Category Archives: mental health

Five Ways to Combat the Post-Holidays Blues

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Christmas is over, the decorations are put away. If you were lucky enough to have time off between Christmas and New Year’s, you’ve got to transition from free time back to the daily grind. Depending on where you live, you have a few weeks to a few months of winter to get through. If that seems bleak, try these suggestions

1. Eschew the New Year’s Resolution in Favor of Real Goal

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for self-improvement. But going from partying to a Spartan attempt to change all your “bad” behaviors to “good” ones may be a bit much. I do set goals for every single year. What I do not do is try to go from the celebration of Christmas to any sort of bleak self-improvement thing. That sort of whiplash will depress you. My goals are about accomplishment, not resolutions of self-denial that are Just Too Much in the face of months left of winter, the cold and a house suddenly empty of Christmas cheer

Don’t try to quit drinking, quit smoking, start working out and go on a diet all at the beginning of the new year. Instead, think of real things you want to accomplish and make plans to achieve them that don’t involve yearly post Saturnalia self-punishment. Make it something you’re excited to do. Have a goal of learning a new skill, making a target income, or whatever, but make it something to gain rather than lose.

2. When you take down the tree, put all the decorations away!

Don’t procrastinate. Get those decorations stored away. Don’t leave piles of Christmas storage boxes lying around. Not only will you be depressed because all the decorations are gone, you’ll be depressed at the constant reminder. Put ‘em away. Right away.

3. Look for something new to enjoy

This one is my husband’s. Part of his self-assessment for a year is to look back and list what he’s done that year that he’d never done before. No, not original to him. He got it from his grandmother. Is there a book you’ve never read? A food you’ve never tried, a location you’ve never visited? Whatever it is, big or small, try something new.

4. Swap out the Christmas decorations with some other appropriate theme.

For Offler’s sake, don’t put out the Valentine’s Day decorations in the beginning of January, but sometimes a pretty wintry-themed centerpiece can be just the thing. I don’t do it every year, but one year I made a goal of putting out a differently themed centerpiece in my dining room every month. I made it to Easter, so it didn’t last. My mother, however, does put out the seasonal decorations. There’s a lot to something small to change, add interest and make the march of seasons feel good and appropriate.

5. Reach out

Did you get a Christmas card from someone you didn’t send one to? Reach out for that person. Call ‘em, send an email, send them a Just Because card. Maintaining contact with people is an excellent way to combat the blues. Is there someone you didn’t see or talk to over the holidays? Now’s a good time. Reach out!

And if you live in the Northern Hemisphere, at least the days are getting longer! We can all enjoy that.

The Value of Failure

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I know that we’re trying to foster cooperation and a sense of pride with children, so we tend not to set things up so that they are either in competition with each other, or that they really fail at anything.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, constant defeat, constantly coming in last, constantly failing will wear you the devil down. That’s a real problem.

There’s a flip side to this, though. The most profound things of value I’ve ever learned in my life are lessons learned when I screwed up, when I failed at something or when I lost. I’m not talking about the “Oh dear, that was a silly mistake” kind of stuff. I mean the real screw-ups – the ones that are gut-wrenchingly embarrassing because of bad judgment or laziness, the ones that are painful because of the sheer unfairness of how I was treated, the ones where I really did try my best and still crashed and burned.

If I could be said to have any real substance of character at all, it’s from that stuff.

How do you teach a kid to learn from failure without crushing the spirit? I mean, dewd, you can’t learn from failure without crashing and burning. But how do you build up the strength in someone else to take that?

Clean All the Things

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I am not particularly neat by nature or general habit.

I am neat by taste. I like order. You can see the conflict, yes?

I do have some habits to take care of this adapted from Flylady. We do have a slightly different approach, but the goals are similar. We’re messy packrats who really would prefer to live in a neat home, and frankly made a pig’s ear out of the attempt for most of our lives.

Part of what I do is daily routine. (Make my bed the minute I get up, make sure the kitchen is cleaned up once a day, etc.)

Part of what the household does is weekly routine. Clean All the Things. (Declutter, dust, vacuum, change bedsheets, give hard floors a quick damp mop). Depending on how bad things are, this can take from 20 minutes to an hour. It’s not enough for white glove inspections, but it keeps the house from degenerating into chaos, and getting used to piles of clutter in corners to the point where we don’t even “see” them as we climb over them. I’ve lived like that and I didn’t feel good with it. Hence the change.

This week was definitely a 20 minute week, especially as my son and I did a very thorough Clean All the Things last week.

In fact, so much so that when I commented it was time to Clean All the Things, my son objected, saying the house wasn’t very messy. (It wasn’t). I said that he was right. The house wasn’t all that messy, so if we did Clean All the Things, it wouldn’t take very long. Neither would it next week. Stuff wouldn’t pile up. He still disagreed.

We took a vote1, and his father and I carried by a 2/3 majority, so All the Things got Cleaned.

I talk a lot about the mundane keeping up of stuff, I know. It’s something I never learned as a child. Not that no-one tried to teach me, mind. It’s just that it was really difficult for me to learn, and I didn’t even really see the value of it. I was into epics, for pity’s sake! Heroic effort, I could value, and get into. Moderate, patient, long-term effort? Not so much. It’s why being able to keep my house clean on a regular basis was such a victory for me and one I still reflect on a great deal.

Now, my pleasure centers still light up at the intensity of effort stuff, and I think that’s okay. I can pour everything into the few hours I’m in front of a class. That’s not hurting anything. In fact, it’s good. But then I need to go home and be patiently moderate about studying for the next class, writing the handouts, and dealing with the other aspects of my life.

I think the theme of this year is going to be learning to be moderately immoderate.

Though I swear, I thought you were supposed to have everything sorted out by the time you were in your forties?2 Goodness knows, my grandparents seemed to in their own minds. I wish I could ask them what they were working on personally (if anything) when they were my age. My parents had my brother and I to deal with. NO-ONE could possibly feel like everything was sorted with us as children. We were kinda challenging to rear.

 

1 Unlike many homes, that vote was not fake. If 2 out of the three of us voted not to Clean All the Things, None of the Things would have been Cleaned.

2 At least, it’s what I used to think at sixteen. Yes, I know, in many ways I’m mentally still a teenager. Stop laughing at me. It’s not nice to laugh at people who can’t help it.

Moderation: Harder than Dramatic Effort

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I’ve mentioned before that my fitness goal is to show up every weekday for half an hour. Ideally this means a swim first thing in the morning. There is a class schedule coming up that means that either I swim after I teach, or I do something else before I open the gym. It may mean something else, because I tend not to want to work out after being around people a whole bunch. We’ll see.

So, the goal? Show up, get blood pumping for half an hour. That’s it. This is not to make myself work out, per se. It’s to contain my enthusiasm for days like today and prevent burnout.

After a couple of weeks, I’ve gotten to the point where I hit that endorphin high in a swim.1 I’m swimming about 1,000 yards in half an hour on more days than not, 2 and I got to thinking:

Me: Hey, if we could do 1,000 in half an hour, why not do another 20 minutes and swim a mile? We’ve got time this morning, because our meetings don’t start till later!

Myself: No. Half hour’s up. Out of the pool.

Me: Aw come on. Let’s prove to ourselves we can swim a mile.

Myself: You already know you can swim a mile. That’s not a great athletic feat for you; it just requires patience. Stop it. Out of the pool.

Me: But it’s cool and intense and stuff! And we feel good.

Myself: Yes it is, and yes, we feel good. You’re not here for cool and intense. You’re here to learn consistency. Get out of the damn pool, right now. You’ll feel good from a workout again, I promise.

Me: But lots of people here are working out for a whole hour and do every day.

Myself: OUT. OF. THE. POOL.

Me: Fine! (Gets out of the pool).

Myself: (Softening a bit) Your problem isn’t whether or not you can swim a mile or work out for an hour, or reach an athletic goal or any of that. You’re pretty good at dramatic, short-term effort. Your problem is consistency of moderate effort. You have not yet proven you will be consistent over the long term with exercise. That’s your goal. Giving in to swimming that mile would interfere with that. After you’ve solved the consistency problem, and that’s going to take at least a year, we can revisit athletic goals. (Muttering) As if you won’t be swimming a mile in half an hour after a year of this, anyway…

 

I’m not by nature a moderate person, nor do I really have any middle gears. I’m intense. I have a bad temper, and I throw myself into joy with absolute abandon. While there are advantages to this in many ways, in terms of the dailyness of life, it can interfere.

I also got to thinking about this for people with a lot of the “invisible” illnesses people can have (CFS and its derivatives, and so on). I have one – arthritis, and swimming is a fine work-around for me on that one. But I got to thinking about small consistencies. And I mean really small, like 5-15 minutes of a workout routine each weekday. (Strength, stretching, whatever).

I know for a fact that there are healthy people who do this and have seen fairly dramatically positive results over a period of several years. Of course, I don’t live in other people’s bodies, but I wonder if it’s anything anyone who has one of these invisible illnesses has tried it over a period of a year or more and liked the results.

 

1 Swimming is the most reliable way for this to happen, because it doesn’t hurt like many land-based exercises do.

2 I’m not permitting myself specific distance goals. The goal is to swim half an hour.

Exercising While Fat

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A friend of mine got yelled at out of a car window recently. She’s the author of Living ~400lbs and discusses being at the sigma six of the weight curve, being active, and life at that weight.

Being active? Yeah, like me she believes in working out. Just because it doesn’t automagically make you skinny doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile. (We’re both technical people and by the nature of the work, that’s darn sedentary. We have to do something.)

I have a question for people: Do you deliberately put yourself in situations where you are likely to be mistreated on a regular basis? If not, why do you act surprised when a fat person doesn’t want to work out publicly? The very worst years of my life were high school, where I was yelled at, harassed and mistreated on a daily basis, and I could not get away from it. As an adult, I am not likely to choose to be in such a situation again. Not ever.

One of the lovely things about being in my forties and having developed a prickly hauteur is that being on the wrong end of this sort of rudeness is rare. But it’s not unknown. A gym patron made a wisecrack about my weight a few months ago. This individual and I do have a bit of a teasing relationship, but I did let him know that he was crossing a line. I did have to be professional about it as I work there, mind.

What is more common for me is a locker room comment about my “bravery” for appearing in a bathing suit. No, the women aren’t trying to be mean at all. They’re being genuine. They recognize that many women who would benefit from the joint-friendliness of water exercise don’t because they’re self-conscious in a bathing suit, and no wonder. People can sometimes be obnoxious. I had to work up the guts to go work out in the college pool with all the young athletes! One thing I did notice is that it wasn’t the athletes or the hard cores that were likely to be jerks. The one time I was messed with in a lane at the college was in the evening (On land I was on crutches from knee surgery and feeling vulnerable. I swear it can be like blood in a shark tank to a certain type of person) and it was a frat boy who thought he was funny. I don’t think he found being dunked by the fat lady quite so funny. But that kind of thing can get you down. I don’t get crap in the pool much these days. My skill makes it obvious I belong there and making a comment only makes you look like an ass. Thing is, as far as I am concerned, you don’t have to earn the right to work out by being really skilled at something. You have a right to go into a gym and be clumsy or slow or whatever. You have a right to walk down the sidewalk or ride a bike, or whatever you want to do.

For the last time, introversion is not shyness!

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I read a piece on introversion lately that was mostly kind of cool, but one line made me want to explode.  It dealt with karaoke and why an introvert doesn’t want to get up and perform karaoke.  Something to do with being terrified of getting up in front of the public and performing, if I recall correctly.

Friends, this is no more a hallmark of introversion than is blue eyes.

Being an introvert is not about being scared of being in the public eye.  In fact, being afraid of public speaking is an incredibly common fear that runs across the introvert/extrovert lines and has more to do with being a human being than it does with one’s mental orientation.

What’s actually a pretty common pattern is for an introvert to be a pretty accomplished public speaker, but find that she detests noisy parties.  Being an introvert isn’t about being scared.  It’s about being drained by too much interpersonal contact.

The introversion=shyness thing tends to get to rub me the wrong way.  I think partially because there is an underlying implication that the introversion needs to be cured, but also because if someone doesn’t know me well, they’ll deny I’m an introvert and interpret my behavior from an extroverted frame of reference.

Ferinstance, if someone sees that because I am not shy that I am an extrovert, but only want to socialize with them on a limited or irregular basis, they’ll interpret that as me not liking them very much, but don’t want to say so.  If they were to see me as the introvert that I am, they recognize that I just need to be alone a whole bunch and it has nothing at all to do with my fondness or not for them as people.

I remember once teaching a class and mentioning being an introvert.  I forget why it was brought up, but since I was teaching, I was probably looking for an illustrative example of something.  One of the class members immediately said, “But you’re not shy![1]”[2]

No, I’m not.  I even enjoy public speaking.

For the last time, fear of being in the spotlight is not an introversion/extroversion thing.  It’s a not-too-unusual people thing.  ‘Kay?

[1] Nancybuttons sells a button I really should buy.  “I’m not shy.  I’m studying my prey.”

[2] I am a very animated public speaker.

Swimmin’ and Body Image

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I’ve been slow getting off the mark with my 50 mile challenge.  But I swam a mile today, gosh darn it!  It took 50 minutes, which surprised me, as I was sure it’d be a least an hour[1].

Last year when I was talking to a friend about the 50 mile challenge and asking her if she was going to do it, she commented, “I couldn’t do that.  I’d lose count.”

I didn’t try to convince her, as I think the real reason she wasn’t doing it was a much more valid one.  She didn’t want to.  But I got to thinking about keeping count.

My pool counts a mile as 1800 yards[2].  That’s 72 lengths of a 25 yard pool, my friends, and is going to take between 40 minutes and an hour for the average lap swimmer to complete.  If you’re counting down by lap, not only are you going to lose count, you’ll probably get bored.

I don’t just hop in the pool and start counting down from 72 doing freestyle.  Forget losing count.  That would be daunting[3].

What I do is sets of laps[4].

1 X 50 Freestyle, backstroke and breastroke                        150 yards

1 X 100 Freestyle, backstroke and breaststroke                  300 yards

1 X 50 Freestyle, backstroke and breaststroke                    150 yards

1 X 200 Freestyle, backstroke and breaststroke                  600 yards

1 X 50 Freestyle, backstroke and breaststroke                    150 yards

1 X 100 Freestyle, backstroke and breaststroke                  300 yards

1 X 50 Freestyle, backstroke and breaststroke                    150 yards

Total Swim:                                                                                         1800 yards

What this really means is that I never count higher than eight, what with 200 yards being 8 lengths.  But it is also a lot easier to face.  By the time I’ve warmed up with the shorter sets, 200 yards of a stroke isn’t particularly intimidating.

I also had a funny thing happen in the locker room today.  Like many women in the gym, especially ones with really long hair who need to dry it, I walk from the showers to the lockers with my hair twisted in a towel, but otherwise am not wearing anything.

It really quiet, only another woman and I.  She was swathed in a towel and dressing under it.  She commented that she admired my confidence about walking naked to the lockers.  She sounded really kind of sad and wistful.

I turn around as I’m putting on my underwear.  She’s about 5’7”, and maybe a size 8.  Had I seen her first, I would have suspected condescension.  But the vocal tone combined with the careful draping of the towel made it clear enough.

I made a joke of it and asked if she had kids.  When she said no, I commented, “Eh, well, giving birth will blow away any body modesty.”

The thing is, that she felt badly about her body was hurting her.  I think it was a bit of a shock to her that the body modification you can achieve in a gym wasn’t necessarily going to cure it.  Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for working out and all that smack.   Obviously, what wit me being there and all.  But I’m not there to make myself acceptable to what I think outside perception is.  I wish I could have thought of something to say that would have helped her.  I wish I’d commented that her body is fine the way it is.  I wish I’d commented that you don’t have to fit a physical mold to earn the right to live.

I just hope my example said something to her, as the pain she clearly felt really bothered me.

[1] Note to competitive swimmers:  I know, I’m slow.  Go laugh at me somewhere else.
[2] Yes, a real mile is 1780 yards, but that’s not divisible by 25 yards – the length of the pool.
[3] And courting a rotator cuff injury
[4] This will look familiar to competitive swimmers, though a bit of a light workout.

The Big, Dumb Beast

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I came pretty close to blowing off my lifting this morning.  Rather, I started telling myself that I would justs go home and lift with dumbbells “later”.  I had opened the gym, was feeling sick of being there, but I had my workout clothes with me.

Now, in Noël’s World, “later” generally doesn’t happen.  When I give myself an excuse like this, chances are very good I’m trying to wiggle out of whatever is going on.   When I realized what I was doing, I just told myself, “For pity’s sake!  Just go lift and shower.  You’ll still get home quite early in the morning in time to get your other work done.  If you blow it off,  you’ll be blowing things off all day in procrastination.”

I try very hard to optimize my life so that it’ll be easier and make more sense to do the productive thing.  You know, like packing one’s gym bag the night before, setting up the crock pot to cook dinner and having housework routines.  I don’t how much time it saves in the real world, but it does save mental effort and Stuff Gets Done.

The author of The No-S Diet, Reinhard Engels, likens habit to a large and powerful beast that you can domesticate and use the energy to suit your purposes.  I think this is true.  ‘Course bad habits are as powerful and dumb as the good ones!

How do you replace a bad habit with a good one, or get rid of a bad habit?

Steroids, Swimming and Solar Power

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I have felt just chilled to the bone lately.  No, it’s not especially cold outside.  In fact, it’s a balmy 40F outside right now.  It’s the damp, and I know it.

Damp, raw chill is probably my least favorite weather.  Even the swimming pool felt really cold to me before I began my laps today, and they keep that pool pretty warm – usually around 75F.  I usually stay pretty warm for several hours after a good workout, but not today.

I’m working snuggled under my slanket today with a rice-filled warmer at my feet and drinking a hot cup of tea.   Tea is more warming to me than coffee.  I’m not sure why.

I saw an interesting question the other day about swimming.  “Will swimming make my shoulders  broad?”

Interesting question.  The real answer is that yes swimming will most certainly aid in shoulder development.  Whether or not you find that desirable is your call.  I will point out that you’re not going to look like a member of the East German 1970s women’s swim team without two things A) Steroids and B) Their training schedule.  Good luck with that.  Me? If I put in three miles of laps in a week, I’m all good.

Which, in this rambling post, brings up another point about steroid use.  While not in favor of chemical performance enhancers, meeself, I sometimes think people have a rather unclear idea of how these things work.  No-one takes steroids then sits on their butt playing video games and expects to win athletic contests.  It’s the drugs and incredibly grueling workouts that do it.  It’s not a magic pill (or shot).

And in the interests of even more rambling, I’m noticing I really do respond well to playing video games that feature bright, sunny weather with blue water and sand.  I have not wanted to hibernate nearly as badly as I often do on gray, wet days when I spend my coffee break on WuHu Island.  I think that surrounding myself with sunny, tropical images is probably a positive thing.   I sometimes wonder if Nanny constantly burning things on icky days was a similar thing.  I think I get my solar-powered tendencies from her.  We might love water, but it’s the combination of water and sun that’s the thing.  The only time I’d want to visit the far North or the far South would be sometime around the Summer solstice, I think.   I’m hoping for more sunshine than this spring.  Last year’s spring and summer were reminiscent of that Bradbury story “All Summer in a Day” and I think another one like it will send me buggy.

And speaking of coffee breaks, mine is over and I need to get back to work.

Wild Times

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Okay, taking a break before diving back in to work.

I didn’t make myself a bento for today and was regretting it, but disciplined myself to make a nice, veggie-stuffed wrap for lunch rather than grab something — not that I have much in the way of bags of easy-to-grab food in the house but fruit, anyway.  (Confession:  Bento are at least in part laziness.  I prefer to make it easy to eat properly).

It’s warmed up nicely outside, and it feels like summer.  But it does make me want to be lazy and take a nap.  Unfortunately, I have way the devil too much work to do and really shouldn’t even be writing this entry.  I’m doing it to reboot my brain.   All I can say is that I’m happy that my projects are on relatively interesting subjects.

My cat is trying to inform me that I’m deficient in my petting duties by sitting on the arm of my chair and looking pitiful.  I suppose I should not whine too much about work.  I’m not in a cube farm, fergossake, and I doubt many offices would permit me that most necessary of writing materials, a cat to paw at your hand when it wants love or curl up at your feet while working.

Ahh, the exciting times of the self-employed writer.