Day 6 – The First Bump

I knew it was going to happen, I knew it wouldn’t be an unceasing, blissful journey of smelling roses and smiling at the dog.  So this is the bit when living in the moment really matters, when actually you feel grim and know the tears are not that far away.

Day 5 - Trinity Sunday

I have been to church today.  More importantly I wanted to go to church, to say the words I know so well, but whose meaning has oddly changed and distorted since my certain faith was demolished so comprehensively with the break-up of my marriage.

Day 4 - Recovery

Day 3 was a joyous experience: that combination of revisiting the past but bringing with it the eyes of the present produced a feeling of real pleasure that has been absent for many weeks.  However, it has to be admitted part of the ‘pleasure’ was alcohol powered, and rather more than my safe allowance of alcohol units was consumed on Day 3.  Therefore Day 4 was always going to be a quiet one, but didn’t actually turn out that way.  My glorious nephew arrived for a gossip around lunch time and we drank tea and laughed, my aunt phoned from Ireland in the afternoon and I heard her latest woes with the weather and the difficulties of a 21^st century existence in rural south west Ireland, then an old friend appeared for more tea and gossip.   In addition the weather was soft and kind, so we could sit outside and look at the garden.

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.