An astronaut's guide to surviving isolation

By ITS Education Asia

Here is a really great article from the BBC for all those people struggling to survive the isolation of being in lockdown. It gives some really practical suggestions that may help many parents, students and individuals keep their sanity in these difficult times.

As we grapple with our new routines, what advice can we glean from people who have already spent months in isolation? To find out, we caught up with two NASA experts. The first is Kjell Lindgren, an astronaut who spent 141 days in space aboard the International Space Station (ISS) in 2015 with five crewmates. The second is Jocelyn Dunn, a human performance engineer who spent eight months living inside a dome habitat with five fellow volunteers as part of a Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (Hi-Seas) mission in 2014 and 2015. Here’s what they suggest.

• Stay busy and make a schedule
• Don’t dwell on the negative and forgive yourself for making mistakes
• Communicate expectations to your crew
• Do fun things with your crew but also spend time by yourself
• Work out
• Expect conflict to happen
• Mentally prepare for the long haul
• Remind yourself of the big picture

Some great ideas in this excellent and interesting article.