One of the things I’ve been working on … you know, one of my side projects (with all the spare time I have these days), is designing a database to capture and track the flow (ebb and tide, rise and fall), of emotional changes during an on-going bout with a cancer like I have.
My interest in this has become intense over the last several weeks because I really believe this is something a person cannot see on their own, and because of that, it’s almost impossible to work on, or improve your emotion health … or for that matter, simply understanding it.
Your emotional well being at a time when something like cancer strikes, is as important as the treatment the doctors are giving you … I believe that. But it’s hard to track what’s going on over a period of time without the ability to look back and see how things are changing.
By mining the data that’s recorded in the database, patterns can appear that are effecting your emotional well being without you ever realizing it. Sleep patterns, depression patterns, stress, can all be seen in a graph. Laid out so you can see what days and times certain emotions are running high, is an important factor in trying to control and understand how your feeling during cancer.
Although I’m not a big believer in the positive attitude thing (a positive attitude will heal you), I am a big believer in having the knowledge and understanding about where things stand and what areas I could improve upon, leading me to a better life quality. The idea of avoiding a stressful thing for example, could lead me to a better day in general … and that’s what I’m looking for.
For example, if I were to find that every Tuesday afternoon was a stressful time for me, it’s gives me something to investigate and hopefully work on reducing that stress.
In a real-life case, I found that one of my medicines worked much, much better, if I took it an hour or more earlier then I had been. The medicine was effecting my appetite in a way that interfered with my family’s meal time. The time I was taking the medicine and the time that we had always had dinner, were in conflict with each other.
Every time I sat down to eat dinner, even if I had just cooked it myself, I just couldn’t eat. If I waited an hour or so longer, my appetite returned. But this effected the rest of the family. Seeing this pattern, helped me adjust a lot of stress out of our household. Being ill is no fun for anyone including your loved ones around you … so any adjustments you can make that can help that, is good for the entire household and your health as well.
The program has a purpose, and a powerful one at that. In the near future I will be revealing parts of this program for you see how it works in real life. The key here is “ask the right questions and you’ll get the right answers” …. More to come about this.
So why did I name this post “The Art of Emotional Health”? Well, besides tracking our emotional health in a database, there are others ways of adjusting and helping our emotional health that have nothing to do with databases, computers or writing software, or anything of that nature.
A friend sent me some recent photos of abstract paintings that I thought I’d share with you. As in looking at any piece of art, and especially abstract art, the artist’s meaning is often not known. Abstract art can be seen by a thousand people and have a thousand interpretations. So we have to say, that the artist’s intent, is as real as is commonly accepted, even if we can’t see or feel it.
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