Meet Your Inner Life –

MAY 12, 2020 – With her basic expenses covered by unemployment insurance — and no happy hours or social obligations costing her money — Thai has been following her instincts every day; doing Zoom workout classes, going on long walks with her dog, attempting complex recipes, and taking up gardening. Other practices, like meditation and writing in a gratitude journal, have replaced a routine she previously characterized as “always go-go-go.”

“They say it takes 21 days to create a habit, right? And we’re on day 40-something,” she says at the end of April. “I’ve created these habits; so hopefully they’ll continue carrying on with my life.” … In addition to temperament, circumstance factors heavily into whether someone might be thriving at this time and rarely does that circumstance involve having children at home to entertain and educate. For a very specific segment of parents, however, quarantine might be ideal.

“People who had kids told us that one of the hardest things about having a newborn is that you feel kind of stuck,” explains Kristin Carlson, 34, a new mother who gave birth four weeks ago. “It’s just such a drastic change in your life that it can be very jolting, but I guess we’d already had a drastic change of being stuck at home and not going anywhere so we’d crossed that bridge.”

@LATimes