Please Start Wearing a Mask While Running

As Knvul Sheikh wrote in the New York Times:

In many Asian countries, everyone is encouraged to wear masks, and the approach is about crowd psychology and protection. If everyone wears a mask, individuals protect each other, reducing overall community transmission. The sick automatically have one on and are also more likely to adhere to keeping their mask on because the stigma of wearing one is removed.

Of course, as anyone who lives in an urban area or a neighborhood that’s densely populated knows, grocery stores and pharmacies aren’t the only public settings where it’s difficult to maintain social distancing. Sidewalks get crowded, people turn corners unexpectedly, randos emerge from behind parked cars, and neighbors lurk just on the other side of doors, bus stops, and mailboxes. Even if I am rigorous and hypervigilant in my social distancing, I can’t control the person who doesn’t want to wait for me to finish taking out my trash to walk by. I can’t stop a maskless runner from turning the corner and not noticing I’m there.

And by the way, you don’t have to live in the middle of New York City or another famously dense urban area to find yourself having to dodge maskless runners. In fact, if you are a runner who’s been psyched to get outside now that the weather is a bit nicer, surely you can relate to the rest of us who feel the same way and are outside because we want to go on walks or garden or sit on our stoops without having to worry more than we already are simply by leaving our homes.

Basically we’re all trying to find ways to relieve stress, to feel like life is a little normal, to spend less time in our homes. None of us are alone in feeling like there is a thing we really need to be able to do for our mental health right now. It’s just that we have to make sure that what we’re doing doesn’t get in anyone else’s way of prioritizing their mental health.

So, maybe you run a little slower so breathing into a mask is less unpleasant. Maybe your daily 5-miler becomes your daily masked 2-miler. Maybe you go for a masked stroll instead of a run. Maybe you check out some of SELF’s great, no-equipment-needed workouts (like our entire Spring 2020 challenge) that you can do in your home or backyard. Maybe you take up journaling or meditating or stress baking. Maybe all three!

Right now is the moment to find new ways to care for our individual health because that’s what public health demands. And because we’re not out here just following rules for the sake of following rules. We’re out here living in a society. Sure, there’s no law that says that you can’t cut people in line or that you should flush the toilet at the coffeeshop after you’ve used it. But if you regularly cut people in line and failed to flush public toilets, you’d be a shitty member of a community and your actions would cause other people to feel angry and stressed. In our new pandemic reality, the norms themselves have changed, but our obligation to follow them has not.

The thing about sheltering in place, social distancing, wearing masks, washing our hands a lot—all the things we’re doing to protect ourselves and others from coronavirus—is that they are most effective (and honestly really only work) if pretty much everyone is following those protocols. Sure you can not abide by those norms even if you have every tool at your disposal to make following them actually doable and feasible. But if you do that you’d be a shitty member of a community and your actions would cause other people to feel angry and stressed.

https://www.self.com/story/wear-a-mask, GO TO SAUBIO DIGITAL FOR MORE ANSWERS AND INFORMATION ON ANY TOPIC

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases

Take a look at our comprehensive guide to the best and most popular information ebooks and products available today on Detoxing, Colon Cleansing, Weight Loss and Dating and Romance. They are all in one spot, easy to find and compere to make a quick selection for the product that best fits your needs or wants.

Weight Loss Ebook Reviews