Salvation Over the Internet

I'm a fan of self-help books from way back, perhaps a subject deserving of its own future post. But with the advent of the internet, now I'm a fan of self-help over the internet, a somewhat more interactive, but still private and self-motivated approach.

I recently did some housekeeping on my phone, and I realized I've got several paid subscription services I'm using, some more intermittently than others. Yes there are blogs and podcasts, but I'm talking about services, where content comes with coaching, often in the form of a moderated forum for subscribers supplemented with email personal coaching. 

I've never done therapy, only one attempt at Weight Watchers (before the internet existed), and I prefer to meditate alone. These internet services suit my introverted home focused personality.  What follows is a partial list of those services I'm using, with notes on how I found them and what I think about them.

I forget how I stumbled onto the Summer Tomato blog, but I'm a big fan of  Darya Rose's Foodist approach to eating. Being a good San Francisco-based internet entrepreneur, she has a few services available, and I've used two of them.  The first was a free, weeklong course in mindful eating, the Mindful Meal Challenge. She runs a new one every Monday. Sign up, and get an email every day with a link to a video with that day's instruction. You get admitted to a private Facebook group, where others in the challenge, and Darya, provide support and answers to questions. Really helped me get started with focus and slowing down my eating. I think it made a permanent difference in how I approach a meal. She also has cooking lessons, Foodist Kitchen. It cost $99 to get 30 days of daily emails and links, and access to another private Facebook group. Because I agree with Darya that one of the keys to eating healthfully is cooking at home from scratch, I signed up for that as well. Of course I know how to cook, but I wanted the discipline and approach of structuring cooking for a month. She is big on building habits, and paying for the course helped focus me on doing the daily work she recommended. I found I could actually make dinner on a week night - but I still don't, mostly.  I think what has stuck with me most from the course is a new (to me) approach to chopping vegetables that is much faster than what I did before-basic knife skills- by decreasing the time it becomes more approachable.

So those are courses, one and done, but with continuing access to the materials and the support groups. I have an ongoing paid subscription to a meditation app, 10% Happier, that definitely makes me happy. I came to this from the book of the same name by Dan Harris. The app has full length courses and guided meditations of various lengths and topics, and is constantly updating the material. I often go to the app for meditating, looking for guidance, rather than just doing a simple timed quiet meditation on my own. Of course, I like that the app records my meditation minutes so I have access to looking at my history. Dan Harris also has a blog, and another book, and I'm a fan of it all. I turned to their guided meditations on living with pain when my back went out, and it was so very very helpful in sorting out the actual physical pain from all the mental anguish I was having.

One of the courses in 10% Happier is on Mindful Eating, taught by Judson Brewer. I did that course, which ends with noting Brewer has his very own, longer, more expensive, app called Eat Right Now. It consists of an app and an online community, which is staffed by Brewer's grad students. The app has a number of tools to access to help manage cravings and hunger, and for 28 days daily unlocks a lesson for the day. I've signed up, and am continuing it. I've been through all the content twice. It is built on the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) approach to meditation, all about noticing what you are doing, and understanding habits. These are common themes with all that I've covered here. It is also using many concepts and approaches Brewer has successfully used in treating drug and alcohol addiction. I found the insights and approaches useful and enjoy the on-line community. I think this program is probably closest to a magic bullet in modifying how I actually think about and approach food. But being mindful requires energy, and my focus has been distracted by other, non-weight, health problems.

I bought the app Migraine Buddy to track my migraines and to try to get a handle on triggers. It is just geared to tracking that, though it also has a community, the community is not so active.

When my back was out, my blog reader turned up a post from Kim's friend Chris, the Younger Next Year guy. He has a new book coming out soon, the Younger Next Year Back Book. His post said he had teamed up with a guy who also had a web service to fix backs. Of course I checked it out.  Back Forever is a 10-week program that has daily, eventually weekly, exercise programs with a write up and really meticulously detailed videos. This gym rat, who has been having personal training for 10 years now, combined with several series of physical therapy, learned a lot in the details of how to do the fundamental core exercises. I didn't go back to my gym for nearly 3 weeks after my back went sproing, but I did do these exercises, and they are what got me up and moving. Like our friend Chris, he's all about this is forever, not just till you are back on your feet. I was totally faithful to the plan for the first three weeks, pushed on to do all ten weeks, over a longer time period, and I've just turned off my subscription but I'm still doing the exercises. I probably will use his recommended technique for standing up from lying on the floor for the rest of my life. I'll also buy the book when it is available, because, hey, I love self-help books!  So I would highly recommend the not-cheap-for-an-app service - more than $20/month - for addressing back issues.

So I have migraines and back troubles and knee problems (not to mention the month of a sinus infection I may have finally gotten over) and Facebook pushes an ad on me about fixing chronic pain. I clicked through, read the blurb about the miracle cure, and signed up for Curable. It says, "Curable is a guided program that helps you understand why you have pain, why it persists, and what you can do about it." Bingo! Pushes all my buttons!  It's all about the mind-body connections, and how understanding and noting what is going on is the key to having less pain. I'm still not totally on board with this - it doesn't say "it's all in your head" but it does say that original physical causes for pain can be amplified and turned into recurrent pathways, so the pain the brain experiences is real, but maybe can be cured or reduced by non-physical means.  There are several pieces to it - basic pain education, with links to publications, meditation exercises from two schools - noting (my MBSR approach) and relaxation - and, finally and most difficult, self analysis by doing guided writing exercises. It's hard. And I'm still a little skeptical. But I'm slowly approaching it, and it's been a while since I've done completely honest private journalling. (And remember, never done therapy.) I still have my subscription, but I access it less than once a day. So definitely not a 30-day miracle cure for me.

I'm sure if I scrolled through my phone I'd find still more apps I thought would fix me. But if there is a theme to the ones I mention here, it's that they all require actual real life work to keep up with them in order to acheive results. Like my bookcase full of self-help books, each one of these has some gem that I'll keep with me going forward.