There is value in that idea.

But sometimes I’ve found this alternate version far more helpful:

If a job’s worth doing at all, it’s worth doing badly.

There are days when doing the next job well feels impossible. Even starting feels hard. When it comes to motivation, sometimes we have to lower our targets. There’s few things as off-putting as feeling we’re expected to achieve an impossible target, and we’re not talking here about the reality of our ability – just how we feel about it.

And the real-life paradox is that our second or third best is almost always good enough.

The thing is, fear of failure can totally paralyse you.

One of our sons joined the selective school where I was teaching. He seemed to be having a good time, doing okay, though I deliberately didn’t pry. Then in the summer term he seemed to fall apart. And finally I got it. We had exams each summer for all year groups. He was in a competitive environment. I asked him how well he expected to do. Didn’t know. What were we expecting him to achieve? Don’t know. Neither do we, I said; we’re just going to wait for the results, and then we’ll know what you can do.

At once he relaxed. Am impossible target with unknown repercussions for failure had been removed. And it was all the more frightening because he hadn’t even known what the target was.

There are a couple of old posts relating to this: here and here. They’re in a series ‘Effective Goal Setting’. And that second link has a recent cartoon fragment in its full environment.

Trick 4

How well do you think you need to do? Identify that ambition which is holding you down and ditch it. Today you feel rough, so things just aren’t going to be that good. You can always come back on a good day and fix things. All you have to do for now is do the job badly. It’s okay. You can always take the ambition back on board when you’re having a good day.

Trick 4.1

It can be hard to ditch a target or an ambition. Try recalling other times when you’ve felt like this, managed to get started, and been surprised by how good the result was. Recall times when you thought you’d really fouled up, yet people you trust told you how good you were. Feel just a little optimistic Go on, you know you want to.

Share on Facebook

As a teacher doing a lot more than just classroom teaching there would be times when I’d be running flat out just to keep up. I’d be alive in order to work, although satisfied I was doing a worthwhile job. The alarm would go at 5.40 am and that would be it till I got home, usually just in time for tea at 6.00 pm. After that was marking and other bits of catching up. Then half doze watching something on TV with Jenny, and early to bed in preparation for that 5.40 alarm.

Now I’m retired from teaching I do most of my ‘work’ at home, but sometimes it’s hard to get out of bed in the morning, it’s hard to make myself get washed and dressed, it’s a cloudy day and maybe raining so I just write a bit if I can, read a bit, watch TV with Jenny. If I’m depressed then I’ll probably play some computer game for hours, if really depressed go back to bed.

These are opposing scenarios except for one key factor: in neither situation am I getting any physical exercise to speak of. And after a while it shows. I feel more tired, get more stressed, sleep less well, think less clearly. In general I enjoy life less, and am of less value to other people. Everything becomes harder to start.

Our bodies are complex systems made up of complex interacting systems. To be honest the experts are still only scratching the surface of how we really function. But one thing that is clear: our minds and bodies work better if we get a modest amount of exercise every day.

The technical term is aerobic exercise but that conjures up a range of images that needn’t apply. What I’m talking about is gentle exercise of any sort that never gets you out of breath and doesn’t leave you sore the next day. The amount and intensity depend on how much you’ve done in the last few weeks, and of course on your age and health. When I was typically running 50 miles a week, a relaxed five mile run in 35-40 mins would have fitted the bill nicely. These days I’ve got ‘post-viral fatigue’, and a walk lasting between ten and twenty minutes is all I can manage. If I go too fast I’ll be too tired to walk the next day, so I try to be careful.

There’s a related old post here.

Trick 3

What type of physical exercise that is continuous for at least ten minutes do you most enjoy (or least dislike)? Do it most days. Get some air into your lungs, the blood flowing, listen to the beat of your heart getting up to natural revs. And as days pass notice the little ways in which you start to feel more like living.

Share on Facebook

I really can't be bothered (part of a 'Uses for a maths teacher' cartoon by Miriam Slechter

Do you ever have days when nothing feels worth starting and everything is shades of grey? Days when the sun doesn’t shine, and getting out of bed is the hardest thing you’ve ever done? Periods when the smallest chore becomes an impossible task?

Well of course you do. You’re human.

I remember someone telling me that as a youngster he worried he’d inherited chronic depression from his Mum. Later at university he discovered that everyone feels down for a few days at a time, now and then. It’s normal.

Actually feeling like this in adolescence (call that ages 12-25 ) is common. The hormones are rampantly badly mixed, the challenges of life are to be faced without as yet the desired rewards. Who am I? What do I believe? What will I do with my life? How do I succeed? Am I happy? Do people like me? Does she love me?

I get this feeling of lethargy and inertia far more often, and sometimes far more severely, than people without clinical depression. But it’s basically the same feeling. Over forty five years I’ve had many tricks suggested to me. I’ve tried them out, and discovered other possibilities too. This series will be the things I have found work. For me. Often enough to be worth trying.

I’ll be including a mixture of quick, medium, and long term tricks. They won’t all suit you, but some will.

Imagine you are at the top of a hill and the enemy approaches. You need to roll that boulder down onto them. But at first it won’t shift. These will be tricks you can try that might get the boulder started rolling.

Miriam’s picture? Yes we know verticals should look vertical even in a cartoon, but it makes sense when you see the whole picture.

Share on Facebook

the old-fashioned type

So there I was cleaning my teeth with the trusty old electric brush when quite naturally my thoughts fell to sleeping tablets.

Sometimes I collect Jenny’s prescription from the Doctors’ surgery and fetch the medication. Last time the duty pharmacist, trying to be helpful, warned me about the number of sleeping pills included.

“She’s being given rather a lot. You need to be aware that clinical trials show this medication ceases to have any effect if you take it for more than three weeks.” (I think he said three weeks – thereabouts anyway).

“That’s okay,” I said, “that’s just clinical research. She gets them on repeat prescription and they work for her.”

He looked at me oddly. You’re not supposed to question the findings of clinical research, just take the raw findings as fact. “She may think they’re helping but they’re not. She really should stop taking them.” he said.

I smiled, hopefully in a warm rather than condescending way. “Actually research is limited in various ways. The tablets definitely help her sleep because if she doesn’t have any she doesn’t sleep at all.”

He seemed an intelligent guy and was clearly educated in some senses of the word, yet looked at me first blankly and then with mild annoyance. He, after all, was the qualified pharmacist.

The trouble is that research into the effects of medication is bound to be limited. Usually the number of people in the test sample is small. Also the people devising the test are handicapped by the limits of their own experience and imagination. I could ramble on about research into use of sleeping tablets but that’s a rather obscure area.

So let’s think about whether electric toothbrushes are more effective than non electric. Now all of us I hope use a toothbrush of some sort.

The electric ones were marketed in part as being more efficient than hand brushing. This claim has been tested, up to a point. The conclusion I’ve encountered several times is that they are not more effective. Common sense, and natural laziness, baulks at this outcome. As I brushed my teeth I’d been thinking up possible reasons why the research might have been flawed. And this applies to research into the use of sleeping tablets as well as (for a later post) whether or not tranquillisers are addictive.

So you take a random group of people and split them into three groups. One group must use electric brushes for the next, what, six months. One must brush by hand. The third carry on as normal. At the beginning and end of the period experts check everyone’s teeth. Surprise: no significant difference between the first two groups. In fact in one study the electric group showed more deterioration.

What happened?

As I brushed my own teeth I got to thinking about what I was physically doing, and what my attitudes to cleaning my teeth have been at various ages.

The brush has a timer. If you spend long enough on each tooth then shortly before you finish the motor stutters. If you don’t spend long enough then the brushing is far less effective.

Add this to one of the great advantages of the electric brush – it does most of the work and half the thinking for you. With a hand brush you not only must consider which part of your teeth to brush first, but also how you brush them. Brushing horizontally will miss a lot of enamel, so you need to use some sort of up and down motion. I was taught to start with edge of bristles on gum and roll so they sweep the whole length of the teeth, then repeat a couple of times before moving on – spend at least a second on each side of each tooth.

Now imagine a normal person being given an electric brush by the researchers. This requires a completely different technique. Were they taught how to use the brush effectively? I don’t know. I wasn’t. I just bought it and away we went till the first time the motor stuttered and I thought it must have broken. Then I read the instructions.

So people in the first group may not have been using their brushes correctly, but there’s a more compelling problem. We’re lazy. Given a dish washer, who hand washes the dishes? Given a car, who walks? You can feel how much faster the electric toothbrush is working. The busy buzzing tells you it’s more efficient. You can get carried away and just move it slowly across the line of teeth, but it also needs to move up and down in order to clean each tooth from gum to tip. It is so easy to halve the time with electric and actually leave your teeth inadequately cleaned.

And this had to be a long term project. The researchers were not observing their test subjects every time they brushed – simply not practical. How many of the electric people lapsed into lazy habits? We’ll never know. But it could dramatically affect the conclusions.

The only valid way to draw conclusions from scientific research is to read the full report, not just a summary. This is not easy, but unless you know exactly how the research was designed, how the data was processed, and what the exact statistical values were, you’re too likely to draw false conclusions. We trust experts to do this for us, but what if the ‘expert’ is a journalist in a hurry, or a scientist who doesn’t really understand the limitations of research?

Mr Leech in the library with the sleeping tablets, obviously

sleeping tablets in fiction lol

In fiction, especially murder mysteries, sleeping tablets receive their own dose of poetic licence. How many times has the villain mixed powdered sleeping pill into someone’s bedtime drinking chocolate and the target has not only dozed off as quickly as if hit over the head with a railway sleeper but also stayed dead to the world for eight hours while noisy events happened round them? The pills don’t work like that.

A general anaesthetic does because it is more powerful and is injected straight into the main blood stream so it reaches the brain in seconds. Sleeping pills first have to be absorbed by the stomach lining. This is a slow process. There is a significant time lag while the concentration in the blood stream rises, and the person who took the tablets gradually feels more sleepy. Effectiveness of the medication is also influenced by whether or not you’ve used it recently, and what frame of mind you’re in – which can be affected by mental illness. Taking a dose does not force you to sleep. With luck it should make it easier to sleep.

Never mind, there are so many other factual inaccuracies in murder mysteries but we still enjoy them. Which real police force would allocate just an Inspector and his trusty Sergeant to investigating a murder? But we love the Morse books and films. Mind you I don’t think Colin Dexter ever has his characters supping a nightcap of drinking chocolate.

Share on Facebook

Yes, I was traumatised for many years. The abuse was merely emotional, but it hurt. Like it or not memories of those days dogged me for years. They simmered just below the surface and distorted my thinking and my behaviour. They made it far harder to learn how to cope with my own depression. They made it less likely I’d make a good parent myself.

I was exceedingly fortunate. Over the years I made a number of friends who listened attentively as I rambled on about how bad things had been. Some experiences I recounted again and again. Gradually I got used to them and they lost their power.

We all have painful memories. By and large they can be left alone because we’ve grown beyond them, but sometimes there’s one worth dealing with because it’s having a damaging effect now. In a previous post I described some NLP work I did with a student which enabled him to recreate an alternate version of a true memory. In the alternate version he handled an embarrassing situation as he would now with his increased maturity and understanding. If the bad memory surfaces he has the option of switching to the modified version. Which version is true? In a sense neither. The actual events happened, but they do not describe who he is now. He is able to relax and shrug off the embarrassment because he knows he has now used that experience, he has grown up.

Some memories are like feuds between families or nations. What triggered things happened long ago and we should move on, but somehow we can’t. Someone, perhaps a parent, treated us in some unfair way which has crippled us, and we continue to resent what they did and suffer the after effects. This is frighteningly normal, but hardly rational and certainly not helpful.

The trouble is that we may need more than friends loving enough to listen to our memories. We may need the skills and expertise of a counsellor trained and experienced in working with destructive memories.

Psychodynamic counselling does far more than just deal with memories, but it is one approach that might prove useful. I suspect Post-Trauma counselling could also be useful, though I’ve not experienced that kind. A competent NLP practitioner should also be able to help.

A triplet of warnings:

• You need to let go of destructive memories, yet if you’ve been hanging on to them grimly for decades that will not be easy. Approach this with your eyes open: it will be hard work, and it may prove very painful for a short time. It is worth it.
• There is evidence that some hidden memories which are affecting you now may best be left alone. Dragging them to the surface and experiencing them again can make matters worse. I suspect whether or not this happens has a lot to do with the relationship you and your counsellor have with each other.
• There are examples of counsellors looking for repressed memories, and phrasing their questions so badly that false memories are created in the client. Beware of a counsellor who asks closed questions such as “did your father abuse you” when they should be asking open questions like “thinking back, do you think any part of your childhood might have been worse than it should have been?”. Police are increasingly being trained to interview witnesses using only open questions and non emotive words because otherwise they run a high risk of altering the witness’s memories just by how they phrase the question. Loftus and Palmer did a neat experiment on this in 1974. Google ‘Loftus and Palmer 1974′ or check out this site which describes the research.

If you know of any other types of counselling which includes constructive reprocessing of bad memories please let me know. Thank you.

Share on Facebook

There’s a well-known saying about how to help people in poor countries: give a man a fish and you feed him for today, give him a fishing rod and he’s set for life. 

Of course if he’s too weak with hunger to fish for himself then a fish to eat first makes sense, but after that it’s wise to show him how you use the fishing rod to catch more fish, and then give him the rod.

In the previous post I described how I was helped after my first breakdown. I was referred to a doctor who specialised in student mental health problems. He first of all established a suitable relationship. Then he prescribed something to help with the immediate symptoms. After that he told me to try one possible strategy which should help, and it did. Since then I’ve been learning how to resolve many subsequent problems, and sometimes I’ve had guidance from counsellors – some of them doctors – on how to set about doing this.

The long-term target has been that I become someone who knows how to set about solving his own problems.

Arguably this should be a part of any type of counselling. It may not be an obvious part; if it’s there it may be hidden. Sometimes I’ve only realised afterwards that I’ve learned something by simply paying attention, observing the counsellor at work. This facet of their work might have been more effective if it had been conscious.

Everyone has problems; they’re a part of life. We start by passively letting someone else solve each problem for us. As we grow up we begin to understand how they have helped us. We begin to listen and to try things out for ourselves. Gradually we develop a stock of possible strategies to look through and experiment with. At this point we’re still immature. We need to learn how to deal with a fresh problem for which we currently have no solution: we need to learn how to solve problems ourselves. We need to move from being entirely dependent on other people like a baby to being independent.

Warning: independence is not the final goal. Adolescence is about becoming independent of our parents, finding out who we are. Full maturity requires us to move even further and to recognise the need to be interdependent, a member of society who helps and is helped by other people, a member of the family.

If you suffer the crippling effects of depression, or are human in any other way and face problems which appear insoluble, look for people who can help you. But don’t be passive. Do not look just for help with the most obvious current problem. Look beyond today and find out more about how you may be able to help yourself. Gradually begin to accept some responsibility for your own treatment. And if you are receiving counselling from someone who wants to do it all for you …

Share on Facebook