weekly check-in #3, january 15th, 2011.

[erika]

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit."

Aristotle

Greetings, earthlings! Welcome to WEEK THREE of our amazing resolutions marathon. I'm erika, this is resolving, and here, in this very entry (!) is your check in post for this week.

So how has your week been? Good, bad, just ordinary? Are you working on your resolutions, and what have you been up to otherwise?

Take a deep breath, and let’s let each other know: how’s it going?

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The question for this week is again taken from the Elements of Change, and it's about our dreaded foe, relapse:

Expect relapse — What might trigger a return to a former behavior?

Stumped? Some resources: What to do when your diet resolutions suffer from a relapse, or a PDF dealing with the same issues that's a little more general.

Feel free to answer in the comments, or if you would like to write a journal entry about it—go right ahead, just link it from the comments please.

Comments

[flowerstar]

This week was bad :(.

- I don't even know why exactly, but food and eating was difficult for me again. You probably should know that I have an eating disorder, Binge Eating Disorder. I'm recovering and the main symptom - binge eating attacks - is pretty much under control but eating and all things around it (cooking, buying groceries, etc.) can be very difficult for me when I'm not feeling well. So I had a pretty bad eating pattern this week, and I expect it to reflect it just as badly on the scales next week as they did this week.

- I also didn't clean a lot, just managed to keep control of the mount of dishes. I caught up a bit yesterday, at least.

- No jobs fitting my profile this week either ;_;. I noticed that my resolution in that aspect was really unrealistic - there simply are not enough jobs for my profession in the area where I'm looking, certainly not enough to manage one application each week. There have to be jobs I can write the applications for!

- Didn't do much art/fic either, just managed to prepare a drawing for colouring.

I hope next week will be better :/.

Expect relapse — What might trigger a return to a former behavior?

Mental problems - see above - and a stretch of lack of success are the most important causes, along with lack of time. I'm easily discouraged and I'm trying hard to tell me that relapses do not constitute failure.

[tielan]

*hugs*

This is going to sound horrendously twee, but: "it's not failure until you give up."

Are there any tasks that can be broken up into still-smaller tasks? Like preparing a drawing for colouring as a subset of 'finishing a full picture'? Perhaps turn it into stages and complete those stages, rather than counting the project as a whole?

[flowerstar]

*hugs* Thank you! I think that's a good saying, twee or not :). And I'm not giving up!

Yeah, I try to do that - spending a bit of time on a resolution is better than nothing at all. So transferring the drawing to the watercolour pad counts as something (and today I started colouring!). I'm working on seeing the small steps instead of just the whole picture ^^.