drugs – Deborah Makarios

May 29, 2015

How To Beat Procrastination

Last week we looked at the first two steps to leading a successful Essentialist life: identifying the important, and getting rid of everything else.
Since you’ve all had a week (or seven days) to work on that, no doubt your lives are now swept clean of all extraneous matter, dust-catchers and time-wasters. No? Well, neither is mine, but every little bit helps, and we’ll get there.

Step three is to remove obstacles; in other words, to make it as easy as possible to do the important things, and not do the unimportant things.

But the procrastination, I hear you say. How do we defeat the procrastination? This has been an ongoing battle in my life, and an ongoing preoccupation of the blog since – well, since the second post I ever wrote.

It was sometime while reading Essentialism, or a book quoted therein, The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg – sorry I can’t be more precise, but I’ve been sick the last couple of weeks and it’s all turned into a sort of formless soup of days – that I had the epiphany.

The solution to procrastination is habit.

What is procrastination but the deferral of what we know we need to be doing? What is habit, but the doing of things without thinking about it?

Of course, not all habits are good habits. When we think of having a habit, we tend to think of drink or drugs or smoking, or something similarly unhelpful or destructive. Think again.

Do you have to consciously make the decision to brush your teeth twice a day, or do you find yourself wandering into the bathroom and loading up the toothbrush automatically (whether it’s time to brush your teeth or not)? Do you need to think about where the light-switch is, every time you walk into a dark room, or do you just turn it on? Do you get dressed in the morning, or do you head off to work in your pajamas?

Habits can be good or bad. The trick is to make a habit (or rather a whole slew of habits) of doing the needful thing, so you don’t have to spend all your time and energy strong-arming yourself into doing it, or feeling bad for not doing it. You just do it. Easier said than done, I know, but there are things that can help.

For one, you can trick your brain. Brains get so used to how the habit works – cue, routine, reward – that they wander off and do something else meanwhile and just stroll back when it’s all over to check that nothing exploded. As long as the cue – whatever starts the routine rolling – and the reward – feeling good afterward – remain the same, you can put pretty much anything in the middle and your brain doesn’t really notice. If you think of a habit as a sandwich, the cue is the first slice of bread and the reward is the second. Your brain doesn’t really notice what’s in the middle, it just goes “ha! a sandwich!”

So you can change the filling of your habit sandwich, and your brain will never notice, because by the time it comes back to check that everything happened as usual, the sandwich is down the hatch and your brain is too proud to ask your digestive system what just happened. (It are a fact. I know because of my learnings. Read Duhigg if you want something a bit more legit.) The crucial difference is that you’re doing what you want & need to do, instead of what you briefly felt like doing.

That’s changing habits. It is also possible to start entirely new ones, although it seems to take more work as you are creating an entirely new pathway in your brain instead of altering an old one. This is the sort of thing that FlyLady gets you to do.

Either way, whether re-using an old pathway or creating a new one, the aim is to tread that pathway down into a rut that you can slide along with the minimum of effort. Yes, it takes a lot of work at first to create a new habit or amend an old one, but think of the results! Imagine a life where you don’t waste your time doing things that don’t matter, and where the important things get done quickly and efficiently without you having to constantly bully and nag yourself into doing them.

Doesn’t that sound good?
It is possible, and the way to reach this golden dream of a future is to train our habits to serve us, instead of allowing ourselves to serve them.

So there you have it, my fellow procrastinees. Go forth and conquer.

May 10, 2014

I am the Chipmunk Queen!

Queen in exile, obviously, there being no chipmunks in New Zealand.

I had three of my wisdom teeth extracted on Thursday, and now sport a square, manly (if somewhat lopsided) jaw. I look “bloody, bold and resolute” – especially bloody, but let’s not go there.
I was expecting to have all four of my wisdom teeth out, but after the whole jaw x-ray (look! your spine on both sides of the screen!) the dentist decided one was too likely to pop into my sinus if messed with. And then apparently they’d have to cut my sinus open to get it out. No, thank you.

I’d never been sedated before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I remember chatting to the dentist after he’d put in the line for the intravenous sedation – mostly about blood pressure, as the monitor on my thumb was betraying my nervousness – and having great difficulty corralling my words into line when telling him about all the monitors I had stuck on me when I went to hospital.

According to the Caped Gooseberry, I got even more inarticulate and unintelligible after that – babbling was the word he used, as I recall – and when he left (no friends and family allowed in during the operation) I was beaming happily away in the chair. I have no memory of this. One can only presume I shut up long enough for the dentist to get the teeth out.

I was fully expecting to be foggy-brained when I came out from under the sedation, but to my surprise it was like flicking a switch: I knew where I was, what was going on – I even had a mutually intelligible conversation with the dentist, who insisted that I have a nap in the recovery room before being reunited with my husband (to ensure I slept instead of nattering).

To be honest, I didn’t think this was necessary, but to my surprise I found on rising that while my brain was working fine, my body was in overcooked spaghetti mode. The dentist and his assistant had to help me round the corner to the recovery room (reclining armchair and duvet) where after a brief spell of boredom I did actually fall asleep. When I woke, the dentist had returned with my Gooseberry, who took me home.

And that was it. Woozy, snoozy, and it was all over.

Of course, the biggest thing with wisdom teeth is the recuperation. I lie. That’s the second biggest thing. The biggest thing is, of course, my jaw.

Did I tell you they carved bits out of my jawbone? Apparently if your wisdom teeth don’t emerge from the jaw of their own accord, the dentist goes in after them and drags them out, kicking and screaming. (You never know. I’ll never know – I was out of it.) Two of mine had wedged themselves in sideways in a vain attempt to evade extraction – Action Dentist carved out the jaw to gain access and then took them apart where they lay. I have the pieces to prove it.

Recuperation seems to be mostly sleep, soft food and prescription medications. Soup, stewed apple, hummus, ice-cream, peanut butter, pills. Many many pills. Fortunately I have the use of the Caped Gooseberry’s brain to organize them, or I’d be taking the wrong ones at the right times. Or vice versa. Three sorts of painkiller (two in one pill) and an antibiotic. The round white ones (paracetamol 500mg with a kick of codeine) have to go in flat like coins in a slot because my mouth won’t open any further.

I think the worst of the swelling is past, thanks to the frozen-vegetable face-packs sandwiching my head on Thursday afternoon. I do detect some tendencies toward jowliness though – gravity at work, one presumes. Apparently the bruising doesn’t come in until about a week post-op, so hopefully I will be spared the indignity of being jowly and jaundiced-looking at the same time. The dentist has promised me that unlike this poor fellow, I will not have a black eye. Pays to go to a good dentist.

I’ve been passing the time in between my tortoise-paced meals by reading mystery novels – as is my wont. So far I’ve read four Agatha Christies (in the one I took to read in the waiting room, the dentist dunnit – glad I didn’t wait long enough to find this out), one of Laura Childs’ tea-shop mysteries, and a Miss Julia novel by Ann B. Ross.
This afternoon I intend to follow my other sick-leave tradition of curling up on the couch and watching the entire 1995 BBC Pride & Prejudice mini-series (all 5 1/2 hours). I may also knit.

What are your favourite things to do when recuperating? Had your wisdom teeth out? How’d it go?

October 27, 2013

October: A Sense of Self-Protection

I do not have a problem with alcohol.

This became something of a problem itself when I did the Deadlies exercise in the Artist’s Way. The idea is that you write the following on 7 slips of paper which you then draw from, at random, 7 times: alcohol, drugs, sex, work, money, food, family/friends.

You then list 5 ways in which the drawn word has had a negative effect on your life. Each time the slip goes back, so it’s even chances for next time. I drew money/money/alcohol/food/alcohol/food/alcohol. Apparently if it seems inapplicable, that’s resistance. Right.

I was scraping the bottom of the barrel, particularly with food and alcohol. The negative effects of food on my life have largely been limited to stomach upsets (I still can’t bear the smell of mango) and the annoyingly large amount of time it takes to ensure meals are regularly prepared and eaten.

Alcohol was even worse. I might have a glass of wine on occasion – particularly special occasions – but that’s about it. Fifteen ways alcohol has had a negative effect on my life? You must be dreaming. Still, at least I didn’t draw ‘drugs’. Confessing to a youthful tea addiction wouldn’t take me very far.

What have I learned from this exercise? Well, besides proving that meaning is not always to be found in randomness, I decided overall that I spend too much time daydreaming and worrying (for what is worry but a dark daydream?) and not enough just enjoying the life I have.

A large part of this chapter of the Artist’s Way looked at workaholism, which is another problem I am happy not to have. Or do I? While I certainly don’t have any problem shaking the dust of the DDJ off my feet at 5pm on the dot, I do tend to fill my life with a lot of other doing.

Housework, handwork – doesn’t really matter what as long as I can feel guilty for not doing it, or at least for not doing all of it.
I’d secretly like to be a workaholic, it turns out, but I can’t bring myself to actually do all that work.

Nonetheless, I have resolved to be a bit more focussed in what I choose to do in my non-work time. As with my writing projects, I won’t start any more until I’ve finished at least some of those I have underway, and I’ll try to work steadily on one instead of floating from UFO to UFO. And I won’t feel guilty for not being able to do everything, which should make what I am doing more enjoyable.

The problem is that I tend to be a bit ambitious in what I can achieve, so my projects often take a long time, even once you take the distraction and procrastination into account. But not always! Having decided a couple of weeks ago to make myself a more permanent eye-swathe, I got straight down to the job with a fat quarter (in black and gold) and my sewing machine (also in black and gold).

I used it last Monday (the swathe, not the machine) and achieved about 2,400 words (estimating 200 words on each of 12 pages and not wishing to count them all by hand). More to come tomorrow, when trouble catches up with our heroine, an unexpected enchantment intervenes, and she uses up her last lifeline.

It’s a public holiday here in New Zealand tomorrow: Labour Day. Which I shall celebrate by labouring at my chosen profession, instead of the one that feeds me. It always struck me as strange that we celebrated Labour Day by not labouring. Very illogical. As usual, I’ll let you know how I go.

In other news, Tim Makarios of Ideophilus is seeking pledges to fund a Creative Commons audiobook of G.K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man. Details here, including where you can find a sample of his reading voice – very easy on the ear! Stop by if you’re a fan of G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis (who recommended the book) or Creative Commons works generally.

Until next week, dear readers!
Sinistra Inksteyne