The New York Times recently published an article called The Mental Strain of Making Do with Less, about a study indicating that dieting can take a toll on your IQ. The deficit isn’t because you are depriving your brain of precious fatty and sugary fuel, but because dieting requires a lot of thinking.

The article describes the phenomenon as “bandwidth scarcity”. While dieting, you’re constantly thinking about what you will or won’t eat, calculating the Weight Watchers points in a Daniels kebab, or feeling guilty about the triple chocolate cookietime you had yesterday. Thus you will have fewer neuro-resources to commit to your pre-lunch meeting – or, in the case of this study, an IQ test.

It doesn’t just stop at dieting. The researchers believe that bandwidth scarcity applies to all sorts of situations:

Just as the cookie tugs at the dieter, a looming deadline preoccupies a busy person, and the prospect of a painful rent payment shatters the peace of the poor. Just as dieters constantly track food, the hyper-busy track each minute and the poor track each dollar.

It occurred to me as I read this article that the theory could easily apply to people living with chronic pain. If mental bandwidth is a pie to be shared out among the mental functions, pain management is a greedy-guts. First, there is planning how to pace yourself during the day so as to cause as little pain as possible. Then there’s deciding on which medication to take and when. Both of those require a rolling cost benifit analysis. Then there are the mindfulness techniques which help to diffuse panic responses to pain and make it more bearable. All the while listening to the wee voice in the background going “ow ow ow ow fuck ow”.

Over the past six months or so, I have been trying to increase the amount of time I spend “working” each day. The idea is that if I can prove to myself that I can work, say, ten hours a week, consistently, then I can start thinking about committing to paid employment. What I didn’t count on is the difficulty of concentrating on a task with pain running in the background. Our bodies are programmed to react to pain and it takes a lot of mental bandwidth to ignore it. It also takes some thinking to determine whether the pain is at a point where I should take action (change positions, take a break, pop a pill) or if I can carry on as is for a few more minutes.

It has become easier, as I experiment and get to know what I typically can and can’t cope with. I know now that I can manage about twenty-five minutes at the computer, though it changes day to day how many of these sessions I can do. The more I practice mindfulness, too, the easier it is let the pain carry on in the background and focus on the task at hand. I also know more now about how to use pain relief and positioning effectively. Still, these techniques all require thought, and the pain itself is always going to chew up some bandwidth.

I think I’d better stop feeling guilty about eating cookietimes.

I realised recently that I’m doing a lot more cooking than I was a year ago. It must have increased gradually, because at one point I was finding it too hard to prepare a few vegetables for our tea.  It was incredibly frustrating, not only because I love it, but also because it’s one of the things I’ve always been able to contribute to my parents’ home. They have, after all, allowed me to colonise the nicest guest-room in the Greater Wellington Region, and hardly ever complain when I leave scraps of paper all over the house. My mum also knows how to stock a good pantry, and not being able to cook from it just seemed downright wasteful. 

I’m oh-so-grateful to be able to cook something most days now. I attribute this to: a) an aqua-exercise routine that keeps me fitter b) a better understanding of (and patience for) pacing myself c) coping better with pain, and d) the beautiful shiny grunty noisy food processor Emmie bought me for my birthday last year. Most things I cook these days involve plenty of loud pulsing and grinding, particularly since I’ve been experimenting with eliminating “inflammatory” foods (gluten, dairy, sugar, soy…). The jury is still out on whether it makes a different to my pain levels, but the resulting foods have been highly delicious.

I still have to be careful to cook in small doses, but most of the time there are natural breaks in recipes. I should write a cook-book for fatigue sufferers: “Combine dry ingredients. Lie down and watch one episode of 30 Rock. In a separate bowl, beat eggs together with milk and oil…”. 

My favourite, though, is back-seat cooking. At Days Bay, if I’m not feeling up to cooking dinner, I can ask Rick to lend some muscle to the meal. He’s not at all a chef (though he whips up beautiful cut-fruit arrangements), so he doesn’t mind if I tell him what to do and exactly how to do it. Emmie, on the other hand, is a great chef. Luckily, she’s not phased if I sit in the kitchen and issue instructions from my head or my browser. We’ve had some great cooking marathons that way. I get to do the easy bits, like picking thyme leaves off their stalks. And tasting. Lots of tasting. 

Here are some of our recent favourites. You should try them. 

http://www.mynewroots.org/site/2013/02/the-life-changing-loaf-of-bread/

http://www.mynewroots.org/site/2011/04/the-raw-brownie-2/

http://www.mynewroots.org/site/2012/05/happy-crackers-2/

http://www.petite-kitchen.com/2013/01/salted-peanut-butter-cookies.html

http://shesimmers.com/2010/04/celery-almond-pesto.html

http://kitchen-tested.com/2013/04/18/chickpea-tofu/

I got my restricted licence last week. Thank god.

Of course, I should have got my licence a long time ago. Like, in 2001. This past year I’ve been cursing my teenaged self for refusing to learn to drive. I’ve also been cursing NZTA for making the restricted licence test harder just when I wanted to pass it so very much. When I tried sitting it in November last year, I was directed back to the testing centre within the first five minutes (do not pass go, do not collect $200). This time, though, after a grueling, hour-long tour of every round-about in Lower Hutt, I passed! Imagine my bliss.

Having my licence makes a huge difference. See, I live in the second-to-top house on a hill that’s too big for me to walk up or down. Until recently, every time I wanted to go anywhere, I needed a driver, be it parental or taxi. I’m lucky that my step-dad works from home, and very generously ferries me to the bus-stop, or further, without complaint. Lucky, too, that he’s an excellent teacher with the patience of a saint.

Driving a manual is pretty hard on the muscles, so I can still only drive so far before I get sore. Hopefully I’ll be able to get a lotteries grant to help me to buy an automatic with lightened steering and an equipment hoist. Then I’ll be unstoppable. For now, though, Mama and Emmie are both generously lending me their vehicles, and I’ve got a new wee walker that I can get in and out of the car by myself. It’s a whole new world.

I still dearly miss the old world, the one where I could walk the length Cuba Street and ride my bike down to the sea. But this new one shines with glimpses of the independence I used to have. And I like it very much.

P.S. I am still very bad at parking.

I’ve just finished my first e-book, and I’m never reading an actual-book, ever again¹. Jonathon Franzen’s The Corrections is five-hundred-and-something pages long. It would have been beyond me if I hadn’t been gifted – care of my mother’s Westpac Hotpoints – an e-reader for my birthday this year.

What a joy it is to be able to read for a decent amount of time again. I’ve got so many horizontal hours at my disposal these days, but tv-on-the-internet has dominated my resting time, because it’s hard to find an angle that suits my neck, arms and shoulders. Now, though, I can read in all kinds of different positions. I can even read on the bus, because I can casually throw my book in a bag, knowing that its weight won’t break the muscle-bank when I transfer my things to and from my walker.

My second light reading revelation comes care of my sister Kath and her partner Andrew. They kindly bought me a six-month subscription to The Listener, a publication that meets the ‘light’ criteria in more ways than one. People scoff a bit at The Listener, and to be fair, it  has its flaws. The ‘feature’ articles usually read more like padded lists of quotes, the editorials are a bit right-wing, and there’s scarcely a page not graced by a getty-image. Despite its shortfalls, though, The Listener is a nice collection of interesting tid-bits written by (mostly) good columnists. It’s possibly worth the $4.30 for Diana Witchell and Jane Clifton alone. I really look forward to the arrival of my new issue every Monday, and not just because it’s light enough to prop up on the arm of the couch while I eat breakfast.

In the interest of maintaining an optimistic outlook, I’m going to try and write a ‘glad’ post for every ‘sad’ post.² And I’m definitely glad for gifts like e-books and The Listener. Sometimes little things are big things.

¹Please don’t hold me to this.
²Or this.