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NaNoWriMo Check-In: Week 2

Audra Edmonson3 Comments

Required word count: 25,000

Actual word count: 27,077

Well, week 2 is usually where people start to find their enthusiasm waning, and I am no exception. I had two days where I had to really, really force myself into the chair to write. I did a few five-minute sprints because anyone can do five minutes of anything, right, and somehow managed to keep my momentum and my word count up. It helped that I had a buffer from the first few days, so hitting my 1667 word count each day kept my count higher than it needed to be. It’s easier to be ahead.

I pushed through those two days though, and now I have my momentum back where it needs to be. Story-wise, I have no idea what’s going on. I know where I need to get to, but getting there…my characters are literally in the woods wandering around, and I’m trying not to just pick them up and drop them in the next location. I may have to do that though, just to get ahead, and go back and fix the tangle in the middle later. Ah, the middle. Always a mess.

Energy level: Adequate. Meaning I can keep doing it without banging my head on the keyboard too many times.

Enthusiasm for my story: Also adequate, but tinged with a little frustration.  Not a lot, just a little, but enough to make me growl under my breath.

Outlook on next week: I’m still confident I’ll hit my 50k words. Now, whether that coincides with the completion of the story is another question. Will I end the story before? After? Who knows?

Anything memorable? The hat still helps. As does fighting colorful bird monsters in the 4thwords app. I also started using programming language to encode my comments with asterisks. Makes them much more noticeable. Also I downloaded a bunch of new productivity apps to procrastinate writing. Awesome.

But Out: Replace This One Word to Change Your Life

Audra Edmonson4 Comments

We live in a world of contradictions.

“I want to do this, but I have to do that.”

We hear this all the time. We say this all the time.

“I want to build my business, but I spend so much time at work.”

“I want to achieve my goals, but I have to take care of my family.” 

“I want to travel, but I don’t have enough money.” 

That one word, but, removes our power in those statements. It makes the two items around the but absolutely incompatible. You can’t do both, is what a statement like that says.

Our words are powerful. They have the power to change our minds, and in doing so, change our lives. We all know how the stories we tell about ourselves impact us. Being a linguistics major, I can tell you that the words we choose to use about ourselves, about others, about anything, matter. They matter a lot.

And, unfortunately, this habit of using but between two items is very, very common. So common we don’t even realize there’s another grammatical way of saying the same thing, one that gives us power back.

Instead of using but, use and. Replace every but up there with and and see what happens.

“I want to build my business, and I spend so much time at work.” 

“I want to achieve my goals, and I have to take care of my family.” 

“I want to travel, and I don’t have enough money.” 

By replacing that one word, we’ve given power back to ourselves. Instead of lamenting that we don’t have enough time to work on our business or our dreams, we realize that we have obligations, and we have dreams, and we can do both. We aren’t sacrificing our families or quitting our jobs, we’re finding ways to work with them.

In the last example, the use of and creates an incentive for action. Okay, so you don’t have enough money to travel, and you want to, so now, how will you get that money? But kind of implies that “oh well, I don’t have enough money. That’s that,” and forces no further action. It stops us in our tracks. But and implies a realization of your current situation and a call to action.

It’s amazing how this simple change can affect your outlook, your optimism, your mindset, and your energy levels.

Now, I don’t recommend replacing every but with and all the time. You’ll sound weird. Just try it out with things that really get you stumped. That make you feel down. The phrases that put a pause in your action plan.

Reframe the idea that two things are incompatible with the idea that there is a way to have both. You can have a full workload and build a business on the side. You can be less than wealthy and travel the world.* You can take care of your family and pursue your goals.

You can do whatever you choose to. So give power back to yourself now. Take the buts out.

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*For tips on traveling cheap, check out anything by Chris Guillebeau on Travel Hacking.

NaNoWriMo Check-In: Week 1

Audra Edmonson2 Comments

Required word count: 11,666

Actual word count: 12,465

The first week of NaNo is hit or miss for me. I either get a lot of steam going and forge ahead to get a lot out of the way, or find myself uninterested after a month of planning and kind of sadly chug along, doing a bit here and there.

Fortunately, this time around, Week 1 was a blazing success!

Energy level: High. I feel good coming out of the first week ahead of the word count, and eager to keep writing.

Enthusiasm for my story: High. I’m still in love with it, and though the thing has happened where I’m getting all these cool ideas for other stories barraging me, I’m still excited about this one.

Outlook on next week: I’m confident I can make it through the usually rough week. I’ve been able to schedule time reliably, and that’s historically been the hardest part for me.

Anything memorable? I have a writing hat. It really, really helps.

 

Trying the Five-Second Rule for Anxiety

Audra EdmonsonLeave a comment

Recently I read Mel Robbins’ “The 5 Second Rule“, and there was a very interesting part in there about anxiety and panic attacks. Robbins has struggled with anxiety, panic, and a fear of flying for decades, but she claims in her book that the five-second rule helped her conquer her fear of flying and come off of medication.

I was intrigued, particularly when she mentioned a very key point. To our bodies, physiologically speaking, excitement and fear are the same things. I knew this from experience, having felt the excitement that quickly turned to fear because my brain associated those feelings instantly with panic, not happiness. You sweat, your heart races, you become hyper-aware – this state of the body can describe fear or excitement. Our body reacts in the same way. The only difference? Our brains. It’s what our brains are thinking that differentiates these feelings. If we have a context for the shaking and sweating as being psyched for something, our brains back off and we’re okay. But if our brains see something to be fearful of, or don’t have a context (as in a panic attack), the brain will escalate the feeling and send us into fight, freeze, or flight mode in order to protect us.

Since I struggle with anxiety, and particularly with confusing the feelings of excitement and fear in my body, I decided to try out the five-second rule to see how it might help. For one month, I used the 5-second rule to re-direct my thoughts and help my body recognize what it was feeling.

How It Works

The idea goes like this. When you’re about to give a speech, make a sale, call a date, or do anything that makes you nervous, tell yourself, “I’m excited.” Give your brain context about what it’s feeling that doesn’t risk escalating the feeling into panic.

I wanted to try this also with panic attacks, because those generally happen without any context at all. Using the related idea of anchor thoughts, I decided that on any given day, should I have a panic attack, I would help my brain contextualize the sudden rush of adrenaline by telling myself I was excited about something. One week it might be the crafting project, another it might be NaNoWriMo, another my next D&D session. But by doing that, I wanted to see if I could actually de-escalate my panic attacks and get through them more calmly than normal.

Results

I am happy to report that the experiment worked. I was a bit skeptical, to be honest, because it’s something so basic and simple it seems like someone, somewhere, would have come up with it before.

But the idea works because it is so simple.

Unfortunately for the experiment, though fortunately for my health, I didn’t have any panic attacks this past month, so I didn’t get to try it out in that state.

I did get to try it out with my worrying. I have a bad habit of worrying all the time, so I used the five-second rule any time I caught myself ruminating on mistakes, thinking of what might go wrong in the future, or general anxiety over what was happening in the present.

When I caught myself, I thought “5-4-3-2-1” and pulled my thoughts away to something else. I had several anchor thoughts; my novel, my next D&D session, how awesome it would feel to be a published author or a book I was reading.

I also added visualization, which was a powerful element. Robbins had mentioned in one of her talks that the act of counting backward moves us from our irrational brain to our prefrontal cortex, a kind of half-circle around the head. It engages that area which literally interrupts our thoughts, short-circuiting the loop of anxiety.

I pictured the numbers as points around my head, and my thoughts literally moving from the back to the front as I counted down. It was so powerful it was honestly surprising.

Overall, I can say that the technique does work. I had just as many anxious and worrisome thoughts as I normally did, but I felt more in control of them, and they didn’t run away with me as often as before.

If you struggle with fear, anxiety, worry or depression, I suggest reading Robbins’ book and trying it out for yourself.

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