Feel Better Blog

iStock/chameleonseye There you are sitting at your desk. You glance at the clock: 2:45pm, plenty of time to complete this email, you think, before you have to go to that important meeting at 3pm. You finally click on the send button and check the clock: 3:05pm, you’re late. Happens to us all, but for you, is it all too frequent?  Or you might find yourself standing there, staring into the refrigerator trying to recall exactly what it was that you came to retrieve. We’ve all been there. But for some it can happen multiple times a day along with a seemingly eternal search for keys, wallet, phone or glasses all of which you may occasionally discover in the refrigerator instead of the milk carton that’s slowly warming on your countertop.  These are just a couple of examples that might indicate a weakness in a person’s executive skills. This post is about how executive skills, stress and my ongoing project all fit together. What are executive skills? You might have already heard o...

iStock.com/bigmikephoto Approximately a quarter of a century ago I was in a car with several friends driving around Cornwall, England, one of my favourite parts of the world. It was a beautiful, sunny day and the windows were down, and just as we came to a halt at a set of traffic lights, a bumble bee flew in through the passenger window. According to the statistics published by the UK’s Department for Transport in 2011, there were 1,901 deaths on the roads of the United Kingdom. In comparison, the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation's annual report from 2011, bee and wasp stings account for approximately the same number of deaths in the UK as terrorism, around 5 per year (apologies, no more political stuff, I promise). With blatant disregard for these statistics that wouldn’t be published for more than a decade later, my good friend in the driving seat, a 6’4 physically healthy rugby player who, to the best of my knowledge, is not allergic to bee stings, shifted the ca...

A long time ago, I read a wonderful book called the Tau of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff. It explains the Tauism philosophy via the behaviour and actions of Winnie the Pooh as well as the other characters in Pooh’s universe.  It occurred to me recently, while studying Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, that the various Cognitive Distortions might map neatly on to those same characters and this might be a simple memorable way to understand these distortions.  However, a Google search tells me that this is not an original thought at all and such a post, albeit focused on the character Eeyore, has already been written on this: Marissa Lee - Cognitive Distortions With Eeyore Maybe one day, after a bit more CBT practise, I'll have a go at the timid character Piglet who labels himself so very small and weak, the feigned superiority of Owl who is anxious that the fact he can't actually read is never discovered, or the egotistical overconfidence of Tigger who cognitively distorts himself into cri...

One of the things that has struck me in the past few years is how much of a symptomatic overlap there is between a wide array of mental health disorders and syndromes. One such symptom is the Impossible Task that I’ve seen described as a symptom of depression, a symptom of anxiety and a symptom of ADHD. The Impossible Task could be anything: going to the bank, refilling a prescription, making your bed, checking your email, paying a bill. From the outside, its sudden impossibility makes ZERO sense. — M. Molly Backes (@mollybackes) August 28, 2018 Impossible Tasks are small every-day simple tasks that everyone, including the person experiencing the problem, knows are not difficult but are surrounded by an invisible but impenetrable barrier preventing their completion. They are generally very mundane such as making a doctor’s appointment, taking out the garbage or cleaning your desk. This impenetrable barrier can take on many different compositions including: The expectation of signific...

“I find it hard to believe you are leaving just to build a crappy task list” I spent nearly all of the previous decade taming the chaos of a successful online dating system, namely PlentyofFish. I joined a very small tech team in 2011 and together we learned the hard way how to turn a startup into a mature software development shop. In those early days we all wore multiple hats and spent much of our time putting out fires and averting disaster. In the years to follow we expanded (and incessantly reorganised) the team and introduced (and frequently circumvented) new process. Scaling the software was trivial, scaling the operation, not so easy. In the latter half of the decade, PlentyofFish was acquired by the Match Group and I accepted two new challenges. The first was to join the executive team with a grand new Chief Architect title, and the second was to begin work on tearing apart the monolithic system we wrestled with each day, and attempting to rebuild it as a set of event-driv...