Activities of daily living Puns

i’m finding a lot of solace in not having to complete cleaning & selfcare tasks or do them consistently. it’s not realistic, but doing some things sometimes is.

i don’t have to clean the entire bathroom if i start, some cleaning is good. i don’t have to do all the dishes, some dishes is enough. i don’t have to brush/floss my teeth any more than i do, some is better than less. i don’t have to sweep the floor everyday, just sweeping whenever i think of it is fine.

it isn’t all or nothing & there is no wrong way or failure if i make the rules. a little work all the time, as i can, & making sure i cover the bases as i go keeps things from building up. for me, it works well to focus on cleaning up yucky, frequently used, & inconvenient.

maybe i can’t stay organized by any other person’s standards, whether it’s due to narcolepsy + a trauma d/o, or just balancing life & chores, etc. - but i can set my own standards & hold myself accountable for what’s realistic & that’s enough.

I know PhD students work really long hours. Some say they work 80 to 100 hrs a week. I was wondering how do they manage to do the daily activities of living.

PhD students who work long hours, how much time do you spend on activities other than work every day and every week. What does you routine look like? Please include at least the following items with the amount of time spent in each and the time from when to when:

• Sleep: How many hours and from when to when

• Grooming: Showering, brushing teeth, face care, shaving etc.

• Food preparation and cooking

• Laundry, cleaning and maintaining home

• Recreation: social media usage, hangouts/parties/social gatherings, hobbies

• Chores that can only be done during workday: post office, banking when you need to be physically present, doctors appointments, getting a plumber to fix the house and so on.

• Exercise

• Time for significant other, family, dating etc.

Bonus questions: Why is your work hour so long anyway? What do you do that needs so much time? How is the pace and volume of your work, how much multitasking and overwhelming is it?

Hello Fellow Painiacs,

I have been in chronic pain for over 7 years as a result of being crushed under a truck at work (no back up beep sound). I’m afflicted by CRPS/RSD, POTS, depression & anxiety, PTSD and insomnia/OSA. After many surgeries and injections and ablation and medications and allllll the things that we do to feel better, I am finally having a small measure of relief from ketamine infusions. I’m finding myself with a little more focus, a tiny bit more energy and a strong desire to improve what I can about my environment and my daily life.

I’d love to know what you do to keep track of your activities of daily living and household chores. I’m also trying to get better at managing mail/email, organizing my schedule, and staying on top of paperwork, phone calls and finances.

Here are some general questions:

• Do you have morning or evening routines you’d like to share?

• Do you have a daily or weekly schedule you follow?

• How do you increase what you’re doing without burning out?

• How many goals do you set at a time and how do you keep track/stay accountable?

• Is this stuff all in your head, on paper, in apps? Do you give yourself rewards or punishments based on completion?

• Do you have any good hacks for making these draining-yet-necessary daily tasks easier (ex. meal prepping, breaking down chores into little bite size pieces)?

I don’t want to hear the standard pick yourself up by your bootstraps type of advice, because pain still limits my every move. I know you understand this and that there is some amazing knowledge and cool ideas in this group. Thank you!

I am 29 and male and I live in Bangladesh. I have OCD, Depression and Social Anxiety and I am out of home for work from 7:45am to 9:15pm+ five days a week Sunday to Thursday. Office is from 9:30am till 7:30pm or even 8pm and the rest is commute. I wake up at 6:45am and go to sleep at 11:45pm, although for the past 3 months I have started getting insomnia sleeping 3-4.5 hours or 1-2 hours a night.

Now, my psychologist tells me that I must learn how to do activities of independant living even with this time schedule and all my mental health conditions. For example I need to do my own shopping, cooking, laundry, cleaning, all other chores and everything, also socializing, recreation etc----all within this time frame. He says, that everyone in my country works such long hours and still maintains a healthy life and manages to do all the activities of independent living. PhD students also work 80 hours a week.

The thing is even with such low hours of work and out of home I can't find time for the activities of daily living. Can someone suggest a routine on how to be independent given my hours and life?

28F, in psychiatric care of some type for the last 16 years and my executive dysfunction and orthostatic intolerance greatly affect my ability to function on a daily basis.

Of course it’s medical and psychiatric institutions that caused some of my trauma, but I feel like I am reliving trauma everyday due to my health issues and disability. For years, I have felt like I’ve been drowning despite heavily engaging in mental healthcare, healthcare, and trying to make changes, empower myself, and find my own answers.

I couldn’t access the proper resources for an in-home aide with the help of a casemangager for various reasons and having homehealth come to my house and treating me like a geriatric cardiac patient and disregarding the actual reason for my referral triggered me into an episode.

This isn’t something that would be adequately helped with even 5 therapy sessions per week. I need help taking care of myself. I know long term psychiatric hospitalization was defunded, and I don’t know what to do. I’m also terrified that checking into a psychiatric hospital for a month would bankrupt my husband. If I divorce my husband, he would be sent back to his home country for volatilizing the terms of his conditional green card. He is my biggest supporter and he’d be forced to leave the country.

I don’t know how to continue like this. Despite taking it day by day, I am getting worse. I see the difference in my old calendar and photos.

Yesterday, we tried to do something nice by swimming in the quiet lake but I felt disturbed that my husband, my partner of 4 years, his face felt unfamiliar and I wondered if I am indeed slipping into dementia.

Trying to predict the next Marvel's Spider-man movie titles.

Forced to "add a filter" to post it.

Hi everyone, I have been seeing doctors for my IBS since 2000, and this has to be one of the most infuriating things I have been told by one of my doctors.

screenshot of message from Dr.: http://imgur.com/8nZcXSH

"Irritable bowel syndrome is not a condition that limits activities of daily living." This is in regards to me asking for excusal of jury duty.

I have been looking for some "scholarly" type articles to respond with - have any of you come across articles that mention the affect IBS has on ADL's? (activities of daily living)

Hi. I am not "officially" diagnosed with StPD yet. But my therapist suggested that I might have StPD, read the symptoms to me, and almost every single one of them was dead on. So I think I do have it.

My problems related to this are myriad (extreme loneliness, social isolation, messiness, ideas of reference, magical thinking - particularly when I was younger - and so on), but the biggest problem I seem to have is not being able to form "good habits" as easily as most people seem to, nor to break "bad habits".

Even to me, it is obvious by now that nobody is going to come in riding on a white horse and solve all of my problems. It will take work to build good habits or break bad ones, I am well aware of that fact. But since, according to the Wikipedia article at least, "strange behavior or appearance" is one of the symptoms of StPD, I feel like I can't be alone here in these difficulties, nor in the desire to overcome them.

So, I want to ask: is anyone else here struggling with Activities of Daily Living (ADLs), and if so, can we provide some form of encouragement to each other to help make a change, which - if you're anything like me - is desperately wanted but all too elusive? Thank you for reading.

EDIT: I am sorry to have to do this, but I feel like I shared quite a bit too much personal info here, and paranoia about it is killing me (and making it harder to actually cope with the symptoms of StPD). So I removed a lot of it. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Did anyone fill this out while on disability or is this an optional form? I am not sure why they would want so many details about my work history, daily activities, etc when my doctor has approved of our disability leave before the baby is born?

Are those your teeth? Yes, I paid a lot for them. They're mine.

Ok so this is embarrassing, but what the hell. I am 38 body age (host age too, nearly 39). Lots of chatter, though, so I'll reiterate: I smoke cigarettes but that's it. I do sometimes drink. I don't use pot or any other illicit drugs associated with dental issues. My prosthodontist said my dental problems likely stemmed from malnutrition coupled with orthodontics along with former bulimia (as well as prolonged vomiting from gallbladder disease).

Sorry, I just had years of people judging me, thinking I was on meth or something when my teeth were destroyed from actual medical problems.

In any case, the current problem. I had my teeth pulled and got dentures several years ago. Every morning I have to brush my dentures and put them back in. But regardless of whether I sleep with them in or take them out, I'm met with the same problem where 9 times out of 10 putting them in causes flashbacks to other things being put in my mouth and I start gagging and vomiting.

It's caused me to be late for work, so serious issue. I've tried doing it first thing as well as after being up for a while and having coffee. I know the trick about grinning as well as the pressure point by my thumb.

I need my mornings to not be a surefire trigger. I can't keep going into the office like this.

Also I know some alter(s?) can do it without gagging and vomiting, just like some can swallow pills (I can't). But I don't know how to make them do it instead of me so that we can save the 20 minutes this usually takes. I tried asking, but no one answered.

Ideas?

Look nice and be comfortable for yourself, before you look good for others. Strangers/acquaintances usually don't even remember seeing you by the time they get home for the night, and, if they do, they usually don't take your hair or makeup into account but, rather, what you were doing. If someone does care enough to remember you at the end of the day, chances are they love you and see your true beauty no matter what you wore or looked like that day, anyway. Try to spend the hours or money that you usually put into clothes, shopping, makeup, cosmetic surgeries, reputation-keeping events or whatever it is towards your own well being and experience or others' needs, because that is what is truly important at the end of the day.