No stress until the new year?

I am finally listening to my advisor, I'm sure he'd be glad to know, and I'm going to try to have a stress-free rest of the year. Well, low-stress rest of the year.

This is going to be hard work on my part. Really. I have gotten into the very bad habit of using stress and deadlines to motivate my work. I have work to do for the next 2.5 months which requires that I work steadily, but I really don't have to be stressed about it. I'm trying to retrain myself.

I did a good job of not being particularly stressed this past week. Except that I'm have some weird brain farts, which I presume are due to hormones or sleep deprivation or my brain rewiring itself (brains supposedly shrink about 6% in pregnancy, though this is all based on ventricle size and . . . well, I'm not the sure the science really stacks up. But it returns by 6 months to pre-pregnancy size). I have always had a problem accessing words while speaking, especially nouns, but it has become ridiculously bad recently and I'm having difficulty writing - I'll think one thing (like, "the best") and type something entirely different ("these") which is really slowing down my writing. I'm making a concerted effort to reinforce words - I'll explicitly look up terms I've forgotten but wanted to use, for instance.

I've decided one strategy is to refocus my primary objective for the next few months. It should be "hang out with babies and enjoy it," but that really is most enjoyable when balanced with other things. I've decided my primary objective for the next few months is to be good to my body post-pregnancy and post-dissertation - I got aerobic exercise 5 days this past week and managed to eat salad 3 days. Go me! How can I always forget that exercise makes me a nicer person?

My other plan is to set reasonable work goals for each week and then spend my energy doing random other stuff that is not work. So hard. The hard part is just getting it done and not screwing around so that it suddenly becomes a deadline. And when I get the week's tasks done, I am supposed to just do other thing. Turing did help me steam clean the couch last week (disgusting!) which hasn't happened for two years and I've been playing with my fancy new sewing machine.

One of my tasks for today is to get the 6-9 month sized clothing out the basement. Ack. Stop it, Huxley! You're growing up too fast already!