carolstimmel.net

I’ve been experimenting with being in gratitude every day, even when I’m disgusted by things like massive oil spills and firing squads.

I’m too much of a curmudgeon to join the positive health movement, but I found this article in Medical News Today that stated:

In a study of organ recipients, researchers from UC Davis and the Mississippi University for Women found that patients who keep “gratitude journals” score better on measures of mental health, general health and vitality than those who keep only routine notes about their days.

Why they studied “organ recipients,” I have no idea. But personal experience tells me, that it gets my day framed up in a generally non-selfish manner. And how bad can that be?

The Carbon Addict project is an educational resource for medical students.  Started by the Campaign for Greener Healthcare (CGH), the idea is to learn day-to-day practices for a sustainable, low-carbon lifestyle.

It has come to the attention of the health profession that common usage patterns of carbon-based fuels bear all the hallmarks of a substance dependence syndrome.  Once recognised as a medical condition, its enormous clinical impact is producing shock waves in the health community.  However, although extremely serious, carbon dependence has been found to be eminently treatable, and evidence-based guidance on its diagnosis and management is now available - as presented on the pages of this site.

Get your diagnosis here.

I am the world’s worst relaxer and first-rate worrier.  Granted, I think my worrying drives a certain attention to detail that helps me understand nuanced details, but certainly has interfered with my sleep.

I’m also an iphone-lover and use it for just about everything in my life from GTD (Things) to putting me to bed at night.  The Hibino Sound Therapy Lab created this sleep app, and it is amazing!  Combining imagery and music, with therapeutic frequencies, I am drowsing and asleep within 2 cycles of celestial viewing.

At first I felt a little foolish staring at my iPhone in bed, but with such a strong prescription for sleep that leaves my brain intact, my nighttime frets are a thing of the past.

As you can see by the temporal spread between today and my last post, blogging has been way out of my central focus.  Even my incessant twittering seemed to take a hit as my work load climbed, uncomfortable things happened in my life, and my energy plummeted. Just now recovering from hip surgery, my desire to care and feed my blog has re-emerged.

As most of my friends know, I love to read and write.  Being a “writer” has always been my dream from my days in college when I tucked my Sylvia Plath book securely under my arm, to the utter joy at the opportunity to produce a real book with Don Olson in 2001.  I seized the opportunity to write publicly even with twitter, and tried all sorts of little private social experiments, including tiny-lies and nano-manipulations (all in good fun, of course).  Sarcasm doesn’t always translate, by the way.

But at some point, the little shouts into the aether from my phone, the incessant influx of information, to the cynical tools available to leverage other people’s “content” for one’s own blogging advantage, I must admit began to discourage me.  But it wasn’t all bad.  In the face of personal tragedy and the loss of my new friend Kevin Haythe in July, it was indeed Twitter and SMS that kept me bouyed up.  People reached out to me in an immediate and meaningful way.  My relationships were indeed ambient, and as rich as a 140 characters burst allowed.

I’m not completely ambivalent.  The emergent social graph is only somewhat trustworthy, because I know that I can’t really always say what I feel, even when I want to.  It’s a form of psychological flooding and a transient moment can get trapped and absconded by robots and social silos.  Not to mention, misunderstood.  But, at the same time, even electronically-mediated communication doesn’t always have to preclude the beating of the human heart.  We have a new form of unity and togetherness that can be adopted for good.  I like that.