Health and practise plan/ Demanding work

Hi SD,

As to your licentiate decision, it sounds like you’ve thought it
through carefully. It’s best to listen to your intuition.

As to your comments about coffee:

“I can drink it one day in the weeak, my new decission.”
“I think that the most important here for my health is to stop with the cofe.”

You know, as well as I, that if you say you can drink it once a week,
then before long it will be several times a week, maybe multiple times
per day. You know how that goes; it’s happened before. If you really
care about your health, you’ll get rid of it completely and stop using
excuses why periodically you can have a little–which ultimately just
leads back to having more use and drain on your energy and adrenals
which you’ve recognized numerous times already. If you need energy,
you can always take a short nap or do some deep breathing or drink some
Goji juice, or whatever. Anything else is just an excuse “the addict”
is using to keep you on the hamster wheel.

Of course, you have your own ideas 🙂
Just keep in mind how successful they’ve been so far (with regard to coffee).

Sorry to poke a jab at you, but you do recognize the pattern right?

Anyhow, it’s all good.
It’s important to not take *life* too seriously–or *this post* for
that matter.

Best to you,
Steven

>>>I appreciate your comments about cofe.
>>>If you right I will go another round with this.
>>>But if it going to be worse, I drink alot,
>>>then probably my aversion against the adictal
>>>behaviour will increase and perhaps I realise
>>>to stop completely.

Well, I don’t recommend drinking it to excess
to “kill the urge”. It could ruin your health to such a
degree it takes you back a couple of years of progress with
your health. This would be bad, as you’ve come so far.
Don’t do something like that, just to gain courage to stop.
Your health is too important. Plus you risk creating
a mind-body split as you develop complete aversion to it, but
at the same time due to frequent heavy use, you’ve created a
habitual conditioning to continue. Then you will suffer some
traumas as you have two sides of yourself at war . . . and you
would have this problem on top of a worsened health situation.
If you don’t have the courage to leave it behind right now for whatever
reason, it would be better to stay “trapped” in the cycle until
you can gather the courage to leave it behind and the lack
of interest in continuing than to do such a radical thing.
Just my opinion of course 🙂

>>>The decission about taking an licentiate degree or not
>>>is not at all easy. I want to do it. It is a way to develope
>>>my mathematical skill and also programming. I want to do it
>>>but not do it when tired all the time.

I understand this feeling completely. I’m currently working
on my PhD, and I’ve thought numerous times about quitting. It’s
sort of too stressful of a lifestyle. I often question the point
or the value in anything that requires a person to accept that
level of stress. In some ways, I admire the “lowly” janitor that
has a “simple” job that, while it may not pay well, doesn’t have
associated stresses that linger. When he quits work at the end of the day,
he’s done with his job. I, however, am not. As I’m sure you’ve
seen, when you are in the academic environment, in a way you are
NEVER done. You always have work to do when at home. It sort of
never ends. This can affect you in many subtle ways over a period
of time. It’s the volume of work, it’s the working to exhaustion,
and the “never really being able to rest” concept that’s the problem–
not the level of interest in the material. So you enjoy your work
and like the idea of a higher degree, but you don’t want the
situation I mentioned–especially when your health is not good.

So anyway, I totally understand. One part of you wants to do it now,
while the other part needs some time to get better.

Not to discourage you in any way from pursuing the licentiate
(or even a PhD) some day, but I can honestly say that if I knew
back when I had a master’s, just how stressful, miserable, and long
the road is to get the PhD, I don’t think I would have gone for it.
The only thing that keeps me working now (by a thin thread, I might add),
is that I think I may only have about two years left–I think.

>>>The thing is that I
>>>enjoy being a teacher and I feel it gives me alot energy back.
>>>But in the long run I will enjoy working at a low level
>>>theoretically. I think the time will come to do the licentiate
>>>in the future, either I will be tired of my teaching situation
>>>or my energy level will increase so that I feel now is it time
>>>to do this. The area I do the master thesis in is rather hot
>>>right now and I think it will be for the next decade or so.
>>>There are also wery few students in Sweden for the moment reading
>>>subject related to it. Just a few people every year. Yes the risk
>>>is of course that when ready to do it the chanse is gone. But the
>>>risk taking it is that I not get back my health. My primal goal
>>>is my health and I have decided that my life chooises always should
>>>take that in to acount before anything else, as fear for not
>>>having the possibility to do the licentiate in the future.
>>>That fear comes from a deeper fear not to have creative and
>>>stimulating work but boring ones, as I have had sometimes in
>>>the past. I think I have good chanses to find things that
>>>stimulate me even if not taking the licentitate and the fear
>>>is irrelevant. later year I have been following the flow
>>>regarding work and studies better than before, that is the
>>>key to create stimulating work situations around myself I think.

Just do what you feel is right, and don’t worry about consequences.
If you decide not to pursue anything more now, and it is meant to be
that you do so, then it will happen later on naturally. If it’s not meant
to happen, it won’t. You sort of have to trust the universe that
it knows what it’s doing, and that anything that happens, it is doing
ultimately for your benefit and growth.

>>>I ve got a message from the field more concreataly a dream.
>>>The message is that the ressession the world is going into
>>>will be deeper and longer than most people included economists believe.

I think that’s probably very true.

>>>This could be a signal on starting the licentiate
>>>when there is money to my payment. But resoning in
>>>another direction it could be a signal to take the
>>>work that exists for me right now, as long as there are any.

I wouldn’t use outside reasons to decide, because they are not
operating from your core axis. Just look within, then you’ll know.

>>>Taking the teacher job increases my income also so that
>>>I can afford more terapy. I have alot of ideas of what to do
>>>and to be able to try them out it is better right now to earn the money.
>>>Something like this is my reasoning about the situation.
>>>Of course the most important is not the logical explanations,
>>>somewhere inside of me there is a gut feeling of what is right.
>>>I realy have that feeling right now on my decission, but sit might change.

Just follow your intuition, and you’ll be OK.
Also, keep in mind that whenever you feel torn between two
different directions, the solution might actually be to do *neither*
exactly, but to do something else that is, in fact, somewhere in between.
I’ve found this latter to be case so many times, even though it’s usually
hard to see how to do this (since the brain is locked into an either-or)

S