How To Build A New Normal Without Losing Your Mind

On micro-routines, manageable days, and why the bar is lower than you think.

By Simone Mazloumian, Founder of Eklektik Mama — Abu Dhabi's community for mothers | March 6 2026

Here we are, sitting in Abu Dhabi, checking news updates between refereeing iPad arguments that have somehow escalated to actual tears.Not the kids’ tears. Yours. Because someone used your mug again.

The week didn’t go to plan. Schools moved to distance learning. The usual architecture of the day — school run, work, pickup, snack negotiation, dinner, the blessed silence of bedtime — collapsed overnight. And in its place: everyone, home, all at once, in the same square footage, with different needs and no shared timetable and a collective energy that can only be described as a snow globe that someone keeps shaking. You are not failing at this week. This week is just genuinely hard to organise. But underneath the chaos — underneath the Class login that doesn’t work and the child who has apparently forgotten how pencils function — is a real question. One that gets harder to ignore the longer the disruption runs:

How do we make this liveable?

Not perfect. Not aesthetically pleasing. Not the kind of week you’d post about. Just liveable. Functional. A week that has enough shape that everyone gets through it without somebody crying in the pantry. (You. It’s you. We know it’s you.) That is what this is about.

First, a quick word about why your brain is struggling more than you expect it to You are a competent adult. You have managed difficult things before. You grew a human — possibly several — inside your body and then kept them alive outside it for years through nothing but sheer force of will and knowing which snacks prevent a meltdown. You are not someone who falls apart easily.

And yet this week you have stood in front of an open fridge for four full minutes and emerged with nothing, forgotten what you walked into a room for approximately eleven times, and sent a voice note to the wrong group chat. You feel slightly stupid and slightly scrambled and you cannot figure out why. Here is why.

Your brain runs on prediction. Every single day, without asking your permission, it builds a model of what is about to happen — what time school starts, what the commute feels like, what the afternoon looks like — and uses that model to allocate your energy efficiently. When the predictions hold, your nervous system stays calm. When they don’t — when the entire structure of normal life becomes genuinely unknowable — your brain has to work significantly harder just to function. It is spending energy on uncertainty management that it would usually spend on, say, remembering where you put your keys or making a coherent sentence.

This is not a personal failing. This is neuroscience. Your brain is not broken. It is working extremely hard in conditions it did not train for, and it is tired, and it would very much like something to be predictable, please, even if that something is small.

Research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that maintaining core routines during uncertain periods reduces psychological distress by around 23%. Twenty-three percent. That is not achieved by having a perfect schedule or a colour-coded wall planner. It is achieved by having a handful of things in your day that stay the same regardless of what is happening outside. Things your brain can locate without effort. Things that tell your nervous system: this day has a shape. We know where we are. We are okay. Psychologists call these anchors.

You can also call them: the only things standing between you and eating toast over the sink at 2pm while doomscrolling with the dead eyes of a person who has given up on the concept of meals.

What an anchor actually is — and what it isn’t Before we go further: an anchor is not a routine in the traditional sense. It is not a morning wellness ritual. It is not a five-step skincare sequence at 6am or a journalling practice or anything that requires you to be upright and functioning before the children have made their demands known.

An anchor is one small, repeatable thing that signals to your nervous system: today is a day with a shape. Not chaos with a sunrise. An actual day. It can be almost anything. A fixed wake time. Coffee made a specific way, drunk while sitting down rather than pacing. A walk at the same point each afternoon. Dinner at the table. A bath at the same time each night. The content matters less than the consistency. Your brain is not looking for enrichment right now. It is looking for evidence that tomorrow will, in some basic way, resemble today.

Research suggests identifying three to five daily anchors — activities that remain consistent regardless of circumstances — is enough to provide meaningful psychological stability. Three to five. Not fifteen. Not a laminated timetable on the fridge (although if the laminated timetable gives you comfort, nobody is judging you, we have all been there). Just three things that happen every day, roughly when you expect them to, that your brain can use as landmarks in an otherwise shapeless landscape. For your children, this matters even more than it does for you. A 2024 systematic review on routines and child development found that routines act as critical resources that help mitigate the impact of stressors — not by removing the stressor, but by altering how the child perceives and responds to it.

In plain language: a child who knows what happens next is a measurably calmer child. Not a different child. Not a child who has processed their feelings and arrived at a place of equanimity. Just a child whose nervous system is not running entirely on alert, because the next thing is predictable, and predictable is safe, and safe means you might — might — get through the afternoon without someone crying about the wrong colour cup. (They will still cry about the wrong colour cup. That is just Tuesday. But perhaps slightly less.)

Let’s talk about distance learning. Honestly. Distance learning is a specific kind of chaos that deserves its own section, its own grief, possibly its own support group.

It is not homeschooling. Homeschooling is a considered educational choice made by people who have planned for it. Distance learning is school, sort of, happening in your house, with you as the IT department, the classroom assistant, the canteen staff, the PE teacher, the person who has to explain why the microphone isn’t working while also answering three work emails, and the human being who is responsible for the emotional regulation of everyone present, including yourself.

If you survived 2020 with children at home, you know exactly what is coming. You know the specific joy of a child’s screen freezing mid-lesson while their teacher waits. You know the Window of Chaos that opens between “my class starts now” and the moment you’ve actually got them logged in, sitting down, and not screaming. You know that at least one child will, within twenty minutes of the school day starting, require a snack, a different pencil, someone to help them find the assignment they were definitely sent, and your full emotional attention simultaneously.

Here is what the research says about what children actually need from home learning during a period of stress: Not excellence. Not a replication of the school day. Not a structured learning environment with designated quiet zones and a colour-coded timetable (again — fine if it helps you, we’re not here to judge anyone’s lamination habits).

What they need is: a start, a middle, and an end. A time when learning begins. A break that is genuinely a break and not just a child wandering the flat looking confused. And a point — a real, declared, non-negotiable point — at which the school day is over and nobody has to think about fractions for the rest of the evening. Research on family routines consistently shows that it is the structure itself that provides developmental support, not the content — shared mealtimes and regular transitions reinforce family stability and give children a sense of belonging even when external circumstances are disrupted.

Which is a science-backed way of saying: you do not need to be a good home-school teacher. You need to be a consistent one. Show up at the same time. End at the same time. The middle can look however the middle needs to look.

Your actual anchors: a practical, unromantic guide Right. Here is how to build a liveable week out of a disrupted one. Not an optimised week. Not a beautiful week. A week that has enough structure that everyone gets through it with their nervous system broadly intact.

1.⁠ ⁠A fixed start. Not early. Not ambitious. Just consistent. The same thing, at roughly the same time, every morning. It could be coffee made properly and drunk sitting down. It could be ten minutes outside before anyone else is awake. It could be a walk around the block before the day officially begins. The purpose is not productivity. The purpose is to give your brain a starting gun — a clear signal that today is a day with a beginning, not a continuation of yesterday’s ambient dread. Pick one thing. Do it every day. That’s it.

2.⁠ ⁠A learning window with hard edges. One block of time in which school work happens. When it ends, it ends. The work is either done or it isn’t, and either way the window closes. Your child’s capacity for concentration under stress is genuinely limited — they are running on the same elevated cortisol you are, their attention is fractured for the same neurological reasons yours is, and pushing past the window doesn’t produce better learning outcomes. It produces a child who is dysregulated and a you who is about to lose it. One window. Hard edges. When it’s done, you’re done.

3.⁠ ⁠Movement. Any movement at all. Bodies that have been stationary and stressed need physical feedback that they are safe. This is not about fitness. This is not about step counts or getting your workout in. This is about telling your nervous system, through your body rather than your brain: we are not in immediate danger. We can move freely. We are okay. Walk to the end of the street and back. Let the kids run in the car park for ten minutes. Do something silly in the living room. The bar is genuinely on the floor here — anything that gets you upright and moving breaks the physical stress loop in a way that sitting and thinking about breaking the stress loop simply does not.

4.⁠ ⁠One meal, together, at a table, without phones. This one has more evidence behind it than almost anything else on this list, and it requires the least effort, and it is still the first thing that goes when things get hard. Which is a shame, because research published in 2025 found that shared family meals reduce stress, enhance emotional resilience, and foster relational harmony — and that these effects work specifically through stress alleviation and emotional support, not just through the nutritional value of the food itself.

You do not need to cook something impressive. You need to sit down, together, with the phones face-down or in another room, and eat. That is the entire intervention. The food is almost incidental. What matters is the sitting down, the proximity, the low-grade co-regulation that happens when humans who love each other share a meal.

An American Heart Association survey found that 91% of parents reported their family was less stressed when they ate together regularly. Ninety-one percent. And yet here we all are, eating over the sink. Put the phones away. Sit down. It counts more than you think.

5.⁠ ⁠A hard stop in the evening. A point — a real, declared, non-negotiable point — where the news goes off, the school devices disappear, and the day is officially over. Not because everything is resolved. Not because the situation has been tidied up. Because your nervous system, and your children’s nervous systems, need a boundary between the uncertain world out there and the place where we sleep and are safe. This is the anchor that is easiest to skip and the one that costs the most when you do. The evening spiral — news, phone, news, phone, 11pm, still scrolling, nothing new has happened but you are checking anyway because your amygdala has decided that vigilance is love — is a trap that the whole family falls into together. Declare the day over. Mean it. The news will still be there tomorrow. Your sleep, once destroyed, is significantly harder to recover.

The day in actual practice In case it helps to see it laid out: here is what a liveable day might look like, with no aspirations beyond functional.

Morning: Wake time is fixed — not necessarily early, but consistent. Coffee happens before devices. Children emerge. Something is eaten, preferably sitting down. The day has begun. Learning block: School work. Devices, books, whatever the teacher has set. You are available but not hovering. It has an end time and when it arrives, it arrives.

Mid-day break: A meal. Outside if possible, even briefly. Movement of some description. Nobody is required to be educational or improving during this period. Minecraft is fine. A documentary about sharks is fine. Forty minutes of collective decompression is not wasted time — it is fuel for the afternoon. Afternoon: Whatever the afternoon holds — more work if needed, free time, a project of their choosing, a long video call with grandparents who are also at home and would genuinely love to see them. Your work, if you have it, happens here.

Evening: One meal, together, at the table. Phones away. Conversation that is not about current events — ask them what they’d eat for every meal if they could choose anything, ask them to describe the best day they’ve ever had, ask them literally anything except what they think about what’s happening in the news. Then: bath or shower, winding down, devices off, bed. That is a liveable day. Unbeautiful, imperfect, completely achievable.

The permission slip you didn’t ask for but are going to receive anyway You are going to do this imperfectly. Some days the anchors will hold and some days the whole thing will slide sideways by 10am and you will be eating crackers on the sofa watching your child’s second screen session of the morning and wondering where you went wrong.

You went nowhere wrong. You are a person, navigating a hard week, inside a life that did not come with instructions. Research on managing uncertainty consistently finds that self-compassion — treating yourself with the same basic decency you’d extend to someone you actually like — significantly reduces anxiety and increases resilience. Not as a nice idea. As a measurable, evidence-based outcome. Being kind to yourself during a hard week is not indulgent. It is, somewhat boringly, the correct clinical response.

The bar for this week is low. Feed everyone. Keep the day roughly recognisable. Get outside once. Sit down for dinner. Check official updates — the National Emergency Crisis and Disasters Management Authority (@NCEMAUAE on Instagram, the UAE’s primary emergency communications body) — twice a day, maximum, and then put the phone down and go and do something that has nothing to do with any of it.

That is the whole plan. That is enough. You have survived harder things than a week at home with your children and a disrupted routine. You built a life here from scratch, in a city that wasn’t yours, and made it feel like home. You can build a liveable week from this. Start with three anchors. Add the rest when you’re ready.

If the weight of it isn’t lifting There is a difference between a hard week and something that genuinely isn’t moving. If you’re not sleeping, not eating, struggling to function, or finding that the anxiety isn’t responding to any of the above — please reach out. Not eventually. Now. The UAE has dedicated mental health support available specifically in response to current circumstances.

800-SAKINA (800-725462) Psychological first aid from qualified professionals, available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You do not need to be in crisis to call this number. Feeling overwhelmed and unable to manage is reason enough. 800-968 (800-YOU)

For acute distress and urgent clinical support across Sakina’s integrated network.

And in the Eklektik Mama community — 700+ mums navigating exactly this, in real time, in the same city — we are here. Use it. → Join the community.

UAE Emergency Numbers — screenshot this, send it to your group chat Police 999 · Ambulance 998 · Fire & Civil Defence 997 · Coast Guard 996 · Government Helpline 800 555 · Non-emergency Police 901

Some weeks you hold the family together. Some weeks the family holds you. Both are fine. Both count.

Sources: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology; Journal of Family Theory & Review — Routines and Child Development, Selman (2024); PMC — Nourishing Holistic Well-Being: Shared Culinary Practices and Psychological Flourishing (2025); American Heart Association Family Meals Survey (2022); Department of Health Abu Dhabi / Sakina (March 2026)