bearing blog

The importance of taking temperatures.

We have had a lot of feelings around here for the last two years.  Feelings of loss, feelings of anger, feelings of relief from time to time. 

In that time, two of my kids have been diagnosed with disorders that bear the names of feelings:  one with anxiety, one with depression.  I've become very caught up in all things "feeling."  There are medications for these conditions, of course, but those don't get you there on their own; therapy is part of it too, sometimes for the individual kids, sometimes including one or both of us parents; occasionally Mark and I have had a session with the child's therapists and without the child. 

Therapy means lots of talk about feelings.

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One of my young people, the anxious one, has been given a diagram called a "feelings thermometer."  I'm told that it goes by other names, with the most clinical-buzzword-sounding being SUDS:  the Subjective Units of Distress Scale (Wikipedia).   

One version of the emotional temperature scale for a younger child.

It's basically a form of "On a scale of one to ten (or zero to ten), how anxious are you feeling right now?" 

You would think that something this simple would not be very helpful, but I've been amazed at how much it's helped. The more reading I do about ways that clinicians use the scale, the more I try to use it in everyday conversations. 

I suspect that one of the reasons it's helpful in our family is just that it yields a number within a number range, which even if it is entirely subjective, is a landscape that...certain people in the family... find to be comforting and reliable, like a well-blazed hiking trail.  

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Notwithstanding the quirks of our comfort zones:  it also gives us a low-impact way to inquire about the well-being of the anxious young person. 

All types of measurement change the value being measured, but some do it more than others.  At the beginning of our journey from "this kid is a worrier" to "we need help if we are going to help this kid" to "this kid is in treatment for an anxiety disorder", any attempt to ask about anxiety tended to create more anxiety. 

Take a seemingly simple question like "How are you doing today" (yes, I know that in many circumstances this question is not perceived as simple).  Sometimes asking it would precipitate a complete meltdown; I think the act of self-examination itself triggered anxiety.   But the number is somehow less weighty, maybe because it doesn't force much engagement with language. 

At first it was difficult for the child in question to nail down the part of the scale, and there was some hemming and hawing, and prompting from us.  But with practice it became a very quick way to check in:  "What's your emotional temperature right now?" gets a numerical response almost right away, with only a few "um"s.

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One thing I found really helpful as I went on reading about how people use the thermometer:   Different parts of the scale call for different kinds of support. 

At the very top of the scale—let's say betwen 8 and 10—the anxious person may be incapable of language-based reasoning.  There's no point in, say, insisting that they just get back to their schoolwork, or that they explain what set them off.  There may not even be a point in trying to talk them down, or reassure them with language.   Instead, depending on what works best with this particular person, it may be time for a cuddle or a hand lightly stroking the back; or an invitation to go to a quiet place and rest, with another or in private; or a suggestion to engage in vigorous activity or in some self-soothing behavior that the young person has practiced and found to work for them in the past.  (more on that below.)

Towards the bottom of the scale—say below 5—even if the anxious person is not totally at peace, they can reason and think and perform tasks, independently or with others.  They can engage in therapy, they can be encouraged to stay on task, they can consciously choose behaviors.  They can also practice deeper relaxation techniques to bring the number lower still.

In the middle, when a moderate amount of stress is being experienced, there is an opportunity to develop self-regulation.  Here is where the young person (as well as their parents!) can learn to notice when the temperature is rising and then do something about it.  Take a break, switch to another task, practice breathing exercises, get up and stretch, try a visualization, get up and fetch something to use as a fidget... all these things are behaviors that have to be learned.  It is here, in the zone of moderate stress, where they can be tried, tested, and practiced; later when the emotional temperature goes through the roof, they can call on these techniques to help bring them down.

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One of the things I have learned by using the emotional temperature scale is that what a kid looks like on the outside is not necessarily a great indicator of what distress level they would report on the inside.  And yes, if you had asked me about this before we were using the scale, I would have said "of course that makes sense, everyone exhibits distress differently." 

But I did not have, then, so much personal experience with how the same person can exhibit distress differently at different times.  A child who appears to be quietly playing a favorite computer game may be, in fact, calm and happy, and often they are.  But a child who appears to be quietly playing a favorite computer game may also be trying desperately to use the computer game to distract from intense internal distress.  A child who is flailing around in the playroom or, grunting with effort, whacking the hanging punching bag with a stick, not answering when called, may be physically expressing anger and distress.  Or they may be absorbed in an imaginary game of swordfighting.   

I often tell the kids, "I can't read your mind; you have to tell me."  I regularly need to remind myself of that as well.

Presenting as imperfect.

I'm so glad that Anne at Preventing Grace gave me this kind shout out in her piece If I Work Hard Enough I Win the other day:

... I am about to turn in all my school reports. And I have made a detailed book list for the fall. And two friends were chatting away about bullet journaling (which turns out not to be at all what I imagined). And then Bearing Blog wrote about how she divvies up her time and keeps her mental health always in view. (Oh how I love Bearing Blog and her calm, rational way of thinking.) And it reminded me that, when I’m in the thick of a school year, I do get into an ugly, constraining loop of not being able to stop working.

In fact, sometimes when I am on holiday I am not able to stop working. And sometimes, when it’s a nice, pretty day outside, I am not able to stop working. Last year I spent most of our sunny weeks away cleaning, picking up, and neglecting the stack of books I had brought to read....

So, obviously, as per usual, of course, necessarily, as I vow every year, I don’t want to do this again. I want to find The Perfect Organizational System that will remove entirely the existential gaping maw of failure. Because, of course, if I just do all the work, I won’t fail. Right. I mean, that’s what it comes down to. It’s me just working hard enough and not forgetting anything that is the difference between life and death.

I was going to leave a comment at Anne's blog along the lines of "You really should say, 'Bearing Blog wrote about how she TRIES to keep her mental health always in view,'" but then I remembered my own advice to myself in the linked blog post, the one where I resolved to blog before I get any work done or do anything else.  Well, there was more to it than that, but  anyway, I should blog before I write the key to the chemistry test, and if I leave the comment at her blog first, my thought will be spent.

(One of my problems is that my mental health is always in view.  I am forever craning my neck to see over and around it.)

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At any rate, today I want to share a post from the excellent physics blog, Gravity and Levity.

Momentary digression.   I first started blogging in 2005, not quite a year after I finished my Ph.D. in chemical engineering.  It was probably right about the time that I was deciding to hang up the idea of switching to technical editing and developing a free-lance network.  And I hadn't yet gotten to  the place where I would accept that I wasn't ever going to get around to cutting and polishing the three publishable pieces of my thesis and shopping them to the appropriate journals, a place of acceptance that I wouldn't finally reach until my academic adviser passed away about two years later.

At the time, I thought that I might do quite a lot of science blogging, in between the recipes and the self-help, commentary on news articles and the like, and so I read some science blogs.  But as time went on, I got bored with all but a few.  It turns out that I don't have time to write commentary on all the Science News that passes by the world's eyes day after day, shining for a moment, inspiring a burst of chatter, then passing back into oblivion.  

It also turns out that a steady diet of Science News is extremely irritating -- maybe not to everybody with research training and a grasp of mathematics and statistics, but at least to me.  Oh my.  I don't even want to go there right now, lest I lose the whole point of my post, but Science Journalism is bad.  It's not all bad, but so much of it is very bad.  And Science Facebook is also very bad.  Painful, even.   Ok, I don't want to get into this, but just so I can be a little less vague, the features that bug me the most are 

• Identifying non-science (e.g., engineering, technology, and nature-education) as "science"
• The disturbing lack of a word other than "science" for fields in which reproducible experimentation is impossible, meaning that those fields' findings acquire an undeserved aura of certainty and universality that should be reserved for physical law
• Identifying the policy opinions of a person who is employed as a scientist as "science"
• Appeals to authority -- the logical-fallacy form, that is
• Ascribing magical certainty to anything called "science"
• Statistics deployed for any reason by people who do not understand them
• The entire system of publish-or-perish and peer review, which discourages negative results and which relentlessly pressures working scientists to get "good" results, thereby undermining the scientific method

There's also the problem of specialization.  I only studied in depth one little tiny area in materials science and engineering.  I can't comment with a post-graduate level of expertise on anything else, except for the general skills that one develops along the way (mostly math and procedure).  

Anyway, the gist of that is that I don't read many science blogs anymore.  I do read some scientists' blogs, though, because people who write generally and well and bring their perspective as a complete nerd to whatever interests them are the people I like to hang out with, virtually speaking.

Ahem.

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So, back to Brian's recent post at Gravity and Levity, Toward a Culture of Tolerating Ignorance.   He begins with some words about impostor syndrome, and then dives into the practical advice, which I'll quote at length.

There is one practice that I have found very helpful in my pursuit of a scientific career, and which I think is worth mentioning.  It’s what I call fostering a “culture of tolerating ignorance.”

Let me explain.

As a young (or even old) scientist, you continually feel embarrassed by the huge weight of things you don’t know or don’t understand.  Taking place all around you, among your colleagues, superiors, and even your students, are conversations about technical topics and ideas that you don’t understand or never learned.  And you will likely feel ashamed of your lack of knowledge.  You will experience some element of feeling like a fraud, like someone who hasn’t studied hard enough or learned quickly enough.  You will compare yourself, internally, to the sharpest minds around you, and you will wonder how you were allowed to have the same profession as them.

These kinds of feelings can kill you, and you need to find a way of dealing with them.

I have found that the best strategy is to free yourself to openly admit your ignorance.  Embrace the idea that all of us are awash in embarrassing levels of ignorance, and the quickest way to improve the situation is to admit your ignorance and find someone to teach you.

In particular, when some discussion is going on about a topic that you don’t understand, you should feel free to just admit that you don’t understand and ask someone to explain it to you.

If you find yourself on the other side of the conversation, and someone makes such an admission and request, there are only two acceptable responses:

1. Admit that you, also, don’t understand it very well.
2. Explain the topic as best as you can.

Most commonly, your response will be some combination of 1 and 2.  You will be able to explain some parts of the idea, and you will have to admit that there are other parts that you don’t understand well enough to explain.  But between the two of you (or, even better, a larger group) you will quickly start filling in the gaps in each others’ knowledge.

A culture where these kinds of discussions can take place is a truly wonderful thing to be a part of.  In such an environment you feel accepted and enthusiastic, and you feel yourself learning and improving very quickly.  It is also common for creative or insightful ideas to be generated in these kinds of discussions.  To me, a culture of tolerating ignorance is almost essential for enjoying my job as a scientist.

The enemies of this kind of ideal culture are shame and scorn.  The absolute worst way to respond to someone’s profession (or demonstration) of ignorance is to act incredulous that the person doesn’t know the idea already, and to assert that the question is obvious, trivial, and should have been learned a long time ago.  (And, of course, someone who responds this way almost never goes on to give a useful explanation.)  An environment where people respond this way is completely toxic to scientific work, and it is, sadly, very common.  My suggestion if you find yourself in such an environment to avoid the people who produce it, and to instead seek out the company of people with whom you can maintain enthusiastic and non-scornful conversations.

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Of course, I have two general responses to Brian's post, which you should really go read in its entirety (if only so you can follow the embedded links -- they are also very good -- and read some of the comments).

The first response is the almost obligatory, "I wish I had read and assimilated this before I started graduate school."

 High school, even.   I emerged into adulthood with a defensive habit of pretending I knew things instead of asking dumb questions or even shutting up and listening, because I feared scorn.  Even though I only had this habit in some contexts, not others, it didn't serve me well in the long term.  (Being able to bullshit very well can be a lucrative skill, but I don't possess that kind, at least not in person.  Maybe Anne's praise is evidence that I can do it in writing a little bit.) 

The second response is that one does not have to be working in academia to put this advice into practice.  Almost any collaborative community in which you find yourself is one in which people have varying levels of knowledge of the subjects at hand.  You can use it at work, in your volunteer groups, in your teams, and in your family.   

Ask questions.  Honor questioning.  The higher your position, the greater your responsibility.  Answer questions.   Eliminate scorn.   

(The hardest part?  Resisting the temptation to conversationally scorn for their ignorance people who are not present, including public figures in the news.  And yet, if you wish to send the message "You are valued, unconditionally, and it is no crime to be ignorant," to impressionable and vunerable people around you, you must demonstrate to them that your tone will be the same even when the vulnerable people are out of the room.)

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There are so many things I didn't have figured out when I was starting out, things I realize now that I wish I could have known then.   It was true about my brief time in academia, and it's true about my longer life making a home and raising children.   But that's the nature of living in time:  you get wiser as you go, and logically that means you must have started out pretty green.  Embracing that logic really does relieve a lot of stress.  

But that, too, is the sort of thing you get better at with practice.

Sunday dinner paradigm shift.

Have I really not ever written a whole post about this? I can't believe it. I must have put everything on Facebook. Well, going to do it now.

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Sunday afternoons wipe me out. If we don't have a planned family fun activity scheduled, I will often wander upstairs right after lunch, lie down for "just a few minutes," and the next thing I know it is 4:30 and I feel like I have been run over by the special truck that comes on Sunday afternoons just to run me over.

And then, of course, it is time to get dinner on the table.

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I like being in charge of cooking. Really, I do; one of the things that makes our life so lovely is that I enjoy cooking, never really get tired of it; I achieve moments of flow in the kitchen, chopping and stirring; I love trying new recipes; I like eating, so it's nice for me that (being the cook) I get to make whatever I feel like eating; I like choosing menus that will fit into our week. The only thing about it that isn't much fun is trying to make the grocery list and menu plan when I am feeling rushed, because then I know I will make suboptimal or boring choices and that makes me less happy than everything being interesting and well-chosen, but it is still okay.

Mark is capable in the kitchen if necessary and has his own little repertoire of things to make when for some reason I am unable to make dinner. Which is great. The kids like his stuff (chilaquiles, bacon-vegetable-tomato spaghetti sauce, the rarely seen lasagna) and so do I.

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We used to use Sunday afternoons for Mark to catch up on household projects and for me to plan my school stuff for the week. Then a few years ago Mark had a sort of -- I don't know -- head-of-household conversion experience and started working on remaking our Sundays to be more restful with more family fun time in them.

This has been a slow change, but it has made a big difference. Saturdays are more busy now -- I do my school planning in the afternoon on Saturdays, and often we have a big housecleaning binge from everyone -- but Sunday afternoons are truly more fun and family-focused. We don't clean the house, just the necessary dishwasher-loading and the like. We take walks sometimes, or naps while the kids do their own thing. I have learned to suppress my inner busy person and just enjoy hanging out, ignoring the sword of Damocles which is things I could be doing right now so that I could relax LATER even BETTER when the things are all done.

Because you know what, the things are never done and if I am going to be restful I have to seize it from the jaws of things that are not yet done.

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Sunday dinner was a sticking point, though. Because you have to eat, and making the dinner was my job.

I remember once (I was pregnant, which is probably definitely relevant) walking into the messy kitchen about 3 pm and bursting into tears because Mark had been insisting that we all relax and have fun on Sunday because it was Sunday and as a result no one had cleaned up anything in the kitchen all day and now I had to MAKE DINNER in the MESSY KITCHEN and everybody got a day of rest but MEEEEEEEE and I don't remember how that ended but I think takeout was involved.

But it all changed soon after the 15-month-old was born almost a month early and just a couple of days before New Year's Eve. We felt deprived of a party, so when I was just starting to sit at the table for dinner again -- maybe 10 days postpartum -- Mark went to the store to buy festive food. He remembered how after a previous birth, his parents had sent us a gift basket from the fancy grocery store, and he bought the kinds of things that were in that basket, and things that pregnant women are supposed to avoid these days. Lox, and several kinds of crackers, and good runny cheese. Cut vegetables with some kind of dip. And fancy salami, maybe proscuitto, and some sweet things too. Party food! We sat around the table, a brand-new family of seven, and devoured cheese and crackers. Probably there was good beer, or maybe some bubbly. It was great. Satisfying. Festive. Special.

And -- this is crucial -- almost no work at all.

It was sitting around that table with the new baby that we had the epiphany we had been waiting for. This was how Sunday dinner needed to be, for as long as we were busy raising young children. It was the solution to the puzzle that had eluded us for so long.

Making food from scratch is not restful enough. Leftovers (at least on their own) are not feast-ive enough. But bought hors d'oeuvres -- enough for everyone to get their fill -- are both festive and easy! Problem solved!

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Now Sunday dinner prep looks like this: At least two kinds of crackers (even if it's just saltines and Triscuits) are set out in bowls, and sometimes a take-and-bake baguette is popped in the oven and sliced. Someone slices salami (or summer sausage); someone arranges 2 or 3 kinds of cheese, usually a mix of fairly inexpensive cheddars and goudas appreciated by the kids, with one good cheese appreciated by me. If we have leftover deli meats of other kinds, those go out as well. (An alternative to the sausage-and-cheese platter: lox and cream cheese on cocktail rye. Mm.) We keep a small stock of jars and cans of fancy olives and preserves and spreads and pâtés and things, which we add to whenever we happen to see something interesting while out and about, and one or two of those goes on the table. We cut up peppers and celery and carrots and radishes, and put them out for dipping, either with bought hummus or with good olive oil, salt, and pepper -- a trick we learned in Rome. We open wine or beer, and the kids may have juice boxes or soda if they have some. It takes maybe 20 minutes to put on the table and is not hard to clean up.

And it feels like Sunday.

We call this kind of dinner "plate," borrowing a word from the family of a friend. I think smorgasbord would be a better word, but plate has stuck.

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We can't keep the work at bay forever. After dinner on Sunday it's back to the grindstone, cleaning up and prepping for the week. But I feel like we've finally hit the sweet spot.

A lot of "wow this is the best solution ever to our problem" doesn't stick. I post about my life-changing new idea with enthusiasm, my readers tell me I am a genius [polishes nails on lapel], and then after a month or a season or a new baby I give up, slink away, and never speak of my formerly great idea again.

i have a feeling this one is robust enough to stick, at least as long as we can afford cheese and crackers.

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