other opportunities for relaxing and feeding our wellbeing. Somehow we want to compensate what we lost during this pandemic and it is not easy to cope with the ambiguity, to find new ways of living and especially to find the joy of life.

This article is for those that cannot separate from their work and faced with the current situation, have mixed their personal life with the professional one in a high extent. Working from home became very comfortable and at the same time came with its side effects: for most of us it is very difficult to end the working activity and to relax. If not planned in the first phase, the self-care will not be a priority, but will remain as an ideal, never possible and never tangible. For not keeping it only on your wish list, you need to plan it and to make sure that you are obliged first to follow a schedule till it becomes a habit: for example, instead of planning to do sport at home, you would better go and walk in the park with a friend. Without a commitment, you will never start to do something for your health and your wellbeing, not succeeding to renounce to your work engagements.