Whatever it takes?

Today was an okay day. I took care of some chores in the morning, didn’t bother with other chores in the afternoon, and I lay down and took a nap to catch myself up on this past week. I’m really glad that week is over. It was killer. Monday I’ve got another big day. Actually all next week is going to be pretty heavy, as I’m pulling triple-duty for two colleagues who are traveling out of town. Should be interesting.

Minute by minute, hour by hour… that’s how things get done.

I recently came across an interesting set of videos featuring Giavanni Ruffin and Eric Thomas, two gentlemen whose mission is to inspire others and motivate them to greatness, excellence and amazing accomplishments.

Here are the videos I’ve been watching — and watching some more.

The cornerstone of their message, from what I can tell, is hard work. Lots of it. And they believe in Taking No Days Off. In other words, keep going, never stop, never give yourself a moment to rest, because you may miss the opportunity you’ve been looking for. Always keep moving, always keep growing, always keep getting stronger and faster than the day before. Never backtrack, never let up. Just keep moving, to crush the competition. Do whatever it takes. But do it.

Now, I don’t know about you, but that’s how I lived for years. It was pretty much how I rolled, no matter when, no matter what. And that Type A drive that Never Surrendered, Never Gave Up, but kept pushing and pushing and pushing past barriers and hurdles and obstacles… well, eventually it just wore me down and wiped me out and I ended up hurt. Repeatedly.

I’ve never been one to sit on the sidelines for long, and I’ve always pushed myself — often harder than was wise or necessary. But I had to do it. I just had to. Something in me just drove me on. And I could totally relate to the message. At the same time, however, I paid a price — in terms of TBI and other injuries that have dogged me through the years. I know the hazards of over-training and not giving yourself enough chance to rest and recover. Sometimes, you do have to take a day off — although it’s not really taking a day “off” because the body is still working to recover and you’re still making gains, even though you feel like you’re idle.

That’s probably been the biggest thing I’ve struggled with over the recent years — learning to back off and take it easy on myself, not drive myself into the ground, and not completely wreck myself with fatigue and overwork. I can totally relate to what Messrs Ruffin and Thomas are saying above. At the same time, however, using good judgment and prudence in terms of balance and recovery… well, that just makes sense.

Speaking of which, it’s late. Time for bed.

Till later.

 

Next visualization of the day – sleep

Long day, full of good stuff and irritating stuff. Didn’t get everything done that I intended to, but I made a decent dent.

Tired, now, and ready to pack it in.

I see myself … asleep.

Good night.

Mental rehearsal for the day

It’s all in there

Today I have a bunch of things I need to get done, among them having a quick nap in the afternoon. I didn’t get enough sleep again last night, and I’m really dragging. I have a lot I have to get done, and I’ll need to refuel at some point. So onward. Until I need to refuel.

I am using what I learned about mental training the other day, and mentally rehearsing a meeting I have in 30 minutes… I can see myself doing well, being patient, helping and contributing and doing a good job. I’ve had good experiences in the past, and I’m hoping this will be one, too. No, not hoping — planning. And preparing. There’s no “hoping” here — just getting ready to do what I need to do.

I’m also visualizing myself answering all my emails and finishing up on some things that have been hanging around waiting to get done. I have a bunch of things like that — and I may take some time this weekend to get them all squared away, so I can have a freed-up schedule next week — well, freed up of the things that have been hanging around — they’ll very likely be replaced by another ton of stuff, starting Monday morning.

Fortunately (or maybe unfortunately), some of the folks in my group will be traveling next week, so I’ll have the chance to run things a little more like I’d like to see them run. It’ll give me a chance to un-cramp my style. At least, that’s what I’m visualizing. I get to run things for three days. Again, this needs preparation. Goals, visualization, self-talk, and — perhaps most importantly — arousal control.

I’ve been thinking a lot about those Big Four components of Navy SEAL mental training, and it makes more and more sense each day. Obviously, I’m nowhere near their level of performance, and the “threats” I react to on a daily basis are mostly manufactured by my flawed perception and reactions, not the real (shoot-to-kill) world at large. But the effect of these “threats” is similar — it still feels like life and death, sometimes. And what makes it even more stressful is logically knowing that these are not a big deal, but my body is telling me they are. It can make a person crazy, it can.

So, work it out, work it out…

• Goal-setting
• Mental rehearsal
• Self-talk
• Arousal control

I feel like God/the universe/the cosmos/fate put these in my path, so I should really make the most of them. Let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth, shall we?

Oh, look – the day is waiting… time to make the visualizations into reality. Enough rehearsing. Time to live.

Goal for the day… and the evening

Thinking about the Navy SEALs #1 component of mental training: Goal Setting, I have been focusing on very specific goals today:

Make it through this meeting.

Make it through another meeting.

Make it through this conversation in one piece.

Make it through lunch without snapping at my annoying neighbor.

Make it through this meeting.

Make it through another meeting.

Make it through this conversation with my boss without sticking my foot in my mouth.

Make it through another meeting… and another… and another.

Make it through the last meeting of the day.

It’s been a really long day, but dadgummit, in less than an hour, my work will be done, and I’ll be free — to sleep.

101 followers on this blog :)

Thank you to all who have followed this blog. I’m not sure how often you’ll be checking in, but it’s nice to see the tally.

I had an okay day today. I counted down the weeks till I will start sending out my resume. I’m at 14-1/2 weeks. A little over three months. I promised my spouse that I would not go job-hunting in September, as that’s when we plan to take a vacation, and also the last thing I want to be doing during one of the most excellent months of the year, is interviewing.

This will give me time to figure some things out. Spiff up the resume. Improve some skills.

But for now, it’s time to go to bed. I have to be up early. I need my sleep.

And there we have it. Good night.

Navy SEALs Mental Training Video

The “Big 4″ Components of Navy SEALs Mental Training

1. Goal Setting – pick a goal, a “small chunk” of an overall goal, and focus on meeting it
2. Mental Rehearsal (visualization) – see yourself doing what you going about to do, and see yourself succeeding
3. Self-Talk – keep positive to override the negative effects of the Amygdala
4. Arousal Control – use long, slow breaths to quiet down the effects of fight-flight

Now, to see how I might use these same principles in combination to improve my own responses to perceived “threats” in my life…

Another approach to rest

Gotta get more rest

Yesterday m mentioned Yoga Nidra, a yoga “version” of sleep. I checked it out, and I found some interesting info — a kind of yoga that can restore you and apparently get to the root of things that are causing you distress in your life (that’s my shorthand version of it, anyway.

The thing is that you don’t actually sleep, but you go past the relaxation phase and remain conscious while your whole physical and mental and emotional and causal body is letting go of all its “stuff”.

Okay… It sounds promising to me. I’m not sure how I feel about the more esoteric stuff, but the part about total relaxation and letting go of all the stresses and tensions sounds good to me. I’ve also heard that completely relaxing your entire body progressively for an hour is as good as four hours of sleep.

I think that sounds more up my alley. I just don’t know about all that “causal body” stuff — if I’m even understanding it correctly. There is a lot I’d need to learn to get my head around that, and personally I think I’d rather use that time to learn other things. Maybe I’ll change my mind in time, but for now, I’m looking for something more down to earth and familiar, to use in getting back some semblance of restfulness.

I slept a fair amount over the weekend. I actually slept in (till 8 a.m.) on Saturday, and then I took naps on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. I even got 8 hours of sleep last night, which is nothing short of amazing. One thing that really helped was going for a swim at some friends’ yesterday. I feel so much better after a swim, and I’m going to start swimming at a lake that’s on my way home from work, when the weather gets warmer. It’s just a quick jaunt out of my way, to get to it. I pass that turn-off every day, on my way to and from work, so I can also swim before work as well.

But back to the rest. On those days when I cannot get a swim in, and I haven’t had 8 hours of sleep, I need to block time off to do some active relaxation. If I can’t find a quiet room in the building, I can always improvise and come up with something.

The main thing is that I take action.

Because although developing the habit of getting to bed at 10 p.m. every night is a noble endeavor, there’s no guarantee that that’s going to happen every night. And in order to catch up on my sleep deficit, I’d have to get 12 hours of sleep each night for something like three months, and that’s probably never going to happen.

So, I have to come up with Plan B — something I can work into each day. Something that I can use on an as-needed basis. I can take myself away for half an hour once a day (plenty of my coworkers step away for 15 minutes at a time for a cigarette, 4-5 times a day), sit and breathe, or lie down and do progressive relaxation. Either way, it can balance me out and get me back to a state/condition that works in my — and everyone’s — favor.

So, I’m getting past beating my head against the wall, trying to make up for my lack of sleep through simply sleeping. It hasn’t been working out for the past couple of months, and I need a different approach. So, here I go.

I’m not necessarily slower – I just have more to think about

Choices, choices…

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about concussion/tbi making you “dumber” – slower, etc. When I had my neuropsychological exam, it became painfully clear that my processing speed was slower than expected. And it really bummed me out for quite some time. Plus, once I was aware that this was happening, it seemed like I couldn’t do anything without being painfully aware that it was taking me a little longer to process things than I (and others) expected it to. For some reason, everybody just expected that I’d be able to respond immediately to their questions or comments or conversation starters. But it just wasn’t happening.

After thinking about this from a bunch of different angles, I had a bit of a revelation this morning. It was something I’ve thought about before (and maybe I’ve written about it before – I can’t remember), but this morning it really made a whole lot of sense:

It’s not that I’m necessarily slower or dumber than I “should” be — or than I used to be. The thing is, after my TBI(s), I became so much more sensitive to a lot of different stimuli, and my brain has to work harder to sort through a larger amount of input, than before. It’s like the injury/-ies put holes in the filters that are usually there, allowing in a whole lot more input and information — sensory, like light and sound and (sometimes) smells and touch/feeling — and all that has to be factored in. It’s like my brain has to work harder to shut those things out, and since concussion/TBI has a way of activating your sympathetic nervous system fight-flight activity, you’re even more alert to all the stimuli around you…. constantly scanning and checking things out and sensing for danger, where it may or may not exist.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who has this.Maybe someone else can confirm/affirm this for me?

Think about it – say you give someone a deck of cards to shuffle and sort. Then you give someone else two decks to shuffle and sort, while they’re having a conversation with someone and an important piece of news is playing on the t.v. behind them. If the two people race to get done with their shuffling and sorting, the person with the two decks of cards are is going to take longer — because they have more to sort through, in the first place. And they have these other distractions going on around them.

That’s what it’s like after concussion/TBI – so of course I’m going to seem “slower” than others — when in fact, my brain is actually working harder, and perhaps even more efficiently than others, because it has so damned much stuff to sort through.

I think this can also explain why folks after TBI have the same IQ level as before, only now their processing speed is slower. I’d like to challenge the idea that processing speed is actually slower, in fact. Because regular measures probably don’t factor in the distractions and added sensitivities that have to be filtered and processed. Heck, if you look at the sum total of all the activity, it could be that post-TBI, your processing speed actually increases — but your brain is so busy trying to sort things out and re-categorize them and figure out what it all means (all over again) and re-learn the old past familiar things… not to mention battle against the rising dismay that things “don’t work like they should” and the wondering “what the hell is wrong with me?!” … that the end result and net effect looks like you’re stupid and slow and not keeping up.

That’s my theory, anyway. Although it’s almost purely anecdotal, it’s consistent with my experience, so I’ll have to go with that.

It’s ironic, isn’t it, that we go through these things that actually make us stronger and more active, but people who don’t understand and don’t share our experience (including researchers and doctors and therapists and other certified experts), will label us as “weaker” and “less active” and “stupid”… all because they just don’t get it, and they can’t see why they should change their opinions.

I’m not sure what it will take to change this, but for the time being I feel pretty good in my own changing understanding, and it’s giving me some relief from that nagging sense of being stupid and slow and (excuse the expression) retarded.

Anyway, it’s a beautiful day, it’s Memorial Day — so, here’s a big THANK YOU to all who have served, and are serving, and to all who have paid the ultimate price out of love and service and duty. I probably wouldn’t be sitting on my back porch watching the dragonflies making their rounds this morning, if you didn’t do what you do. So, again, thank you.

But enough of the talk. It’s time to get into my day and enjoy myself with friends and family. Here’s hoping you can too.

Finding a good place

May you find your own good place

I’m sitting outside this morning, writing in the quiet of the day, before the lawnmowers start and the leaf blowers and the construction projects my neighbors are doing over the long weekend.The sun is hot, where there is no shade, but the air is cool where there is no sun, and I have been moving my chair around to find the best place to sit where I am not too hot, but not too cool, and I can enjoy the morning.

Some robin has found some good bugs/worms in my back yard, and it’s making repeated caterpillar-fetching trips to the high grass (I’m letting it grow, so the roots get well established before I start mowing for the summer (and yes, I am aware that summer is practically here). Other robins have also discovered this, and they have been fighting over that little space in the back yard for a little while, now. They are very aggressive with each other, and they have been flying and fighting over this territory with loud, angry cries and swooping attacks. The other birds that happen to be nearby — the blue jay, the downy woodpecker — have been also getting the brunt of their aggressive anger.

But something very educational just happened, while they were fighting with each other. They were all embroiled in a flying group brawl, when I saw a big crow fly into a nearby tree. He sat there a few minutes, seeming to hide behind the trunk of the tree, seeming to look over at the robins. Then, when all the robins were flying around attacking each other, the crow flew over to where they were… and a minute later, it flew away — with a baby robin in its beak. I could see its legs hanging down, and the crow’s flight was a little more lumbering than it had been, coming in.

All the robins flipped out and realized what was happening, and they turned from their attacks to chase the crow, which was already on the wing, headed off to some place where it could eat its little victim.

Over at the nest, a lone robin calls plaintively, chirping with distress over and over again.

Nature can be cruel. And it can be beautiful. Just now, a yellow swallowtail butterfly flew over to me and fluttered around my head for a while. A study in contrasts — in the space of a few moments, terrible “cruelty” and wonderful beauty. Coarse necessity and fragile bliss.

That crow has to eat. The butterfly has to fly. Sooner or later, each of them will in turn become food for something else. That’s just nature’s way — as surely as it’s also nature’s way for yellowjackets and mosquitoes to be visiting me, as well.

This was a good lesson this morning — watching the robins fight, and seeing how their distraction cost them one of their little ones. I doubt that if they had all been minding their nest, the crow would have come in and picked off one of their babies. It is a natural thing, but it could have turned out different, if those birds hadn’t been so fixated on fighting amongst each other.

The other thing I noticed was how quickly these aggressive enemies became allies, when they had a common foe. When they had the same threat to combat, they quickly left their differences behind and joined forces. That is also nature’s way.

Seeing this happen, I can’t help but think about all the ways that we people also fight amongst ourselves, and in the process lose things that are very important to us. We can be so intent on proving we are right, or filling some need that we are convinced we need to fill, that we trash our relationships and alienate/punish those closest to us. We can get so caught up in “taking care of ourselves” — or just looking out for NUMBER ONE — that we lose the connections that bring us life and happiness and fulfillment. We can get so caught up in chasing after the things we think will bring us happiness, that we never get there. And the more we chase, the harder we try, the farther we are from our goal of ultimate happiness.

Ironic, no?

But it seems to me that that’s how we are built. All the chasing, all the fight-flight we are caught up in… that’s the very thing that keeps us from being truly happy. When that is all we do, day after day, week after week, year after year, our ability to just let in the happiness and joy tends to shrivel and shrink. It’s like a muscle, this ability to enjoy ourselves — if we don’t use it, it atrophies, shrivels, shrinks, and becomes so weak that it actually hurts to try to use it.

But like our muscles, our ability to enjoy life can be restored. It doesn’t have to go away for good, and although at times it may feel like we will never ever get back to a place of peace (like I felt this morning at 1 a.m.), the fact of the matter is that with practice and time and patience, we can get back that sense of pleasure, that sense of enjoyment, that resting, digesting part of our lives that is as real and as vital to our survival and ability to thrive, as our beloved fight-flight reflex.

We can get back to that good place again. Because it’s always there. We just need to find it again.

We can, you know. We all come into this world with an autonomic nervous system that gives us as much access to enjoyment and relaxation, as it does to drama and stress. Over time, we may get trained to focus more on the fight-flight, and we may actually feel more alive when we are in fight-flight. But the fact that we digest our food and breathe and even have a regular heartbeat is testament to the fact that we always have a side of us that can — and does — love to just chill. Getting back to that place takes practice. God knows, I can testify to that. For some of us, it comes easy. For others (like me) it takes A LOT of practice. But it gives you something to work towards — and the rewards are pretty awesome.

So, on this beautiful day, I wish you rest and relaxation — remember those who have given their all so that we can enjoy our freedom and our opportunities. Remember those who have also returned, still bearing the burdens of their missions and their service. I like to also remember all those who have served in another capacity, tho’ they weren’t in the military — all the individuals who have given their all to make this country, and this world, a better place for those to come in the future.

May you find peace, may you find rest, and may you find your own good place.

Back to bed?

Didn’t get much sleep last night. Had some misunderstandings about timing, last night, when we had a friend over. Long story short, we didn’t even eat dinner till 9:45, and I didn’t get to sleep until 1:30 a.m. — maybe later.

I know why it happened. I was tired from my full day yesterday, and I didn’t manage my time well in the evening. Had a big fight (in front of the guest, which is never comfortable), and was so whacked out over the argument and the situation, that I couldn’t relax… and hence couldn’t sleep.

I totally did it to myself. But my spouse has been increasingly erratic and spacey and argumentative. The whole situation is totally messed up. But it’s largely my doing, because I did a piss-poor job of managing my time and energy yesterday.

I, too, get erratic and spacey and argumentative. Between the two of us…

Anyway, today’s another day. It’s a gorgeous day, too, all the pollen nothwithstanding. I’ll get some good sleep later on today, and do my best to get in bed at a decent hour tonight.

Gotta watch my sleep. Take care of myself. It’s dangerous, if I don’t. Whether or not my spouse gets it, is beside the point. I’m responsible for me, and my own choices. It’s on me, to make sure I do the right thing(s) at the right time(s) and keep myself in the game.

I’m feeling a little drowsy. Maybe I’ll go back to bed.