I didn't make it through any of the links I already have this week, so I picked another topic I need to work on; Willpower and Consistency. I am generally very low on willpower; I have a hard time doing the things that must be done and I have a hard time resisting the things I want but don't need, frex, the fourth cookie or the entire chocolate bar in one sitting. I also have a hard time consistently following through on plans I make, especially for things like housework and daily chores.

Both of the links below explain a little bit about how willpower works and how to strengthen it. I found them helpful because they show that willpower is like a muscle; you can make it stronger with exercise and you need to give it a break sometimes, just like muscles. This is going to be helpful in the near future, since I am attempting to make diet changes. Nothing major, just going from less healthy to more healthy but it's still going to require some adjustment. Resisting the temptation of eating five cookies all at once it another thing I need to work on but I am better with that than I used to be.

Willpower training

Boosting willpower

Consistency and follow through is the other thing I really need to work on. There are so many changes I want to make and should make, but I make it only a couple days before lapsing back into old patterns. Part of this comes from a lack of external consequences I think. I've been trying to get into a regular housework routine but I find sticking to it really hard. I've never really been one for self-imposed or natural consequences and so I usually find a way to talk myself out of it or put it off until tomorrow. If anyone has any tips for how to stick to a (mostly tedious) plan, those would be greatly appreciated.

I have managed to post most Tuesdays and Saturdays, though I have yet to make a Thursday post, so I can stick to a plan if I want to. :) Sometimes baby steps is all you can do. 😊

I am back again with my weekly post. I missed last week due to lack of motivation but I am actually on top of things this week so I had spoons for this post. Yay!

This week I looked into breaking tasks down into manageable pieces and scheduling. I also took a brief look at conflict resolution, though I will go back to that in more detail at a later date.

This site was very helpful for giving step-by-step instructions to make something big easier to accomplish. I feel like this will be useful for many different things in my life right now, though I'm going to take a crack at it with language learning first.

( Example Here )

Scheduling your day sounds like a lot of work, but I do think it will come in handy in the future, once I actually sit down and start scheduling things. Of course, I need to then find time to schedule my days but it does sound worth it. I don't think I like the idea of having the day scheduled down to the minute but it might be helpful to write in the big things and approximate time expected to complete them. This will be a work in progress, like most things. :p

As I said earlier, resolving conflict will have to wait until a later time for more attention but this was a helpful article to read. It really puts the emphasis on remaining calm and working towards finding a solution rather than staying upset and angry. It is also almost entirely foreign to me since I grew up in a house where just about every disagreement turned into a shouting match. I'm also not sure what to do if the other person isn't willing to take time apart to calm down.

Many "disagreements" with my sister turn to shouting and I don't know how willing she would be to walk a way from something small to calm down. Me needing to walk away from a heated discussion about why I don't like it when she takes my things without asking would almost definitely seem silly to her, since it is just a "trivial thing" and not that hard to deal with.

It is definitely food for thought and something that I think I will come back to more than once as I try to figure out how to effectively handle disagreements and express myself.

I learned some new things this week and am feeling rather accomplished. I hope you learned something too, whether from this post or just on your own. Anybody learn astrophysics lately?

Sorry about the lack of post last week, it was a busy week and I was short on time. The important bit to me is that I'm posting now. I have a tendency to say "Oh, I missed one, so if I miss another it doesn't matter." I have derailed myself this way many times, so any time I avoid doing that and stay on track instead is a win for me.

Over the past two weeks, I looked into coping skills and took a look at emotions. For coping skills, I sat down and went through the lists of potential coping skills, looking for which ones might work. I also tried to sort them by category, to cover all the bases. I found far more that fit into the Distraction category than any of the others, but I do have a better idea now of the different things I can try. I also have coping skills to try in different situations or when I feel differently.

I haven't tested most of them yet but I picked the ones that seemed most likely. I also found that a coping skill I didn't think would work for me actually does, in the right situation. "Hyperfocusing" on something; I thought this would be a bad idea because I tend to end up lost in my own head and that is what I typically need coping skills for, dealing with the emotions that pop up when I'm too deep in thought. However, as a calming technique, hyperfocusing actually works pretty well. If I'm frustrated or angry, focusing very closely on something concrete, like a cardboard box or my hand, allows me to calm down and overcome the sense of frustration.

I am not very fluent in emotions, so the links I checked out were very illuminating. The first link was very detailed and helpful. I will did to check it out in depth later. It explained what Plutchik's Emotion Wheel was and how to use it. It also explained a bit how emotions work and the break down of them. As a science logic type person, this was very useful for me. It also included a link to being mindful of your emotions and a second emotion wheel. I liked the emotion wheel a lot, because it has a lot of different emotions and it breaks them down into their components. For me, it is helpful to know that if I'm feeling bored, I may also be feeling indifferent or apathetic. Seeing the breakdown of emotions like that made a lot of sense to me and I think it will help with identifying and acting on my feelings in the future.

Another bonus about this link is that there are two emotion wheels. The first is similar to Plutchik's wheel, but it has faces. I like how it shows which emotions go together and seeing one demonstration of the emotion was helpful. Something I may come back to in the future, if I need some help reading other peoples' emotions.

The link about emotions look like was interesting but overall not very helpful for me. It only showed eight basic emotions, and the faces all seemed super exaggerated. It is a good starting point but I think I might attempt to find better faces showing emotions.

The last link talked about how to examine your feelings and deal with them. It was written by a person who had personally struggled with this and it made a lot of sense to me. I don't have much skill in identify or dealing with my emotions, so a step by step guide that worked for someone else was a nice starting point to have.

All in all, very useful resources and a good start to understanding what is going on within me. Now I might be able to more than just "I'm upset". I have a hope of defining the emotion I'm feeling and, consequently, finding a way to deal with it, or the problem causing it.

Welcome back to my journey through learning new skills! I've been a bit busy this week so I haven't done any concrete work on coping skills, but I did read the articles below.

99 coping skills

Coping ABCs

Article on Coping

Coping Categories

Even just at a brief glance, these were very helpful links from the lovely ysabetwordsmith. In praticular, I think the third link will be a lot of help. It describes coping methods in detail and has a lot of worksheets that I want to check out. I find it easier if I have a starting point or guidelines to work from, so this one is especially helpful for me. The chart of coping skills also looks very helpful.

I learned two main things while reading these links. One: I do have some coping skills already, though at a quick glance, they mostly seem to be of the distraction or emotional release variety. I am going to need to find some more diverse coping skills as well as do some work actually tackling the problem that is necessitating the coping skills. This is a work in progress and will hopefully go smoother once I have acquired a few new coping techniques. Two: I am going to need to take the time to sit down and sort through the coping skills, making a list of the things I want to try or that I think might work. I made good progress so far, by reading about things I can do to help myself. Now I need to move onto the action stage, and actually test things. Or at least make a list to test.

I am hoping I will have made some progress in this regard by next week, but as my sister's wedding is this Friday, I am aware that I might not have much time for self-work. I am still going to make an effort to put time in, but I also won't be too hard on myself if I don't get as much done as expected. Next weeks post will most likely be about my progress on Coping Skills, or about Basic Needs and Emotions.

(I am posting this an hour early because I will have a busy day tomorrow and I want to make sure it gets posted.)