engines: stalled, officially.

I'm a little...stalled.

Wasn't it just two short weeks ago that I ran 2.5 miles on Wednesday and did a one-hour step aerobics class at 8:00 on a Saturday morning? And finished painting the nursery, and tried a new (awesome) recipe, and slept through the night - every night? And was on top of my bills and my projects and...I don't know...my life?

Not the case this week. It might be because of work - this is the busiest time of the year for me, this month before camp starts - but everything. Is. Stalled. Such as:

• This blog. Usually I have more post ideas than I can keep up with, and I spend my lunch breaks snapping and editing photos. This week, I spent my lunch breaks watching reruns of Grey's Anatomy while eating Strawberry Newtons, and I literally wished I had a blog. And then remembered that OH YEAH I DO.
• The nursery. Still need to paint the crown and shoe moulding so it can be installed. Still need to finish painting all the trim. Still need to choose a closet paint color. AND THAT'S ALL JUST FOR PAINTING. No other decisions - furniture, textiles, wall art - have been even considered, beyond some halfhearted Pins.
• Eating. Which is not so much stalled as it is wonky. I'll eat a normal amount of food and (a) still be hungry, but (b) feel like my stomach might literally explode. It's so damn uncomfortable. (I know, I know, just wait, omg, etc.)
• Sleeping. No position is good. I drift off and wake up almost immediately. I toss and turn. I draft hate letters in my head to the manufacturers of my stupid new expensive mattress, listing its numerous shortcomings, and I imagine the unicornish ways in which they'll compensate me for my nights of sleepless agony. (Which...surely don't have anything to do with having a brand-new body shape...or anything.)
• Exercising. I went out to dinner tonight with people from my step aerobics class. Does that count?
• Memory and general coordination. I'll forget something you asked me to do while you're still asking me to do it. And then I'll knock over my pencil jar. For the third time in the last hour. Placenta brain: It's not just a myth...and it definitely complicates things in the workplace, especially when I'm such a control freak meticulous, dedicated employee.
• Bills. Am I really supposed to pay them every month? Didn't I just pay a bunch of them...like, seven weeks ago? Crap.
• Documenting. You know, things like my first Mother's Day, understanding my fetus's sleep and wake cycles, and uploading belly shots. Speaking of, someone is growing quickly:

19 weeks, 2 days

20 weeks, 2 days

Oh, and? I still need to document our last ultrasound, which was a week and a half ago. We got to see all sorts of crazy stuff (like ventricles and kidneys); my super-special placenta was discovered; and - minor detail - we learned the sex of our baby. Our child. Our...daughter. I never want to forget that moment, and considering my track record as of late...I better hop to it.

...Tomorrow.

check yourself III/IV.

I was a bad girl and never checked in last week, but seriously, I've been a very, very good girl overall with my physical and mental health goals. That might all be heading downhill, what with my kitchen growing increasingly non-functional - and with me pushing the limits of my renovation abilities - but...but at least the last two weeks were quality.

Physical
I've been taking mad advantage of the warm weather and have gone for two runs and some walks. It turns out the more I exercise, the easier it is to motivate myself to exercise. It's like, when my ass was on the couch for two straight months, the idea of moving my muscles for anything more than chewing candy was totally overwhelming. But I think I broke through that barrier; now, I find myself looking for ways to exercise throughout the week. I even (get this) did an Insanity video on Saturday! I also played football and Frisbee that same night, which probably pushed me over the edge - I'm still totally sore today. But I did it! Who knows if it will continue beyond this exercise challenge, but for now, I have check marks next to all five weeks (which for me means I'm logging at least 10 minutes of exercise per day and at least 30 minutes on three out of seven days per week). And no, I didn't count the minutes of running through downtown Ann Arbor on Thursday for the safety of Jolly Pumpkin as tornado sirens wailed and hail pelted me. And yes, one of my runs was to the drugstore to purchase Cadbury Eggs, but whatever! A run is a run.

Goals over this next week? Another Insanity video and another run, at minimum. It's fun to keep adding new things, but I'm not sure what else to add. Maybe the dance video Yanna had mentioned? And I haven't busted out my Wii Fit or Dance Dance Revolution at all...

Mental
Okay, first things first: I had two harsh weeks in a row at work. One was harsh because my boss was out of town, and, as fate would have it, things just went batshit crazy while she was gone. Being second in command, it was on me to un-crazify things, and I did. Everything. All the things. That might not seem like a big deal - after all, that's my job, and I deal with most of that stuff regularly anyway, but truly, it was like the seven circles of hell descended upon my workplace. Pretty much anything that could go wrong, did. It was bad.

Not helping the situation was the fact that I had a training to put together, one that I'd be facilitating four separate times over the following week (i.e., last week). Sometime in the last six years, I developed a seemingly intractable fear of presenting. Don't ask me where it came from - I was in theater and Forensics in high school, and I thrived on giving presentations during undergrad and grad school. Anxiety rears its stupid head, I guess.

So last weekend rolled around. I was feeling pretty good about juggling All The Things, even while I was a bundle of nerves about facilitating the trainings that were scheduled for four out of the five work days last week. And?

A mental breakthrough.

Seriously. Mornings are my worst time for anxiety, and I woke up last Sunday morning unable to concentrate on anything except the trainings - for which I was woefully unprepared, having had zero time to plan them the week before. Now, there are few things I dislike more than a sunny Sunday that's wasted stuck in an anxiety vortex. So I located the source of my anxiety - fear over not being prepared yet - and decided to accept the fear. Even beyond that; I welcomed the fear. It was going to motivate me on Monday to thoroughly prepare for the first training on Tuesday morning. It was going to guarantee that I wouldn't fail, that I wouldn't let people down, that I wouldn't make a fool of myself.

And, wouldn't you know it, once I accepted and welcomed the fear...it left me. Mostly. Like, 95%. It rose occasionally throughout last Sunday, but I just acknowledged it, and it would leave again. Unbelievable.

Then I had an inexplicably crappy end of the week, but the weekend kicked me out of that funk. Three days of a funk - it may have been random, but I'll tell you what, it's way better than a year spent in a funk, or months or weeks. Three days. It's manageable.

But it's all more manageable when I get sleep, so I'm going to do that now.

check yourself II.

Week 2 of my new physical and mental health goals. How'd it go?

Uhh...well...here's an auditorial interpretation of my efforts this week:

Yeah, so, not my best. I had three goals for Week 2:

1. Do a new physical activity this week - anything.
2. Do a new mental activity this week. 
3. Order the paperback version of The Joy Diet.

One out of three isn't so terrible, right? Because I did do #1, and I did it big-time. First, I went to my old step aerobics class on Saturday morning. I was out of practice, but it was good times. And then, last night, I attended an African dance class with my friend Yanna. It was...unreal. Live drummers, talented dancers, major adrenaline and endorphins, and...me. It was a workout, no doubt. I'm sore from head to toe today, even though I truly don't remember doing anything to exercise, say, my biceps. 

And you know what? I'm gonna go right ahead and count the dance class for #2 as well. I was way, way out of my comfort zone. Par exemple: A major portion of the 90-minute class involves forming two lines and then executing the dance steps I had learned less than 10 minutes earlier. Towards the live drummers. With all the other (super talented muscular intense awesome) dancers watching. YEAH. Yanna...I still am in semi-disbelief that I didn't run away screaming, and that may have only been because then I would have been stuck in Chelsea with no way home, nor did I want to bring shame to my high school kin. 

Some of you who regularly try new, exciting activities (!R, I'm thinking of you, with your acrobat classes and whatnot) might not think this was such a big deal. To that, I can only say, YUH-HUH IT WAS. I looked like a fool 98% of the time (that's 88 minutes, audience members), and my massive ineptitude was reflected in the host of floor-to-ceiling mirrors. I smacked an indoor tree with my hand, and then my foot. It was frightening, awkward, and uncomfortable. (Not unlike the ladybug orgy that's going down around my desk lamp right now...geez, ladies. Let's keep it civil.)

But also? It was invigorating. Empowering. A chance to completely lose myself in the moment, without even having to try. Fun, when all was said and done. And, now that I think about it, definitely a win for Goal #2.

So I didn't do #3, ordering the paperback, but that wasn't the most important one. I did stay on top of my work's exercise program's daily/weekly goals, but my mental health goals pretty much followed the same pattern as the week before - I did one full-out deep breathing session, and the rest were little spurts here and there. Hey, at least I'm remembering to try it when I need to. And I had big mental health success late last week, so I must be doing something right...

Now the challenge will be ramping it up even more, and staying on top of the daily goals. My physical activity goals are good; I may even up my weekly minimum minutes on the exercise program's website. The un-lousy Smarch weather (65 degrees tomorrow!) will help - I'm hoping to actually go for a run, which I don't do if it's less than about 55 degrees.

And, in light of the efforts I did actually make this past week, I'm taking the liberty to change my auditorial depiction to something a little more representative:

I don't know. Interpret at will. I think I'm doing okay after all. This week...I pledge to do one Insanity video, and to get outside tomorrow (while the gettin's good). And, come on, Cathy: How about three ten-minute breathing sessions? Like, it's breathing. It's not African dance.

We'll discuss my (non-) progress on the kitchen reno another time.

check yourself I.

Okay - this was Week One of holding myself accountable to new standards of physical and mental health. I detailed last week my proposed methods of promoting my own mental health, and the goal was to do at least 10 minutes a day of any one of those activities - meditation, yoga, deep breathing, journaling, stretching, progressive muscle relaxation.

Wellll...there were only two days where I can say I truly devoted myself, for a full 10 minutes, to a mental health exercise. Both times, it was deep breathing. So, okay, it's a start. And I can say that a some good things came from Week One:

• The two times I did the deep breathing were freaking awesome. Very calming, very effective.
• I think there were about five other times throughout the week that I stopped what I was doing to "find my breath." Finding my breath was (1) easier to do after devoting myself to concentrated deep breathing sessions, even just two of them, and (2) still calming even when I didn't spend a full 10 minutes doing it. Word.
• I found another activity to add to my arsenal (because "arsenal" sounds way more badass than the cliched social work "toolbox" <shudder>) - Doing Nothing. It's one of the first principles in Martha Beck's book The Joy Diet, which is sort of a partner book to her Finding Your Own North Star, which taught me about essential self vs. social self. (Enough linkage for ya there? Sorry.) Martha Beck has been a favorite author of mine for about a decade, but I only recently started reading her self-help books. They are, like Martha herself, witty, hilarious, and decidedly un-cheesy. What can I say, I'm a fan obsessed. But anyway - I'm learning about Doing Nothing, which is part of her Joy Diet, which I predict will offer even more activities for me to add to my toolbox arsenal.

And although I struggled with my goals for mental health activities, my physical activity goals for for my work's exercise program are going well. I'm supposed to do 30 minutes of activity, three times a week, plus at least 10 minutes the other four days of the week. Might not sound like a lot to you, but I am in full winter-blues couch-potato mode right now. It's been baby steps to get me to meet my admittedly meager goals. The mild(ish) temperatures are helping - I've been going for a lot of walks - and last week, I brought my little five-pound weights up by the television. Yeah, that's how bad it's gotten. I went from doing full-on Insanity in the fall for six weeks to begrudgingly doing squats and bicep curls while watching Hoarders.

Which brings me to my Week Two goals:

1. Do a new physical activity this week - anything. One step aerobics class, one drop-in class at the rec center, one Insanity DVD. ANYTHING.
2. Do a new mental activity this week. You know...going to a yoga class would meet both of these goals...but do at least one new activity from the list, and aim again for the 10 minutes per day goal.
3. Order the paperback version of The Joy Diet. The Kindle version isn't cutting it. I love my Kindle for most books, but sometimes, I need to be able to dog-ear the corners and scribble notes in the margins. Yes, I know that, technically (no pun intended), you can perform similar functions on the Kindle...but it's not the same. I want to be able to easily access the lines that inspired me and the exercises I want to remember.

I think that's enough for Week Two. (Side note, yes, I'm actually on Week Three of of the exercise program, but it's only Week Two of my individualized plan, so whatevs.) Really, the best side effect of incorporating mental health maintenance is that it's already so much easier for me to locate the calm center of myself, even though I only did two "real" breathing sessions. And a fun side effect of the increased physical activity? During one of my walks, J.J. and I happened across a house in the neighborhood that's undergoing construction - an addition over the garage, which is totally my "should-we-ever-happen-to-magically-fall-into-a-medium-to-large-amount-of-money" dream. Slash, maybe we'll take out another loan to make it happen, because we love, love, love this neighborhood, and specifically the location of our house within the neighborhood...but we'll outgrow it if we have more than two kids. I seriously want this to happen someday. Like, I already have floor plans (with measurements) in the back of my journal detailing our new master suite / first-floor mudroom & laundry room. Yeah. And a Pinterest board devoted to it. Yeah.

What the hell was I talking about? Oh, right - so we found a house in the neighborhood that's under construction. In a move totally out of my character, I left a note in their mailbox a few days later saying I'd love it if they could contact me to chat about the addition. And a woman called a few days later saying she'd be happy to talk with me! I missed her call intentionally didn't pick it up because I don't answer my cell if I don't recognize the number, but she left a message saying they were going on vacation until this past weekend, but I could call then. I procrastinated calling back by moving furniture and measuring kitchen stuff (anxiety avoidance techniques, what what!), and finally, I had to bribe myself to call her back: I couldn't go to Lowe's to get my lumber for kitchen projects until I called her back. Weird-ass bribe, but it worked. The woman was so, so nice, and she shared a bunch of details - square footage, timeline, cost, architect and contractor names, etc. She also said we were welcome to check it out once it was finished in a few months. Yes! Awesome!

...So now I just need to realllly work on my mental health exercises before I go see it, because even talking on the phone with her left my cheeks flaming red and my nose a sweaty mess. Score one for anxiety, and phone anxiety, specifically. UGH PHONES. Doesn't matter if I'm talking to my best friend, my husband, a stranger, or the lady down the street...phones suuuuck. Again: Need to incorporate the mental health exercises. STAT. 

Here's to Week Two.

check yourself.

...You know, before you...wreck  yourself?


It's been a week since I officially started tracking my exercise for my work's exercise-incentive program, and, um...yeah. Mixed results. So far, it's at least pushed me to exercise more, and I'm technically meeting my time goals, but I'm not yet actually doing the daily activities I planned out for myself. Nonetheless, the exercise program concept + having a bad anxiety funk a couple weeks ago = a new concept for me: If, in order to maintain physical health, you really need to work on it daily, then wouldn't it follow that mental health maintenance requires the same kind of effort?


There are lucky folks out there who don't need to put much effort into their physical health to maintain it. I can count myself among them. I mean, aside from consuming massive quantities of sugar (which will probably need to be decreased if I get pregnant someday...zoinks), I eat a generally healthy diet - vegetarian, mostly grains and fresh produce, organic when I can, not too much food, not too little. I cook at home more than I eat in restaurants. I hardly ever have fast food. I'm also an active person, and I get regular sleep (and regular naps, woo!). I'm on a prenatal multivitamin that, hopefully, fills in any nutrient gaps I may have. So, physically, I don't require much conscious effort beyond my relatively healthy lifestyle.


Mentally? Ha. Another story. Most people can probably skate by without having to put in major hard work to maintain their mental health, and I've been one of those people for the majority of my life. Not these days, though. I don't want to give too much weight to mah new label (Generalized Anxiety Disorder); in fact, I think that's partially why I had a rough time a couple weeks ago. I started believing in it too much and giving it an awful lot of power, which created (shocker) more anxiety. I despaired at the thought that, for the rest of my life, every day would just be a fight against unbidden, inexplicable anxiety. Generally anxious, day in, day out. I mean, that's a pretty awful prognosis. Sometimes I understand the origin of the anxiety - an important presentation, a misunderstanding, a meeting with my boss's boss's bosses. But when I'm chilling on the couch, flipping through a magazine, sunshine streaming through the windows, and all of a sudden, I'm barely breathing and my stomach clenches and my hands grow clammy? Nuh-uh. Unacceptable.


I shouldn't say that: "unacceptable." Part of this is going to be learning to accept that anxiety will just sometimes be there, provoked or otherwise. But I was forgetting that acute episodes of anxiety, whether they last an hour or a week, aren't representative of reality - even the reality of general anxiety. In order to give myself any kind of hope, I needed to address two things: preventing the constant anxiety, and my response to the moments of acute anxiety.


That's when it clicked - the connection between maintenance of physical health and of mental health. And although I'm still working on incorporating my exercise program ideas, I think it would be a good idea to start incorporating daily activities that promote mental health, and that, specifically, prevent anxiety.


There are a few activities that I know are stress-reducers for me, like watching dumb super awesome sitcoms ("Big Bang Theory" and "How I Met Your Mother" rank high up there), perusing home magazines, stalking blogs, and singing at the top of my lungs in my car. Those are great, and I don't really need to work on incorporating those into my life any more than they already are. (In fact, that's one of my hesitations about becoming a parent - not having time for those regular stress-reducers anymore.) And the fact that I eat well and sleep well (minus the periods of frequent waking, nightmares, and panic attacks) certainly contribute to good mental health. I think, though, that all of these qualify as "inactive" efforts.


I'm aiming now for times when I am actively working to calm and relax my mind and body. These would be in addition to the therapy sessions I go to every other week. So far, I've come up with a few activities that fall under this category:

• Meditating
• Deep breathing
• Journaling (ew, I hate all forms of the verb "to journal." "Journal" should only exist as a noun.)
• Stretching
• Yoga
• Progressive muscle relaxation

Two of these activities - meditating and yoga - I need professional guidance for...although I could probably find some guided meditations on YouTube. Or through my friend Leonard. The rest of the activities could easily be incorporated into my day.

Like physical exercise, I'm gonna have to ease my way in. I want to start with 10 minutes a day of any of those six activities and eventually work my way up to at least 10 minutes, three times a day, with one of those sessions being longer than 10 minutes. It's not all that much, when you think about it, especially since the one that helps me reduce anxiety the most - deep breathing - can be done anywhere, almost anytime: driving to work, on my lunch break, while watching TV, before I fall asleep.

My other goal? To hold myself accountable by checking in here, weekly, on Mondays. For this week, since I haven't started the mental exercising yet, I'll only log my physical exercise (which I'm also doing through the exercise program website, but I only log the minutes there, not what I did). The weekly "check yourself" check-in will go a little something like this:

• Tuesday, 2/14: 60-minute walk with J.J.
• Wednesday, 2/15: 10 minutes of stretching/yoga
• Thursday, 2/16: I logged 15 minutes, but I can't remember what I did - wasn't keeping careful track yet
• Friday, 2/17: 20 minutes of heavy lifting (and, yes, heavy breathing) while I built a bookcase and moved furniture
• Saturday, 2/18: 60 minutes of mega house cleaning
• Sunday, 2/19: 10 minutes of stretching/yoga
• Monday, 2/20: 60-minute walk with J.J.

Challenges (aside from remembering to record all of my physical and mental activities)? Eh, the usual. Time. Laziness. Acute stress. Being tired. And, just like physical exercise, it's when those challenges loom that the mental exercises would benefit me most, so I'm just going to try to remember: 10 minutes a day. Push through it.

Totally worth it if it reduces the general feeling of omg-panic-sucky-panic-sweaty-fearful-omg-anxiety.

push yourself.

:: This post contains affiliate links.

A couple winters ago, I found myself wallowing in the worst season of the year: Still-winter-and-not-even-close-to-summer. Especially in Michigan, this time of the year blows for those of us who thrive on sunshine and warmth. My sister-wife, Kristen, suggested I sign up with her for an exercise class through our local recreation center. I hesitated for a few reasons:

1. I don't like to exercise.
2. I don't like to pay money to exercise.
3. I don't like to pay money to exercise with a group of people.
4. I don't like to pay money to exercise with a group of people...at 8:00 on Saturday mornings.

But Kristen is realllly good at manipulating sweetly convincing me to submit (heh). She was the motivation I needed to get moving. The thing is, I just don't typically feel pressured to keep up with any sort of regular exercise routine. Whether I'm exercising or not, eating healthily or consuming six-pound bags of candy, running around all day at summer camp or sitting at my desk for eight hours, I pretty much stay around a certain weight, give or take five to ten pounds. (Don't worry...this is bound to catch up with me eventually.) Weight maintenance is why lots of people push themselves to exercise. Luckily, I had Kristen to help me remember the other benefits:

• Tightening up - I might not gain a bunch of weight if I'm not exercising, but I do get kinda smushy.
• Lightening up - i.e., letting the endorphins chase away my winter blues.
• Nothing else really rhymes with those two things. But I'm sure there were other good reasons, too, along the lines of general health and wellness.

I was willing to give it a shot, so I signed up for step aerobics with Kristen...and about 20 other folks, most of whom were literally twice my age. And totally kicked my ass at step aerobics. But it was fun, and a challenging workout, and I didn't want to get on Kristen's naughty list, so I kept going (except in summertime, when I exercise all day, every day anyway, and when I need to sleeeeep on the weekends to make up for that constant exercise).

Exactly what I looked like every Saturday morning.
Totes available on Amazon.

Last year, some of my aerobics classmates organized a team through an exercise-incentive program that our place of employment hosts every winter. It's pretty sweet - you form a team and agree that each member will be active for a pre-determined number of minutes per day (and overall per week), and the teams who do the best at meeting their goals win a cash prize. MONEY: A new exercise motivator! Also, the free t-shirt. Really, though, for me, it was really the endless subconscious pursuit of perfection that was motivating: I didn't want to let the team down or be the one to mess everything up. That said, I may have, um, allowed some wiggle room in my definition of "exercise." To be fair, this program encourages participants to think outside the box in order to incorporate physical activity into daily life...but I'm not sure they would have agreed that sex counted. Or a brisk Swiffering session. Oh, well.


We're forming another team again this year, but I'm actually not enrolled in the step aerobics class currently. Kristen moved to D.C. last summer, and I really relied on her encouragement (and companionship. Awwww) to keep going. So this year will be an extra challenge for me - first of all, because I'm not in the aerobics class with my teammates, and second of all, I am currently exercising zero (0) minutes per week.


I came up with some daily exercise ideas, because I like to be a woman with a plan, and because it'll be easier to reach my weekly minute goal if I have lots of activity ideas:

1. 60 minutes once a week of either a step aerobics class (drop-in) or racquetball. Because if it's good enough for senior citizens, it's bound to be my physical activity of choice.
2. 40 minutes twice a week of the Insanity workout DVDs. I did Insanity for a month late last year, and it was...well, totally freaking insane. But effective. I obviously fell off the wagon, but I should be able to incorporate it twice a week.
3. 30 minutes once a week of Wii fit (or 15 minutes twice a week). I literally jumped up and down when I got Wii Fit for Christmas from my sister a few years ago. Know how many times I've used it? Rhymes with "gyro."
4. 20 minutes once a week of vigorous cleaning. Seriously, I reviewed the guidelines - scrubbing the floor or shoveling snow definitely count!
5. 10 minutes on the days I don't do anything else dedicated to stretching/meditating. IT COUNTS. Or, at least, it should. 

That adds up to at least 200 minutes per week, and it meets the guidelines of 30 minutes at least three days out of every week. I'll be checking in weekly right here to track my progress. The great thing is, this all totally coincides with my grand "help yourself" project. Also? If I want to get knocked up anytime soon, it's probably better to be in shape beforehand. --Oh, right! Coming soon: My perceptions on conception. Because what's better than reading about my family planning? You know you can't wait. :) But in the meantime, I have some leftover Pizza Hut cheesy breadsticks to eat for dinner. Pre-fetuses love salty grease, right?