Tag: stress

Categories
Art and Design Meta

Defining constraints for a new creative project

Much of my free time is oriented around reading — on my phone, on my kindle, in a paper book — and I’ve been feeling like it’s been too long since I made something. Blogging is a great outlet for thoughts, but writing is my default response, and there are so many other formats I’d like to play with — I just need to remember to do them. As part of my recovery process to bring down my elevated cortisol levels, my therapist has also encouraged me to do more tactile and immersive activities.

I’m working on multiple long-running projects that take a huge upfront time investment before they’re ready to share with others. It’s hard to measure my progress in much besides hours invested. It would be nice to finish some things. (That’s something I like about blogging; the format encourages me to finish and publish.)

I find it challenging to create visual art for the sake of creating. I suspect I am more a designer than an artist at heart. Blogging works well for me because there are endless prompts to think about. I have way more ideas for fiction than I’ll ever have time to write. But visual art? Inventing something pretty to draw feels kind of meaningless — purely aesthetic — but I’m not sure how to translate what I can do with writing into the visual arts.

In the past, identifying themed projects for myself has unlocked a ton of creative energy for design and other types of work that aren’t my first instinct to turn to. Time-based art challenges like MerMay and Inktober spurred me to draw more, but the daily pressure to create was too intense and the prompts felt hollow since I didn’t pick them. A more enjoyable — and meaningful — project was making daily comics during a vacation.

I’d like to give myself a creative focus, a new project to orient my art around this fall, so I’m starting by brainstorming the boundaries of what I want out of it. Constraints make a project. If I draw a bunch of random shit, it’s a sketchbook; if the drawings have a theme, it’s a collection 😎

Although waiting for an organic idea for a project sounds more natural, thinking back, I’ve always had a goal that served as a constraint at the core of each project idea: I made vacation comics because I’d always wanted to do hourly comic day but missed it again right before I was leaving on vacation; I created my Sense Memory project because I wanted to experiment with a newsletter format and revisit old photos; I created an online t-shirt shop for my political satire project because I wanted to critique capitalism through capitalism.

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Categories
Getting Shit Done Health

Accepting the capacity gap

Replied to To move toward fully living by Lisa OliveraLisa Olivera (Human Stuff from Lisa Olivera)

The grief that runs a line between what I long for and what I currently have the capacity for is, at times, oceanic in its power.

I’m feeling this right now not with depression (happily), but with stress: I have cut back so much on work and stressors, but still my body is cranking out cortisol like I’m slacklining over the Grand Canyon without a harness. To accept that my capacity is both less than others, and less than I want, is just as hard as actually clearing my plate. It’s much easier to reject capitalism’s misuse of my body than to perceive my own self-driven overexertion. Of course, part of my own creative ambitions and impatience to ship are driven by both the culture and reality of capitalism 😉

I keep hoping I’ll stumble into a routine that will magically let me recover better, faster. And it’s true I probably haven’t yet found the best balance — but even when I do find a more restorative schedule, that doesn’t mean I’ll be able to crank more or harder. Again, it’s easier to see in others than myself: organizations that run without buffer are brittle. Hospitals operating without buffer was why the number of hospital beds available became an important metric during the early days of COVID. Working on less capacity than I have most of the time saves extra to deal with unexpected needs. I shouldn’t design a routine that relies on using all the spoons I have on my best days, every day.

Continue reading “Accepting the capacity gap”
Categories
Getting Shit Done Lifestyle Self Care

Read How to Calm Your Mind

Read How to Calm Your Mind by Chris Bailey

How to Calm Your Mind is a treasure trove of practical, science-backed strategies that reveal how the key to a less anxious life, and even greater productivity, is a calm state of mind.

I took my time reading this over the past three months to let it really soak in. It’s great and totally aligns with my own shift in thinking over the years.

I’ve followed Bailey’s work for many years, and enjoyed his previous two books, but also struggled with anxiety, stress and burnout. Culturally it feels like many Millennials are going through this transition at the same pace, throwing ourselves into work and burning out through our twenties, then rethinking priorities in our thirties and recognizing the societal factors pushing us to work so hard and yet ineffectively. We see decades of our careers remaining ahead of us and are acknowledging that we can’t keep brute forcing ourselves till we’re eighty.

I appreciate this comprehensive recentering of the value and importance of rest and calm to let us live the lives we want to. Stress and anxiety have physical consequences to the way our bodies and minds function, and make it harder to be intentional. He covers the scientific backing behind burnout and stress as well as offering a whole host of practical steps to try calming your body and mind, while reminding readers not to overdo it by trying to change everything at once. Even as someone who’s practiced meditation and mindful breathing and such, I found new ideas.

I appreciated the deeper grounding in root causes, especially the framing of looking at activities in terms of stimulation. I was reading The Shallows by Nicholas Carr at the same time as this,  which provided a perfect complement of messages on the impacts of digital spaces and the value of analog. I don’t 100% agree with Bailey — like his assertion that hanging out virtually “doesn’t count” as social time — but overall agree that I’d like to use my digital devices less and more thoughtfully, and replace digital with analog where viable.

Categories
Mental Health Personal Growth

Listen to yourself

Liked Taking a break from personal projects: Mental health and coding by James (jamesg.blog)

[I]f you feel anxious or worried about progress on personal projects, don’t feel that you have to continue.

👏 A good reminder that personal projects are not obligations, and sometimes quitting a project is the right choice.

Categories
House Lifestyle Mental Health

Home organization is often a quest for control

Liked Perfectionism and the Performance of Organizing by Virginia Sole-Smith (Burnt Toast by Virginia Sole-Smith)

Organizing is a complicated drug. It’s about instant gratification and control… But it’s also an illusion of control…

My husband calls it Nesting Mode when I get super into making the house better.

I’m not sure there is a more peak White Lady moment than texting your friends photos of your newly organized Tupperware drawer…

Lol I just reorganized my snack shelf this weekend and sent a photo to my mom and sister 😂

But lots of people, particularly straight women in cis het partnerships, play the role of the Noticer in their household, which tends to translate to also being the Organizer and resetting that balance requires the less organized partner to start valuing that there is now a place to put the permission slips and library books…

I’m working on letting go of more things / caring less — although I am extremely attuned to Noticing shit that “needs” to happen. I’m also trying to give my partner more opportunities to take ownership of how our house is organized, like having him help me figure out where to store our salad fixings after I removed them from the snack shelf where I’d been keeping them with the other nuts and dried fruit.

See also: The Mental Load

Categories
Health Lifestyle Society

Society and environment sets the baseline for your health

Liked https://mobile.twitter.com/thefatdoctoruk/status/1591062358532972545 (mobile.twitter.com)

Rest of the thread:

We like to blame others for making choices that cause their woes but it’s easy to fall into some logical fallacies — turns out the whole every individual for themselves thing doesn’t really reflect reality, or help improve outcomes.

See also: Stress response — finding / achieving health as a community

Categories
Mental Health

Happiness and unhappiness should be measured separately

Bookmarked Happiness Is Two Scales by Uri (Atoms vs Bits)

The common way to talk about happiness is as a single scale: unhappy at one end, neutral in the middle, happy at the other end. I think that model is wrong.

If someone (including yourself) is struggling with low well-being, it’s important to ascertain which of two problems are happening:

  • not enough happiness
  • too much unhappiness

This is interesting and resonates with where I am now:

Removing unhappiness doesn’t actually increase happiness, it just…. removes unhappiness, which is good but unrelated.

Now that I am free of a stressful situation, I have space to add more happiness, but filling that opening with positive feelings isn’t a given.

Categories
Health Self Care Work

Chronic stress recovery

4 elements of recovery activities:

  1. Psychological detachment
  2. Relaxation
  3. Mastery
  4. Control (choosing how to spend your time and doing things the way you want to do them)

Citing:

Sonnentag S, Fritz C. The Recovery Experience Questionnaire: development and validation of a measure for assessing recuperation and unwinding from work. J Occup Health Psychol. 2007 Jul;12(3):204-21. doi: 10.1037/1076-8998.12.3.204. PMID: 17638488. (No free full text)

Cortisol levels may actually be low in chronic stress due to:

  • Desensitization of the receptors that interact with cortisol
  • Exhausted secretion of cortisol
  • Enhancement of the negative feedback loop process

Citing:

Hannibal, K. E., & Bishop, M. D. (2014). Chronic stress, cortisol dysfunction, and pain: a psychoneuroendocrine rationale for stress management in pain rehabilitation. Physical therapy, 94(12), 1816-1825.

Fries, Eva, Judith Hesse, Juliane Hellhammer, and Dirk H. Hellhammer. “A new view on hypocortisolism.” Psychoneuroendocrinology 30, no. 10 (2005): 1010-1016.

(See also:

Fiksdal, Alexander & Thoma, Myriam & Hanlin, Luke & St. Pierre, Danielle & Chen, Xuejie & Rohleder, Nicolas. (2017). Chronic stress moderates late phase cortisol recovery from acute stress.

–> Chronic stress was evaluated using the Trier Chronic Stress Inventory (TICS) )

Recommend keeping consistent sleep and wake times to reinforce the normal pattern of cortisol release that is supposed to happen when you wake up.

(See also:

Duan H, Yuan Y, Zhang L, Qin S, Zhang K, Buchanan TW, Wu J. Chronic stress exposure decreases the cortisol awakening response in healthy young men. Stress. 2013 Nov;16(6):630-7. doi: 10.3109/10253890.2013.840579. Epub 2013 Oct 1. PMID: 23992539.)

Good explanation of adrenal dysfunction:

https://www.fwdfuel.com/adrenal-fatigue-adrenal-dysfunction/

Categories
Health Self Care Society

Stress response

Liked That’s a stress response (annehelen.substack.com)

My intense stress may have been less than others’, in other words, but that didn’t diminish how my body was internalizing it.

And so, instead of acknowledging — then or until recently — the effects of that structural stress, and connecting it to my hair loss, I did what so many of us learn to do: 1) conceive of it as a personal failing and 2) conceive of it as a personal failing remedied through consumerism.

My body has severely expressed its anger over the situation over the past two plus years. From little things like irritating dermatitis flare-ups to constant indigestion to heart issues, my body is trying to tell me something is wrong.

We’re bad at talking about this stuff because a lot of the causes are intertwined and intersectional…But we’re especially bad at talking about it because of a collective tendency to treat ailments as personal.

It’s our structures — the units of community and family and care that are supposed to catch us — that are fundamentally unwell.

So we can navigate this alone, as so many of us have…But on a societal scale, I also know this: we recover together — or not at all.

The current societal response of saying everyone’s responsible for protecting their own health is ableist and short-sighted (it literally costs more to not offer universal health care): we operate as a society and need each other, no matter how much some like to think of themselves as independent. They need workers at the ports to transport goods they buy, they need the workers at the factory to make things, they need waiters to serve them at restaurants. And that’s just looking at the direct dependencies. As a society, what are we missing out on by excluding everyone with cancer and chronic illnesses from participating in society because we’ll do nothing to help protect their safety? I think of an Eons show I watched recently sharing examples of early human groups caring for disabled and “non-contributing” members of their group, in some cases for years. Economic contributions and service aren’t the only ways we need each other, they aren’t the only value we offer our community. Something we seem to have forgotten for the time being.

Categories
Comics Mental Health

Just everything

Liked Poorly Drawn Lines – What is it (poorlydrawnlines.com)