Make your day better than being in bed...

This week was not a great week productivity wise, but I think it was good for realisations. Part of that is from the books I have been reading. The Way Out by Alan Gordon, which is about dealing with or overcoming chronic pain, and The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson, which is about well, it says it on the cover really :)

I've spent a lot of this week sleeping in. Without motivation bigger than the comfort of sleeping in, it is very hard to get out of bed unless I have to, and my first 'have to' is work after 12pm, sometimes after 4pm. I've been laying in bed a lot 'knowing' how to get out of bed. All I have to do is do it. But knowing is not doing. And over the course of the last few weeks I have started to feel the wall between those two states. Basically I need to figure out how to create a bigger reason to get out of bed than to stay in it or I have to completely remove, not reduce, the thinking stage of getting out of bed. There is anywhere between a microsecond to several hours of thinking about getting out of bed which is where I fail. A microsecond is more than enough to keep you in bed, that second of indecision is enough to keep you chained for hours. I just need to get up, automatically even. I assume the more I do this, the easier it will become. The start of anything is always the hardest however.

That said, I did get some work done. I worked a few hours on the Opal low poly character, I practiced my Welcome to D&D parody based on Bo Burnhams's Welcome to the Internet. I added some extra project pages to this website.

I read all of The Way out, which I do recommend for people with chronic pain as it has some interesting ideas on how to reduce, and potentially remove, neuroplastic pain (which is pain that the brain thinks is there, not actual structural pain) through rewiring the brain. I will be giving the approaches in the book a go, and I already think I have a little bit of improvement. Which is something after years of not having any improvement. So that's a win in my book. I did find the book had a lot of fluff to fill it out some. I guess that makes sense, a single chapter for a book is a hard sell. I think most books do this anyway, and there is something to be said for examples to help buy into the concept.

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck is interesting for sure, I think with any book, you take what is useful and leave the rest, and there's a lot to work with in this one. A lot of it is basically saying that the world we live in is all kinds of messed up for many reasons, and there is basically no reason to do anything you don't want. I have to admit that is not a very good summary however. A lot of what Mark says actually is in tune with a lot of other things I am putting together from different books such as How to do the Work by Dr. Nicole LePera and watching Struthless on YouTube. Both of which I highly recommend.

I think in future I need to take better notes on the books I read, thinking about it and trying to add a summary here about The Subtle Art and I'm coming up blank. I will probably read all these books again anyway to really drill the points home as they all are quite useful.