Advice from astronauts on isolation on Earth

Before living for months in space, Christina Koch lived at the South Pole and Chris Hadfield lived at the bottom of the ocean, in a laboratory just off the coast of Florida.

The astronauts didn’t get out much, or couldn’t, with Koch surrounded by frozen terrain and Hadfield 62 feet underwater. But the experiences proved useful. When they rocketed out to the International Space Station, each on separate months-long missions in different years, their brains were well acquainted with isolation.

Koch returned to Earth from her 328-day mission on the space station just last month, breaking the record for the longest spaceflight by a woman, while Hadfield spent more than five months on the ISS from 2012 to 2013.

The station is like a cluster of pressurized aluminum bubbles, and feels like living in the boiler room (cuarto de calderas) in the basement of a large building for a long period of time, Hadfield said.

They work each day with the same small group of people, with no way to leave. Their workspace is their living space. They are connected to the people they love only through the power of video chat.

Astronaut Christina Koch knows a few things about isolation, having
returned to Earth from her 328-day mission on the International
Space Station just last month.

Now, in the middle of a pandemic that has sent millions of people into an oddly similar situation, the astronauts might just be some of the most qualified people on the planet to offer advice about how to live in a socially distanced world.

“The big parallels to what people are going through right now is that there is a big unspoken danger out there that is not clearly defined,” said 60-year-old Hadfield, a retired Canadian astronaut who served as the commander of the space station in 2013. “It’s not like a car driving down the road. It’s like a big, amorphous, frightening thing, and operating a rocket ship is very much like that. There’s a constant elevated level of danger, and it’s sort of nameless and quiet. We are very remote, unable to return in any easy sort of way and physically separated from all 7.7 billion people.

“And then the question is, how do you deal with that?”

Speaking to The Washington Post this week, Hadfield and Koch are among several astronauts offering self-quarantine tips as at least 175 million people across the country have been urged to stay at home or shelter in place.

They know what it’s like adjusting to extremes, relearning social interaction after months of isolation. But now the key is to leave behind a life ruled by “external demands,” Hadfield said, trading a daily schedule built around going places for a daily life built around going almost nowhere.

As sleeping, studying, playing, and virtual happy hours all happen in the same confined quarters, Koch said the way to think about “this new normal” is to look at it as if it were “a new planet to explore."

“There will be things that you can do that you’ve never done before. There will be things you can’t do,” said Koch, 41. “But we’re almost like a new group of people now, operating within a completely different set of rules and under a completely different normal.

What are the new things people can do on this new planet?”

Hadfield, who became the first Canadian to spacewalk in 2001, said rule No. 1 is that people should research the risks of the novel coronavirus in their immediate area. Then, they should understand how it affects and constrains them individually.

“Become experts on the thing that is threatening you,” he said.

Next, is to “be your own taskmaster” — developing mini-missions for every day.

On the International Space Station, to-do lists were regimented down to five-minute intervals, for 12 hours a day, seven days a week. Missions ranged from fixing a toilet to investigating the subatomic particles of the universe. But at home on Earth, those missions can be as simple as reading, tidying up your room, cooking, doing some exercise, or calling a grandparent.

“You should always have objectives every single day,” Hadfield said. “What do I want to get done in the next 10 minutes, and what do I want to do in the next hour? And if today goes perfectly, what will I have done by bedtime tonight?”

Make a to do list of the things that you are going to do today.