Burnout Recovery Progress

Why, thanks for asking about how my burnout recovery is going. I don’t know what the cure for burnout is: burn-in? chill-in? chill-out? rebuilding?

I’m still parking the car at the station. This does cost money but I’m not doing it five days a week. And the place I used to be able to park is now jammed with cars and left overnight. Nobody lives on that road. So it’s either park at the station or walk all the way in. And back at the end of a long day. No thank you.

The person who can most frazzle my working life went off on paternity leave, and has now gone on holiday for a fortnight. This is what happens when you have a Higher Power looking after you.

I finished a long and fact-packed presentation about the customers of the business I’m in. It was a personal goal, I used any spare moment I could, I was wondering if I’d ever get it done. But I did, and now people are telling me how much they like it.

Exercise is going well. I’ve learned to forget what I’m doing next when I’m in the gym. Focus on the reps, then the set. I’m trying to get four times a week in. I have abandoned bench press for now. This means I have lost any claim to bro-tude as I don’t do deadlifts or squats either. I’m doing dumb-bell press instead, and I’m sure it’s easier on my nerves. (Bench, squats and deadlift are all exercises which can frak you up badly if you make a bad move. Hence they take a much larger toll on your nervous system than a fairly harmless dumb-bell based exercise.)

I’ve noticed that I feel better if I get to bed at 21:00 rather than 21:30, and even better if it’s 20:30. 20:30 is going too far.

I’m learning not to beat myself up when I don’t immediately do the ironing or the washing up. Chaos is not going to descend if I leave the sheets until a weekday evening.

I had forgotten how restful two or three episodes of a good DVD series can be. I’m still inclined to let one day a week go by with scraps of this and that and far too much You Tube. Maybe I can work on that now.

And I’m slowly coming out of my scuttle - which is what we should call the routine that takes us from home to work to gym to home without ever stopping in the middle to do something random like go to a film or stop at a restaurant. That’s going to take longer.

Still haven’t beaten that afternoon slump. Still experimenting.

On the other items, morale at work is not good. The office still sucks. My social support is still close to zero.

I took a week off at the end of August, a lot of which was about finally coming to terms with passing what I thought was going to be retirement, and yet having to carry on working. I’m pretty much over that, and over myself as an “old man”. I will meditate on coping with getting older in another post. It’s a subject on which vast amounts of horse-shit has been dropped.

Why It's Harder To Lose Weight Now I'm Older

One reason is that my BMR decreases. The Basal Metabolic Rate is the energy I use to keep my core temperature up to 37C, handle basic stuff like breathing, digestion, liver function, making new blood and body cells, muscle growth, maintaining body posture, and so on. The BMR of a teenager is high, which is why teenagers can eat so much and not gain anything, while if I ate the same, I would put on pounds. Overnight. The older I get, the lower my BMR, so my energy intake has to decrease over time just to keep the balance.

The other is that it takes effort to lose weight. Self-control takes energy. We have to put our bodies into a different metabolic state so that we burn body fat (ketogenesis) , rather than the calories from the food we have just eaten. That takes effort, and it’s possible that not everyone can work the trick. I have to do early nights, so I don’t start eating last thing. Avoiding eating triggers - TV anyone? Getting through the occasional period of hunger pangs and dizziness - not easy if I'm trying to produce a tedious but detailed data request.

The last time I lost weight was nearly ten years ago (!) and it was an effort fuelled by the fear of having my GP prescribe filthy drugs with names ending in “statin” and “formin”. Over the years, the weight has come back on, but with a different body composition, so I don’t have the high(er) blood sugar that went with the last time I weighed this much.

I have tried to lose some weight now and again, but usually I get a cold after a couple of weeks, or something happens and I can’t keep the calorie-restriction going. I don’t have the fear of God to put in me. 97kgs is a floor I keep bouncing off.

What I’ve realised now, is that If I want to lose weight, via calorie-restriction and exercise, it has to be the only thing I’m doing, other than going to work and routine housework stuff. As soon as I try to do anything else that requires concentration, I fall off the weight wagon.

And like I’ve said countless times before: I’ve given up drinking, smoking, and wenching. You want I should give up chocolate as well?

Read this post from the always-honest Nick Krauser https://krauserpua.com/2019/04/11/how-i-lost-13-kilos-in-7-months/ about his weigh-loss attempts at 43. I endorse every single one of the final ten thoughts. I quote point four:

I’d never taken diet or weights seriously before. You absolutely must make it your first priority in life to make big fast improvement. If I’d had a job, or been daygaming, I’d have too little willpower remaining to expend in the gym and resisting bad food.

If you don’t believe me or Krauser, try it yourself.

This Post and the Next One Cancelled Due to Heat and Holiday

Three songs with That Early Eighties Sound

According to some academic, Eighties music is the most similar-sounding of all the decades. I present three examples:

Joe Jackson, Stepping Out


Trevor Horn with Dollar up front, Hand held In Black and White


And finally, and you may need to sit down for this, Kajagoogoo. Yes, you heard. Don’t watch the video, listen to the music.


What was it? That sound? Not all the songs had it, but most of the best ones did. It has a space in it, wide open chords, a rock-solid rhythm with a hint of swing, and for me, it’s best illustrated by the instrumental section of Too Shy from about 2:05 to 2:40. The repetition is minimalism, the keyboard chords and other sounds are there to help you drift away wondering about what might happen if the shy girl comes a little closer.

After the turmoil, inflation, and general bleakness of the Seventies, people were starting to think that their lives could actually be fun again. That Eighties sound captured the exact mix of optimism and caution we felt, and provided the soundtrack to the good times we had from time to time

When The Blogger Says...

When the blogger says they’re not posting as much because they’re working on a project.

Now I know that feeling.

It has to do with my interest in the philosophy of mathematics. You try making sense of Riemann's PhD thesis on the foundations of complex function theory. I am, slowly, because I'm not Gauss. It's taking up all my background processing capability.

Magnetic Crane Grab

What else would you leave behind when closing down a factory that clearly was rolling steel plate? A crane with magnetic grabs. Because who would you sell it to?

Look Through Any Window...

Which is the title of a song by the Hollies. What I'd love is if the couple at the table were talking about... oh, anything but what you know they're talking about, which is work. Notice how everyone is smiling. Clear blue skies and warm weather do that to people.

(I'm honestly running out of things to say about the human condition. Someone fast forward to November 1st. Please.)