Best Buy Geek Squad and Staples EasyTech

photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/uxud/3396427350/in/photostream/}Gavin Schaefer{/link}

First off, I would LOVE to do these kinds of things for a living. Playing with, fixing, tweaking (and occasionally, but never permanently, breaking) gadgets is one of my favorite hobbies. And I’m pretty decent at it. I’m the one my family calls when they have a question about or a problem with their computer or cell phone or wireless network.

And all bragging aside, they’re lucky to have me.

Yes, I know that sounds cocky. Get over it, because I’m going to make a very good point with it.

“Professional Tech Support”

I put that in quotation marks because I think the title is bogus. And anybody who has called or chatted online with any company’s tech support knows exactly what I mean.

“Have you tried turning it off and then back on?” “Have you pulled the battery?” “Have you tried unplugging it and counting to ten?”

Seriously?!?

Those kinds of questions are why I HATE having to call support for a serious problem, because even if you’ve already done all that, they tell you they still have to walk you through all the steps. (“I’m sorry, ma’am…”) Then they tell you they have to escalate you to someone higher up the chain because they don’t know what to do to help you. Usually, I just sit there and play solitaire on my phone and say, “ok… uh huh… now what?…no, that didn’t work either,” until I get past the minimum wage employee reading from their manual to someone who can actually help me.

Hell, even my mom gets irritated with the simplistic shit they ask you to do when you call in. And she once called me to fix her computer and it turned out she had set a notebook on top of her escape key. I’m not kidding.

But I digress.

No, not everyone is as computer savvy as I am, and not everyone wants to be. That’s part of why they call me in the first place. And that’s fine.

After all, if they had to go out and pay for these services, they’d go broke pretty quickly. And if they had to call tech support instead of me, they’d probably go bald from pulling out all of their hair.

Profit, jobs, fulfilling needs, and meeting a demand for services

I understand that the world doesn’t run on charity, that it’s more efficient to outsource certain things to an expert (like getting your transmission rebuilt), and that at the end of the day, a company needs to make money on a service that it provides. So while I’d LIKE to say that Best Buy and Staples are raping customers by charging ridiculous prices for some of these services ($9.99 to pair a Bluetooth headset? Are you kidding me?), it’s not entirely true.

I do think the prices are a bit steep, and I think they’re so high because they can take advantage of the people who don’t want to call free tech support for their product but who don’t have someone like me to call instead.

But that’s not the root of the problem, because a need really is being met by these companies.

The real problem here is that some people will actually pay those prices for those kinds of services. After all, if no one did, they wouldn’t be offered at all, or at the very least I would have seen a price reduction on them in the last couple of years. People are actually so lazy, that they’d rather pay someone else $10 than read a two page instruction manual and figure out a two minute process for themselves. Or if they really do need help, they don’t have someone they can ask because no one socializes any more.

That’s just sad and pathetic.

And yes, I know there are exceptions to what I just said, but tell me it’s not true for about 80% of the people who pay for that kind of crap. After all, how much is your time and convenience worth to you? $10 for 2 minutes for that Bluetooth headset means $300 an hour. I know MY time isn’t worth that much.

Educate yourself

You can do a lot of this basic stuff. Or you can learn. And most of it, if you mess it up along the way, you’re not going to do any permanent damage. Just try again.

Google it, for God’s sake!

photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/moneyblognewz/5267464508/in/photostream/}MoneyBlogNewz{/link}

If you do have to ask someone for help with something, watch what they do. Ask questions about what they’re doing and why. Then next time, give it a go for yourself. I have to give my mom credit for this. She tries to fix stuff before she calls me, and if it’s something with a lot of steps she doesn’t think she’ll remember, she asks me to write her up a guide.

But back to what I said at the beginning – my family is lucky to have me for stuff like this. And I’m not complaining about their asking me for help. I had to learn too, it took me lots of time and trial and error, and it probably would have been easier to have someone show me. They’re just lucky they don’t have to pay these outrageous prices for simple things, and good for them that they ask me to help them rather than just paying someone to do it for them. Because there’s a difference between asking for help, and asking for it to be done for you.

The rest of you – STOP paying for this garbage. Do you really need to pay someone $30 to put a disc in the drive on your computer and click “next” for you? And that’s if you take your computer to them; it’s $120 if they come to your house. What about $10 ($90 at your house) to uninstall old programs, defragment your hard drive, and use a can of compressed air to blow dust out of the damned thing? Or do you think you can Google “defragment Windows 7 (Vista, XP, whatever)” and follow some instructions?

If the demand goes down for these services, they’ll get cheaper. And then, when your 90-year-old grandmother needs help hooking up her printer so she can get photos of her grand-kids, she won’t have to pay $130 for that nice man at Staples to come to her house and help her out. Or fly you across the country to do it for her.

/rant

Oh, and if you need help with anything, hit me up on the contact form or something. Or look for my panel van in your nearest Staples parking lot. I’ll at least point you in the right direction.

I’m Going to Buy a Van and Park Outside Staples is a post from: Social Discomfort

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via {link:http://weheartit.com/entry/2574761}weheartit.com{/link}

Yeah, them. The women and their dogs look damn near identical.

Yes, I know it’s a cartoon and an over-exaggeration, but tell me you’ve never seen something like that in real life.

That’s what I thought.

Spend enough time with someone, and some of them is going to rub off on you. And some of you will rub off on them too. It’s why your mom always told you not to spend time with that kid at school who was always in trouble. It’s why you see old couples who look and act frighteningly similar despite being unrelated by blood (at least you hope they are). And it’s why when you get older and have kids, you catch things your dad said to you as a kid coming out of your mouth.

“I will turn this car around RIGHT NOW!”

We can’t help it. And since you’re all grown up now and mommy can’t tell you to stop hanging out with bad boys, you’re going to have to start watching yourself. Because that shit sneaks up on you.

“You are what you eat”

No, I’m not suggesting you’re a cannibal, and even if you are, that’s not what I mean. It’s just a very handy analogy.

The statement is true in two ways – you’ll get healthy if all you eat is healthy food, and if you tend to eat healthy food, you’re probably healthy already. We eat what we are and we are what we eat.

The same thing goes for the people we hang out with – we hang out with people who are like us, and we start to become like the people we hang out with. (Though I can’t explain crazy cat ladies this way. It’s not like they have crazy cat lady clubs or anything… anyway, back on topic.)

So, why do I care who you hang out with?

Honestly, I don’t. Go join a cult where the members drink each other’s blood or start stealing your neighbors’ lawn gnomes with your kids every Saturday night. It doesn’t matter to me. Your real question should be -

Why should YOU care who you hang out with?

There are a couple of reasons for this, so even if you think the people you spend time with are good people and don’t mind them rubbing off on you, keep reading.

1. Who you choose spend time with says a lot about who you are.

Yes, people will judge you for spending time with worthless wastes of space, but that’s not what’s really important. Let’s go a little deeper.

Take a look at the people you surround yourself with. Are they who you want to be? I hope so, because chances are, you’re a lot alike. More alike than you realize.

It’s hard to look at yourself and make an honest judgement about who you are as a person. We tend to be blind to our own faults, but are much more aware of the faults of others. That’s why it’s much easier to look at your friend and make an honest judgement about who THEY are. Go on, judge your friends, right now as a matter of fact. You know you want to.

But here’s the kicker: now take that judgement and apply it to yourself. If you surround yourself with drug addicts, you’re probably a drug addict, too. Sorry.

2. Who you spend time with is a preview of who you’re going to become

There’s a small chance that during my previous point, you could honestly say that you aren’t exactly like the friend or friends I had you judging. You may have been able to look around at your drug addict friends while you’re clean and sober and gainfully employed and say “I’m better than these people.”

Don’t pat yourself on the back just yet.

If you keep hanging out with these people, you’re probably going to turn into them if you haven’t already. Sorry again.

3. If there’s something about yourself you want to change, go find people already like that and hang out with them

This is probably the most useful thing I have to say to you, and the simplest.

Want to quit smoking? Go find a group of friends that don’t smoke.

Want to start eating healthy? Go out to eat with your friends who eat well, and stay away from the fast food fiends at mealtime.

You don’t have to ditch your current friends; just find some new ones too.

And no, I don’t mean online friends. Real friends. There’s no salad bar or non-smoking section in Farm Town.

But what if I’m stuck with these people?

After all, we rarely get to choose our coworkers and neighbors, and we almost never get to pick our family members; we’re stuck with our parents and our kids and that obnoxious man who shares an office with us. There are some people you just can’t choose NOT to be around.

If that’s the case, just try to keep all that crap I said before in mind. Check in with yourself to make sure you haven’t picked up any of their bad habits or manners or some of those rude phrases they use. It may not completely protect you, but it’ll help.

In short – look at the people around you to see who YOU really are or who you’re going to be, get rid of the people you don’t want to become, hang out with who you want to be, and make sure you don’t turn into that deadbeat brother you just can’t get rid of.

That’s it! Now it’s your turn. Any advice, questions, funny stories? Funny pictures of couples who’ve turned into twins? Please, share!

You Are Who You Spend Time With is a post from: Social Discomfort

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photo by {link:https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/9M6i5u60qDHsuLCZE8kbFtMTjNZETYmyPJy0liipFm0}Times Square Public Art{/link}

I don’t need to tell most of you why this is the case. There are loads of reasons why people make and break New Year’s Resolutions – the primary one being that most people don’t know how to effectively set goals for themselves. I guess the real question is this – if we always break our New Year’s Resolutions, year after year, why do we bother making them in the first place?

And perhaps even more importantly, SHOULD we bother making them?

The Goals We Set and Abandon

You can read all over the internet for ways to help you keep your resolutions, and most of that advice is going to boil down to what I already said - practice effective goal-setting. You can also read all over the internet what the most common New Year’s Resolutions are and get some specific advice on how to keep each one. These include:

• Lose Weight/Get Healthy
• Get Out of Debt/Save Money
• Learn Something New
• Spend More Time With Family

That’s what we’re going to talk about here.

All of those above are worthy goals, and probably some things that all of us could benefit from – even the healthiest, debt-free, and adventurous family man. And we set these goals for exactly that reason. They’re good for us, and if we achieve them, we’ll likely be healthier, happier, better people for it. The problem is, few of us actually act on our resolutions once we set them, or we give up on them quickly.

Yet we make them every year. Some of us make the same resolution every year without actually making any progress on it during the previous year. And some of us make all of those resolutions every year, with no plan at all to achieve them, and get unbelievably overwhelmed the first time we sit down to think about starting on them them. Why?

For the same reason we made the resolution the first time – we really do mean it. It’s something we want to accomplish or change about ourselves, and we think this time we’ll get it right. It’s the optimism in all of us that tells us to make our resolutions, even after previous years of failure.

It’s not our ambition that kills the resolutions, it’s poor execution of our plans.

But what’s the point?

This may seem like a strange question. Why make resolutions that we’re not going to keep? What good is it to set and fail at goals, year after year?

First, it gives you a chance to take a good, hard look at the previous year and evaluate it in terms of your priorities. Maybe spending time with your family is really important to you, and you find by looking back at the year that you spent too much time on the computer and not enough playing with your kids. Or maybe being healthy is a big priority for you, but you look back and see that your eating habits have gone down the proverbial shitter over the last few months.

Second, it gives you a chance to reevaluate your priorities altogether. Maybe being healthy wasn’t on your list of important things in your life. Maybe you’ve always been reasonably healthy and never needed to pay close attention to it. But now you’ve found at the end of the year that you don’t feel as energetic as you used to – it’s a good time to shift your focus and make your health something that gets more attention than it used to.

You can do these things any time of the year, though. What’s so special and beneficial about doing it at New Year’s?

It’s a Group Effort

New Year’s resolutions are rarely something that you come up with alone at your desk and make quiet plans about. You talk about them with your family and friends during the week between Christmas and New Year’s, and usually the following week as well. You talk about them with the people at the New Year’s party you go to.

photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikebaird/3539161615/in/photostream/}Mike Baird{/link}

You get to see what other people find important to them and what they plan to do about it, and if you have similar goals you sometimes make plans with them to meet those goals together. You find workout buddies and people to diet with you, find other people you know to sign up for a cooking class with you, and get advice from people who made these same resolutions last year.

In fact, this group effort towards common goals makes it more likely that you’ll actually follow through on your goals. Your workout buddy can come give you a kick in the ass when you try to back out of going to the gym with them, you can guilt trip your friend who says he doesn’t have time to go to class with you after all, and you can keep each other from cheating on your diets.

Maybe you don’t lose the 50 pounds you were hoping for, maybe you still don’t cook more than two meals a week at home, and maybe you only go to the gym a handful of times before you’re back to staring at the TV every night instead. That’s okay. Because you’re still paying more attention to how you’re eating, you’re still saving money and eating a little healthier by cooking a couple times a week at home, and you’re still a little more fit for having gone to the gym a few times.

Besides, the fact that you signed up for a year at the gym (and are paying monthly whether you go or not) means you’ll probably go at least a few more times out of guilt or boredom.

The goals aren’t as important as the process.

What about you? Got any New Year’s resolutions or tips on keeping them? Any fun stories about resolutions going horribly wrong? Any really unique goals for the new year?

Happy New Year!

photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/foxypar4/2153422313/}John Haslam{/link}

Why New Years Resolutions are Pointless, and Why You Should Make Them Anyway is a post from: Social Discomfort

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photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/fenanov/4885568297/}Fernendo Valenzuela{/link}

Do you have a hard time finding or staying in a good relationship? Do you tell yourself, and your friends, that you just have high standards and aren’t willing to settle? Do you go through boyfriends (or girlfriends) faster than you can spend your paycheck? After all, life is short and you can’t waste time in a relationship with someone you’re not compatible with.

Does your list of recent break-ups look like this? -

• She’s too loud. And she talks too much.
• He’s always ten minutes late.
• He chews with his mouth open.
• She doesn’t have enough career ambition.
• He likes reggae music.

It’s not you, it’s me

Little did you realize, saying this to the people you’ve been dumping is actually TRUE. Maybe your mom raised you to believe that you should never settle for second best. That’s fine. You shouldn’t. But guess what? Your idea of “best” is wildly unrealistic.

There’s a difference between settling for less and accepting a person’s humanity.

There’s no ONE ideal person out there, waiting for you to find them. You’re not “looking for Mr. Right.” You’re looking for perfection, and you’re not going to find it.

Nobody’s perfect

Every single person you meet is going to have at least one annoying quality. Most of them are going to have a few. This fact doesn’t make any of those people second best, because being second best implies that there’s someone better out there.

There’s not.

I know you don’t want to hear this, but listen to me anyway. Lower your standards. If no one you’ve ever met has measured up, you’re probably expecting too much. You’re expecting a fairy-tale life and a fairy-tale relationship, and you’re not going to get either.

photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/americanistadechiapas/5678103297/in/photostream/}Audrey Pilato{/link}

Happily Ever After – the fairy-tale fallacy

We all heard fairy-tales when we were kids, and they all ended the same way: “and they lived happily ever after.” The perfect but unappreciated girl was swept away by the perfect handsome prince and their life was perfect. And as a result, we all think that this scenario should somehow play out in our own lives. I hate to tell you this:

The story is bullshit.

There’s a honeymoon period in all relationships, where we’re so blinded by our love for the other person that we’re temporarily blind to their faults. This is the only thing that fairy-tales talk about. The story’s over before the hard part begins. The prince doesn’t snore, the princess doesn’t suck at cooking or leave her dirty clothes on the floor, and forget the endless sleepless nights that come with having a kid (or three).

And your problem is, you call it quits as soon as the honeymoon’s over because you’re expecting happily ever after.

Like I said before, lower your standards.

Are you perfect?

Yeah, I didn’t think so. And I’m betting that you expect your (future) significant other to love you for who you are, imperfections and all. Give the people you date the same courtesy.

Instead of looking for perfection, try this: figure out what flaws you’re willing and able to put up with, and find people who have them. Unless you want to die alone. Then, by all means, keep looking for Mr. Right.

Are you picking the wrong people?

Before I leave you to ponder how realistic your standards are when it comes to the people you date, I have one more thing for you to think about. There’s something else that could be going on here, something that will require a little more self-evaluation.

You might be, either consciously or unconsciously, choosing to date people who you know are bad for you.

We do this for any number of reasons. You might be trying to fix something that went wrong in a previous relationship. You might be dating people who are just like your mother, either because you have attachment issues or because you idolize her and can’t win her approval. Or you might be dating assholes because you don’t think you deserve any better. Or you could be hung up on something else.

A good therapist can help you sort these kinds of situations out if you can’t seem to get to the root of the problem on your own, but it’s definitely something to consider if you find that your standards really aren’t that high and the people you date STILL don’t come even close to them. It’s easy to sabotage ourselves and not even realize we’re doing it.

Does any of this sound like you? Take a good, hard look at yourself before you say no, because you can’t fix something you won’t admit is broken.

Stop Dumping People and Look in the Mirror is a post from: Social Discomfort

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When you have a mental illness (and admit to needing help), the first and primary goal in your mind is usually to get well again. While admirable, this is pretty much a useless goal; wellness is not an end result. In the long run, it’s impossible. Wellness is a process, and it’s never permanent. Instead, you’re going to feel good for a while, and then you’re going to feel bad again. Think of it in terms of another illness I’m pretty familiar with: diabetes. Once you have diabetes, getting rid of it is not the goal. In fact, it’s currently impossible; there is no cure. Management and control are the goals, and even with the best management and control you’re still going to have trouble sometimes, for reasons beyond your control. You just do the best you can.

The same is true of mental illness.

photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/jiaren/334040641/}Jiaren Lau{/link}

There’s an upside to all of this, though. The bad times aren’t permanent either. Now, this may be hard to remember when struggling through a crippling depression or some other kind of relapse, but try. It can’t last forever. This isn’t to say that it can’t last a damn long time or that the solution is just to wait these things out; it can and you shouldn’t. But getting treatment and managing your condition to the best of your ability will keep the bad times from taking over your life.

If you expect to go to the doctor or psychiatrist or therapist and eventually get cured, you’re going to be disappointed. In fact, if you expect a permanent cure and never get one, it’s going to undermine and sabotage your treatment. I’m talking to myself here as well, because every time I have a relapse into depression I get unbelievably discouraged. After all, what’s the point of trying to get better if it just keeps coming back?

Just remember this: It can’t last forever.

And as an extra pick-me-up, every time you look at one of your friends who doesn’t have any mental health problems, remember that their mental health isn’t any more perfect or permanent than yours.

It’s all about perspective.

Mental Health is Never Permanent is a post from: Social Discomfort

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photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/ncc_badiey/3095099782/}Nima Badiey{/link}

A lot of people walk around every day feeling like they fail at life. Hell, I’m probably at the front of the line, waving the banner. Not just depressed people, though (as I’m not exactly a golden ray of sunshine). Everyone. I’m hard-pressed to find someone I know personally who is truly happy with their life. Are you, or do you find yourself thinking the following things on a regular basis:

• I need to eat healthier and exercise more
• I’m not as good a parent as I should be
• I don’t make enough money
• I should try to be a better friend
• I should try harder at work
• I need to spend more time with my kids
• I drink too much (soda, beer, coffee, etc.)
• I hate my life

Okay, so that last one is a bit extreme, but you get my point. We spend a lot of mental energy berating ourselves about what we’re doing wrong with our lives rather than enjoying the good things and praising ourselves for the things we’re doing well. I think I’ve thought everything on that list TODAY, and it’s barely afternoon. Not only that, but I consider myself to be reasonably happy with my life. Sad, huh? Very few of us, if any, know someone who thinks they’re a good parent, friend, spouse, employee, and all-around person, and who talks to other people about how they managed to keep their temper with their kids for two days in a row?

Instead, we look at the strengths of others and compare them to our own weaknesses. Not exactly fair, is it?

Let’s blame someone for all this negativity

No, I’m not going to tell you to point a big, fat finger at yourself for thinking all these negative things about yourself. I could, but the problem goes deeper than that. After all, we had to learn it somewhere. Our parents? Closer, but still not the root of the problem.

To be nice and vague (and cliché), society is to blame. Kind of like they’re to blame for body image problems in women and money problems in the debt-ridden masses. This isn’t an attitude that each of us has developed individually; this is something our culture has internalized, and I can sum it up in one short phrase:

I’m not good enough.

This is the flip-side of our attitude about self-improvement; we think that we should constantly strive to better ourselves. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, the implication is that we’re not good enough as we are now, and that we’ll only be good enough if we’re better. And no one can excel at everything, so there will always be something about us that we think sucks.

What can I do about it?

Other than those narcissistic individuals we all know and hate, most of us could benefit from going easier on ourselves. There are a couple of ways to do this, some more fun than others.

photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/55391407@N03/5137410738/}M 93{/link}

First, you can do some reverse comparisons between yourself and someone you think is better than you in some way. Maybe your neighbor makes more money than you, and you find yourself constantly comparing your possessions to his. He has a BMW; you have a used Toyota. He took a vacation to Hawaii for three weeks; you spent two nights on a friend’s couch and went to the beach for a day.

How does your neighbor’s life suck? Does he have to work weekends? Are his kids obnoxious little shits? Does he wear flip-flops and black socks? Think about THAT every time you start telling yourself you want his life, and you won’t be nearly so depressed about your own.

Another way to do this that doesn’t involve mentally putting down your neighbor at every opportunity is to compare yourself to yourself. Whenever you think of something about your life that you hate, try to think of something else that you’re awesome at. It helps if the two things are somewhat related – you’re not likely to care that even though you make minimum wage, you have great fashion sense. You’d do better to compare making minimum wage to the fact that you love your job and can’t wait to go there every day.

Just cut yourself some slack

The point is to negate all those negative thoughts before they can get to you. And it’s harder than it sounds, because you’ll often find yourself thinking “who cares?” when playing the comparison game. Just remember, you can do anything, but you can’t do everything. (and if you know who this quote is from, please tell me. I can’t remember.)

Do you walk around feeling like you’re not good enough? What do you do about it?

Maybe You’re Not a Failure After All is a post from: Social Discomfort

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Especially now that I’ve started working full-time again, most of my weekdays are almost identical, with the biggest differences being what I had for lunch. Even there I had the exact same thing on at least 3 days. Boring, huh?

We’re all creatures of habit, but too much habit and your whole life goes by on autopilot.

photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/mein_arkengel/3728122696/}Kreutziana{/link}

Routine is comfortable

It’s comforting to know what’s going to happen to us in the future; we don’t walk around in a constant state of panic worrying about everything. It also frees us up to think about more important things, like projects and work, because we don’t have to construct every day from scratch and keep asking ourselves “what do I do now?” Thinking about every single detail of your day is exhausting and stressful.

If every day is unpredictable, life is scary and we feel insecure and unsafe.

When routine turns into a rut

It’s fine to have a routine for a lot of things, like what time we go to bed, our morning ritual, and when and where we go out every Friday night. But every minute of your day shouldn’t be a carbon copy of the day or week before. If you don’t have to think about anything all day and can run completely on autopilot, then you stop thinking about anything at all.

That’s bad.

Not only does it make you bored and uncreative, it makes you boring as well.

So what can you do about it?

photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/vramak/3920805766/}vramak{/link}

This part’s easy, at least the theory part is – do something unusual every once in a while. You don’t have to dance naked in your living room like the title says (unless you want to, anyway), but find something outside your comfort zone and try it out.

If even this small change is too uncomfortable for you, you can go even smaller and just try to mix things up a little bit. Eat breakfast for dinner. Go out on Saturday instead of Friday. Just do something different.

Even if you end up hating every new thing you try, you still get the benefit of having new experiences. You give your brain a workout to keep it sharp and flexible. And even better, you have some new things to talk about with your friends.

Dance Naked. Just Close the Blinds. is a post from: Social Discomfort

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So please, bear with me during this transition while I acclimate to the working world again. I’m sure my writing ability hasn’t abandoned me completely; it’s just buried in the fog and the sleepiness.

By the way, I just recently moved the site to a new host, so if you find anything broken that I missed, please contact me to let me know so I can fix it. I broke a whole load of crap when I moved, so there’s bound to be something I didn’t catch.

My Brain Has Turned to Mush is a post from: Social Discomfort

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photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/littledebbie11/4236291994/}Deborah Austin{/link}

I went to the store yesterday and discovered they had discontinued my favorite lipstick. The only one I’ve worn for the last 8 years. The one I wore to my wedding.

Now, you may be judging me right now, thinking, “It’s only a lipstick. Don’t you have bigger problems in your life?” Well yes, yes I do, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t bummed out by the discovery. I’m sure you’ve experienced the same kind of thing in your life – your favorite show got cancelled, your favorite restaurant went out of business, your favorite shirt got a tear in it that just couldn’t be fixed. And I’m sure you didn’t just shrug your shoulders and say “C’est la vie” about it, either.

You probably had a little pity party, am I right?

However, there was an upside to this discovery, though I didn’t realize it right away. I found a new lipstick I like even better than the one I used to wear, and I never would have tried it had I been able to buy my favorite.

There’s a lesson in all this, even though it seems like I’m just talking about lipstick.

We rarely get to choose when and how things end

Some of us are more comfortable with change than others. We like to get new things, try new things, replace the old things in our lives with new shiny things. For the most part, I’m like this. I don’t mind letting go of most things, because it gives me the opportunity to get something new.
But even for those who embrace the new, we only really like it when it’s on our own terms.

You may love going out and regularly getting a new car and trading yours in. But it’s different when you have to do it because the car you already own and really like breaks down beyond repair or is totaled in a wreck. You’re uncomfortable and unhappy because you’ve lost something you really like and can’t be sure what you get next will be just as nice. You don’t have the option to fall back on the tried and true if the new doesn’t work out for you.

Change is fine, as long as we get to initiate it. Unpredictable change is what upsets us so much.

Try not to be such a baby

photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/percivalsmithers/2525525423/}percivalsmithers{/link}

I know, I know, easier said than done. Most of us like the predictable; we like our routines and our plans. But we don’t have nearly as much control over things as we think we do, so it’s better if we can understand and accept that. Throw your hissy fit if you need to. Then quit crying that you lost something you’ve learned to depend on, and take the time to step back and see how the change might benefit you. There’s bound to be something positive waiting for you.

All good things end. But they make room for new good things.

All Good Things Come to an End is a post from: Social Discomfort

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You have a family with two parents and a child, and they’re receiving no-cost Medicaid and Food Stamps. Both parents are unemployed, and one is receiving disability and GI Bill for going to school. All three individuals have medical conditions that require regular maintenence and prescription medication.

photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinksherbet/4004791663/}D Sharon Pruitt{/link}

The parent who isn’t going to school gets a job, making enough to disqualify the family from both the Food Stamps and the Medicaid. No health benefits are available from the new job. After subtracting the Food Stamp amount lost, the cost of buying private health insurance, and the cost of medications and doctor’s visits, the family would be lucky if they came out with more money every month than they had before. Add in the new transportation costs and child care, and it’s possible that they could end up with less.
In a situation like this, where’s the incentive to look for a job? Would you look for a job if it could end up costing your family money?

I wouldn’t.

Getting a job should be a happy occasion, not a math problem

I just got a new job after being unemployed for a year and a half, and my situation is very similar to the one outlined above. I happened to come out positive after figuring out the cost of losing my public assistance. If I were working less than full time, or working for minumum wage, I might not have been so lucky.

photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinksherbet/3724943003/}D Sharon Pruitt{/link}

Now, if my family consisted of three perfectly healthy individuals who only went to the doctor once in a while and didn’t have to take daily medications, a new part-time minumum wage job would be nothing but a good thing; all the money wouldn’t end up going to medical expenses. But for someone in my situation, taking a new job requires weighing the pros and cons and doing the math.

I had this same kind of process before I asked for a promotion at my last job. At my then current pay rate, I would continue to qualify for Medi-Cal, but the increase in pay would cause me to lose it. I would have to pay for insurance through my employer. However, I had to make sure the price of the insurance was less than the difference in pay. Otherwise, I could end up getting a promotion and making less money. It was very close.

It shouldn’t be like this.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Health care should be less expensive, or the income limits on government-subsidised health care should be higher. If the goal of public assistance is to help you get back on your feet, then it should make financial sense for a person to take a job rather than staying unemployed. People wonder at other people who stay on public assistance for years, or they wonder why someone on public assistance would be picky about finding a job. If I had to choose between being unemployed to keep my full coverage health insurance or getting a job where I end up earning less because I now have to pay all of my medical expenses, I’d stay unemployed. Judge me all you want; my health is more important to me than my pride.

What do you think? I’d really like to know.

Why Does Health Insurance Suck? is a post from: Social Discomfort

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photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinksherbet/3206805049/}D Sharon Pruitt{/link}

Bad idea #1 – Cut certain kinds of food out of your diet to help you lose weight

This one is perhaps the most important, and it really makes me wonder about the intelligence of people sometimes. Maybe I just have a magical ability to apply the things I learned in science and health class, or maybe people are in such a need of a quick and easy way to lose weight they’ll swallow anything. I think it’s probably the second one.

Anyway, we’ve all seen it. The one that immediately comes to mind is a low-carbohydrate diet, the good ol’ Atkins Diet. According to this diet, in order to lose weight, you need to restrict your carb intake and eat more protein and fats instead. Personally, I hate this diet, and its principles scare me a bit. Basically, you keep your carb intake low enough that your body doesn’t pump insulin into your blood, and it starts to produce ketones in order to burn fat for energy instead.

There are two main problems I see with this diet (and I’m not alone, since the American Heart Assocition, American Dietetic Association, the US Department of Health and Human Services have some problems with this diet as well – check out the Low-Carbohydrate Diet article on Wikipedia for more details).

First, ketones in the blood are not a good thing. They are a short term emergency mechanism that responds to starvation when the body’s cells aren’t getting enough energy. Ketoacidosis results from long term blood ketones, and should be treated by going to the emergency room. Yet the Atkins Diet is designed to produce ketones in the blood, and dieters even use urine ketone strips to make sure they are producing ketones. These strips were designed for diabetics to make sure they AREN’T producing ketones. Which do you think is a healthier use for them? (As a side note, ketoacidosis is what hospitalized my son when he was diagnosed with diabetes, and it resulted in several days in the Pediatric ICU)

The second problem is actually much simpler and much more concerning than the first. Your brain runs on sugar, glucose to be exact, and sugar alone. It can’t use fats or proteins for energy. Oh, and ketoacidosis can cause brain swelling. Neat, huh?

Basically, eliminating any single category of food is bad for you, because your body was designed to use all different kinds of food. You need sugar, starches, protein, and fat in order to keep your body in good working order. Leave one out, and you throw off the balance. And that’s when bad shit starts to happen.

Bad idea #2 – Cut calories drastically in order to lose weight quickly

photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/alancleaver/4222532649/}Alan Cleaver{/link}

This one actually makes a certain kind of sense if you’re not thinking too hard about it. We’re told that eating fewer calories than we burn in a day is the way to lose weight, so we figure that eating even fewer calories is going to burn off the weight faster.

I hate to tell you this, but it actually has the opposite effect. You can only cut so many calories out of your diet before your body starts to freak out and hold onto its fat stores with all its might. Rather than burning calories and losing weight, your metabolism slows to a crawl as your body enters starvation mode, and you may actually end up gaining weight and wondering why.

Starving yourself is both an unhealthy choice and likely to backfire.

How To Really Lose Weight

I’m going to tell you something that no one wants to hear but everybody already knows. The best way to lose weight is to eat fewer calories than you burn and to exercise regularly. You need to add the exercise in order to burn off fat rather than protein, though. When your body starts burning itself for energy instead of the food you eat, it likes protein first. So you have to tell it not to burn protein (your muscles) by using them and showing your body that it needs them. Then, it’ll move onto the fat that you want to get rid of.

Fad diets are stupid. Short-term diet solutions are stupid. The Atkins Diet can actually make you stupid. Just eat less and move more, and stop looking for an easier way out. There isn’t one.

The Truth About Diets is a post from: Social Discomfort

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photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/tacitrequiem/2801158109/}joanneQEscober{/link}

Don’t you hate to listen to people whine about their lives? I’m betting, like me, you do. I mean, the occasional complaint is fine, and bitching about a bad day once in a while is to be expected, especially from someone in a high-stress situation. I’m not about to deprive someone of their release valve and ask them to bottle everything up just so I don’t have to hear about it. But there’s a limit. It’s a hard thing to explain and describe, but we can all conjure up a picture of someone in our lives who resides in the land of self-pity almost constantly. Yeah, THAT guy.

Whining can have a large negative impact on almost all areas of your life , so let’s start by making sure THAT guy isn’t you.

Do any of these things apply to you?

• You feel like you’re unlucky in some area of your life (love, work, friends, etc.)
• You regularly feel that life is unfair to you
• You’re usually unhappy
• You frequently need to vent
• When you talk about your problems, you rarely get useful feedback or people seem bored

If you said no to most of all of the above, then good for you! Well, unless you’re lying to yourself or me, in which case I think you need to reevaluate some things. I can’t read your mind through your computer, so it’s not like you have to worry about me finding out or something. And it’s not like I asked you if you torture kittens in your basement; there’s no reason to lie to yourself about this. Anyway, if you said no, then there are a couple of things you can do here.

• Go find something else interesting to read (preferably on this site) that’s more useful to you
• Read on for some pointers to ensure that you keep up the good work (see my “words of warning” below)
• Go outside (you know, that place where your computer isn’t) and do something with other people (REAL people, not the ones in another country you chat with on Facebook)

If you said yes to any or all of the above, go away. These are some warning signs that you might be (and probably are) a whiner, and I really don’t need another whiner to listen to in my life. However, if this is something that you want to change, or at least work on, then disregard the “go away” and feel free to stick around and read on. I’ll try to be nicer to you.

Some words of warning: even if none of the above apply to you, you have to make sure that you keep a check on your legitimate complaints. Even if they’re reasonable and justified, if people hear them too often, they start to interpret them as whining. This is especially true of chronic conditions and recurring problems. Often, the people know you have a genuine reason to complain but can’t help how they feel about it.

It’s not your fault

photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/turn_your_swag_on/3818617188/in/photostream/}Kennedy Garrett{/link}

Well, not entirely anyway. You may have learned this annoying behavior from a friend or family member (like a parent) and started doing it without even realizing it. It’s really easy to start whining and not notice it until it’s gotten really obnoxious, and most people start small. It’s even easier to start with acceptable complaining and have it turn into whining because you’re not being listened to. You complain more and more and more in the hopes that someone will hear you and help. This is usually the result of a weak support system, or just crappy friends and family, and unfortunately, it just makes things worse. Think about it this way: when someone is complaining and we ignore them for it, when they start complaining louder does it make us want to listen? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

And guess what? Now that you’ve read this, “it’s not your fault” doesn’t apply to you anymore. You’re aware, and if you choose to do nothing about it, then it’s all your fault.

You’re not special

Besides the ease with which we start our whining, it can be hard to keep it from getting out of hand. Life is hard, and everyone has their own challenges. Everyone, not just you. Airing your problems can make you feel a little better about them, so sometimes we do it more often in order to keep feeling better.  However, while it can be tempting to think that your problems are more difficult than the ones other people have (and therefore give you more of a right to bitch than other people), you’re probably wrong. Even the people in your life who seem to have no problems and no worries at all have something going on; you just may not know what it is. So don’t fall into the trap of thinking that your whining is more justified and less annoying than anyone else’s.

You’re a big kid, so act like it

The worst part about people who feel sorry for themselves is how childish they are about their problems. There’s a big difference between adult venting and whining like a baby about your bad day. So if you do feel the need to vent, or whine, or piss and moan, try to choose a good method. Because the less irritating you are when you’re feeling sorry for yourself, the more leeway the rest of us will give you.

Quit Whining Already is a post from: Social Discomfort

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Let me clarify.  You can know each other in the familiar sense, like when someone asks you, “Do you know Frank?” and you say, “Yes, I do.”  You can even know each other in the biblical sense, if that’s what you prefer.  But knowing a person with perfect understanding rarely leads to happiness in a relationship, mostly because it’s too hard to accept things we don’t like about other people.  Instead, it’s best to be blind to the flaws of the people we want to love.

Big Flaws and Little Flaws

Okay, so those are just arbitrary categories I made up, but work with me here.  The flaws we see in other people come in two kinds: Big and Little.

The Big Flaws are the ones we can’t ignore or even tolerate, like being a serial killer or voting Republican.  These will be different for everyone, since there are people that don’t mind serial killers or Republicans, but everyone has things they consider to be Big Flaws.  And these Big Flaws are the deal breakers, the things that we just can’t stand in other people.  If we know that someone has any of these Big Flaws, we usually end the relationship or avoid starting one if it hasn’t started already.

When someone passes (or seems to pass) the Big Flaw test, then we have the Little Flaws.  These are the things that annoy us but we can deal with, at least in relatively small doses.  Like snorting when you laugh or picking your teeth when you eat.  You know those people.  In relationships, these are the things that we ignore and occasionally bicker about when we have to endure more than a small dose.  But they’re rarely deal breakers, unless someone has a whole lot of them. Twenty-five minor irritations can sometimes be worse than one Big Flaw.

Everyone we know has flaws, whether they’re big or small.  And most people we know have MORE flaws than we currently know about.  After all, most of us try to hide, or at least minimize, these bad qualities in order to get people to like us.

The problem with flaws

You would think that because none of us is perfect we would be able to tolerate the flaws of others.  Nope.

Even though we know that everyone has flaws, even though we have them ourselves, we still want to fix them.  Sometimes we can handle ignoring them, but rarely do we simply accept them.  Most of the time, we want people to change so they don’t annoy us any more.

The really unfortunate part is the fact that, try as we might, we can’t hide our flaws forever.  It’s hard pretending to be something you’re not, so once a relationship stabilizes, we start to relax.  And when we relax, we start to get annoying.  At least at first, our friends or significant others may simply shrug off our annoying behavior; I can almost guarantee you that this won’t last forever.  We’re all human, and they’re eventually going to look at us and say, “Will you STOP that already?!”

The blind optimist

photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/foxtongue/389536821/}Foxtongue{/link}

The person who loves us the most is usually the person who sees the least of our flaws and assumes that no others exist.  This is also the person who’s happiest in any given relationship.  When your friends are complaining about you behind your back, and trust me they do, this is the person who always says, “I’ve never noticed that about her.”

Now some behavior is impossible to miss, and this is where denial comes into play.  If you can successfully deny that a behavior exists by explaining it away, it’s just as good as not noticing it.  ”Oh he doesn’t mean to be negative; he just uses sarcasm as a joke.”  Or you can plug your ears, close your eyes, and scream “la la la la la la la” at the top of your lungs.  That works too.

So we’ve made it back to my point.  Yay!

Knowing a person really well, knowing how they think and feel and act all the time, is just asking for trouble.  You’re not going to like everything you find out, and then the things you don’t like are going to grate on your nerves for the life of the relationship.  Unless you can turn a truly blind eye or explain everything away.  Then you’ll be truly happy.

DISCLAIMER:  I’m not advocating turning a blind eye to abusive behavior.  If you or someone you know is being abused, GET HELP.  If someone in your life chews too loudly, practice deafness.

Okay, commence arguing with me.  You know you want to.

Why Arranged Marriages Should Make a Comeback is a post from: Social Discomfort

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Out of the mess, however, I learned some very important lessons that I want to pass on to all of you so you can protect yourselves in the future.  Reality is a very harsh, unforgiving teacher, so here are some things I wish I had known before all this happened.  No one really thinks it’s going to happen to them, but trust me, it can and probably will.  So get your head out of the sand and get prepared.

photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/ell-r-brown/5035906423/}ell brown{/link}

1. Make sure you have insurance.  I’m incredibly thankful that I did, because there’s no way I could afford to go out and replace the $17,000 worth of stuff that I lost.  Most of it was bought when I was much better off financially than I am now.  If you own your house, you probably have homeowner’s insurance since most mortgage companies require it.  If you rent, get a renter’s insurance policy if you don’t already have one.  Take an inventory of your personal property and the values of EVERYTHING, right down to your socks and your power cords, and then make sure you have enough coverage to pay for everything should your house burn down or something.  Some policies require an additional fee in order to get replacement cost for your lost items rather than a reduced depreciated value (used items are worth less than new ones, and you probably want to buy new ones to replace your used ones rather than buy other people’s used ones).  If you’re low on cash, this is especially important, and definitely not the place to cut back expenses unless you’re okay with not having things, like a bed or a stove, if something happens to them.  Don’t just get the bare minimum unless you’re sure that it’s enough to completely protect you.
2. Take a specific inventory of all of your electronics, appliances, and the like.  Write down model numbers and serial numbers for everything and keep this list in a safe place.  These model and serial numbers will not only help you replace things, they’ll also help the police identify your things as stolen property if they turn up.  Online storage would be a good place to put this inventory, because if you keep it in the house or on a computer, or even on an external hard drive, it could get stolen with the rest of your stuff or destroyed in a fire.  I have a spreadsheet in Google Docs for this purpose, and it’s safe online and free.
3. Take pictures of valuable items, like your TV, your computer, your furniture, and your jewelry (you may have to take out a special policy on your jewelry if you own more than a certain cash value – check with your insurance company).  Store these photos somewhere safe as well, preferably online and password protected.  The more documentation you can give the insurance company in case of a loss, the faster and easier the whole process will be.  Also, if you pay extra for replacement value on your insurance policy, you’ll need these receipts to get the full amount up front.
4. Keep receipts for EVERYTHING, especially any high-end items you buy such as expensive watches, shoes, or appliances.  This way you can tell your insurance company exactly what you owned and how much it was worth.  Then, they can’t tell you that they’re going to give you $500 for your $2000 washer.   Find somewhere safe to store these as well, in case of fire or theft.  Scan them so the ink doesn’t fade to unreadable, or photocopy them if you don’t have a scanner.  I’ll say it again: online storage, online storage, online storage!  There are plenty of free storage solutions you can use, because all this information shouldn’t take up that much space.  Or, print the scanned receipts and bury them in a metal box in the backyard if you prefer.  Just keep them safe.
5. Consider a security system or surveillance camera system for your house.  This way it will alert the police in case of a fire or break-in, or you’ll at least have footage after the fact of what happened and who was involved.  Lots of companies offer free installation and free equipment if you sign a contract.  Dogs are NOT a security measure, especially if the burglary is committed by someone they know.  I have a dog that generally wants to eat strangers when they come to the door, even if I let them in, but my stuff is still gone.  And they sure as hell can’t put out a fire or call the fire department.  Also, remember to lock your doors and windows when you leave the house, every time, even during the day.

Please, do me a favor and take care of all this NOW.  Don’t wait until tomorrow, or next week, or next payday.  Bad things don’t wait to happen until you’re prepared, and things get forgotten when you put them off.  You may not be able to afford everything I talked about right away, and that’s fine. Do the free stuff now and then do the stuff you have to pay for as soon as you get some money.  And you may not be able to afford a security system or cameras, and that’s fine too.  But please, don’t consider the insurance as a luxury that you may or may not be able to afford.  Adjust your budget if you have to and find the money; it’s not very expensive, and it’s much less expensive than buying new things.  For reference: my renter’s insurance policy is pricey compared to others I’ve seen, and it’s $23 a month.  I know Allstate is much cheaper.  Check with your car insurance company and see if they offer renter’s insurance; you may be able to get a discount.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to be prepared for the sense of violation that comes with being burglarized.  I’d imagine that fire is much the same way.  It’s very unnerving to not feel safe in your own home, and I don’t know yet if that feeling ever goes away.  I’ll let you know if it does, because as it stands now, I hate leaving the house with no one home for fear I’ll come home to an empty living room again.

Do you have any home safety tips to share, or any good methods for home inventory?  Anything I’ve missed or you’d like to add?  Experiences, good or bad?  Please, share in the comments.

Why You Should Be a Pack-rat and Compulsive List Maker, the Home Invasion Edition is a post from: Social Discomfort

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photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinksherbet/3484925590/}D Sharon Pruitt{/link}

Yes, you really do.  I’m not trying to hurt your feelings.  I don’t think you’re a horrible person; I don’t think you’re horrible at anything at all.  But you’re not perfect at anything, either.  There’s room for improvement in everything you do.

Yes, everything.

I hear you doubting me because I just made a BIG generalization.  You’re thinking something along the lines of,

“What about little things like tying my shoes?”

Okay, maybe you’re an expert at tying your shoelaces and can’t improve the skill any more.  You have THAT perfected.  Or do you?

Unless you’re awesome like me, I bet you don’t tie your shoes like that.  Which means that you’ll spend twice as much time as you need to tying your shoes in your life.  Or you have velcro and slip-on shoes, in which case, I salute you.  Velcro is most definitely not just for little kids.

Back to my point.

You suck.  That’s not a bad thing.

Actually, it’s a good thing if you can look at it in a positive light.  Remember my post about realistic positive thinking?  Now is the time to practice that.  Instead of being offended that I just told you that you suck, you should be saying, “Great!  How do I suck?  And how can I suck less?”  Because, let’s face it, people rarely deliver criticism in a constructive manner unless it’s an English assignment.  You’re going to have to dig for the constructive criticism inside the insults.

Just a short post today, with two simple points.

1. There’s always room for growth and improvement.
2. Insults are useful if you can think first and cry later.

Since I probably DID hurt your feelings, feel free to tell me how I suck in the comments.  Or, if you’re feeling brave, tell me how YOU suck.

You Suck. That’s a Good Thing. is a post from: Social Discomfort

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Messed up sleep

A lot of people take sleep for granted.  I want to slap those people.  Some don’t even consider it to be important, much less a priority (I want to slap those people too, but I kind of understand where they’re coming from), and sleep is often the first thing to go when our schedules get too hectic.  We have a presentation to give at work, or we have a midterm the next day, and we’re likely to stay up extra late or not go to sleep at all trying to get everything done.  This is a bad habit and a bad mindset, because lack of sleep causes even more problems than the ones you were trying to solve by staying up all night.

Instead of not knowing all the material on the midterm, we end up sleeping through the midterm.  We finish the presentation, but we end up forgetting it at home, along with our shoes.  Sleep deprivation is rarely kind to us.

The problem with sleep is, most of us don’t get enough or the sleep we do get isn’t good quality. It’s also a temperamental thing.  You know that friend you have who gets upset over nothing, blows it out of proportion, and stays angry for months?  Yeah, sleep is like that.

How to mess up your sleep:

• drink caffeine
• be exposed to light near bedtime
• watch TV or use the computer (or your smartphone) too close to bedtime
• be too cold
• be too hot
• have a noisy environment while you’re trying to sleep
• drink too much water (or anything, really) so you wake up to go to the bathroom
• drink alcohol
• take medications that cause you to wake up
• take sedatives
• stress, depression, and anxiety

You get the idea.

It’s so easy to mess up, and a real pain in the ass to fix.  Not to mention, light sleepers (like me) have it even worse.  Noises that most people wouldn’t notice even if they were awake will wake up a light sleeper.  My husband swears turning the doorknob wakes me up.  It’s probably true.

What really pisses me off are those people who never have sleep problems and never seem to suffer from sleep deprivation (yes, sweetheart, I’m looking at you), and the things I listed above have no effect on them.  They fall asleep the second their head hits the pillow and don’t wake up in the middle of the night.  Ever.  And if they have to get up extra early or go to bed late, they don’t drag all day with dark circles under their eyes.  It’s okay to hate these people; they won’t be reading this article, anyway.

For us mere mortals, healthy sleep is a challenge and a lifelong goal.  And I hate to tell you this, but if you want to fix your sleep, you’re probably going to have to make some serious changes.  I know how you feel about that, and I empathize.  Really, I do.  I don’t want to make those changes, either.  I just want sleep to come easily like it does to my husband instead of staring at the ceiling for hours.  You’ve heard the old adage, though, “Wish in one hand…”

So let’s get down to business.

photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/zaqschlanger/5023929422/}Infinite Winter Photography{/link}

(Why is it so much easier to sleep when and where you’re not supposed to?)

How to fix your sleep

I’ve posted some quick tips to help with fatigue and sleep problems, and you can start there if you’d like.  You can also take a look at my previous post outlining some potential causes for fatigue, because sometimes your energy problems aren’t because your sleep is messed up.  However, if you want some ideas to improve your sleep, rather than simply to deal with insomnia or fatigue, read on.

First, you have to train yourself to sleep

I know that sounds kind of dumb, or maybe just a bit simplistic, but hear me out.

If you have chronic sleep trouble, you likely do things like read or watch TV in bed.  Or worse, you take your laptop to bed with you, or your cell phone, and the last thing you do before you turn out the light is check Facebook.  Knock it off!  Ever heard of Pavlov’s dog?  You know, the one who learned to salivate at the sound of a bell because it always came before food.  Well, it’s not just dogs that get trained this way.  It’s also the reason my son cries when I take off his shoes, because that’s usually the step before going into bed.  And it’s the reason your brain wakes up when you get into bed.

photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/krossbow/4509414056/}krossbow{/link}

Reading, watching TV, and using the computer are all stimulating activities, so when you do them in bed, your brain starts to see the bed as a stimulant.

I bet I don’t have to tell you why that’s a problem.

So, from now on, the bed is only for sleep (and sex).  All those other things need to be done somewhere else.

After this step, there are two more to train your brain that the bed is for sleep.  Don’t sleep anywhere else, and if you go to bed and can’t fall asleep after 15 minutes, get up and go do something relaxing.   Just don’t do it in bed, or even in your bedroom.

Next, you have to make sure you’re tired at bedtime

Duh, right?

This one is actually more complicated than it sounds, and it’s usually where I mess myself up.  There are lots of ways to sabotage yourself here (caffeine!), and this is where most of our bad habits lie.  Fortunately for you, I have some new habits for you.

1.  Get up and go to bed at the same time, every day.  Yes, even weekends.  Yes, even when you’ve been invited to a late party.  Yes, even when you had trouble sleeping the night before.  I don’t know anyone personally who does this.  Myself included.  Even the people I know who have a regular work schedule still at least go to bed at varying times.  Those who don’t work, or whose work hours vary, are even worse.  But I do know that when I do it, even though it doesn’t last, I feel better while it does.

2.  No naps.  Yes, sometimes a nap can be a healthy thing, and a catnap can often recharge you for the rest of the day.  But if you’re having sleep trouble, you’re just making things more difficult for yourself, and I’m looking in the mirror here.  You can start taking naps again once you’ve ironed out your problems.  Or not; you may not need them any more.

3.  No caffeine after noon or so.  (I know this is a hard one.  I’m drinking a soda at 10 pm as I write this.  It’s a process, and I’m not perfect.)  The exact time depends on how much caffeine you usually have.  The half-life of caffeine is 4 hours.  A small Red Bull has 80 mg of caffeine.  If I have one at noon, at 4 pm there’s still 40 mg, at 8 pm there’s 20 mg, and at midnight there’s 10 mg.  Even a little caffeine can make it hard to fall asleep, even if you feel sleepy.  You may even have to cut caffeine completely.

4.  Avoid bright lights at night.  This includes computer monitors, TV screens, and cell phones.  If you can’t live without them, at least turn the brightness down at night.  Turn the lights down in your house at least an hour before you plan to go to bed.  You should also make sure your room is dark, eliminating clocks and those LEDs that let you know stuff is charging, or invest in a sleep mask.  Even filtered through your eyelids, light signals your brain that it should wake up.  And no, I don’t know why the daylight doesn’t make it harder to nap in the afternoon.

5.  Turn down your thermostat at night.  The temperature drop signals your brain that it’s time for sleep.  A warm bath can also help, because it will raise your body temperature and cause it to drop an hour or so later.  This, like the thermostat lowering, makes you sleepy.

Other things that mess with your sleep

• 

  photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/democlez/4424898002/}democlez{/link}

  Alcohol at bedtime may make you drowsy and even help you fall asleep, but you won’t get restful sleep and will likely wake up early and be tired the next day.

• If you have a habit of taking your problems to bed with you and worrying instead of sleeping, then you may need to practice some kind of relaxation technique before bed.  Progressive muscle relaxation works great for me.  I have a tape I put on (or an mp3 file, to be truer to life and less poetic-sounding) that’s about 10 minutes long and makes it much easier for me to sleep when I’m feeling stressed.
• Quit TRYING to fall asleep.  Stop looking at the clock to see how long you’ve been awake, and stop dwelling on how much you need to sleep.  The harder you try, the harder you’ll make it on yourself.

Theory vs. Practice

As for me, I’m a work-in progress.  I’ve taken some steps to fix my sleep, and it’s getting a little better.  I won’t lie and say I do all of these things (yet), or that I do them all the time.  I’m getting there.  It’s easier for me to start one thing at a time rather than do everything at once, but jumping in head first and tackling it all may work for some people.  Everyone’s different, but everyone can benefit from better sleep.  At least, unless you’re one of those people I hate.

So take all these ideas, and implement one a week.  (Or, overhaul your lifestyle completely if that’s something that works for you.)  Who knows?  Maybe you won’t even miss the caffeine you’ve cut out of your diet because you feel so much more rested.

Oh, and by the way, if you’re the parent of a newborn, just give up for now.  There are some battles you can’t win.  Wait ’til they hit puberty or something, and then give it a go.

How about you?  Got any tips?  Success stories?  Failures?  Please, share in the comments.  I’m not writing to hear myself talk, after all.

Sleep: The Elixir Of Life is a post from: Social Discomfort

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1. 3 Reasons You’re Tired All the Time: When Enough Sleep Isn’t Enough
2. 4 Ways to Fight Daytime Fatigue and Nighttime Sleep Problems
3. Depression: What It Looks Like In Real Life

Before you get on me about being insensitive to people who actually have ADHD, let me assure you that’s not my intention.  I’m not here to doubt the existence of the condition or validity of the diagnosis.  Actually, I truly believe that ADHD is a REAL condition and not the product of poor parenting and a desire to make kids easier to deal with, though it may be over-diagnosed for those reasons and others.  I’m simply stating that all of us suffer from distractedness and inattention to a degree.  Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way…

photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/bethcanphoto/134245664/}Beth Rankin{/link}

We all have ADHD symptoms and behaviors to an extent, and there are lots of things in our culture and lifestyles that make it worse.  Things like television, video games, text messages, and the internet.  There’s a simple reason for this.

Focus and concentration are skills, not the standard way we’re designed to operate, and they take practice.  TV and the rest are the opposite of practicing focus, so naturally they’re going to make our concentration worse rather than better.  They’re also going to make things even harder for those people who have the actual medical condition of ADHD.  So stop blaming your lack of concentration on technology.  It’s not causing anything; it just makes it easier to express and indulge.  It’s like feeding sugar to someone who’s already diabetic; it’s not going to cause diabetes, but it sure isn’t going to help matters.

Here’s something to keep in mind when a study comes along that says technology causes ADHD.  The only way in science you can prove cause and effect is to conduct an experiment and see what happens.  An experiment to prove that technology causes ADHD would mean that the researchers would have to have 2 or more groups of kids and make one group use technology excessively while the others were restricted to varying degrees (one used none at all, one used only an hour a day, etc.).  A scenario like this would not only be extremely difficult to create and maintain, it would be extremely unethical and never approved by a research board.  All studies on technology and ADHD are correlational, meaning the two are related, but we can’t say for sure exactly what that relationship is.

But back to the idea that focus is a skill and not the natural way of doing things, since I kind of went off on a tangent there.  This means that we all need to stop trying to fix our attention difficulties.  They’re not an illness or a condition that needs to be medicated.

They’re normal.

It’s when these behaviors become excessive that it becomes a problem.  It’s like depression: there’s normal depression and there’s clinical depression.  Most of us fall into the normal category for ADHD symptoms.

The truth of the matter is, we all need the ability to be distracted sometimes, to be able to multi-task rather than to focus once in a while.  It’s fine to be in the moment and focus on a task when you need to or want to, but then you need to let your attention lapse.  Sometimes, life is too boring to focus on, and the ability to be easily distracted is essential to keep from killing yourself.  Not to mention that constant focus is exhausting and leads to burnout.

Even that perfect state of “flow” eventually has to end, or we’ll starve.

If you’re truly having trouble concentrating to the point it’s impacting your life, start practicing how to focus before you go to the doctor for an ADHD diagnosis and some Ritalin to make it all better.  Guess what?  Ritalin helps EVERYONE concentrate better.  The fact that it helps doesn’t mean you have ADHD.  It means you’re taking a stimulant.  Ask a college student during finals.  But a pill for a quick fix isn’t going to solve your problems.

photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/tomsaint/2987926396/}Rennett Stowe{/link}

For those of you who have a little trouble concentrating once in a while and find yourselves thinking you have ADHD and looking for a fix, I feel sorry for you.  Normal human behavior is not an illness, and if you think it is, you’re a special kind of hypochondriac.

We all need to quit making everything in our lives into a disease, we need to quit medicating aspects of our behavior that are inconvenient, and we need to quit blaming our lack of focus on technology.  Technology just plays to this normal human trait; it doesn’t cause it.  If you didn’t have your cell phone to distract you, you’d be staring off into space out the window instead.  Quit kidding yourself.

Technology Does NOT Cause ADHD is a post from: Social Discomfort

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1. Technology and the Need to be Constantly Connected
2. How The World Has Changed
3. Electronics and Our Ability to Focus

photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/agius/203942947/}agius{/link}

Yes, you heard me correctly.  Not only is having high self-esteem bad for you, it’s bad for the rest of us as well.  And not just because we’re annoyed by you.

If you’ve read any of my other pieces on here, you may be thinking that I’m contradicting myself.  I assure you, I’m not.  I have written before about the benefits of self-esteem and provided tips on how to improve it.  These pieces were meant for people with pathologically low self-esteem and for people looking for a boost on their bad days to help them feel better.  In no way was I advocating that you need to have high self-esteem to be happy.

In fact, your self-esteem should be average.

Yes, low self-esteem is bad

photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/supersonicphotos/4078364523/}kelsey_lovefusionphoto{/link}

It should be high enough to keep you from being miserable in your own skin, and it should be low enough that at least some of the time you try to please others and make them like you.  You shouldn’t feel like you have no worth at all as a human being, and you shouldn’t tolerate others walking all over you because you don’t think you’re good enough to deserve any better treatment.  No one deserves to genuinely hate themselves.  (Actually, let me clarify that.  Usually, the people who DO deserve to hate themselves are actually the ones who think they deserve better than they’re getting.  So if you truly hate yourself, then you probably don’t deserve to.)  If your self-image resembles a doormat, then you definitely need to work on improving your self-esteem.

For example, eliminating competitive games in schools doesn’t promote healthy self-esteem; failing and losing are ways that we learn and grow and improve, and they provide healthy evaluation of our abilities.  This inflated self-esteem we’ve produced by eliminating failure and losing has two negative outcomes: people who see themselves without failure are either crushed when they experience it in the real world, or they’re oblivious to criticism, feedback, and falure and see themselves as nearly invincible and incredibly valuable in spite of evidence to the contrary.

But high self esteem is not the answer

We’ve seen what happens with crushed self-esteem already.  It affects the way you treat others by making you focus all your efforts on pleasing other people with no regard to yourself.  But what happens when people DON’T try to please others at their own expense some of the time?

These people suck.  Here’s why:

• people with inflated self-esteem generally think less of others (picture the slave-owner-slave mentality before the civil war)
• since they think less of others, they don’t worry about them as much as they worry about themselves.  Other people don’t really matter.
• since they worry about themselves more, they try to please themselves more than they try to please others, if they try to do so at all.  Again, other people don’t matter.  And their pleasure is more important than yours, always.
• since they value others less, they don’t feel bad about pleasing themselves at the expense of others.  After all, other people aren’t important.
• Additionally, since other people aren’t important, their opinions don’t matter either.  So to someone with inflated self-esteem, if someone thinks they’re an asshole, there’s no motivation for change of self improvement.  And since they don’t ever feel bad about themselves, that’s not motivation either.
• as a result, society is full of self absorbed people with no regard for others.  No exactly a great environment in which to live, especially if you’re struggling in some area of your life.  No one cares.

photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/pedrosimoes7/449314732/}pedrosimoes7{/link}

I’m pretty sure you can think of other consequences to this kind of behavior and mindset.  Put simply, it makes society hostile, intolerant, non-compassionate, uncooperative, and uncaring.  Sound familiar?

So what does healthy self-esteem look like?

You have value as a person, but you’re not perfect and you have room to improve and grow.  You’re good at things, but there are also things that you’re lousy at.  It’s okay to have shortcomings; we’re all human beings here.  And perhaps most importantly, you are NOT the center of the universe. The well-being and happiness of others should take the lead in your behavior a lot of the time, and it should be at least considered all of the time.

Any questions?

Your High Self Esteem Makes Society Suck is a post from: Social Discomfort

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2. High-Speed Lifestyle: Should We Slow Down?
3. Why Does Health Insurance Suck?

photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/seyyed_mostafa_zamani/4266283238/}seyed mostafa zamani{/link}

I hate to be the one who has to tell you this, but all that crap about how love should be unconditional is just that.  Crap.

Yes, I should love you for who you are and not what you can do for me.  Yes, I should accept that you’re not perfect and that I won’t agree with everything you do or like every thing about you.  I should love you in spite of your faults.  And yes, I should tolerate and excuse your obnoxious and generally bad days.  But if you’re usually a self-centered, unlovable snot, why should I love you?  ”Because love is unconditional” is a lousy answer.

Anyone who thinks love is unconditional, unless they’re talking about a dog loving his master or a mother loving her child, is seriously self-deluded.  Maybe just naive.  Or, more often, they’re one of those self-centered unlovable snots trying to convince you why you shouldn’t hold them accountable for their behavior and why you should love them anyway.

You have to earn my love.  Unless you’re my three-year-old son.

This doesn’t mean you have to buy my love, and the conditions for love aren’t steep.  Love isn’t about giving me presents or doing things for me.  But there are conditions.  Well, really, there’s just one.  Don’t suck.  (Romantic love has steeper conditions than just “don’t suck.”  This is just friendship and familial love beyond the “I love you because you’re my *fill in the blank* and I have to.)  If you don’t suck, at least not most of the time, you’ve done enough to earn my love.

And there’s an easy test to see if you deserve to be loved.  Ask yourself, “Would I love someone who acts like me?”  If you’re honest with yourself when you answer, you should be able to figure out why it seems like no one loves you.  However, if you’re having trouble with that test, here are some basic guidelines:

• Don’t borrow without being willing to lend.
• Don’t take without giving.
• Give, and lend, without expecting to receive.
• Don’t assume you “deserve” anything or are “entitled.”
• Don’t keep score (odds are, you don’t remember accurately anyway) – I want to qualify this statement, though.  If the score is blatantly 100-1, there’s a problem.

Stick to these simple rules, at least most of the time, and you can pretty much guarantee you’ll be a lovable person.

Now, you may be thinking, “Maybe love is conditional, but why shouldn’t it be unconditional?”  After all, saying that I don’t love you unconditionally and that you have to earn my love seems selfish and cold-hearted.  Shouldn’t we strive to make the world a better place by loving without condition and without reserve?

Uhm, no.

Let me tell you why.  It sounds nice, but the fact of the matter is, all unconditional love does is spawn selfishness and condone cold-hearted actions; it doesn’t get rid of them and make the world a better place.  Instead, it removes accountability for behavior.  If I love you no matter what, there are no consequences for any bad behavior on your part.  How is it good for you, or for me, if I love you when you’re treating me like crap?  Aside from the fact that I shouldn’t allow you to treat me like crap with no consequences because I deserve better, I also shouldn’t let you get the impression that it’s okay to treat anyone else like crap.  I’d actually be doing you a disservice by not punishing you, because if you think bad treatment is okay, you’re going to screw up the rest of the relationships in your life by treating everyone badly.  I’d be setting a very bad precedent and a very bad example.

Rather than touting unconditional love, which is different from unselfish love by the way, I think we’d benefit a whole lot more if we tried to earn the love of others.  By all means, love people unselfishly, but make sure they actually deserve it.  And don’t expect others to love you unconditionally; make sure you’re acting like you deserve to be loved.

Otherwise, does it really mean anything?

Recommended Reading:

For the complete opposite of my opinion here, check out RealLove.com.  While I disagree, a lot, it’s a good read about the definition of unconditional love and a good explanation of selfish love which they define as conditional love.  I think they’re two different things, but you can read and decide for yourself.

Feel free to tell me how wrong you think I am in the comments.

Love Is NOT Unconditional is a post from: Social Discomfort

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2. Why Arranged Marriages Should Make a Comeback
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photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/austinevan/1225274637/}austinevan{/link}

Here’s how the extended problem solving procedure usually looks:

1. Have a problem.
2. Try to fix it.
3. Fail.
4. Do some research.  Look for new ways to fix your problem.
5. Try new solution.
6. Fail.
7. Try another solution.
8. Fail.
9. Seek an expert’s opinion and advice.  Maybe their expertise.
10. Expert fixes problem, or tries and fails.
11. NOW WHAT??

Let me give you a common example:

1. You need to lose weight.
2. You start watching what you eat and cutting back calories.
3. You haven’t lost any weight in two months.
4. You get online and look for weight-loss info, maybe go buy some dieting and weight-loss books.
5. You start a new diet according to this research.
6. You still haven’t lost weight.
7. You switch to a different diet.
8. And you STILL haven’t lost weight.
9. You look up a dietitian, go to your doctor, or join Weight Watchers.
10. For some, this works.  For others, still no weight loss, or not enough.
11. NOW WHAT??

For the person in this example, it seems like they just can’t land on the right solution to their problem, and so they keep digging for new solutions to try.  You may even look at this description and think to yourself, “Yeah, this person just hasn’t found the right diet for them.  Or maybe they need to exercise.  A last resort might even be one of those gastric bypasses.”  They’re not ultimately failing at their goal, really, they just have to keep trying.  Because quitters never win and winners never quit.  Right?

WRONG!

This person actually needs to give up and STOP trying.  All these failures are telling this person something, but they aren’t stopping to listen.  ”You’re working on the wrong problem.”

I’ve got something for you to chew on here.  You don’t need to solve your problems. Before you do anything, what you really need to do is evaluate your problems.  Ask yourself two things:  Is this really a problem? And, is it the REAL problem?

photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/floodkoff/3709957294/}floodkoff{/link}

To keep with the original example, let’s look at weight loss through this new way of thinking.  Is the need to lose weight really a problem? The answer will vary for everyone.  It depends on your weight, your health, your happiness, and lots of other variables.  In a broad generalization, if you weigh 500 pounds, then yes, it’s really a problem.  You likely have some mobility issues, and your weight is likely causing some other real health problems, like diabetes or high blood pressure.  However, if you’re 300 pounds, have no mobility problems and are otherwise healthy, then it’s probably not really a problem.  Yeah, you would benefit from losing weight, but your weight is far from killing you.  If you’re 300 pounds, as I described, but unhappy about being so, weight loss is a problem.  But it’s not the real problem.  What IS the real problem? In this case, it’s body image and how you think about yourself.  You’ll benefit a lot more from solving these underlying self image problems than your surface weight loss problem.

But wait, the 500 pound person with diabetes and high blood pressure still needs to answer the second question too.  And the answer will vary.  Maybe weight loss is the real problem, and maybe it’s not.  Maybe it’s a need to be healthier, a need to be more active, or a need to improve eating habits.  Maybe the real problem lies in the person’s diabetes management, and that’s where they should focus their energy.  Is something else causing the weight gain?  Our problems are rarely as simple and straightforward as they seem.

Here’s another, shorter example:  A person with diabetes is having pain in her feet.  Pain pills, new shoes, and physical therapy aren’t going to help her, at least not much, if the real problem is that her blood sugars are always high and she’s suffering from diabetic neuropathy.  Focus on the diabetes, not the feet.

At this point, you may be thinking, “Okay, so the next time I have a problem that I can’t seem to fix, I’ll take a look and see if I’m working on the wrong problem.”  That’s not what I want you to do, at all.  There’s a reason why I’m telling you to evaluate the problem BEFORE you start trying to solve it, rather than after repeated failures.  You need to make sure you’re working on the right problem before you start so you can make sure you’re not sabotaging yourself. The person who’s dieting but whose real goal is to be healthier is in trouble, because lots of diets, while causing weight loss, can actually make you less healthy.  Evaluating the problem after failing at solving it in this case will leave you with even more work to do, because now you have to undo the damage you’ve done.

The short version

photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/dierkschaefer/2961565820/}dierk schaefer{/link}

Find the REAL problem before you try to solve it.  You have a brain, so don’t jump in to action before using it.

And, for God’s sake, stop generalizing!  Each situation and person is unique, and the solutions will be too.

Any questions, or do you just think I’m full of crap?  Go ahead, share in the comments.

Are You Solving The Wrong Problem? is a post from: Social Discomfort

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2. 4 Ways to Fight Daytime Fatigue and Nighttime Sleep Problems
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For the skeptics:  I don’t mean to stick your head in the sand and pretend everything’s okay.

For the believers:  I don’t mean to stick your head in the sand and pretend everything’s okay.

photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/wwarby/4915793804/}wwarby{/link}

We’re not talking about denial here.  More like realism with a smile, and smiles are good for you.  The doctor told me so.  (okay, maybe the doctor didn’t tell me, but he did tell about.com, and they told me.  So THERE.)

In the past, I’ve talked about positive thinking and how it can help your mental health and your general happiness.  And I meant what I said.  However, if you take it to excess, it’s just as bad for you as negative thinking.  Only more obnoxious and not nearly so hip and edgy.  The terminally negative have that brooding mysteriousness to them.  Bubbly ostriches just make you want to be one of those terminally negative to spite them.  Or maybe strangle them.

But you don’t have to take every train wreck at face value and mourn it.  Acknowledge the bad part, then try to figure out if there’s any good you can salvage from the mess.  Maybe a lesson of some kind, or at least some spare, undamaged parts.  Maybe a way to keep from making the same mistake twice and having another train wreck in six months.  That would be positive, right?

If life hands you lemons you don’t have to make lemonade.  Just do SOMETHING with them.  Throwing them in the trash is wasteful and stupid.

I guess what I’m saying here is to do your positive thinking in moderation.  As long as you do it sometimes.  Because I have a secret for you: people don’t really like the constantly negative people any more than the obnoxiously positive ones.  If anything, they like them less because they’re such a drag to be around.  The occasional positive statement will keep your friends from not inviting you to parties.

On the flip side, here are some clues that you might need to turn down the positive thinking:

• Are you avoiding things that make you feel bad instead of doing something about them? Avoidance as a coping mechanism is fine if things are really out of your control and you’ve done all you can to fix a bad situation.  But being positive isn’t pretending that things are okay when they’re not.  That’s just dumb and counter-productive.
• Are you completely satisfied and happy with your life, as is, with no desire for growth or change? Wanting things to be better than they are is a sign that you’re alive.  It’s good to be happy with your life, but you should always be able to visualize improvements and have goals.  Happiness and positive thinking isn’t being the pot smoker who lives with his mom at age 40 in the tv commercials.  (yes, I know those are wildly inaccurate and misleading, but we’re not talking about that right now.  Just get my point, take a breath, and move on.  We can tear into misleading marijuana propaganda some other time.)
• Do you feel “fake”? Feeling fake usually comes along with coming across as fake to other people.  Not good.
• Do you never feel bad? Never feeling bad is a pretty clear sign of denial, and a great way to start screwing up.  There are bad things in life, and you should experience and accept them before you let them go.

Being positive all the time will make you seem ignorant, unintelligent (not the same thing), and blind.  And being negative all the time will make you unlikeable.  So try to be positive sometimes for the sake of your friends and family, if not for yourself and your own happiness, and try to be negative sometimes because, let’s face it, since it’s so easy and prevalent, evolution must have put it here for a reason, right?

… I had a pithy statement here to close with, but it sounded too trite (and stupid) to leave in.  Feel free to insert your own (and tell me what it is in the comments so I can steal it and use it next time).  I WILL include my standard closing questions, though.  Why not?

What are YOUR thoughts on positive thinking?  Are you a skeptic or believer, or somewhere in between?

**By the way, I never completely understood the ostrich as a symbol of being fearful and in denial.  I mean, yeah, they do the head in the sand thing, but they’re also mean sons of bitches.**

Positive Thinking versus Ostrich Thinking is a post from: Social Discomfort

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2. Overriding Negative Thoughts: The First Step Towards Positive Thinking
3. The Key To Self Confidence

1. I apologize to the regular readers of this blog who enjoy it as it stands (and, let’s face it, there aren’t that many of you.  A generous estimate numbers you at about 15.).  I have a few subscribers and regular commenters, aside from my mom, who seem to like this place.  I’m about to shake things up, and you may not like it any more.
2. I apologize to the rest of the web, to my friends, family, acquaintances and anyone else you can think of (including YOU, by the way, unless you fall into item #1) for this blog as it stands.  It’s nice, but that’s about the best you can say about it.  I don’t blame you for not reading it.

I started this blog with the best of intentions.  Maybe I just started it with intentions; I don’t know.  Good, bad, indifferent is pretty irrelevant.  I was in a bad place, and I wanted to help people.  Seeing as how I like to write, advertising money sounded good even if it was pennies, and I have a thing for technology, a blog seemed like the way to go.  And I wasn’t wrong.  A blog was a great idea, a self-help themed blog was a great idea, building the blog myself was a great idea.  I had lots of great ideas.

I just failed miserably at the execution.

Live and learn, right?

While “nice,” this blog has turned into a fluffy bunny on Valium.  I think it may have even started as a fluffy bunny on Valium.  Hell, maybe it was the fact that my anti-depressant roulette was screwing up my ability to relate to other people and myself (even THIS could end up being nothing but the product of having forgotten to take my afternoon pill in the afternoon and therefore taking my afternoon pill with my evening/bedtime pill and having some weird kind of “high” as a reaction.  But I digress.  As usual.).  Maybe it was my almost unavoidable lifelong habit of trying to please everybody, to be “nice.”  To my credit, I succeeded WILDLY at nice.  Non-offensive, upbeat and positive, encouraging nice.

photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/captainsubtle/4578687697/}captainsubtle{/link}

Here’s the problem as I see it:  It’s BORING, and it’s kind of like a watered-down version of myself.  Like watching The Sopranos on A&E (if you never watched it on HBO, it’s not even the same show after the editing).  I wrote for the masses, for the broken and the hurting, for those seeking a bite-sized self-help tidbit that was easy to swallow and digest, and in the process of trying to appeal to them, and genuinely help, I filtered out the harsher aspects of my personality.  I didn’t want to ruffle any feathers, hurt any feelings, make anyone feel bad who might need help instead.  The result was this blog up until this point.

In my defense, you really can’t blame me for the sugar-coated, coma-inducing execution of this blog (well, you could, but you really shouldn’t after you hear my reasons.  That’s just mean and unforgiving, and not at all in the spirit of self-help).  I was in a haze of depression, which is now only beginning to lift, and it was the best I could do.  My personality was as muted by my mental state as it appeared on here.  The comfortable and safe was what I needed, both to practice and to hear from others.  It doesn’t mean that the information, opinions, tips, and the rest that I provided on here were without value.  That’s not the point at all.

The point is, now that I’m capable of it, there can and should be MORE.  More personality, depth, sarcasm, humor, mocking of others… just more.  More everything.  Except Valium.  I’m flushing the Valium down the toilet.

NOW, it would be unforgivable of me to continue in this manner.

This Post Is An Apology is a post from: Social Discomfort

No related posts.

photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/shandilee/5062415235/}Shandi-Lee{/link}

Seriously, is there a more worthless and degrading question you can ask yourself than “what’s wrong with me?”  Well, maybe.  Here are a few that come to mind:

• Why does no one like me?
• Why can’t I do anything right?
• Why does everything bad happen to me?
• Why is (fill in name here) so much better than me?

I’ll admit, if you can approach these questions with a positive, objective attitude, there can be some real insight to be found.  The thing is, if you’re actually looking at things from a positive, objective viewpoint, you probably aren’t going to be asking these questions in this way.  Instead, they’ll sound a lot less whiny and self-hating.  Here are some more productive alternatives to the above questions, in order:

• How can I improve my relationship with (fill in name here)?
• What mistakes am I making over and over, and how can I stop?
• How can I avoid some of these bad things in the future?
• How do I want to be more like (fill in name here), and how can I accomplish this?

As I wrote this out, I noticed something.  You may have noticed it, too, while you were reading through the two lists and comparing them.  The self-defeating questions are all “why” questions, and the revised, more useful questions are all “how” questions.  It’s so cool when that light bulb goes off.

Quit asking “Why”

While the whys in life are sometimes useful, they rarely give you any actionable information.  The hows, on the other hand, give you a way to take a step forward and fix what you think is wrong.  They give you a way to get what you want, rather than lamenting the fact that you don’t have it.  You can stomp your feet and pound your fists on the floor, asking “why why WHY!?” all day long, and you’ll get exactly nowhere.

Instead of asking “why” or “why not,” try asking “how.”  You’ll find that you can accomplish more than a temper tantrum as a result.

I think this goes along with a post I read the other day on The Positivity Blog, called “What Would Winnie the Pooh Do?”  You have to ask yourself the right questions in order to get the answers you need.  Questions like “what’s wrong with me?’ just make you feel like crap and get you nowhere.  Try to ask yourself the questions that can help you.  The questions that matter.  The questions that get you moving and improving your life.

What do you think?

“What’s Wrong With Me?” – How To Ask Questions That Don’t Make You Feel Like Crap is a post from: Social Discomfort

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photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/ladytaz/1720653058/}Melissa P.{/link}

While this isn’t exactly on topic here when you think about the theme of this blog, this is a subject that’s close to my heart.  So I wanted to share it with all of you.  The day after tomorrow (November 1) begins American Diabetes Month, and I think it’s important to spread awareness about this disease that affects over 23 million Americans, including children.

Now, before you get bored and click away from this page, let me tell you that I’m not here to quote statistics at you.  You can read the linked info-page if you want to know the most current statistics about diabetes in this country.  I’m here to share my story, and my son’s, and to help dispel some myths surrounding this disease.  Because, odds are, you’ve got at least some of it wrong.

Like mental illness, it seems that diabetes is misunderstood by a lot of people.  It also seems like there is an attitude of “blame the victim” that mirrors the stigma affecting a lot of mental illness sufferers.  Instead of being told to “just get over it” or “stop whining” like people with mental illnesses hear all too frequently, people with diabetes are often told to “diet and exercise” as if that is going to fix all of their problems.  Don’t misunderstand me; a healthy diet and regular exercise are important to a person who has diabetes.  But they’re important to someone who DOESN’T have diabetes, too.  And they aren’t a magic cure-all.  Sometimes the disease has nothing to do with either.

The diabetes stereotype

Imagine that you’re sitting in a restaurant for dinner, and you look over at the table next to you.  You see someone sitting with their family, getting out a blood glucose meter to check their blood sugar before the meal.  This person is older, and somewhat overweight.  Without even thinking about it, you may look and see what they’re eating, and they have a large plate of spaghetti with garlic bread, a large Coke, and what looks like a quarter of a chocolate cake sitting on the side.  The rest of the family, including the child in the highchair, has a light meal such as a soup and salad or fish with steamed veggies.  Notice yourself and how you think about this scenario and react to the person in it.  At any point, did you think to yourself that the person needed to make some kind of improvements to their lifestyle, such as what they choose to eat, how much they weigh, or how often they exercise?  If so, you’re not alone.  But keep reading.

photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/jenniferchong/5066610227/}jchong{/link}

The diabetes reality

Imagine that as you continue to watch, this person reaches across the table and, rather than checking their own blood sugar, they check the blood sugar of the perfectly healthy looking two-year old sitting in the highchair.  What do you think now?  Are you confused?  Again, you’re not alone.

While I’m neither older nor overweight, I get that confused look from people all the time when I’m out with my son.  And being the parent of a small child with diabetes, rather than “blame the victim” I sometimes encounter “blame the parent.”  Which, to be perfectly honest, can be really irritating.  I did everything right, both during and after my pregnancy.  No smoking, no drinking, eating right, taking all my vitamins and doing exactly as my doctor said when I had preterm labor.  I breastfed, and when my son started eating solids, I made my own baby food.  Yes, from scratch.  His meals were balanced, his juice was watered down.  He was the picture of health.  And no one in my or my husband’s family ever had diabetes.

What to take away

Here’s my point: You don’t have to do anything WRONG to get diabetes.  And you don’t have to have any of the risk factors.  Sometimes, things just happen, and all you can do is roll with it.

More than that, I want you to take away the idea that people are NOT to blame for their illnesses, and blaming them only makes an unhappy situation worse.  Try to withhold judgment when you meet someone with a “preventable” illness or an “illness of lifestyle,” because it’s not going to do anything positive for either of you.  Just because someone has a preventable illness doesn’t mean that they somehow caused it.  Do you think it helps the lung cancer patient to be told, “well, you shouldn’t have smoked”?  Maybe they never touched a cigarette.

You don’t need to be self-righteous.  Instead, try to be supportive and encouraging.  You’ll both feel better.

Stop blaming the victim.

Have something to share or add?  Comment below.

Stop Blaming the Ill For Their Illness is a post from: Social Discomfort

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Maybe this isn’t the most surprising thing you’ll read today, but think about the implications.  In addition to exercise, which I talk about regularly as a way to improve your overall health, and how much control you believe you have over your life, which I don’t think I’ve covered yet, your level of social support can affect your health as well.

photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/stuseeger/226628124/}StuSeeger{/link}

According to a study from Brandeis University, better social support predicts better health (for a short overview, check out the PsychCentral article).  Not only is this good news for those who choose not to exercise, but it also gives us all another way to protect our health and the health of others.  Want to make your friends and family healthier, but they just won’t change their diet or exercise habits?  Be there for them.  Want to make yourself healthier?  Evaluate your relationships; maybe form some new ones and make some changes to the ones you have.  There’s no downside here.  Well, except for those who have soul-sucking family members who just won’t go away.  All the more reason to cut them loose.

I love it when research backs up something I’ve believed all along.  Don’t you?

Relationships Can Improve Your Health is a post from: Social Discomfort

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photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/auntikhaki/4161161051/}Kathy Mackey{/link}

Ask someone for advice on a job interview or a first date, and they’ll tell you, “just be yourself.”  Then they follow up with a list of things you should do and tell you how to act (which may or may not clash with who “yourself” really is).  It makes you wonder why they told you to be yourself in the first place, if they feel the need to give you additional rules and suggestions and limitations.

• “Don’t be nervous”
• “Get her talking about herself”
• “Make sure to smile”
• “Don’t talk so fast”
• “Be agreeable”

You get the idea, I’m sure.  Now, I understand that certain social situations have certain social rules to them.  You don’t swear in church, you don’t give lectures on politics at a party, and you don’t scowl at an interview.  But this kind of behavior and attitude goes deeper than that.  We feel the need to downplay certain parts of ourselves, leave things out, and emphasize others.  It’s like we try to project an idealized image of ourselves to other people.  Rather than “be yourself,” it becomes “be BETTER than yourself.”  ”Yourself” just isn’t good enough, I guess.

As an individualistic society, we should value people as unique individuals rather than trying to make them fit into an idealized mold.  Ever seen “The Stepford Wives?”  Too much “ideal” is creepy.

The problem is, we think that no one will like us as we are, so we want them to see something better.  We feel like we’re not good enough, so we make some tweaks and act like (what we think is) a “more likable” version of ourselves.

To complicate the issue even further, we have slightly different faces we have to put on depending on the situation, because in order to be universally liked, you have to be different things to different people.  At work, you’re one person.  At home, another.  While out with friends, you’re a third.  If someone runs into you outside the realm in which they normally see you, like a coworker spotting you at a karaoke bar on Saturday night, it’s downright awkward.  Neither one knows how to act.  You may not even recognize each other because you both seem so different outside of work.  Not because drinking isn’t allowed at work (unless you work quality control at Budweiser or something), but because your coworker has never heard you laugh and didn’t know you love to sing, even though you’ve sat next to each other and exchanged chit chat every day for the last six years.

[pullquote]As a matter of fact, I’m guilty of the laugh thing.  I tend not to laugh in public if I can help it; I chuckle.  Because when I really laugh, I’m very loud.  People stare.  My laughing even made my niece cry once when she was a baby.[/pullquote]

It’s fine to conform to the norm.  After all, that’s what society expects and demands of us.  But only to a point.  We should still remain true to our own personalities, all the time.  Repressing ourselves makes us uncomfortable and unhappy.  Sure, you may land the job by appearing to be exactly what the boss wanted, but how happy is either of you going to be once he figures out that’s not who you really are?  Or he doesn’t and you have to pretend for 8 hours a day until you quit or die?  If you’re normally agreeable, then go ahead and be agreeable.  But if you’re usually challenging, let it show.  It’ll be better for everyone.

Go ahead.  Be yourself.  Not just a halfway, watered-down version because you’re afraid of what people will think.  All the way.  Because more than that “ideal” version of yourself, people like genuine.  My husband thinks my laugh is great.

Be Yourself. Really. is a post from: Social Discomfort

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photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/mcgraths/2414196249/}Sean McGrath{/link}

I read a post recently on Positively Present that talked about the difference between motivation and inspiration in our lives, and it got me thinking.  Oh, how I love it when I read something that makes me think.  This quote pretty much sums up the author’s feelings about motivation versus inspiration:

Motivation gets the job done, but it gets it done in a much different way than inspiration does. The more I think about it, the more I realize how completely different they are and the more I realize that I want to spend time doing the things I’m inspired to do, not those I am motivated to do.

So I started to wonder, is there a way to make inspiration?

After all, if inspiration is so much more effective when it comes to getting things done (and it is), it would be great if I could drum some up to get me through the times and the tasks when simple motivation gets me nowhere.  And I think that maybe it can be done, though it may take some serious effort and mental rearranging.  I’ve written before about finding your inspiration; this goes a step further to get help you inspired by things that don’t normally inspire you.  Like cleaning the toilet.

Change your mind

Besides being the title of one of my favorite songs, I think this is the first step to making yourself inspired.  You have to change the way you see things and the way you think about things.  If you see things as boring and mundane, that’s the way you’re going to treat them, and doing them is going to make you feel dull.  However, if you think about things as being more than a means to an end, and find a way to enjoy the process, you may find them more uplifting than they once were.  Maybe even… wait for it… inspiring!  If you turn mopping into a meditation that you enjoy, you’ll find yourself more inspired to mop.  See what I did there?  (granted, that only works if you like to meditate, but you get the idea)

Look deeper

Things in life are almost always more than they seem on the surface.  Going for a walk is more than just exercise; it’s a chance to observe the world around you, breathe the fresh air (unless you live in LA, in which case, I’m sorry), and be a part of your environment outside your living room.  Making dinner isn’t just about food and eating; it’s a chance to teach your children about nutrition and connect with your family.  Look for the meanings and implications behind the things you do every day, especially those you don’t like to do, and see if there’s something inspiring hiding in there.

What else?

I really want to hear from you on this one.  Do you have any more ideas to make the things in your life more inspiring?  Do you think my ideas are dumb, brilliant, or somewhere in between?  Have you tried this? Please, share.

Get Inspired, Not Just Motivated is a post from: Social Discomfort

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Projecting self confidence is one thing, and it’s a good thing to learn how to do.  But projecting self confidence only gets you so far.  It’s skin deep.  At the heart of it all, at least some of the time, most of us feel like sub-par human beings.  To put it bluntly, we think we suck, for one reason or another.  Too many reasons, in fact, to get into in this post.

We all need a little self esteem boost from time to time (some of us need bigger ones more frequently, but that’s another topic for another post).  The problem is, unless someone happens to give us a well-timed compliment or we happen to get recognized for something we’ve accomplished, it’s hard to make ourselves feel good when we need it.  Asking a friend, “Do you think I’m awesome?” doesn’t really help either, since the reaction we get is probably closer to a puzzled look and a hesitant, “uh, yeah, sure” than it is an emphatic “ABSOLUTELY!” complete with sounding trumpets.  Instead, we’re usually stuck with giving ourselves a pat on the back and telling ourselves what wonderful people we are.

Now, positive self-talk is good and all, but what if it’s not enough?  What if we need something more than a self-administered pat on the back?  What can we do to feel like the awesome people we really are?

photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/moonlightbulb/3338852116/}moonlightbulb{/link}

Do something you’re good at

Find something that makes you feel at least above-average, and go do it.  You’ll get an extra boost if you do it with other people, so you can also feel admired and looked up to, but it’s not required.  It’s hard NOT to feel good about yourself when you’re doing something you rock at.  Me, I turn on Rock Band and wail on the drums for a while.  My husband and my son think I’m awesome.

Exercise

I know, I know, it seems like every other post I write comes back to the merits of exercise.  It’s not because I’m an exercise junkie (trust me, I’m NOT); it’s because it works.  And working up a sweat will definitely make you feel like you’ve accomplished something.  This is probably going to take more effort than a leisurely walk, though.  Panting and sweat dripping from your eyeballs is what you’re going for here.  Try it out and see what it does for your self esteem.

Dress up and go out

You don’t have to get out your best clubbing outfit or anything like that, and you don’t have to “go out” per se.  Just get out some nice clothes, maybe your favorite shirt or something, and take some extra care with your appearance.  Shower, shave, do your hair, and put on something that smells nice.  Whatever makes you feel sexy (or at least attractive).  Then get out of the house, though you probably shouldn’t go to the gym and combine this with exercising.  If you can’t think of anything better to do, go run some errands.  The point is to make yourself look nice, to feel like you look nice, and to make sure some people see you look nice.  Easy, huh?  (hint: smile at some strangers for a bonus)

Donate or volunteer

What better way to feel like a good person than by helping out those less fortunate?  An easy pick-me-up when you feel like a crappy person is to give some money to charity, donate some clothes and toys, or volunteer your time.  If you’re more selfish-minded, you can compare your situation to theirs and be happy about being better off, or, you can just be happy you’ve helped someone who needed it.  Your motivation is up to you; I won’t judge you for it.

Help a friend

[pullquote]Let me tell you, if someone called me or showed up at my house and offered to do my dishes today, I’d probably fall down and kiss their feet.  That’d be sure to boost their self esteem.[/pullquote]Rather than donating or volunteering to help people you don’t know personally, you can take that helpful attitude and turn it on a friend or family member.  They don’t even necessarily need help; we all have things that we hate to do but that have to be done anyway.  You can figure out what those things are for one of your friends, and then offer to help with them or take over a task for the day.  This is a two-for-one deal, because not only does it make you feel good about yourself, it also improves your friendship.

Clean house

Now, this doesn’t work for everyone, and it doesn’t work all the time, but it’s still worth mentioning.  When you feel lousy about yourself, cleaning up where you live can make you feel better.  While the action of cleaning house can be less than exciting, the end result is a tangible accomplishment you can look at when you finish.  I know that, personally, when my house looks like crap, I tend to feel like crap, and cleaning it usually makes me feel better.  Not as good as Rock Band does, but hey, we have to be adults sometimes, right?

What else?

What do you do when you need a self esteem boost?  Any additional tips to share?  Please, comment.

How To Feel Like You’re Awesome is a post from: Social Discomfort

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2. Changing Negative Thinking – Why Bother With a Positive Outlook?

“Do you exercise?”

Or perhaps you decide to try to work on your problems yourself before seeking professional help, so you decide to ask for advice on a mental health forum online. You describe your uncharacteristically unstable mood, your unprovoked rages, your insomnia. Then you click the “post” button and wait for the help to come. The first person who replies suggests,

“Why don’t you try a hypoglycemic diet?”

Um, WHAT?

photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/kankan/58748696/}Kanko{/link}

I don’t know about you, but I hate it when people give me advice that seems to have absolutely nothing to do with my problems. All sorts of thoughts and feelings go through my head.

• Did this person misunderstand me?
• Is this person even listening to me?
• Am I not making any sense?
• Am I speaking a foreign language?

Back to the picture we painted. In a situation like this, why are people talking about exercise and changing diets? Shouldn’t you be exploring your mental health?

Well, it depends.

What you may or may not realize is, the two responses I mentioned above are completely reasonable. A lack of exercise can lead to depression, and so can certain eating habits. Starting an exercise regimin or changing your diet can be effective treatments, and some people may never need anything else for their depression. The same is true for other mental health conditions.  Our well-meaning advisors in this example just didn’t take the time to show us how their help was relevant.  An easy enough mistake to make.

We have to remember that mental health isn’t all in our heads.  It’s not completely separate from the rest of our bodies and our lifestyles.  All aspects of our health are interconnected, and our mental health is no different.  The next time you’re talking about your mental health, and you get some seemingly unrelated advice, take a second and think about it.  It may be more relevant than you first thought, and it may be just the advice you need.  You just don’t know it yet.

Mental Health Isn’t All In Your Head is a post from: Social Discomfort

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Ah, the joys of medical referrals and waiting for treatment.

photo by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/joelshine2/4603938716/}Joelshine V2.3d{/link}

The referral process

A while back, my antidepressant medication quit on me.  Maybe six months ago, maybe more.  I can’t remember exactly.  At that point, I went to the doctor and got on what I’ve affectionately dubbed “the medication merry-go-round.”  We tried medication after medication, trying to get me functioning again.  Needless to say, since I’ve told you my current condition, we haven’t fixed things yet.  In fact, my primary doctor finally threw in the towel and referred me to Behavioral Health so I could see a therapist and a psychiatrist for better treatment.

Unfortunately for me, there was a snag in the referral process, and it took two months to get my appointment with my new therapist.  And this appointment turned out to be only an evaluation, rather than the beginning of a new course of treatment, with follow up appointments in two weeks to actually start helping me.  I had been eagerly looking forward to this appointment, hoping some kind of medication change would happen to at least MAYBE make me feel better.  Anything would have been better than my current condition.  I had a lot of hope riding on that initial appointment, and the disappointment I experienced when it didn’t actually help me left me feeling pretty hopeless.

In the meantime, I’ve been taking medication that’s almost useless for me, for more than two months, and not exactly functioning at my physical and mental peak.  The result has been pretty lousy.  I haven’t clawed my eyeballs out yet or anything, so I guess it could be worse.  And my husband has been wonderfully supportive through the whole thing, doing things for me when I couldn’t do them for myself and letting me sleep as much as possible since I can hardly keep my eyes open for most of the day.

Treatment

From what I understand, my experience in waiting for a referral isn’t all that uncommon.  A lot of the time, the referral process, coupled with insurance regulations, can be a downright painful experience for people.  It seems to me that you take someone who needs help, then tell them to sit back and relax until the system can get around to them.  Not exactly ideal, huh?

Especially for someone suffering from a mental health problem, waiting rarely makes things any easier.  It can be hard enough just for them to take that first step to get help.  Having to wait to actually get that help can be frustrating and depressing, and can make the condition even worse.  And there’s rarely anyone to turn to during the process to speed things along or make things easier; everyone involved is such a small cog in such a big machine that their hands are tied and they can’t do anything but follow procedure.

Let’s help each other

Rather than giving tips today, I’m here looking for your experiences and advice.  Maybe we can all help each other get through this lovely process together.

Have you had to wait for a referral in order to get some kind of medical help or mental health treatment?  What was it like?  Do you have any tips for getting through it with your health and sanity intact?

Medical Referrals, Mental Health, and Staying Sane in the Meantime is a post from: Social Discomfort

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