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Hope you are doing well, taking care and staying safe.
India has witnessed a rollercoaster of week with the overwhelmed healthcare infrastructure to social media coming to rescue. Stay strong, help each other and lets overcome this challenge together. If you are looking for any resource, please mail to us- we would try to amplify it and get you verified sources for the same.
This week we talk about the emotion which is dominant in all of us, surge in cases in India, and zoom fatigue.
Are you going through languishing?
When someone asks ‘How are you?’, what comes to your mind these days? and what do you say?
‘I don’t know, Can’t describe it, Something’s off, can’t say.’
Well, there’s a word for it- ‘Languishing’. It is a sense of stagnant feeling of emptiness. When we are languishing, we are neither mentally ill nor well. It hampers our ability to focus and dulls our motivation. Dr Corey Keyes, the sociologist who coined the term languishing in 2002 said that we may not feel burnt out or hopeless, we sure don’t feel like we’re flourishing.
A few tips to help you go through this feeling:
Set boundaries- Divide tasks on a priority basis and give your full attention to those tasks in the particular periods.
Have some ‘me’ time to relax and just do what you love- Play with your pet, Paint, bake, listen to music.
Journal your thoughts- it helps in articulating your ideas, feelings and emotions.
Rather than focusing on a big target, for example- To finish a book in a day, focus on small goals- ten pages per day. So that you don’t exhaust or overwhelm yourself.
Stay hydrated- Fluids work every time. Whenever you feel stuck, they fill you with new energy.
(Sources: Irish Times, New York Times )
Virtual meetings and Exhaustion
Are you feeling tired and weak after overwhelming video conferences? Are you feeling like you lack the motivation and energy to finish your tasks? Well, there’s a word for it, and it is called ‘Zoom Fatigue’.
A team of researchers at the University of Gothenburg collected responses from 10,500 people on a Zoom & Exhaustion Fatigue scale. It covered five types of Fatigue experienced during video calls, which were general, social, emotional, visual and motivational.
1 in 7 women reported feeling “very” to “extremely” fatigued after Zoom calls and 1 in 20 men complained of a similar feeling. Researchers suggested one main reason for this feeling is ‘mirror anxiety’ where people often get conscious by looking at their image in the camera.
How to deal with the zoom fatigue-
Start team meetings with individual check-ins and ice breakers.
Introduce agenda items designed around the topics on which everyone has an opinion.
Encourage Mini-Breaks in between calls.
Switching to phone calls or emails whenever possible.
(Sources: NYTimes, Harvard Business Review, Swaddle)
What led to surge in Covid cases in India?
Just when we were hoping that Coronavirus could not create more havoc, the National Task Force for Covid-19 brought into light that they had detected around 24,300 mutations in 7,000 variants of the virus in the country which has caused the cases in the country to skyrocket.
India has been recording more than 3,00,000 cases per day and more than 2,000 deaths. Doctors and scientists are still in the process of understanding the cause of this sudden surge. The primary reasons which have come to the forefront:
Variants: Scientists blame Double mutations of the coronavirus for causing the catastrophe spreading across India.
Violation of social distancing norms: There was a sudden decline in the cases during the starting months of 2021, through which people let their guard down and stopped following the protocol by violating the social distancing norms in public, not wearing masks etc.
Distress over resources:
Where is the oxygen? - As the country witnessed a downward trend in cases till last month, construction of covid-19 facilities and procurement of oxygen was halted. Many state governments also lowered their capacity and with the new tsunami of cases the healthcare system found itself unprepared both at public and private levels.
Medicines- Even after assurance in March that there would be no shortage of medicines, the situation on the ground is far from being ideal. In an on-ground investigation, India Today found several touts and pharmaceutical vendors black-marketing the drug six times its official price.
(Sources: Aljazeera, India Spend, Guardian, India Today)
What else is happening?
The US refused to export the raw material to India for vaccine production. On the other hand, India’s allies and neighbours have extended help- offering remdesivir and oxygen supply, tech support and ambulances.
On a positive note, Bhutan and Israel performed remarkably well in inoculating their population. The former managed to vaccinate 93% of its adult population in less than two weeks and the latter started its vaccination drive much earlier in December 2020 and vaccinated 64% of its population, reaching herd immunity.
All the adults (18 and above) are eligible for the Covid-19 vaccination program starting from May 1. Online registration on the Co-Win platform is mandatory now which can be done from. 28th April.
Joe Biden has declared this decade as a ‘decisive decade’ for tackling climate change and pledges to cut its carbon emissions by 50-52% by 2030.
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