Feeling all Ahoo

I'm feeling very off-kilter, un-organized, anxious. I'm getting back up but a number of things are driving this, and I have a number of strategies to cope.

1. Work is taking too much time. There is a lot of work to do. Much of it is good and challenging work that feels important. But we don't have enough people to do all of it well, my people are working their hearts out, and I just don't want to spend that many hours in the office. Actually, I do want to spend that many hours in the office, I just also want more hours out of the office, with sufficient energy to do everything else I want to do.
   Short-term strategy: Take a Break. There's a Lake I Know... (But this leaves my people even more in the lurch.)
   Long-term strategy: Haven't got one yet.
2. My girl is still unsettled.
   Not a crisis. Not going to say more.
3. My mother is not so on top of things. She needs time and attention from me.
   Strategy: Pay her bills, organize her healthcare, enlist other family members to spend time with her.
4. My garden needs serious work. This is mostly maintenance, the function of neglect for several years, and exacerbated by the work time crunch and incessant rain. Some few projects will require hiring someone, which is also time and effort to plan and carry out.
   Strategy: budget and keep to some time spent on the yard each weekend day. Mow the grass during today's window of sufficiently dry time. If work comes more into balance, during these long days, count on a half-hour or so an evening or two during the week.
5. Serious home improvement projects have made little or no progress. I want to refinish the basement, which will be a major undertaking. I have it planned out in my mind. The first step is to empty the basement of as much stuff as I can permanently.  I have made small bits of progress on this, but it needs time and focus. I also want a nice soaker tub in the upstairs bathroom, which still has the original, shallow, builder's grade tub installed in 1950.
   Strategy: Focus when I get back from vacation. Draft family members to help. Requires wresting back time from all the items above.
6. My kitchen is a mess, and other chores aren't getting done.  Work time is my ever-present excuse, but right now I also have ants. My galley kitchen has a long counter-top along the outside wall, with a pilot of dog treats at one end and Nan treats at the other. Along the way are a microwave, cutting board, sink, and typically dirty dishes being staged for the dishwasher.  The ants came marching in, and I've swept stuff off the counter (dog treats to a grocery bag, Nan treats to the fridge, everything else to the dishwasher) and sprayed. Now the kitchen is stinky from the spray, and ants are re-appearing. It's just another barrier to cooking and eating healthy stuff at home.
   Strategy: relocate the food more permanently, and deploy traps and spray ferociously until I leave on vacation, hope it's solved itself by the time I get back.
7. I'm eating crap. I realized driving home ravenously one night this week at 7:30 pm that I had no food in the house. By this I mean I had no food that could be made dinner-worthy in ten minutes or less - no leftovers, no convenience foods. I went to the McDonald's drive through for a bigmac and fries - the first time in probably five years I've done this. I'm buying lunch which is not terrible but also not perfectly healthy. The kitchen disarray contributes.
   Short-term strategy: I just came back from buying convenience foods. "Saffron Road" is a frozen dinner brand with good taste (and portion control). I bought fresh prepared food for today and tomorrow. 
   Longer-term strategy: recommit when I get back from vacation to cooking.
8. My dog is old. He is probably older than I thought when I got him. Also he's had a hard life. I made a rational decision this very hungry labrador is not going to have any more operations to remove things from his stomach. I doubt my ability to keep him safe, but I try and will keep trying. Our time together seems a bit more precious since I've thought this through.
   Strategy: enjoy our ambles together while we can.
9. I'm going sailing!  This is very very good, but not without stress. Sailing pushes me from comfortable life. I had major work done on the boat over the winter, which of course ended up costing more than I had planned. Tomorrow we're bringing her home to her summer berth. It'll be some hours, but not especially arduous nor dangerous - as long as nothing unexpected goes wrong. When a boat is 30 years old, the unexpected does happen.
   Strategy: sail my brains out this summer. Cultivate additional crew since my schedule and my boat partner's don't sync up that well. Ensure all my skills are sharp.
10. I'm going on vacation!  The astute reader will have deduced this already. This is also very very good, but it takes a lot to get things together. The vacation will be physically vigorous, and I've been training for it, but not enough. My laundry has piled up and because of work I am leaving no time to pack at the last minute, so I have to get to it this weekend. Because of going hiking in rural areas, my normal antidote to "did I bring the right stuff?" anxiety of "all I really need is a passport and a credit card" is not necessarily true. I also have significant aches and pains, and don't want to be a drag on the group.
    Strategy: pack drugs, electronic entertainment, credit cards and passport. Print physical copy of itinerary documents. Then chill. It'll be fine. 

Overall:  ensure having fun!  Thanks, Liz.  Got to make sure there is time for that. Like doing this - this is fun. But I'm off to mow the lawn now.

Willpower, Habits, and Mindfulness

I had great responses to the last post which has got me thinking even more, as I continue with my mindfulness training.

Liz suggests mindful eating is deprivation, which as I am doing it is not true. It is some work - maybe a bit of willpower to remember to be mindful? But what I've found, very recently, is I truly don't want certain foods. This feels like a breakthrough. Doughnuts, no problem. I stop and feel the urge, curiously, and note where in my body I have it. But this pause, to feel and investigate it, allows it to pass, or triggers the next feeling, which is I really don't want it. Many of the sugary and starchy foods make me feel bad in relatively short order, and I know that about them and me, so I don't do it. Sweets also lead to more sweets, so in general I try to delay them, even if I decided to have something. If the perfect exquisite doughnut were offered to me, I'd take it gratefully, but I'd try to save it for later rather than eat it right away, because I know how that type of food acts on my body (not because of making me fat in the long term, but because of making me crazy in the short term). But at the same time, I have ice cream in my freezer, and I may have a small portion of it just before bed. Not going to deprive myself - but hopefully not going to overindulge. Careful testing, with my new found skills.

Yesterday, I walked ten miles on a small breakfast, and with poor planning and without good choices turned up my nose at a sea of energy bars before me. The last time I ate one of those it was chocolate cardboard, insufficiently delicious yet with too much sugar for me. (They didn't have any Kind brand bars, which while not perfect are pretty delicious. Also they are mostly nuts and fruit, no added sugar in some, and no mysterious multi-syllable ingredients.)  Today, I bought a salad from a food truck about an hour after my normal lunch hour, and stopped eating two thirds of the way in. Chewing and swallowing and savoring slowed me down, and I realized I was full. Portion control, folks, coming from myself. Another breakthrough.

Darya Rose of the Summer Tomato believes in mindfulness but also is a big proponent of habit. (Also the advocate of awesomeness.) Darya, a PhD in neuroscience, breaks it down, and describes willpower as a muscle that can be strengthened, but will always still get exhausted. Habit, on the other hand, will continue with little or no effort, when built well. Habits are built of three things: trigger, action, reward. To eat better, build up good food habits, including figuring out the rewards, and make life easy on yourself. To eat better, identify the bad habits, and analyze the triggers and rewards and adjust accordingly.

The mindfulness course I'm doing now seems to propose always being mindful. Be present in the moment. This is a good thing, but surely they don't mean always? What is the alternative to being mindful? Autopilot (habits and automatic reactions), yes, I'd like to avoid the bad ones of those. But there are good ones too. More importantly, I like planning. I like analyzing. Sometimes, for some period of time, I like ruminating, turning things over in my mind. I really enjoy daydreaming. Once, I daydreamed enjoyably for the better part of a week deciding what I would do if I won the mega-lottery. (My odds are actually worse than most peoples' because I've never actually bought a lottery ticket. Nevertheless, I got hung up for most of a day on whether I wanted the beach house to be in North Carolina or Long Island before I finally decided to just have both.) Clearly these "inside my head" functions are an important part of my life. But there is a question mindfulness trainers suggest, along the lines of "what am I getting from this?" or "how is this working for me?". The lottery planning, that worked great for me. Some of the agonizing over the kids, not so much.

I have no doubt I'm going to reach for the food in an unhealthy and unhappy way sometime soon. I have been very conscious of "I shouldn't be doing this" as I do it, and yet I do it. There can be a conscious self-destructive impulse there, a reckless wild jumping off a cliff feeling. The reflection that at any moment, I can stop with the food halfway to my mouth and just walk away (heck, I could even spit it out) is not going to be compelling in that moment. But to pause to investigate curiously, to feel and note what I am feeling, may be something I can try to do. To ask what I'm getting from it, curiously and really wanting to know the answer. This is what I'm hoping for.

Thanks, guys, for helping me think about this. Off to bed, and the body scan (it starts with the toes, and I never stay awake past my knees). Turns out I don't want ice cream tonight after all.  Maybe tomorrow.

Mindfulness

I'm going deep into mindful eating. I'm not yet ready to say if this will make a permanent difference, but I feel changes to my relationship with food underway.

I took a meditation class a few years ago (and wrote a bit about it here) - the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction course, MBSR, a practice developed and standardized at University of Massachusetts hospital for those chronically (physically) ill, and now studied and applied to a variety of situations, such as depression. Since then, I have irregularly meditated on my own, and with the use of recorded guided meditations (of course there are apps for this). From the course, I've seen there are three main strands of guided meditations - general, the body scan, and loving kindness. I've done general meditations for stress and body scans for my chronic backpain, and turned away from the loving kindness which seems the most woo-woo and out there, but not especially for eating.

A blogger I follow, Dayra Rose of the Summer Tomato, sponsored a five-day mindful eating challenge, with daily email videos coaching what to do that day, and a facebook group to share experiences. The basics are "pick one meal, put away all distractions, thoroughly chew and taste and swallow each bite, don't fill your fork until you have swallowed." Specific days had specific things to focus on during the experience. It was useful, and felt like I was on the right track, though not any earth-shattering breakthroughs. The pause to make sure I am experiencing the food, chewing it, tasting it, and not just shoveling it in, has persisted.

So I went to my current meditation app, "10% Happier", which has a combination of discussions about how and why to apply mindfulness to different situations, and they have a 9-section course with Dr Judson Brewer. Brewer has apparently developed a successful practice at treating addiction using mindfulness and is now applying the techniques to the (more lucrative) diet industry.  I did that course, and it kept me mindful, and introduced me to a new practice about riding out cravings, "surf the urge". Don't fight a craving, don't push it away, embrace it and investigate it. As it turns out, Brewer has his own complete app, Eat Right Now, (not free) with months of video coaching and specific meditation guidance, and its own community to share experiences. I've been faithfully daily following that for 20 days (they keep count for you). So this journey has been steady for many weeks now. Finally, I feel like my relationship to food is actually changing.

I think I eat pretty well (though sometimes too much) day in and day out - until about 4 pm each day. I know what food my body likes and I've upped the deliciousness factor as well. I mostly cook at home, or buy not terribly processed meals like salads. I told my doctor I may be her only patient that actually eats seven servings of vegetables every day.

But here's the thing:  I have portion control problems at every meal. I will eat what is served for breakfast and lunch, always always cleaning my plate even if I bought a huge prepared salad. I like the full feeling in my stomach. I have a terrible tendency to binge in the evenings, when my body is jonesing for something, and I can't rest until I feed it. Sometimes the binge is simply on my dinner, seconds and thirds, cleaning the pot of food I'd hoped to eat all week. Often, the binge is sweets, which continue to be in my house because I like sweets and don't want to lead a life of constant denial. I also sometimes feel the imperative so strong I will get in my car in the dark and the cold and go to the supermarket to buy ice cream. I feel I can't rest until I do.

So the mindfulness is helping me break this cycle, with the pause before eating, a pause while eating, and embracing and investigating my cravings while they happen. This feels different. But, I struggle intellectually with some of this, and think about how to put this experience into my other bits and pieces I've learned about myself and other humans, how willpower and self-talk and data and analysis fit together with this. This long post is to catch up with myself, reflect on where I've been with this, and I hope to build from this to additional posts investigating some of these intersections and contradictions.

Question to ponder until next essay: willpower is hard, and won't work for the long term to manage eating. What is the difference between mindfulness contemplation of eating in order to not eat too much or unhealthily, and using willpower to resist eating too much or unhealthily?