sarakingdom

Week 2 Day 4 Sleep has been at red alert levels, and my brain has been doing strange things that did not involve challenges. The Needs of the One Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun Score Control the emotions 2 Eat the plomik soup 0. 75 Drink the water 2 Sleep at 11 -4 Train the lirpa 1 Weekly Score Things I need to remember: Lirpa training options Emotional control options Take a walk Yoga Balance exercise Plank Horse stance Bridge Superwomen Rest when I don't wanna Reward incremental progress to make goals feel immediate

Gentle alternatives to steps while your knee settles down: Yoga Swimming Biking It's likely just the rate of the change and/or some general body tiredness and repair energy allocation while not feeling well going on. Welcome to the randomised aches and pains of being older. They are the worst.

Be aware that it's not factually correct when it gives answers. It's purely text prediction, it will give you any words that tend to appear in close proximity in its training data. So its list of native plants may not be, and its list of nontoxic plants may not be. The general rule of thumb is never to use AI where you need factual accuracy. It has none. It will tell you whatever you want to hear. It will also tell you that ketosis is inherently dangerous, veganism is the healthiest diet, and so on. It'll tell you anything in its training data, with the words slightly reshuffled. Don't do this to yourself, Harriet. When you're so invested in curing yourself with diet, when it consumes most of your daily reading, when a few bad days cause you to lose hope and throw you into despair, do not turn to a very convincing literal magic eight ball to confirm your dietary beliefs and choices, or worse, to decide them. It will mess your brain up so hard.

Cats don't have an ego problem. They have a huge ego, and it's not a problem for them.

Week 1 Day 5 - Pon Farr Night at the Vulcan Nightclub Hang on, I'll come up with something SFW I can do for this challenge theme day. Any day now. The Needs of the One Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun Score Control the emotions 0 1 1 1 1 Eat the plomik soup 0 0 0.5 0.5 0 Drink the water 2 2 2 2 3 Sleep at 11 -4 -3 -5 0.5 -4 Train the lirpa 0 0 1 1 2 Weekly Score -2 0 -0.5 5 Things I need to remember: Lirpa training options Emotional control options Take a walk Yoga Balance exercise Plank Horse stance Bridge Superwomen Rest when I don't wanna Reward incremental progress to make goals feel immediate

That will never happen. We've apparently already moved on to pretending it never occurred. (Well, everyone but me. I'm staying out of social range and indulging fantasies of giving everyone involved the cold shoulder for a few days. It is not worth acknowledging people who behave that way, and not wise to engage. This will only last until I need to be polite to them, so I'm enjoying my remote righteous avoidance while I can.) Oh man, I want sticks. I need to hit things.

Thank goodness I slept well, because someone today decided they were going to cope with their day by lashing out angrily. I stayed calm. I didn't totally follow this advice, but I did manage some: TLDR, everyone but me is really stupid today, and I wanna go live with the Vulcans.

LOTS?! Lots is too many many! An unreasonable number of many.

I need many many sleep? Too hard. I could have some sleep?

Week 1 Day 4 The Needs of the One Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun Score Control the emotions 0 1 1 1 Eat the plomik soup 0 0 0.5 Drink the water 2 2 2 2 Sleep at 11 -4 -3 -5 0.5 Train the lirpa 0 0 1 1 Weekly Score -2 0 -0.5 Things I need to remember: Lirpa training options Emotional control options Take a walk Yoga Balance exercise Plank Horse stance Bridge Superwomen Rest when I don't wanna Reward incremental progress to make goals feel immediate

I have had many sleep. I want more sleep. Why do I want more sleep when I have had many sleep?

Week 1 Day 3 - Women in Trek Wednesday (part 2) I am in bed roughly on time. This is 75% of the task. I am also in bed with more of the bedtime things done than usual. Things that helped: I am tired from many nights of bad sleep. This one, not so repeatable. Nap before dinner. I'm a bit rested. After dinner viewing was not the sleepy usual, but a bit adrenalin filled. This may or may not be repeatable, cuz I don't always get to choose. And just to be clear with my subconscious, I am done. I did the tasks on the list. All I need now is an audiobook. And a gong. Vulcan rituals have gongs.

Doesn't sound like any ADHD med I've heard of, but it's wonderful that you found one that works for you!

Week 1 Day 3 - Women in Trek Wednesday The Needs of the One Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun Score Control the emotions 0 1 1 Eat the plomik soup 0 0 0.5 Drink the water 2 2 2 Sleep at 11 -4 -3 -5 1 Train the lirpa 0 0 1 Weekly Score -2 0 -0.5 Things I need to remember: Lirpa training options Emotional control options Take a walk Yoga Balance exercise Plank Horse stance Bridge Superwomen Rest when I don't wanna Reward incremental progress to make goals feel immediate

It's my best guess, too, although I may need to be more targeted with shorter brain rests more often at night. I'm not sure how long the effects last as the day moves on. (I also don't want to fall into the "I've had some extra rest, I can take this bedtime easy" trap.) I may need to switch to frequent short breaks. That is the time of day when I tend to wind down my work day timeboxing schedule on X minutes of work, Y minutes of break, and maybe that's part of the problem.

Absolutely. I have several. There's always a reason, and it's often reasonable. Future me really needs more hydration before I sleep (this simple task takes hours). Ten more minutes of this activity so present me can accomplish this thing won't matter to future me (which then turns into hours). Past me was being overly rigid in setting this particular alarm. Past me didn't know this other thing would be more urgent. Future me would benefit from just this little other task that's on my mind getting done tonight, and it won't take much time (it may or may not, and then is followed automatically by another related task that pops up). Or best of all, I actually do follow several of the timers I have to get ready for bed, so I'm basically all ready on time, and then it just... doesn't happen. It's every symptom hitting at once, even ones I usually don't have quite that much trouble with: deep underestimation of how long things take; no planning; no scheduling; no future modeling; no task switching; no task initiation. Often the task initiation is so bad I can sit there doing something, telling myself I want to stop doing this thing right now and go to bed, and the action just does not happen. Not "I should", but "I am trying to do this", and, like, nothing happens. (There's one doctor who describes ADHD as a severing between intentions and actions. You can form a good plan. You can have a genuine intention to act. And then you don't.) The irony is, when this happens during my work day, I treat it with rest, which works fairly well. Like, instant meditation or lie down wherever I am with fifteen or twenty minutes of podcast. Not always a perfect fix, but always good enough to make progress. There's another guy who describes ADHD as, like, the hunter trait, of being highly reactive to the environment and to urgency. (This started as metaphor or speculation, but the current thinking is leaning a little more towards science, and it may actually be a residual hunter-gatherer genetic thing.) It's the people who don't really notice the passage of time while they hang out in the woods, until a deer trots by or a bear shows up, and an immediate action has to be taken. You don't react to "well, time to go feed the pig, then muck out the stables, which should take me half an hour, then...", because those things have only abstract priority, not concrete priority or immediacy. (And that kind of time awareness is a challenge.) You can make the plan, but you're not well designed to do the plan. Nothing will be concretely gained or lost in the next fifteen minutes if you don't act now. Alarms are abstract; nothing concrete is gained or lost now. Not strong triggers for my brain. (Turning off alarms, on the other hand, is an immediate concrete win. Annoying environmental disruption stopped. Immediate easy win. Double down on the thing I was focusing on, having been a master interruption stopper.) Hunger is not abstract; I win food if I act. Dehydration is not abstract. (They're also not often urgent in modern life, so it can still take a while.) While other needs are more urgent and concrete, they win. When the need to sleep becomes more urgent and concrete than other needs, it wins. When it causes me more pain or reward than anything else on my mind, it's got priority. An alarm does not give it priority.

Vulcans are very martial arts. Me, I have a hard time with strict schedules that aren't shared with people. The problem isn't usually falling asleep. It's stopping work and/or getting into bed. Being tired does not make that happen. I'm frequently tired and still trying to finish something. I'd just have brandy in me and still not be in bed. Likewise, the foot of my bed might be very warm, but I would not be in it. Or I'd be enjoying the heat while tiredly ordering groceries in bed at 1am, or something. Sleepiness is not the problem at all. The problem is that being sleepy does not trigger task change to engage in sleep. Nothing reliably does. 100% disconnection between feeling tired and acting on it around bedtime; I will fight sleep for hours if there's something I'm trying to finish. That's normal for me. Nothing triggers the sleep task. (Unless it's early in the day. When I'm rested enough for my prefrontal cortex to do better task switching and task initiation, I can go to bed because I'm tired. In the evening, my brain will pretty much not initiate the task, whatever the cue. It's common for people on meds to have them wear off by this time of day and need a top-up dose to go to bed; it's also common for fatigue to exacerbate symptoms even on meds. The brain just runs out of energy for the extra overhead. At that point, it's only responsive to urgency, and won't act on sleep until the need for sleep is so urgent that it interrupts everything else.) When I manage a workout and meditation before bed, that knocks out a lot of the obstacles and provides enough mental recharge to go to sleep. But it relies on not having anything in the way of task initiation of those tasks. Timers help, but if there's something unfinished I actually need to do to sleep, those tasks won't initiate reliably. Every task in this chain involves that kind of effort to make it happen, with no remaining executive function skills to make it happen. No prioritising. No scheduling. No task initiation to non-emergency cues. By that time of night, it's all gone. Eastern, and 11pm for now. My liver is cringing at the thought. My ADHD brain does not stop working (or trying to work) in order to physically get into bed. I have no trouble sleeping (barring sinus issues, which can make for a rough night, and have been bad this winter). I will sleep eight hours with minimal well-managed (usually) interruptions, no problem. I have trouble physically being in my bed. When I am, I have trouble not working on a task there for hours. Which means I get half the sleep I need at night. If I enforced staying in bed four or five hours every night because that's my average, instead of the eight my body needs to sleep, it would be an absolute disaster. Thank you guys all for trying. Unfortunately, these are all solutions for a problem I don't have. I don't have trouble falling asleep unless I'm sick. I have trouble being in bed. ADHD is, at core, a task initiation problem, and it's worse at the end of the day. Getting into bed is a task. Stopping other things to sleep is a task. I spend hours trying and failing to initiate tasks at night.

Week 1 Day 2 In deference to Vulcan sensibilities, we will not be celebrating today with an ode to romantic love, but to a nice, logical twenty-year friendship: You know, the Vulcan socially acceptable form of love. In deference to human sensibilities, it's a twenty-year friendship where they are occasionally married (god, that utter boredom sends me every time), indulge in a few kinks, go out on the pull together (not always successfully), discuss their bisexual experiences, and occasionally share genuine intimacy. So not a good scoring start to the week. This needs some work. God, I'm so tired of work. The Needs of the One Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun Score Control the emotions 0 1 Eat the plomik soup 0 0 Drink the water 2 2 Sleep at 11 -4 -3 Train the lirpa 0 0 Weekly Score -2 Things I need to remember: Lirpa training options Emotional control options Take a walk Yoga Balance exercise Plank Horse stance Bridge Superwomen Rest when I don't wanna Reward incremental progress to make goals feel immediate

Your dog is equal parts majestic and doofy. My goodness. (Also looking sort of like a seal crossed with a periscope here.)

In active recovery terms, your body needs nutrient and protein and healhy fat rich foods like meat and vegetables in order to rebuild itself, and you should generously prioritize those whenever you can manage to eat. Sugar will just have to get in line (and not make it to the front of it).

Week 1 Day 1 - Training Montage Monday I've flipped this theme day to its other alliterative day, because that aligns with a workout that has punching, and thus I can fulfill the thematic requirements more readily. It is more logical. My sleep is not more logical. It keeps starting out that way, and then suddenly it's several hours later. Maybe there's a localised time disruption in my quarters that would explain that. The Needs of the One Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun Score Control the emotions 0 Eat the plomik soup 0 Drink the water 1 Sleep at 11 -4 Train the lirpa 0 Weekly Score Things I need to remember: Lirpa training options Emotional control options Take a walk Yoga Balance exercise Plank Horse stance Bridge Superwomen Rest when I don't wanna Reward incremental progress to make goals feel immediate

You have no idea how much I envy all that amazing watercress potential.

I have. They're good for the actual falling asleep part on most nights, but they don't get me into bed or work too well when I wake up at stupid AM and need to get back to sleep. (Well, that's true of ASMR sound, at least: I haven't tried the video specifically a video, cuz it's hard to see a TV from my bed.)

50 square feet is less than two standard garden beds, so not too bad. Go for a YouTube tutorial like Charles Dowding or Epic Gardening, or the one they did together. It's a lot of dirt if you're getting it in small amounts, but not bad if you can find a source. If your town dump has a free compost program, you can cut it with some less intensely nutritious stuff that might be cheaper, like, I dunno, sand or wood chips. (UK tutorials say compost, and mean potting soil by that.)

If you're talking a not too huge area, let me introduce you to no-dig gardening, where you won't need to dig out any grass at all. It is good nutritious material for the plants, it just needs to be covered to decompose. You can get more details on setting up a no dig bed on YouTube, but you basically need enough cardboard boxes to cover the area, and enough dirt to put on top of that. (That can often be supplemented heavily from a town composting center, if your town does that.) It would work for a huge area, too, but it's harder to get the dirt.