How To Stay Healthy while living in a confined space

It's not easy staying healthy when you live in a confined space.

The challenge to maintain your health and wellness becomes that much more difficult when you're not even allowed to leave your apartment.

The quarantining that has taken place around the globe due to the coronavirus has left millions of apartment dwellers struggling to maintain their physical health and their mental sanity as they remain cooped up in relatively confined spaces. If you can relate, here are a few tips and suggestions to help you keep your body strong and your mind sharp throughout the pandemic.

1. Address your environment

It's always important to consider your environment when you're working with a small space. When it comes to setting up a healthy apartment, it's important that you start with the basics.

Look for anything from pest infestations to exposed wiring, broken stairs, missing smoke detectors, poor ventilation and really anything else that can significantly affect good hygiene and cleanliness in your living space.

Most of these are the responsibility of your landlord to take care of, but they can't address an issue if you don't bring it to their attention first.

2. Be energy efficient

Energy efficiency and health are more closely linked than one might imagine. Keeping your apartment at a comfortable temperature with proper insulation and ventilation can have a huge effect on your overall health and wellness. For instance, having quality air can reduce allergies, as well as both cardiovascular and respiratory diseases.

With these health concerns in mind, it's worth taking some time to address energy inefficiencies throughout your apartment, such as:

Sealing cracks and gaps in windows and doors
Replacing air filters when necessary
Using natural light whenever possible
Utilizing a ceiling fan to distribute heat

3. Exercise creatively

Limited space doesn't have to confine you to a lack of exercise. There are many ways to get cardiovascular exercise without ever stepping foot outside of an apartment. You can begin by findinga good fitness app to help you stay accountable as you exercise.

Then, look for an >exercise regimen that you can embrace within your space. A 7-minute workout requires very little room. YouTube is filled with cardio routines that can easily be done in a living room. If all else fails, you can even resort to good, old-fashioned push-ups and sit-ups.

4. Gauge your mental condition

When it comes to mental health, it's important to stay on guard against nasty threats like stress, anxiety and depression. One way to help assess your mental status is to go over a list of cognitive distortions and consider if you're struggling with any of them.

If you can identify that you're overgeneralizing, catastrophizing, jumping to conclusions or anything else, it can help you catch yourself mid-thought and shift into a more positive pattern of thinking.

5. Practice preventative health care

While health care is often considered as an option once you're already struggling with a health concern, the prevention of illness is equally important in the eyes of the modern healthcare worker.

If you can catch a potential danger to your mind or body early in the process, you can save both yourself and the health care system from needing to deal with a larger issue in the future. This is particularly important with the strain currently being put on the global health care system. Proper preventative care can encompass a variety of things.

For instance, you can make healthy food choices and try to sleep well (7 to 9 hours per night for an average adult). You can also utilize things like telemedicine to contact a nurse or physician if you're concerned about a health issue but don't think it warrants setting up a normal doctor's appointment.

Staying healthy in small spaces during a pandemic

Staying healthy starts with basic considerations, like healthy eating, proper sleeping and regular exercise. From there, it's worth investigating your living environment, analyzing your mind for negative thought patterns and utilizing preventative health care measures to keep yourself safe and sound.