After it passes: a recovery checklist

Advice tends to stop at the moment things settle, as though the settling were the end. It is not. What follows is often several hours of low ceiling — slow thinking, a short fuse, a body that feels like it has done something strenuous. That is ordinary and it is worth having a plan for, because in that state a plan is much easier than a decision.

Use whatever is useful. Skip the rest. A checklist you get halfway through has worked.

The first hour

1. Get water and something to eat, even if it is small and even if you are not hungry.
2. Change one condition in the room. Lower the light, open a window, turn something off.
3. Take off anything tight — shoes, a collar, a waistband.
4. Put your phone in another room, or on silent and face down, for a while.
5. If you are cold, get warm. This is more often the problem than people expect.
6. Do not make any decision that would be hard to reverse. Not tonight.

The rest of the day

1. Cancel one thing. Pick the one that would cost most and cancel that one.
2. Say no to anything new. "Not today" is a complete sentence and requires no reason after it.
3. Choose an activity with no unknown in it — a programme you have seen, a game you know, a walk on a route you could do without thinking.
4. If you are with people, you are allowed to be quietly present rather than conversational.
5. Go to bed earlier than you think you need to.

Permission, stated plainly. Doing less today is a reasonable response to having done something hard. It is not a debt. Tomorrow does not have to make up for it, and there is no total that has to balance by Sunday.

What you do not have to do

1. You do not have to explain it — not to a flatmate, not to a friend, not to whoever saw part of it. "I had a rough afternoon" is enough, and so is nothing.
2. You do not have to apologise for having needed to leave a room.
3. You do not have to work out what it meant tonight. That is much easier in two days.

If you want to say something and cannot find the words, this works: That was a hard one. I am alright. I would rather not go through it now.

Before the next one: check conditions, not character

The useful question afterwards is not what is wrong with you. It is what was loaded that day. Have a look at the ordinary variables, ideally the following morning rather than the same night:

• Sleep — how much, and how broken, in the two nights before.
• Food and water — how long the gap had been.
• Noise, light and people — how many hours of unavoidable input you had taken by that point.
• Stacking — how many demanding things sat in the same day. Three moderate ones often cost more than one large one.
• Warning — whether something changed at short notice, and how short.
• Recovery gaps — whether there had been any time alone since the last demanding thing.

Write down whichever two showed up. Over a few instances a pattern usually appears, and it is almost always about conditions that can be adjusted rather than a fixed fact about you. A day with four back-to-back commitments and a four-hour sleep is a hard day for anyone; it is not a verdict.

What the setting can do

Recovery time is the adjustment that almost never gets offered, and it is cheap.

Departments and workplaces can build in the gap rather than expecting people to claim it: no seminar directly after a three-hour lab, a standing rule that nobody is expected to reply to messages within an hour of a difficult meeting, one deferral per term on a piece of coursework taken without a written reason. Halls and shared houses can agree that leaving a room needs no explanation, and that nobody follows.

Any of these is worth raising with a course rep, a personal tutor, a hall manager or a line manager, framed as scheduling rather than as something about you. Is there any way to get a gap between those two sessions? is a timetabling question, and timetabling questions get answered.

If things feel heavier than a page like this can meet, talking to a person is a reasonable next step: a friend, a GP, or a university counselling service.