On the Couch Again

(Can you hear the Willie Nelson melody behind the title?)

I'm getting a fair amount of things done this week, but for some reason my current default position is sitting or lying on the couch.  In between work and errands and tri training, and the odd swipe at domestic sanitation and rearrangement, that's where you'll find me.  Unless I'm on my backyard swing/couch, or in my hammock/couch, weather permitting.  Much tea is being drunk.  Several books are in the process of being read.  Some phone conversations are being conducted.  And my new computer is too often in my face.  But the mode is definitely sedentary.  Oh, and the wardrobe?  Except when I have to leave the house (all too frequently, in my estimation), suffice it to say that my daytime and nighttime apparel are pretty much indistinguishable.

I'm not sure what that's about.  But I've decided it's not entirely healthy.  I'm getting stiff from lack of movement, despite yoga and almost daily brief but intense workouts.  And my mood goes south after a few hours of this sort of inertia.

My preliminary self-diagnosis is spiritual exhaustion--akin to the burnout we used to read so much about.  

Whatever happened to burnout?  Is it one more thing we can no longer afford in the present economic circumstance? 

According to that incontrovertible source, Wikipedia, burnout is recognized by the ICD-10: International Classification of Diseases of the World Health Organization, 1994, as "Problems related to life-management difficulty."  And anyone who has read more than a couple of posts here almost certainly knows that I have a few of those.  Problems, that is.  And difficulties.

Psychologists Herbert Freudenberger and Gail North have theorized that the burnout process can be divided into 12 phases, which are not necessarily followed sequentially, nor necessarily in any sense. . .exist other than as an abstract construct.

• A compulsion to prove oneself
• Working harder
• Neglecting one's own needs
• Displacement of conflicts (the person does not realize the root cause of the distress)
• Revision of values (friends or hobbies are completely dismissed)
• Denial of emerging problems (cynicism and aggression become apparent)
• Withdrawal (reducing social contacts to a minimum, becoming walled off; alcohol or other substance abuse may occur)
• Behavioral changes become obvious to others
• Depersonalization (life becomes a series of mechanical functions)
• Inner emptiness
• Depression
• Burnout syndrome

Uh-oh!  This is sounding familiar.

Here's what Wikipedia has to say about dealing with burnout:

While individuals can cope with the symptoms of burnout, the only way to truly prevent burnout is through a combination of organizational change and education for the individual.  Organizations address these issues through their own management development, but often they engage external consultants to assist them in establishing new policies and practices supporting a healthier worklife. Maslach and Leiter [Annual Review of Psychology, Vol. 52: 397-422 (February 2001)] postulated that burnout occurs when there is a disconnect between the organization and the individual with regard to what they called the six areas of work life: workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values. Resolving these discrepancies requires integrated action on the part of both the individual and the organization.

But which of my many organizational contexts is the culprit?  And if, as I suspect, my problems are multi-situational, could the problem be moi?

Maybe a few more days' rest, tempered with a bit more movement, will allow some insight. 

Done for the Week: Return of the Couch Potato

If I glance over to the right side of my slightly redesigned blog (see item 16 below), I see that we have finished with 10% of 2011.  Yikes.  And double yikes, considering how I spent this last week.

Here's what I did with my time.

Done for the Week:  Jan. 31-Feb. 6

1. Continued off-season race training, fighting a sinus infection and an intestinal bug; biked once; ran once
2. Succeeded in getting husband to gym with me once
3. Finished The Winds of Change:  A Guided Journey with Healing Music through Grief, Loss & Transformation, by Marcia Breitenbach
4. Continued providing minimal volunteer support to transitioning nonprofit
5. Worked my two part-time jobs
6. Published 5 blog posts
7. Wrote 2 Gratitude Journal entries
8. Wrote 1 Morning Page
9. Meditated 2 times
10. Spent time processing last week's training experience (See my post, Back from the Jungle) 
11. Attended first meeting of committee to hire new organizer
12. Watched our two favorite basketball teams play 4 games, with son and husband
13. Took a snow day; played outside with my son, my daughter, my grandson, and a Plott Hound
14. Took a sick day; rested, read, and spent (too much?) time on the computer
15. Attended one yoga class
16. Spent a significant amount of time tweaking my blog layout, and making network connections 
17. Watched possibly excessive number of episodes of Becker on YouTube
18. Attended professional basketball game with my husband and two sons
19. Celebrated 18th birthday with my son's friend--my "third son"
20. Stayed inside long enough to wash my warmest winter coat
21. Helped shovel our driveway after major winter storm
22. Spent one abbreviated session on "novelling"
23. Walked my daughter's Plott Hound once; took my Lab/Greyhound to the dog park
24. Watched my second Super Bowl ever--nice bonding experience with my household's three males

My focus goal for last week was "to get back to working on my novel."  I anticipated that the weather would take a bite or two out of my scheduled writing time.  And yet I wrote that "no matter what, I commit to two writing sessions of two hours each."  Ahem.  See item 20 above, highlighted in green.  Glass half full, I'm going to say.  This week should be a bit more hospitable to writing, if I can get my head back into it.


The most important thing I did last week, somewhat counterintuitively, was to give in to my irresistible urge to slack, as in "that which a slacker does."  One snow day, one sick day, (both in red above) and several days down in the valley of lethargy, and I am starting to feel like moving again.  Of course, I am not generally the sort of person who comes to a grinding halt; even sick, and even blue, I normally still attempt the minimal required activity.  But from time to time, like this past week, I experience an uncharacteristic inner rebellion.  I have observed, in the past, that this usually follows a period of business, especially in the service of others' requests, needs and demands.  I am thinking it may be wise to approach the whole "hitting the wall" thing with an attitude of acceptance.  It remains to be seen if I am right about this, and if I can really pull off the acceptance part of it. 

Given this recent work stoppage, I am going to try to ease into the coming week, and to resist getting drawn into the vortex of other people's agendas.  I am congenitally bad at this, but I am making it my focus goal for the week, nonetheless.  And about time.

Done for the Week: Time to Tweak this Feature

It's the kind of morning we live for in my neck of the woods.  Sunny, almost shorts weather.  I've already slept two full hours past my alarm, on a day jam packed with tasks and obligations.  A day all too likely to be "filled with surprises."  


At 5:30, my face in my pillow, I made a deliberate choice to turn off the bleating of my now old-fashioned clock radio.  I'm not sure I should be trusted with such decisions at that hour, but it seemed at the time that facing the day with a bit more rest was a good idea.  


I'm moving towards thinking more long haul with the changes I'm trying to make.  I am looking at how to deal with old bad habits in a way that will stick.  And my recent frenetic pace is probably not going to get me there.  


Reading M. J. Ryan's book This Year I Will. . . has given me some new ideas about using this weekly Done List to get where I'm trying to go.   Last week, I introduced a goal for the coming week.  Starting this week, I am going to assess my progress on the previous week's focus goal; renew or replace that focus goal for the coming week; and identify in the done list my most important accomplishment of the previous week (in red below).

Done List--Week of Mar. 29-Apr. 4

1. Finished This Year I Will. . . :  How to Finally Change a Habit, Keep a Resolution, or Make a Dream Come True, by M. J. Ryan; Remembering the Wilderness:  Poems by Sara Rath
2. Took my blood pressure daily
3. Survived two part-time jobs for another week
4. Attended 2 meetings; scheduled 1 more
5. Published 5 blog posts
6. Meditated 2 times
7. Succeeded in napping resistant 2 year-old twice
8. Returned to running after 5 weeks off with mega-virus; surprised to learn I am still closer to 5K than to couch potato--I'm going to call it Week 7 (again)
9. Committed to 5K race in 3 weeks
10. Finished my part of long-term pain-in-the-neck project in time to leave for New Orleans on Tuesday
11. Played teenage son in basketball, lost 3-2 with handicaps
12. Attended interesting Tenebrae service on Good Friday as part of brave new spiritual exploration
13. Improved relationship with husband 
14. Went toe-to-toe with frustrated boss, and held my own
15. Determined that it's time to retrench, and commit less time to volunteer work
16. Experienced lightening of depression

In my completely subjective opinion--and no other opinion is needed for this purpose--the most important "done" thing on this list is item 8, returned to running.   Its significance lies in the incredible lift it gave me to fight through the fear and discouragement, to lace up my shoes and get back on track.  Literally.  This breaks a cycle of abandoning goals when circumstances conspire to mar the perfection of their accomplishment.  Since all goals are similarly vulnerable, changing this pattern is big.  

Last week's focus goal was to meditate 5 times.  My progress toward that goal is highlighted in green in item 6 above.  Clearly, 2 is not 5.  But neither is it 0.  I confess that I considered trying to cram in three more meditation sessions yesterday, or modifying my definition of meditation to include some trance-like states I did "achieve."  But M. J. Ryan persuaded me that there is merit in tracking my real behavior, and learning from it--without judgement.  

In comparing some of the things I have been able to do more consistently to my spotty record on meditation, I see two things:  first, that meditation is more subtle than, for example posting a blog, or running, or reading; and secondly, that I have not yet succeeded in finding a routine time to meditate.  When I was meditating more regularly, last fall, I had fallen into a practice of meditating immediately after lunch.  A colleague suggested to me that doing it before lunch would alleviate the distraction of digestion, but for some reason the call of midday hunger often proved too much for my fledgling inner buddha.  And lately, lunch itself has been imperiled by my frantic efforts to stay on the ramped up treadmill of my days.

This week's focus goal is to meditate 5 times, while on vacation.  My plan is to take 20 minutes after lunch each day, wherever I am--tomorrow I will be either at O'Hare or on a plane.   Both great, if challenging, places for this recovering flight-phobic to concentrate on breathing.

  

Couch Potato Training--Part 2

For any of you who might be still in suspense, holding your breath to see if I made it through yesterday's workout, featuring two 8-minute jogs, the answer is yes.  After four and a half weeks of following the Couch Potato to 5K training program, my body is a bit leaner, the contours of my muscles a bit more defined, my edges somewhat sharper.  But four and a half weeks into the new, improved, 2010 me, I am becoming aware of some other vitally important muscles that need work.  And for this muscle group, the couch I am to have abandoned for the gym is a tried and true training zone.  I aspire to partial couch-potatohood.


Answers.com  provides this fascinating history of the term "couch potato:" 

Very few words have a birthday so precise, and so precisely known, as couch potato. It was on July 15, 1976, we are told, that couch potato came into being, uttered by Tom Iacino of Pasadena, California, during a telephone conversation. He was a member of a Southern California group humorously opposing the fads of exercise and healthy diet in favor of vegetating before the TV and eating junk food (1973). Because their lives centered on television--the boob tube (1966)--they called themselves boob tubers. Iacino apparently took the brilliant next step and substituted potato as a synonym for tuber. Thinking of where that potato sits to watch the tube, he came up with couch potato.

Or so the story goes, as told in the subsequent registration of Couch Potato as a trademark. In any case, when the new phrase reached the ears of Robert Armstrong, another member of the boobtubers, he drew a cartoon of a potato on a couch, formed a club called the Couch Potatoes, registered the trademark and began merchandising Couch Potato paraphernalia, from T shirts to dolls. He published a newsletter called The Tuber's Voice: The Couch Potato Newsletter and a book, Dr. Spudd's Etiquette for the Couch Potato.

If the story ended there, couch potato would have been as passing a fad as the "pet rock" (1975) of the same vintage. But since the 1970s the tube has grown more alluring and the couch potato culture more compelling, especially with the 1980s invention of the zapper (1985), or remote control. No longer a cartoon character, the couch potato is now one of us.

Somewhat more generically, Princeton University's wordnetweb gives us this stripped-down definition:  

an idler who spends much time on a couch (usually watching television).

As I have understood and used the term, the key element is physical (and perhaps mental) inactivity.  Television is optional.  And not all couch potatoes are overweight, or subsist largely on junk food.  


Danielle van Versendaal, in her article "On Mirror Neurons or Why it is Okay to be a Couch Potato," offers one of the few defenses of sitting around that isn't intentionally facetious.  She argues that watching sports, for example, can be almost as good as engaging in them, in terms of what's going on in our premotor cortex.  She doesn't address cardiovascular capacity or muscle strength, however.


But I am intrigued with the word "idler."  Thesaurus.com reveals the language's ambivalence about this appellation.  Definitions for idle include:  "not used; out of action;" "lazy;" and "worthless, ineffective."  Synonyms for "idle" range from the enticing--"asleep," "at rest," "taking it easy," and "leisured"-- to the judgmental--"mothballed," "shiftless," "pointless," and "slothful."  Idler is defined as "lounger," with synonyms of "couch potato, drone, lazy bum, loafer, [and] slacker."  

This collection of meanings reflects our productivity-obsessed culture's uneasiness with ease.  Meanwhile, bookstores and libraries, talk shows and coffee house conversations are teeming with discussions of stress.  And in the midst of these conflicting messages, we are left to find our own resolution, and make our own resolutions, and struggle for balance.


For me, I have felt increasingly stressed as my balance has tipped to the overly active side.  A little more down time is called for.  Maybe even some television, a nap or two.  I need to log some hours on the couch.