Supporting my wife who lives with Borderline Personality Disorder while maintaining self care.

Other than feeling fatigued everything is as good as it gets here @Former-Member

Cognitive load has been ramped up with work and uni classes and.jas been a challenge.

Have had some positive feedback from.S3 school. He is doing so much better than was anticipated. Family have even commented on how he has improved in communication and interaction. This is encouraging.

This about sums it up lol...

@Determined, great to hear that S3 is doing well. 🙂

I was doing some interesting online research recently. One of the effects of prolonged stress is that it actually reduces the number of dendrites coming off brain neurons. Dendrites are tentacley-looking bits that do a lot toward making the cells function as they should, storing memories, and plain old thinking and comprehension. Loss of dendrites is part of what pushes a brain into depression. BUT the good news is, when you learn new things, "neuroplasticity" kicks in, which is the process of the brain adapting and rewriting itself, which means it's forming new dendrites.

So yeah, stress makes it harder to study effectively, but the fact that you're learning new things goes some way towards repairing the damage stress does to the brain. So stick at it, it will genuinely be doing you good. 🙂

That is very interesting @Smc

Kind of the reason I kicked off the study to begin with.

Without that knowledge but with some sort of understanding that I needed to be doing something to prevent a complete breakdown myself.

I often think over what I have done and wonder if I have actually learned ( more to the point remembered) anything. But I am confident that despite the stress the preassure of study has kept me.moving forward. (A rather expensive compas lol) which has more value to me tha anything that I have learned. 🙂

On a brighter note

I was somewhat excited when getting ready for.church on Sunday to find I could do up the top (neck) button on my dress shirt. (I like to wear a tie to Church ) . Cant remember the last time I was able to do that. 10 years + .

While there has been some weight loss (GP is excited about that) cycling is starting to pay off with positive shape change more than weight change. 😀

That's a pleasant surprise @Determined. 🙂

I think I've managed getting somewhat fitter this year due to more work happening in the garden- a lot of it along the digging and carrying lines. I'm not sure it's actually making a difference at the waistline level yet.

I initially started doing a pottery class as "self care" during a high stress period, and that led on to me doing the TAFE Cert 4... and I did a permaculture course a few years ago for the same reason. Both things I wanted to know more about, and hoped to put to good use. And sometimes the plain fact that there's structured "me-time" is so important.

Hey @Determined, is your place OK with the current heavy rains?

Wondering how @Shaz51 is going too.

@Smc we are wet here but not in any of the problem areas.... yet....

Watching with interest rainfall in the catchment above us however.

Our home.is high enough to be safe from flood if the town does flood.

Was watching on the news last night. Heart breaking scenes.

I was actually wondering about you and @Former-Member @Smc .

*I did drive for an hour yesterday for a uni class to find itnhad been cancelled and moved to online due to the wet. Notification was sent after I was already in the car. Personally I think it was a big over reaction given our region. A choice would.have been nice. Any excuse for the coordinator to stay at home in her pj's I think 😡

We're fine here @Determined. Our forecasts haven't been anything more drastic than "showers". The creek behind our place has hardly budged. But we well remember what it was like having a house full of flood silt, and everything up to knee deep in the lower rooms soaking wet. It's a hard thing to go through, and a lot of people in this round of floods will have it worse than that.

I fully understand the uni cancelling classes. Flood events can be unpredictable. There were two major floods in the season when we copped it. The first one only got into our backyard, not the house, but the morning it happened we were picking Younger Daughter up from a school sleepover, and coming home we drove through three points on the road where there was water starting to cover the road, up to about the floorpan of the car. All the roads had been dry on the way there, and if we'd been a bit later heading back, we may have had trouble getting home to our other three kids. So erring on the side of caution is a wise move.