Shadow Boxing, Rounds 3 and 4

Ninety days in, give or take a couple of days.

So far, no one has commented that I have radically changed. In a lot of ways, I don't really "feel" any different now. The only obvious sign I've seen is when I take the medication later than normal. that leads me to having very restless nights and occasional insomnia. It has also led to some crazy vivid dreams, but again, I think it's because my brain is still a bit "amped", and trying to discharge. If I take the medication before 9:00 a.m., I don't have these issues.

Much of the initial experience of "appetite suppressant" now seems to have faded as well. I find I'm not fiend-ing for food, but the whole "work an entire day and get home and think to myself 'oh yeah, I forgot to eat today'...", that's not so much a problem any longer.

The interesting thing is that my wife and kids now know the days that I don't take the medications. There have been a few weekends where I've decided to not take it, and by Sunday afternoon, I'm being reminded of snappishness or drifting attention span. My wife has, a few times, asked me if there is any detriment to me taking them every day. When I said "no", she followed on with, "well, then please do so!" (LOL!)

The definite biggest change has been the change to my energy cycle. I feel a lot less inclined to wake up at 4:00 a.m. now, though I can if I need to work on something intense. I still do it once a week, but I'm OK with just doing it once a week right now. Standard wake-up at 6:00 a.m. feels very natural now. Most of the time, no alarm clock needed. In return, it feels as though I've gotten better with that "low ebb" I often felt between 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. Also, provided I have not taken the pills too late in the day, a bed time of 10:00 p.m. feels perfect. It makes me a lame date, to say the least, but again, I guess we can work around that.

I've been experimenting with a 25 minute time limit for many things lately. Not a true Pomodoro in the sense of 25 minutes on and 5 minutes off, but "you have 25 minutes. Can you accomplish this goal in that time?" My reasoning for this is that I want to make sure that I don't overly fixate or get too caught up in things that end up taking way more time than I intend to (my recent garage adventure is a perfect example; what should have been a two to three hour job, tops, turned into a 36 hour total time "engineering project". Granted, I had fun doing it, but I kept finding myself getting into the minutiae of how to do different things and make sure they were working right. Not that I'm complaining, I love the more useful garage, I just wished I could have done it sooner without so many "interesting" side trips.

Anxiety levels have dropped and for the most part, stayed down. I like that change, a lot. I hope it holds.

More to come, to be sure :).