By CHARLOTTE HIGGINS & MARISSA GALARDI

It’s a struggle to get out of bed as assignments are piling on, the headache worsens and face-to-face interaction hasn’t been an option for over a week.

Rachel Miyazaki, a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences, spent more than two weeks in isolation last winter after testing positive for COVID-19.

“I never want to do that again,” Miyazaki said. “That was brutal.”

Miyazaki, who lives off-campus and has three roommates, said that isolating in separate rooms away from her friends was one of the hardest parts of the experience. 

She said Facetiming with her roommates was helpful “but it was also kind of torturous in a way just because I knew that they were right across the hall from me and I couldn’t see them.”

Miyazaki said being in isolation was detrimental to her mental health, motivation and academic performance.

“I was pretty depressed and unmotivated to finish anything being trapped in a small place like that,” Miyazaki said.

“[In quarantine] there’s less access to everything that makes mental health functional,” said Maddie Moore, mental health practitioner with Student Counseling Services. 

“There’s less access to your support system, less access to physical activity, less access to the outdoors, sunshine, less access to fun,” Moore said. “So you’re just kind of cut off from all of the things that help you cope.”

The Lancet reported that “longer durations of quarantine were associated with poorer mental health specifically, post-traumatic stress symptoms, avoidance behaviors, and anger.”

Moore said that quarantine and isolation have a unique effect on students because of the stresses associated with classes and extracurriculars. 

“You still are expected to maintain all of your responsibilities academically, personally, socially, yet you aren’t able to in the same way — if at all,” she said.

Pandemic isolation affects students differently by age as well. While freshmen lose the ability to connect with campus and become involved, some seniors can no longer partake in major milestones or the final interactions with their campus and professors.

FaceTime has played a role in keeping people of all ages connected, the Atlantic reports.

Moore offered similar advice to students on strategies to stay positive during quarantine.

“Stay connected and keep calling friends,” she said. “I think FaceTime [or Zoom]  is important … you need to see peoples’ smiling faces. That goes a long way.”

Moore also said that trying to stay active and having some kind of routine can also be helpful.

She said that although quarantine and isolation can be detrimental to mental health, it can also provide an opportunity to rest.

“I just know so many Creighton students are hardworking perfectionists who don’t allow for a lot of downtime. I think my biggest thing to advocate for is just to slow down,” Moore said. “If you don’t have a routine, if you sleep in, if you miss something, if you don’t do it all at 110%, that’s OK.”

In the article “Finding Joy: Staying Entertained And Happy During The COVID-19 Pandemic” by John Shumway, it ends by stating, “Some day down the road we will all look back on this time and tell stories about how we got through it.”

Yoga teacher Peter Walters describes that one shouldn’t be necessarily hunting for happiness in the pandemic — instead, they should seek joy.

In an article by CNET, Walters said, “Joy is lasting, and really always here, ripe for the picking. Joy is just a layer underneath fear, guilt, shame, anger, longings and aversions. Happiness tends to pass like a storm — a really great storm, but it’s fleeting. Joy is our natural state, and yet we forget it.”

To find that natural state, Creighton students continue to seek joy in new ways even when faced with the challenges of being in a pandemic.