I'm going to visualise myself doing better visualisations.

This week was fairly uneventful. I did a quite a lot of cycling. I have had some physiotherapy for my hip.

As this has been a pretty quiet week, I thought I'd have a wee ramble about visualisation. This is not so much going to take the form of me giving my top visualisation tips (I don't have any, when it comes to visualisation I am much better at predicting disaster than I am at Positive Mental Attitude). So, it will be more a bit of a muse on the topic.

I started thinking about visualisation for a few reasons. Firstly, because I have noticed myself visualising both positive and negative outcomes in the last few weeks and because I have been watching 'Run For Glory' - a programme about unfit people training to run the London marathon. Last week they were discussing visualisation techniques.

Visualisation comes in a number of different forms. For example, when I was younger I used to do a lot of gymnastics and we used to have to visualise ourslves performing many unlikley manoeuvres without visualising crash landing or the need to ping the back of your leotards (I used to lose a lot of points in competition for precisely this nervous habit).

When I'm going up a particularly arduous hill on my bike I visualise myself at the top of it and when I'm coming down a particularly arduous hill after a days hillwalking I visualise myself in the chip shop.

However, like one of the (not very) hopefuls on 'Run for Glory', I do tend to say "I'll try..." rather than "I will...". I find it hard to visualise things working out and all too easy to predict disaster.

I am a great one for scenarios of disaster, I find myself walking down the street imagining the most unlikely sequence of events usually culminating in some kind of accident. Great if you're trying to write the plots for a soap opera but not really a recipe for a happy life.

For example, if I'm in an underground station I might imagine someone tripping on something as they pass me, falling into and pushing me off the edge of the platform, I land and injure myself in such a way that I am unable to get back onto the platform before the train comes. This is not an active thing, it is just what my mind does when it is not sufficiently occupied: daymares rather than daydreams. I might idly picture 5 or 6 such events in any day. These mental ramblings are in no way related to panic attacks (although I'm not great in the underground it is true) but they do probably show a general pessimism.

Even when life is going relatively well, I can never really imagine staying happy for very long or achieving the things that I want to achieve. If I think about something and I can't picture myself doing it, then I tend not to try, be it a job, a relationship or even just a shot in a game of darts. This wasn't the way things were when I was younger, up until I left university it seemed that I would decide I wanted something, convince myself I would get it and that was the way things ended up.


Obviously, you can't have everything you want nor everything you wish for, but it might be better if I didn't spend quite so much of my time predicting the worst.

So, I am going to visualise myself doing better visualisations.


Week commencing 27/03/06

Medication: Hardly any at all other than a lot of cycling.
Exercise: 6.5 hrs at least.
Alcohol: 5
Anxiety: Pretty low.
Anxiety Level (0-10): 1
Number of Panic Attacks: 0
Severity of Panic Attack (0-5): NA
Depression: Much improved on the previous week.
Depression Level (0-5): 2
Mania: Not noticeable mania.
Mania Level (0-5): 0


Summary

A pretty stable, uneventful week. A few nights of slightly weird dreams, other than that nothing to report.