The thing that made this most obvious to me was training my dog.
For example, when conditioning her out of a behavior I dislike, my intuitive approach seems to be to monitor the intensity of the behavior… I expect a steady stream of intense performances BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB to become a stream of less-intense performances bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb and then disappear altogether.
But in reality the intensity doesn’t change much, and sometimes it even gets worse. I never get “bbb...” What declines is the frequency. That is, BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB becomes BBBBBB_BBBBBBBBB_BBB which, from my intuitive perspective, is essentially no progress at all… I don’t notice.
And then on the other end, when the behavior is almost extinguished, I get _____B___B_______B___ which, from my perspective, is an endless series of “oh good, we got rid of this behavior—oh, crap, now it’s back again, just as bad as it ever was! This isn’t working!”
So it really really helped to keep a chart of the frequency of the behavior that I can look back at and realize that actually, we’ve been making steady progress all along, even though it completely doesn’t feel like progress at all.
After my stroke, when I was relearning to walk/talk/think, that strategy was absolutely critical to warding off despair. I charted everything, and it made a huge difference.
Some examples: How many times I could raise and lower my leg before being exhausted. Number of steps I could take at a time. Words I blocked on. Number of times I became altogether unable to complete a sentence. (Though this was more approximate.) Number of pushups I could do. Distance I could walk. Complexity of the hardest logic-puzzle I’d successfully solved. How many words I could write before my hand was exhausted. How coherently I could write (I still have somewhere a piece of paper on which I wrote the same sentence, over and over, on each line; it gradually morphs from a literally indecipherable scrawl to something indistinguishable from a normal-though-sloppy person’s handwriting.)
These were, of course, at different times in my recovery.
Oh, and re: motivating… that’s a much more difficult question to answer.
The charting techniques were “motivating” only in a prophylactic sense… they helped me resist a certain kind of “I’m not getting any better” despair that was otherwise very compelling and very _de_motivating.
Positive motivation to progress was much harder to come by, and I had a much less concrete grasp on it. I was often in a not quite apathetic, but highly disengaged state with respect to my recovery. Mostly I dealt with this by accepting it as just another intermittent deficit where I had to ride out the bad periods and take advantage of the good ones.
I think the closest I can come to describing it accurately is to say that motivation-to-progress was highly correlated with focus; when what I was doing was recovery, I was very motivated to make progress. What direction causality ran, though, I have no idea.
The thing that made this most obvious to me was training my dog.
For example, when conditioning her out of a behavior I dislike, my intuitive approach seems to be to monitor the intensity of the behavior… I expect a steady stream of intense performances
BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB
to become a stream of less-intense performances
bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb
and then disappear altogether.
But in reality the intensity doesn’t change much, and sometimes it even gets worse. I never get “bbb...” What declines is the frequency. That is,
BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB
becomes
BBBBBB_BBBBBBBBB_BBB
which, from my intuitive perspective, is essentially no progress at all… I don’t notice.
And then on the other end, when the behavior is almost extinguished, I get
_____B___B_______B___
which, from my perspective, is an endless series of “oh good, we got rid of this behavior—oh, crap, now it’s back again, just as bad as it ever was! This isn’t working!”
So it really really helped to keep a chart of the frequency of the behavior that I can look back at and realize that actually, we’ve been making steady progress all along, even though it completely doesn’t feel like progress at all.
After my stroke, when I was relearning to walk/talk/think, that strategy was absolutely critical to warding off despair. I charted everything, and it made a huge difference.
After your stroke, what kinds of things did you chart specifically? In which areas was the progress most motivating?
Some examples:
How many times I could raise and lower my leg before being exhausted.
Number of steps I could take at a time.
Words I blocked on.
Number of times I became altogether unable to complete a sentence. (Though this was more approximate.)
Number of pushups I could do.
Distance I could walk.
Complexity of the hardest logic-puzzle I’d successfully solved.
How many words I could write before my hand was exhausted.
How coherently I could write (I still have somewhere a piece of paper on which I wrote the same sentence, over and over, on each line; it gradually morphs from a literally indecipherable scrawl to something indistinguishable from a normal-though-sloppy person’s handwriting.)
These were, of course, at different times in my recovery.
Oh, and re: motivating… that’s a much more difficult question to answer.
The charting techniques were “motivating” only in a prophylactic sense… they helped me resist a certain kind of “I’m not getting any better” despair that was otherwise very compelling and very _de_motivating.
Positive motivation to progress was much harder to come by, and I had a much less concrete grasp on it. I was often in a not quite apathetic, but highly disengaged state with respect to my recovery. Mostly I dealt with this by accepting it as just another intermittent deficit where I had to ride out the bad periods and take advantage of the good ones.
I think the closest I can come to describing it accurately is to say that motivation-to-progress was highly correlated with focus; when what I was doing was recovery, I was very motivated to make progress. What direction causality ran, though, I have no idea.