Some stuff we already knew

I mentioned Wesabe in my last post, and I may or may not have mentioned the blog that goes with it, Wheaties For Your Wallet. If I didn't, I apologize, because these are some chipper, delightful folks, and they've introduced me to a new brand of geek: the social-software creators. These people don't just use stuff like Flickr and del.icio.us, they make it, and they love it, and they think about how it works and why it works a lot. Which means that they talk about, and link to, some real brain-bustingly awesome talks on the natural behavior of groups on the internet (I knew groups operated that way, but it never occurred to me to actually think about it, you know?), and-- this being the whole point of the post-- the role of self-awareness and monitoring in staying engaged in working toward a goal.

The post in question (which was off of 43 Folders, a life-hacking site) says some things that I think we can all relate to:

...Any idea that helps you to become more self-aware can usually help you to reach a goal or affect a favorable solution. That’s pretty much the entire bag of doughnuts right there.

Self-improvement juju works not because of magic beans or the stones in your soup pot; it works because a smart “system” can become a satisfying cipher for framing a problem and making yourself think about solutions in an ordered way. Systems help you minimize certain kinds of feedback while amplifying others.

Also, when you’ve undertaken most any kind of program, there’s usually a built-in incentive to watch for change, monitor growth, and iterate small improvements (think: morning weigh-in). While I don’t doubt that some systems empirically work better than others, I suspect that success with any of them has much to do with how we each think, behave, and respond to our environment.

His basic guide to having a good operating system for self-improvment:

action almost always trumps inaction

planning is crucial; even if you don’t follow a given plan

things are easier to do when you understand why you’re doing them

your brain likes it when you make things as simple as possible

I read that and thought, "Dude. He has just given us a roadmap to success."


In the post on the Wesabe blog, Marc linked that post to a number of other things:

Cars equipped with displays that show gas mileage, when compared to cars without the mileage display, get better gas mileage. That little bit of knowledge helps the driver drive more economically. More visible energy meter displays in the home have a similar effect... people use less energy when they’re often reminded of how much energy they use. Weighing yourself daily or keep track of everything you eat, and you’ll find yourself eating less. In the same way, using a program like Quicken to track your finances might compel you to spend less, at least in areas of your life where you may be spending too much.

Which, yeah. Where things diverge between the gas milage meter and a diet or Quicken, however, is what Marc calls "Tamagotchi Software" syndrome: you work on this thing, and you get changes and results which are cool, BUT a) to keep things moving, you have to expend an excruciating amount of work, b) after a certain amount of time (longer for the stubborn and bloody-minded), the reward is not enough to convince you that doing this excruciating amount of work is worth it, and c) if you stop doing the work, your Tamagotchi/personal finance/diet will fall over and die. He doesn't add what dieters would automatically add as d) once stopped, it's even more painful to get back on board than to start in the first place, because OH MY GOD ALL THE LOST EFFORT FROM LAST TIME.

I'll add another geek note: anyone else play Animal Crossing on the GameCube? When we first got that game, my Hub and I played it for hours every night. We built little houses, made animal friends, planted trees, collected fruit, fished, saved money, traded codes online for new fun things at the store, and breathlessly awaited the nightly arrival of the little dog with the guitar who would sing a new song every night. There was a certain point at which the game sort of peaked, though; there was no new world to conquer, no new rewards, BUT, as we discovered, if we didn't keep working in our little Animal Crossing towns, we'd lose our stuff because it knew how long we'd been gone, and it would punish us. Grass would grow, mail would stack up, food would go back, houses would fall to ruin, animals would be mad because we hadn't been around to talk to them in forever. We felt like we were just being forced to do upkeep, in spite of the fact that our interest had flagged. This was no longer fun. And, in the era before pretty much everything game-wise was online and would eventually offer more content for download, there was nothing coming down the line except more work. We abandoned the thing.

The main point here is that as time goes by, the higher the workload, the more likely people are to abandon the project. This can be cancelled out if the returns continue to be high (results, money, pounds lost, compliments gathered) or even increase, but if the returns for all one's hard work is to maintain the status quo, it's quite discouraging, and any bump in the road becomes a justified reason to throw up your hands and say "to hell with this, I would rather go broke/be fat/lose the game than have to spend all my time doing this shit."

So, to review: Anything is better than nothing. Simple is better than complex.

It's nice to know that weight-loss is not unusual in this, you know?

Cut for length-- click to read more.

Kidding myself is a luxury I just can't afford

My Hub would sooner put a fork in his eye, I think, than do any kind of financial tracking. (Let me pause to offer a fervent prayer to my deity of choice that this does not turn into another thing that will bite us in the ass.) When he has money, he spends it; when he doesn't, he stops spending and mopes; tracking or analysis of his spending would give him the chance to even out the bumps in the road, but he holds to a general rule in life that if a thing involves self-exploration or analysis of any kind, it's not for him; he prefers to be unencumbered by such. He'll take the trade-off of having days-- occasionally weeks-- in which he doesn't get to spend money and has to sit around feeling poor and morose.

I, on the other hand, adore tracking, but only so long as it tells me good things. The history of my financial tracking efforts dates back to 1999, when, freshly installed in my first solo apartment here in Chicago, I set up a complicated tracking system for all my receipts, used it for about a day and a half, and then watched out of the corner of my eye as it gathered dust until I finally ditched it after six months. I clearly remember feeling strongly that I ought to organize my finances, but I didn't have a clear idea of why, and I was really not good with how, since I really had no idea where I was headed.

My second shot at tracking occurred in 2001, although, having learned from 1999, I compromised and made it so that I would divide all my money into two accounts-- one that would automatically pay all the set expenses, and the other that I could use for the ATM. Which wasn't so much "tracking" as "well, at least this way the bills will get paid." In retrospect, it was a very rudimentary form of the Mvelopes system I've got set up now, but with only two sections: set expenses and everything else.

After things got complicated when me and my Hub moved in together and got married, and I ended up in charge of money because I was the less-flighty of the two of us, I sought the services of a financial adviser. Note to everyone considering this: this solves fewer current problems than you might think, because while they're setting you up for the future, financial advisers don't do much to sort out what you're doing now. This mostly led to us adding on more and more bills for insurance, IRAs and the like, with a twice-yearly pattern of collapse and digging back out again via tax refund or bonus check. We'd get frustrated with the tight noose of the budget and the "I'll pay it off right away on payday" credit purchases began, which quickly turned into balances on the cards, which we'd "solve" by throwing all of our tax refunds or bonus checks at the balances, and then we'd be good for a few months before it would begin again. Every time, I'd start to avoid doing the math because it would tell me things I didn't like.

Apparently in order to keep us from going under, I have to pay a service to do all the math for me. Well, so be it.

The lesson learned here, I think, is that we have a vast ability to kid ourselves, which kicks in right about the time that the empirical data coming in stops telling us good things, stops making us feel proud of ourselves. It's easy to track information when the bottom line keeps improving; when it stalls, or starts going sour, that becomes difficult-- and that, I've found, is the most important time to keep tracking, keep your eyes on the empirical data, and avoid the huge temptation to start kidding yourself. Which sucks.

We are the children of the good times, folks, and it's hard to learn to restrict yourself when there's no outside force that makes you learn. Our generation (and yes, I'm generalizing about the United States again) hasn't had to learn self-restriction, hasn't had to learn to make do, because more is always available-- and, worse, more is the culturally accepted method of making yourself feel better. More credit, more clothes, more house, more food. Less, then, is not something we're accustomed to doing. Less feels not only restrictive, but embarrassing; with what seems like the whole world spending money they don't have and eating tons of food, restricting yourself to necessities looks freakishly monkish by comparison. So when reality strikes, and the alarm bells go off that say "something's gotta change", it's so, so tempting to avoid thinking about it because you just want to stay in that dream of denial a little longer, that dream where you're not that far over, it's not so much of a problem that it can't be fixed right away, so the strict rationing doesn't have to begin again quite yet.

Gotta tell ya, folks, my vast ability to kid myself has led to project "take off that depression fat" turning into project "oops, put on another 10 pounds on top of that". Which I can blame all I want on my Hub and his bulking diet (and oh, I do), but at the end of the day there has to be a point where I stop and say, "Okay, that didn't work. Try something else."

The trick is finding a happy medium between a) spend ALL DAY keeping track of shit (i.e., which is what my time on Weight Watchers turned into) and having any break from that unbearable load make it incredibly unlikely that I'll get back to it unless forced to, and b) spending no time at all keeping track of shit, which means I can kid myself all the damn time until, again, forced to admit that something has gone awry.

For finances, Mvelopes takes the middle option for me, since after the herculean task I had of setting up eight months' worth of finance tracking by hand (my one gigantor complaint: they do not let you upload past info from your bank and sort it, which means no reports for pre-Mvelopes months, which... WTF, dude, I NEED that in order to sort my shit out in the FIRST place, otherwise I'm just putzing around moving things into envelopes with no concept of what my real budget is)... er, after my initial giant task, it's actually been very very low-maintenance, just takes a few minutes of the day to handle, and thus I don't have a real excuse to "take a break" every once in a while. I am pondering low-maintenance options for food intake at the moment (please, don't try to sell me on anything right now, due to being uncomfortable with the process in the first place and demand-resistant in the second, it would probably just send me into another round of avoidance), and have given myself a mental deadline of next Friday.

It's odd, trying to hash out something that's low-maintenance that will give me enough information to keep me from kidding myself. Everything I've seen from commercial diets is pretty much an engraved invitation to an eating disorder, or a one-way ticket to malnutrition, or utter crap, or two out of three, or all three. I'm sort of leaning toward a combination of tracking my weight (like, daily, on a spreadsheet, with graphs), keeping up the exercise, keeping up the meditation, and making a vague effort at "eating better", because frankly I know what my problem is: I've got a moderate amount of OCPD, that I've soothed the tension and stress from that by indulging in mindless eating, comfort eating, comfort purchases of large containers of junk food which then gets eaten mindlessly because it's right there, and other food-related crimes against my stomach.

That's it.

That's the main thing.

That's what has buggered me after every diet, that's what makes each diet such an effort in willpower, that's what makes my mind drift toward thoughts of chocolate whenever the tension levels start creeping up. That's what drives me toward shopping for clothes and books and electronic doo-dads when I manage to avoid the chocolate.

I've mentioned before that it's been almost impossible for me to focus both on weight-loss and financial solvency at the same time, but since in this case the root of the problem is the same damned thing, I'm going to do something very foolish here and tackle both at once. Neither my body nor my bank account can continue to pay for the problems that my head is creating. It's time-consuming to spend 40 minutes doing walking meditation on the elliptical every other day, and to spend 40 minutes in a prone position on the off days, doing a body-scan meditation, and it's time-consuming and awkward to have to stop in the middle of things and re-focus myself and just breathe, because I can tell I'm getting wacky again. On the up side, it costs nothing and it's calorie-free, and it does make me feel better than a chocolate bar or a shopping excursion, so there you go.

If I can get into the habit of eating mindfully 80% of the time or more, and practice non-food-related calming methods, and track my weight (I put together a spreadsheet with a "scatter" graph on Google Docs where today I started tracking my daily post-pee, pre-breakfast weight), and keep exercising, I should be okay. I don't think I have to spend all day tracking things; I just have to stay fucking well calm.

Example: got to work this morning and beheld my desk, covered in paper, including three notes from my boss delivered after I left yesterday. I'd already had the vague idea brewing in the back of my mind that I ought to go get candy or something, but the desk really made that thought stand up and wave its arms around for attention. Did a minute of meditation, and that seems to have settled down, but I'm guessing that my project for the morning is going to be catching myself every few minutes and re-focussing, re-calming.

That's just where I am. No good kidding myself about that.

Cut for length-- click to read more.

Money may not make the world go around...

...but it does just fine at brewing a shitstorm here on the home front.

I've spent three days uploading our financial histories for the year into Mvelopes, a fine bit of online financial software which I highly recommend. It's like Quicken and that sort of thing, but it lets you divvy up the cash per paycheck before you spend it and keep track of how that budget works for you-- including which Peter you end up having to shortchange to pay Paul, as it were. I've divvied up everything into specific "envelopes"-- categories, such as groceries, rent, yadda yadda yadda.

Ran some reports.

YEOWZA. OUCH. OH, BUGGER.

Well, that explains why we keep running out of money. That lovely budget that I put together works very well when it comes to some things, but others-- like groceries-- it does not. After some scrutiny and discussion, we've concluded that it's because some stuff is just not a monthly expense, it's a weekly expense, and that budgeting for being paid twice a month is not the same as budgeting for being paid every two weeks. There are some things that we need money for every weekend, such as grocery shopping and quarters for the laundry, and there are many occasions when we end up having three weekends in one pay period-- which is one weekend over the budget.

Also: a short rant. Here's the thing: both of us have a certain amount of "fun money" per paycheck. My Hub gets twice as much as I do, which happened not so much because I am a self-sacrificing sap but because I'm trying to keep him from going into debt. If he gets X amount per paycheck, then he can put some into savings and then when the next big thing comes along (and it will always come along) that he desperately MUST HAVE RIGHT NOW, then he can take money out of his savings account instead of putting it on a credit card. So this is an improvement over before, really.

Currently, in order to deal with stress, he comforts himself with driving to work instead of taking the CTA a few times every week (absurd parking fee every time), frozen pizzas (which is a large reduction in expense from when he used to order out all the time) and beer (or, more often, diet soda with a shot of liquor in it, which he deems more financially prudent), and more occasional things such as purchasing video games, books, and whatnot. This is where finances get dicy, because any reduction in his "fun money" amount per paycheck means that he either goes ahead and puts expenses on the credit card (TOTALLY NOT WHAT I'M GOING FOR, ARGH), or is sad, and miserable, and broken, and pissy, and cranky, and altogether not a joy to live with, and there's really only so much of that I can take before I can't stand seeing him like that and give in, as I always do, and fund these things out of my accounts or the shared accounts.

We just can't fucking well keep this up, you know? It's not a major financial issue at the moment-- we're not going into debt, at least, but this stagnation is not good-- but we absolutely can't add anything more. Like, say, kids. So that makes it an issue. More importantly, though, this is really not a healthy way to deal with stress.

I know well the way of external-object-based stress relief. Bad day at work? Pizza for dinner! Cranky at the Hub? I deserve to buy a bag of baked Doritos! (Which is sad because they totally taste like cardboard with Doritos dust on them.) I deserve to go out with my friends and get plastered! I deserve to go shopping (oh, Ann Taylor, why must you have sales? why must your store be located between me and the El?) and get a new outfit! I deserve to go wacky on Half.com and order an entire set of mystery novels from an author I just discovered! I deserve this bag of mini-Snickers! DAMMIT, I AM STRESSED, I NEED THIS.

...Which, wait, hold on. "Need" is a very strong word. Seriously, do I really need this stuff? I can't fit any more books in our apartment, I really don't feel like working off the extra calories of the Doritos or pizza or mini-Snickers, and while I do kind of require new clothes, it's not exactly prudent to go and spend $45 when that means I'll have to avoid spending any more money until the 15th, just so I can afford to go out to eat with my buds on Friday. It is not cool to be desperate for some object that I feel will soothe my problems. Particularly when I'm pretty sure it's not so much the fact that these are great things to have, as that I want them, I'm cranky, and the act of buying them somehow proves my worth. Today, I am worth the extravagance in money and space and calories! Today, I am so important that my whims mean more than the budget, or the meal plan!

Well. That's just not healthy. It's also not as effective as you'd think.

I'm starting to break out of this, I think. I've been able to recognize those moments for a while now, and I'm trying to combat them by giving myself other ways to calm down.

Which... okay, I can remember very clearly that back when I first started this blog, I was trying to figure out this sort of thing. And, in retrospect, it was pretty funny. I would read how a nice-smelling candle would make me feel better, or a nice bubble bath, and I would march out and buy candles and bubble-bath liquid; I have a very clear memory of stoically soaking in the tub, covered in bubbles, lit by candlelight, still tense as a board and wondering how long I was going to have to do this stupid pointless shit in order to feel better. Shortly thereafter, I recall, I ended up weeping all over my Hub. This period of time was also when my binge-eating kicked in again-- shocker. I could not fucking well relax. I didn't know how. I read all these articles on how to relax, and I tried out tons of stuff, but nothing ever really worked and I'd end up binging some more.

That was the summer of 2005, which ended with Hurricane Katrina, my catastrophic meltdown spurred on by seeing something so horrific happen, my diagnosis of depression, the Zoloft, and therapy. Now that I'm off Zoloft (one week and two days and nothing bad has happened; huzzah!), I'm pretty clear on one thing: relaxation is crucial for my mental health. Cruicial.

Budget-wise, I'm also clear on one thing: if we don't find some relaxation techniques that aren't tied to spending money, we're in trouble.

I think I'm improving on this. The first step was being able to recognize that I was having those moments, AS I was having those moments; the second step was to develop a way to deal with stress without requiring external input (for me, it's meditation, but as they say in fandom, your milage may vary); the current step I'm on is being able to recognize in those stressful moments that I do have a choice in what technique I use to deal with it, and that one version is totally free. I don't hold any illlusions that I'll get myself into a 100% healthy stress-management level, but I'm shooting for about 75%. Also hoping that, over time, continued mindfulness practice will lower my overall stress levels so I don't hit quite so many "peak moments", but instead will be able to dissolve little pockets of stress along the way.

The problem is that I'm not there yet, and the much, much bigger problem is that my Hub isn't there at all. Okay, that's not quite true; he's taken the first step of realizing that there are other ways to deal with stress, thanks in part to me using him as a sounding board about my meditation project. He has, on a few stressful occasions, asked me what he's supposed to do in this situation; I talked him down and got him breathing and rubbed his feet. Lately, I've been trying to explain that it's a long-term project-- that meditating every night is, literally, practicing for those moments, getting it ingrained as a reflexive response the way that fighters have to get moves into their muscle memory so that they don't have to think of what move to use to defend themselves. So... I gotta remember, these are big steps forward, and modern boys are not known for introspection. This is going to take some time. Lord knows, I've been working on this since March and I feel like I'm still scratching the surface.

So as things go, I feel like I've got kind of a plan. I want to get my Hub to have-- and manage-- his accounts on Mvelopes, so at the very least he's assigning his transactions to the appropriate envelope and will get a basic knowledge of how much he's spending each month. And I want him to start investigating alternate modes of relaxation, at times when he's not stressed, because trying a new form of relaxation in the middle of a stressful moment is just not useful at all. Which means that for the forseeable future, he'll still be responding to stress with money, and will still be spending that money... so I must be patient and not flip out over that.

On a side note, I was on the phone with my sister for two hours the other night and read her the chapter on demand-sensitivity and demand-resistance from Too Perfect: When Being In Control Gets Out Of Control, because some stuff she'd been saying led me to believe that her fiance' is very demand-resistant, especially considering that his mother is one seriously pushy broad and any sane human being would need to develop demand-resistance to survive her presence. She's written down the info for the book and is going to check it out. She's also concluded pretty much what I did-- that our family, both sides, is riddled with obsessive personalities, and the problem is that they feel very justified in being so, because of THE DEPRESSION. Seriously, it's 75 years later and any "why/why not" argument about obsessive traits like frugality and cautiousness is automatically won by somebody talking about "well, back in THE DEPRESSION, this and that, which is why I'm right." Most of these people weren't alive during THE DEPRESSION. Including me, because I've used that argument. It's like my family's version of Godwin's law. Gads.

Anyway. More later, probably; it's been too long and I have much built up. ;-)

Cut for length-- click to read more.