15 Things You May Obsess Over During The Quarantine

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Idle hands are the devil’s playground. We’ve all heard it. We’ve all lived it. Almost any time in your life you were too fixated on one thing, it’s because you didn’t have enough going on. When you got wrapped up in that dead-end relationship, it was because you didn’t know what you wanted to do with your career. When you obsessed over having the perfect garden and putting up angry notes around the neighborhood about people not walking on your garden, it was because you had just gone through a breakup. A void will make us obsess over minute things because, well, it’s all we have. This pandemic and the ensuing quarantine has put us all in a state of some boredom. It’s not by our own doing (well, it is by those who aren’t wearing their damn masks!). But we don’t have the resources we normally would to get out of this funk, get busy, get active, have fun, and forget about that one thing we were obsessing over. My friend owns an outdoor furniture company and he says he’s never gotten so many phone calls about complaints over the tiniest things than he has during this pandemic, because people are bored! And they’re fixating on small things. For some, it’s that outdoor furniture. What is it for you? Here are things you might obsess over during the pandemic.

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Your home décor

Since we’re spending so much time at home, we’re really honing in on every little detail of the home. That shelf should be an inch higher. Those accent pillows aren’t quite the right color. This bedspread doesn’t match the walls well enough. We don’t have enough art in that corner. We are stuck in our homes so we need them to be perfect and are obsessing over every little thing.

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Your home cleanliness

Home cleanliness can be another thing that gets to us, especially if we’re used to having professional housekeeping services come in, and now we’re doing it all ourselves. Every speck of dust and layer of film can keep us up at night. Cleaning your home also has a way of making you feel in control, during a time when we feel we have so little control over things.

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Your social media presence

This is another thing that gives us some sense of power right now when we’re all so powerless: our social media following. A lot of people are increasing their efforts on social media right now. Every time you see you have a new follow or friend request, you feel like, in some little way, you’re taking the control back in your life.

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Perceived slights

You may feel like people have become very rude lately. Funny enough, you’re seeing people less than ever, but every little slight upsets you. Why weren’t you invited to the social distance hang at the park with those four vague acquaintances? Why did that person take so long to text back? Are you not important to her?! You’re just bored…and your mind is playing tricks on you.

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What is everyone else doing??

There is this major FOMO going on, but it’s also all an illusion. It feels like everybody must be having fun or finding some way to beat this quarantine in a way we know nothing about. We feel left out. Everybody must be having some secret adventures. We need to know what everyone is doing! We see a photo of someone on a hike. We ask “Where was that? When was that? Was it good?!”

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The perfect lounge clothes

There is a whole shopping category of cute lounge clothes. Casual luxury. High-end yoga pants. Those wonderful cardigans with the shawl collars. You may start to obsess over perfecting your lounging wardrobe because you do so much lounging. You stay up at night, deciding between drawstring pants.

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Is that neighbor coughing?

If you hear someone in the building cough, you’re on the case to figure out who it is, is it repetitive, and do they have COVID-19? You’ve started pressing your ear to all of the walls in your place, seeing if you can catch the cough again. You’re wandering around the building, listening outside of windows, and asking others if they’ve heard anyone coughing.

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Your bank account

Most of us are stressed about money right now. We all experienced some shift, most likely. Whether it was a job loss or a salary cut or a decrease of clients or having to close our business for a while. So we’re looking at our bank accounts, every day, obsessed with that number. Is it going down or up? Is it staying the same? We’re reviewing and reviewing statements to make sure everything is correct.

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How much you sleep

We’re allowed to sleep more right now – well, many of us are, at least. If you aren’t going into an office, you can sleep a little extra because you don’t have to commute. If you aren’t working, you can really sleep extra. But for many, the opportunity to sleep more actually puts pressure on us to rest more, which can upset our sleep. Aaaah!

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Cleaning out your inbox

Many of us didn’t have the time before to acknowledge all of those newsletters we didn’t mean to subscribe to that are filling up our inboxes. We just had to accept that we lived that way. Now, personally, I’m watching my inbox like a hawk. I’m unsubscribing left and right. It’s just one more way of gaining control.

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Not wasting food

The quicker you go through your food, the sooner you have to return to the grocery store. Right now, this is upsetting for two reasons: 1) it means you have to leave the safety of your home and potentially interact with the COVID-19 virus and 2) it means you have to spend money again at a time when finances may be tight. So you’re trying to plan your meals to a T so no morsel of food goes bad.

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Anti-aging

I personally feel like some of my prime beauty years are being wasted in my apartment. I’m not huge on posting selfies every day, so the best I can do is try to preserve my youth so that I emerge from this thing looking exactly the way I did when I went into it – if not better. I’m obsessing over the progression of every fine line and wrinkle.

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Finding the best deal

I’ve never had so much time to search the entire Internet for the best deal on…whatever I’m getting. I’ll spend a half hour looking for coupons for a lap desk that’s already pretty inexpensive as it is. Just knowing there may be a better deal out there keeps me up at night.

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The news

And finally, the news. We’re all obsessing over the news. Do we have the most up-to-date news? Or the most accurate? Is it unbiased? Does this channel cover everything? We want to know the most recent news on the pandemic, all of the time. If we hear something from somebody we didn’t hear from the news, we ask “When did you hear that? Where? From what network??”