Tag: Recovery

Daily Life, Motivation

It Really Is A Drug

This is going to be a little embarrassing. But I suppose, like any good twelve step program, the first step is admitting you are powerless over your addiction. My morning routine every morning, day in and day out, 365 days a year is as follows; Up at 4:30-6, make coffee, surf news sites and X/Twitter until 8-9:30am. At that point I start my day. Why is this embarrassing? That routine means that I average 1,095 hours a year mindlessly scrolling through news sites. I give up six and a half weeks of my life every year to an algorithm designed to keep me scrolling.

But it’s worse than that. I’ve noticed lately that I can’t stop checking in on my phone. Sit down for a few minutes and I compulsively find myself quickly scrolling through X/Twitter to see if anything new happened. During commercial breaks or pausing a TV show to let the dog out, I’m instantly on the phone flipping through stupid Instagram reels of funny animals, car crashes, and people doing stupid shit. Waiting in line at the grocery store, boom, out comes the phone. It truly is a drug.

What a waste. I suppose on the other hand, it’s not like I was going to invent an amazing new chemical compound that solves the problem of plastics in our landfills during that extra six weeks a year. But still, there must be something more productive I could be doing with that time. Watching cat videos and reading three sentence “news” blurbs is not exactly making me more informed. Sure, I can chat casually with someone at a cocktail party about current events (if I was to actually go to a cocktail party) but that doesn’t mean I actually know anything about the subject. X/Twitter has given me the back of the milk carton condensed version of the news. Which is usually just enough to make me angry and/or to start a fight at the holiday dinner table.

I believe it’s time for a detox. We’ll start with the phone. First step, put it away. I’m going to keep it on my dresser in the bedroom all day. Sure I’ll make a point of glancing at it occasionally to see if there was a missed call or text message, but I don’t need to obsessively carry it around with me in the house. I’m not a doctor on call 24×7 who needs instant access. There is literally nothing so important that it couldn’t wait the 45 minutes I was in the backyard working on the garden. Sure I might miss out on that hilarious meme I came across during a commercial break while watching Seinfeld reruns, but I’m sure I’ll survive.

Now for the harder one – the morning computer screen time. I’m not changing my wake up time or the time I start my day. I’m a slug, I admit it. I need several hours before I can get moving. The question is, what to do with those hours? I’m not going to give up the news entirely. I am a news junkie after all. I think the recovery approach will be twofold. First, limit the amount of scrolling through X/Twitter. Anything major or newsworthy that’s happened will show up in the feed within about five minutes. So let give ourselves a thirty minute budget to flip through some news sites and scroll through tweets. Done, I know now roughly what’s happening in the world. Now what?

I think the remaining time will be spent on reading long-form essays. Probably going to have to be subscription based. In reality anything worth reading takes a writer days to weeks to compose. A banger tweet, or paragraph posted on CNN.com, probably didn’t have a whole lot of thought put behind it. I’m at the age where I’m better off reading quality over quantity.

I’d also be much better served by spending my morning time working on creative pursuits than reading speculation about the latest celebrity gossip. Writing, maybe editing a photo or video. Anything to get the brain juices flowing. At my age I don’t have many brain cells left so I may as well exercise them.

So there you go. The confession of a news/phone/Twitter junkie. The first step is to admit you have a problem. Now let’s make a change. If you see more frequent posts here, you know it’s working. If I’m radio silent, you’ll know that I’m still mired in the addictive world of Russian dash-cam crash videos and reading pithy one-liners about how evil the other political party is.

Wish me luck. The algorithms are powerful, fueled by AI, and designed to prevent you from breaking out of the matrix. It’s time to take that red pill.

Daily Life, Health

I Got Hurt. Now What?

Back in the stone age when I played Pop Warner football as a kid, I remember getting my bell rung. Full speed, helmet to helmet, I’d made a pretty spectacular tackle. Or so they told me, as I had zero memory of it. I staggered off the field and sat dazed on the sideline, trying to remember where I was and what I was supposed to be doing. The coach came over and asked if I was ready to go back in. I answered that I didn’t know. He gave a deep sigh and asked, “well son are you hurt or are you injured?” I have no idea what I said, but eventually someone stuck some smelling salts under my nose, and I went back on the field. Today I’m sure I’d have been diagnosed with a minor concussion and sidelined for a few weeks.

I was never quite sure what was the worst part in that saying – being hurt or being injured? I think being injured is the worse one. I imagine injured is broken bones or torn ligaments. Being hurt means it’s time to pull your big boy pants up and get back after it. Suck it up, buttercup.

When you get older, getting hurt rarely involves anything dramatic. Usually, it’s something stupid like stepping awkwardly off the bottom rung of a ladder, walking into an open cabinet, or slipping on some ice. In my case it was something even more mundane. I bent over. That’s it. I bent over to pick something up off the floor and BAM, it was like someone hit me with a baseball bat in the low back. Sigh.

Now in my defense, I had just come home from the gym and a pretty hard back and squat session. But still, a muscle strain bending over – really? Is this what old age looks like? The worst part was that I was scheduled to do a two-day backcountry motorcycle trip in a few days. Determined not to miss out, I consumed a frightening amount of Ibuprofen, applied non-stop heat, and subjected myself to hours of electrical stimulation using a TENS unit set to cattle prod levels. All of that got me on the bike and I survived. Although, sleeping on the ground with just a thin pad and a sleeping bag is not an ideal recovery plan after a full day of motorcycling. Just saying.

So now what? I went to the trainer when I got back, and after a pretty thorough evaluation, he essentially said that the answer was movement. I needed to move, lift, stretch, and move some more if I want to get better. He said that I wasn’t going to hurt anything or make it worse by continuing my activities… it’s really just up to my pain tolerance as to what I can do.

Crap. What I wanted to hear was to sit on the couch for six weeks and let it heal (and eat nachos. I hear eating nachos cures most anything). I have a hard enough time being motivated to work out as it is – trying to be motivated when everything hurts is a tall order. Pulling on a pair of sweatpants in the morning when I’m super stiff and painful is a comedy routine right now. I’m probably going to send myself headfirst into the back of the closet one of these mornings as I try to fling one leg of the pants around an outstretched foot without bending at the waist. I’m sure it’s not a pretty sight.

But I suppose my old Pop Warner coach was right. I’m merely hurt, not injured. Time for some smelling salts and to put on my big boy pants and get back after it. But I will say… this is my first real taste of what old age pain must be like. I can see why older folks are reluctant to move or workout and take large amounts of pain medication. It’s actually scared me a little bit.

I will not let that be my future.