Since last year I’ve been in a Peace Corps affinity group called Volunteers Supporting Volunteers (VSV). Part of my role in this group is to edit and write articles for our monthly newsletter called Mental Health Monthly. Each month this gets sent out via email to all PCVs in China. Below is an article I wrote recently for it about optimizing mental health in the Peace Corps. Enjoy:
How often do you remember what you did yesterday? Or the day before? Last month? Maybe you keep a journal, but still find it hard to bring to mind what you ate for dinner last night without reading what it was. It’s objectively hard to keep track of these life statistics, especially with new China memories forcing their way in every day. Sometimes I find myself wishing I could take a better snapshot of what I’ve been doing than what I occasionally post on Facebook.
There are service-affirming and creative ways to do this. Keeping track of life events and falling in love with the numbers can create a new outlook towards Peace Corps service. So, if you’re like me and wish you could remember how many times you actually wore pants during high school, this article might be for you. Here are two easy, practical ways to keep track of your service that can help optimize your mental health.
PC Experience Bar
In Middle School I happily filled up my life with videogames and not with girlfriends. I played a lot of World of Warcraft. In WoW you create a character and then take them out into the world to battle monsters, level up and become more powerful. Across the bottom of the screen is a purple experience bar that looks like a long horizontal sand clock tipped over. It feels really good to fill that bar up with experience and level up.
One way to optimize mental health is to apply the same principle to experience in the Peace Corps. Literally make a Peace Corps experience bar. Tape together five to six pieces of paper and draw a long horizontal bar with twenty-six interconnected segments. Each section on the bar representing a month of service, with one extra month at the beginning and the end. Pick a favorite color highlighter and fill in each month as you move ahead in time. This creates a spread and visual of your service, what you’ve completed so far and what you have left. You can even write personal highlights or achievements as they happen under where you are on the bar. Having a visual like this can create a feeling of contentedness that can help affirm your choice to join the Peace Corps in those times of distress or doubt. Just look up at the wall and see the progress you’ve been making.
Are Excel Spreadsheets Really That Soul Crushing?
Another way to try keeping your head above water is to fall in love with numbers. That’s right, pop open a laptop and pull out that old, dusty green Excel spreadsheet application. You know, the one from that random statistics class in college? Maybe you have a small habit you want to develop or a bad one you want to get rid of. The trick is to apply a few numbers to it. Find something you can track that you think will improve your life and immerse it into the Excel experience.
I wanted to optimize my morning routine. So I Excelled it up. First, I wrote down seven things that I thought would help make my day better if I did them in the morning. I put those things in columns. For example:
The trick was to give myself a score by determining my daily average out of seven. If I did a thing in the morning, I put in a 1. If I didn’t, I put a 0. Keeping track like this helped me remember what I did, but also gave me some hard hints as to where I could improve. After a month, the knowledge was there, but I was too lazy to apply it. It doesn’t matter. Simply put, the process of actively gathering personal data like this can vault the brain onto a platform of higher thinking. By thinking hard about what we’re doing, or just looking over what we did last month, we can put things in perspective and realize what we did.
Originally posted in an old blog.
My Peace Corps timeline of service.
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