I'm working on a tool for understanding obstacles 🚧 and overcoming them in a way that feels easy, friendly and safe. This is my work diary. Feel free to reach out with questions, feedback, ideas. 💁♀️
🇬🇧 Most of my posts are in English, but there's some in German, too.
🇩🇪 Ich poste meisten auf Englisch, weil mich Austausch über Sprach- und Ländergrenzen hinweg interessiert. Ab und an gibt es hier aber auch Posts auf Deutsch.
| Location | NW-Germany |
| Header Image | A city scene at night. Blurry street and buildings and warm white and green lights lights. On the right there's a short-haired human staring into the distance. |
| Avatar | White background, a black circle, a black zigzag line inside the circle, one end of crossing the border. |
Just a tiny comment from a country who has already tried the fascist dictatorship 🇩🇪
Today I can't stop thinking about the Oscar-nominated movie 13 Minutes, featuring the story of Georg Elser who tried to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1939. I don't want violence to be a normalized part of politics but as a woman born into a democratic Germany I honor Elser's moral compass + courage. I guess history will tell how these events will go down.
Highly recommend the movie!
@KitMuse When I'm confronted with IMPOSSIBLE choices, I do pair-wise comparison. There's better explanations but the basics are:
- list all projects + add both mental and physical health as items
- compare all items 1:1 by asking "If you could only do A or B, which would you choose?" (eventually there's the decisions between projects and health items, these are usually painful but sobering)
- rank the items by matches won
- look at the bottom items and figure out what needs to be done
3/3
@KitMuse Or you could look into Freudenberger's stages of burnout, I found them quite illuminating for myself.
If any of the questionnaires indicate a problem, I'm afraid there's probably only these ways to go:
1. You choose what to let go of/get help with and build more recovery into your schedule.
2. One day your body will drop anything it cannot manage anymore, and this is usually chaotic and frightening and you might end up with much, much less than if you made the trade-offs.
2/3
@KitMuse @neurodivergence I second everyone's worries that you might be in burnout territory, but maybe it's useful to get an objective view of your energy levels first.
- for short-term mental fatigue, there's the VAS-F questionnaire: https://link.springer.com/10.1007/978-1-4419-9893-4_100
- for mid-term mental fatigue there's the Need For Recovery Scale: https://europepmc.org/articles/pmc1765728?pdf=render
- for long-term fatigue (aka burnout) there's the Maslach Burnout Inventory with surveys for several populations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslach_Burnout_Inventory
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The scale consists of 18 items relating to the subjective experience of fatigue. Each item asks respondents to place an “X,” representing how they currently feel, along a visual analogue line that extends between two extremes (e.g., from “not at all...
@Furthering Oh lots, actually! Breaking up with someone who wasn't right for me, people breaking up with me who weren't a great fit after all. Quitting my dream job because it made me an exhausted mess.
Is something hard coming up for you?
@JulieB ooh, that's a handy way to remember how to care for someone or yourself. I do know the movie and I liked it so much. It's such a good story about the value of challenging feelings.
Thanks so much for the kind feedback 💫
@dyani 💜💜💜 As a reader, I just want to tell you, that yes, it's okay to feel so much and I see what a big deal it is. Even the words "big deal" seems too small, too normal to address this extraordinary pain. I just want to let you know that I'm a witness to it and that I care.
(And also, I think I can somewhat relate to being absolutely overwhelmed by terror and I think you expressed this so well. I'm grateful you wrangled those words out of yourself.)
getting unstuck