Day 3 - the joy of make up

I had a lunch date in London yesterday, day 3 of this contentment challenge - very exciting and generous as I know the meal will be paid for - and so I have set about using it as a motivation to get myself spruced up.  The last two weeks have been something of a self-indulgent feast of wine, crisps and chocolate, thus undoing a lot of the work I have put in at the gym, and low fat, high protein diet I had been following.  

The Twenty Eight Day Challenge - Day 2

I have been most impressed by Caro Fitzgerald's #100daysofhappiness on Facebook.  To find something good to say about every day, including those 'Hardwork Thursdays', is a real achievement.  However Caro is a dear and sweet person who tends to see good in most things.  This is not to diminish her achievement, far from it, but only someone with her goodness of heart could make such a good job of it.

As I face another bleak time in my life, I know if I pull away and retreat into my despair, then the numb misery I feel now could solidify into something rather more dangerous.  The habit of 'oversharing' is actually quite important for me, but difficult for many more reticent souls to come up against, I know.  So, with the help and support of my dear friend Richelle, I'm taking on a 28 day challenge.  28 days to find something that brings me contentment in the day.  Rather than use Facebook, making everyone read it, I'm tucking it away in the blog, so I have it, and you can too, but you've made the effort to find it because you want to.  That somehow assuages my guilt at ramming my problems on people, whilst still appreciating it is better for me to be like this.

Being and Belonging: The New Beige

Where is home?  Has your mind drifted to a childhood image of safety and security, so beloved of our Yorkshire friends?  Someone from Yorkshire can be living anywhere else in the world for most of their lives and yet, somehow ‘home’ is where they are not.  Is this because Yorkshire grit requires its own to be constantly bearing some hardship, and when all else fails not being in Yorkshire is the ultimate hair shirt?  I don’t mean to poke fun at Yorkshire men and women (a behaviour akin to taking a stick to a lion as in that lovely monologue of my youth ‘Albert and the Lion’) but it is something of a stereotype, perhaps one we all accept as gospel.  Home is childhood, a place to go back to.

Schedules of Reinforcement

Schedules of reinforcement are from Operant Conditioning theory, part of the Behaviourist Approach to explaining behaviour.  Behaviourism is a way of explaining human behaviour that ignores everything that is not observable.  Schedules of Reinforcement are different ways of delivering a reinforcer with the aim of maintaining a person’s present rate of response.  Continuous or full reinforcement ensures a rapid acquisition of behaviour, but once a rate of response is achieved, it is best to switch to partial reinforcement to maintain the response rate at the desired level, both fixed and variable interval and ratio.  There are many examples in real life, gamboling strategies being often cited in literature.  It is suggested that our behaviour is maintained over a much longer period if partial reinforcement schedules are used.  I might suggest there is a price to pay, a cognitive debt, if you like.

Technological Breakdown

Technology has been failing me over the last few months.  For the stereotypical woman that is a sort of a simpering statement as those sort of toys are definitely for boys.  Not for me, I love technology, love computers and gadgets and am the proud owner of an Iphone 4, a Nexus 7 and a Lenovo Ideapad laptop.  Those of you switched onto technology will note that none of these items is ’top of the range’, that is perhaps were the girl in me comes in. 

Softness: The New Strong

As August draws to a close, I find myself affected by the change that is all around us, and this year is no different.  I have never been a fan of autumn; it seems to me to be the season that most marks out the fleeting nature of our lives; underlines most clearly that ‘all things must pass’.  In years gone by it has signaled the start of the fight to survive winter, both psychologically and to some extent physically, but that too has changed.  I no longer dread the descent to depression that made the winter months a battle, alongside the struggle against physical illness.

Father's Day Blues

I've been battling with fury recently.  Deep burning, frustrated fury.  As a result I've been drinking too much wine and beating myself up for failing.  Then crying at small bits of sadness in deep and heavy gulps.  Why the dramatics?  My long suffering and relatively recently acquired boyfriend is bewildered by the madness I'm sure.  Which, of course, turns me back to the paranoia of 'when he finds out what I'm really like I won't see him for dust'.  A state of mind that insults his intelligence and belittles his affection for me, and could indeed set up a need for an escape on his part.  The one thing I haven't been able to do is write.  The muse has deserted me.  No pictures in my mind to form  into words, just pain and loneliness within.  A empty vessel making rather a lot of sound.