About Me

My photo
I have recovered from the disease of Alcoholism. I believe there is only one person really,.. everybody. And that peace of mind is everything. -So treat your neighbor as you would treat yourself, because your neighbor IS yourself. I think most of recovery is what I would call common sense, but that learning to be ordinary is a true gift very few people acquire. My ambition is to accept everything unflinchingly, with compassion, and therefore be intrinsically comfortable in my own skin, no matter what. I am comfortable being uncomfortable and am willing to go to any lengths to improve my life. I believe the Big Book was divinely inspired, and is extraordinarily powerful. Unfortunately AA's best kept secret a lot of the time. (In my opinion). I just try to do what works, no matter what it is.

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Hamster in a wheel or Duvet Diver? Too fast or too slow?

The hamster in the wheel types, prefer perpetual motion. Busy busy busy! Never a moment to stop and think. No down time. No time to reflect. Its a form of avoiding feeling as it is much harder to feel when you are busy all the time.

The duvet diver, always feel like having a nap. Too MUCH down time. Never actually get round to DOING stuff. Avoidance, procrastination, lethargy. When an onerous task presents itself, suddenly you feel tired, sleepy. Like in the middle of double geography!

Sometimes you get people who switch between the two.
When you are TOO busy, it is helpful to MAKE some time for yourself.
And when you are suffering from inertia, it is helpful to try to keep active, in whatever way you can. Just keep moving basically!

Some people are hamster in the wheel types, other are duvet divers.
I tend to err on the inactive side when things are difficult. So I really liked the Fifth suggestion on Daaves post called SIX BEHAVIORS THAT INCREASE SELF-ESTEEM that included this suggestion.Heres a link to the article posted online. I LOVE it! Thank you Daave for finding it and bringing it to my attention! Here is a section of the article:

"Fifth, respond to difficult times or depressing moments by increasing your level of productive activity. When your self-esteem is being challenged, don’t sit around and fall victim to “paralysis by analysis.” The late Malcolm Forbes said, “Vehicles in motion use their generators to charge their own batteries. Unless you happen to be a golf cart, you can’t recharge your battery when you’re parked in the garage!”

Sixth, choose to see mistakes and rejections as opportunities to learn. View a failure as the conclusion of one performance, not the end of your entire career. Own up to your shortcomings, but refuse to see yourself as a failure. A failure may be something you have done — and it may even be something you’ll have to do again on the way to success — but a failure is definitely not something you are.

Even if you’re at a point where you’re feeling very negatively about yourself, be aware that you’re now ideally positioned to make rapid and dramatic improvement. A negative self-evaluation, if it’s honest and insightful, takes much more courage and character than the self-delusions that underlie arrogance and conceit. I’ve seen the truth of this proven many times in my work with athletes. After an extremely poor performance, a team or an individual athlete often does much better the next time out, especially when the poor performance was so bad that there was simply no way to shirk responsibility for it. Disappointment, defeat, and even apparent failure are in no way permanent conditions unless we choose to make them so. On the contrary, these undeniably painful experiences can be the solid foundation on which to build future success."

1 comment:

Shadow said...

that's also got something to do with having an 'A' type personality, doesn't it?