# Mental health in the times of COVID-19
## #0
Much like everyone else in developed economies -and increasingly in developing ones as well-, I've found my freedom of movement and free assembly severely curtailed by restrictions imposed to stop the spread of COVID-19.
Rather than waiting for the onset of cabin fever, I've decided to work on maintaining (and hopefully even improving) my mental health while holed up in my flat. The first step in this process is to setup measurements of some kind. One widespread technique used to monitor the mental health of individuals is to conduct mood tracking, a sort of diary of one's emotions and life circumstances affecting those emotions.
I'll be using Feedweave to track my mood, but crucially also to experiment with various techniques to improve my mental health and report back the results, anything from exercise to meditation, from nutrition to socializing over video calls.
I'll be reporting back on two main points for each technique:
**1.Stickiness**: How difficult it is to make a habit out of it
**2. Impact: **The direction and magnitude of the effect of a technique on my mental health
I'm starting calendar week 15 with two measures: **caloric restriction** combined with **aerobic exercise**.
* **Caloric restriction: **The goal is to maintain a deficit of 500 calories per day, so I can lose 500g of fat per week and improve my terrible body-mass-index.
* _Stickiness: _I ingested 300 calories this morning and I'm constantly thinking about food, to the point that it's distracting me.
* _Impact: _I feel less groggy than normally, so that's a positive. I try to distract myself from paying attention to hunger by focusing extra hard on work. That's also a positive so far.
* **Aerobic exercise: **The goal is to work out for an hour each day to support my caloric goals, increase my sense of accomplishment and help me sleep naturally at nights.
* _Stickiness: _Woke up extra early (6am) and managed to do 30 min of aerobic exercise. Waking up early was tough, 10 min into the training, I was wide awake.
* _Impact: _I feel great, proud of starting again after months of hiatus. Got a bit winded so I know this is going to be hard, but still up for it.
**General mood: Motivated and focused **
That's it for today!