Month 3, day 2

It seems it has been a long time since I last posted here. Work has been heavy, and Gettting Things Done has redirected some of my priorities. My weight has stalled, but recently began to turn downwards. Lowest morning weight is 20 Stone 4.5, today I was 20 stone 5.5

My feelings about Getting Things Done are that its a good system, but quite rough around the edges. One could conceivably fill their entire day doing Getting things Done, and never actually DO anything. On the other hand, it is keeping large chunks of my life in check. Possibly I need to work more on becoming motivated to do things, and less on keeping track of the things I have to do.

In short, I'll be keeping up Getting things Done at least until the house move and the wedding are over, because it proves to be a good way of knowing what I haven't done yet.


On to Month 3.

In the last month I have felt stressed (because of the house move), frustrated (because of the house move, and because of the lawyers I'm using), dispondant (because the house move didn't happen when I was expecting it would), and annoyed at myself (because I hate making telephone calls, so I hated talking to some of the contractors and lawyers involved in frustrating and stressing me about the house move). The wedding isn't much better, but its further away, and the hotel people are very nice (if French railways would let me book train tickets more than 90 days in advance, everything would be perfect. Sort of.)

Most of this is the fault of other people. As Yoda might say "House moves lead to other people. Other people lead to stress. Stress leads to pain. Pain leads to suffering".

Does pain lead to suffering? According to the people behind ACT (Acceptance Commitment Therapy) apparently not. What ACT (pronounced "act" not "ay-see-tee") says is that while everyone feels pain (and that the pain can be useful in guiding us in our lives), we don't have to suffer. The techniques it uses are based on the far eastern technique of Mindfulness, but using short-cuts around some of the decades of meditation which Buddhist monks put in (if only those Buddhist monks knew about self-help books, they could spend their time doing useful things like kung-fu and, um, Falling long distances (near walls) without getting hurt. For shame, Buddhist monks!)

ACT is a genuine development of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy which is being developed by leading researchers right now. When I was last in Addenbrookes in Cambridge, I saw signs up on the walls talking about their mindfullness groups for psychiatric patients. So there could well be something in this, somewhere. But can a self-help book convey it all to me, and turn me into some sort of emotionally intelligent superhero? One month... lets see how it does.