Friday, November 01, 2013

November's Habit: Duolingo

This month I am going to recognize something I have been doing for the last month and would like to continue officially.  My brother got me into Duolingo.com.  Duolingo is a free language learning app for smartphones, tablets, and desktops.  It is great, especially since I am not actually learning my languages for the first time, but refreshing them.  I took German in high school and college, then studied abroad in Italy and took away an Italian minor.  It has been 10 years since coming home from Florence and I have used both of my languages only a handful of times since then.  I want to get my languages back where they were (and then some), so doing at least 1 lesson per day per language on Duolingo will really help.  I can tell a huge difference already.  So, there is my plan.

In the month of November, I will complete 1 lesson of both German and Italian on the Duolingo language app every day.  I hope you will join me!  If we connect as friends we can engage in a little friendly competition.  I'm ahead of my brother in points at this moment.  Boom!

P S.  I should mention that I consider "every day" to be six days per week.  Everyone needs a day of rest!

September and October: An Update

So I didn't post about the results of my September habit or tell you what I was going to do for October. Sorry.  My September habit of eating a frog every morning went really well.  Almost too well.  Like maybe I wasn't eating my biggest or ugliest frog well.  But I really felt more productive and that is the most important thing.

For October I decided to do a hard one.  I wanted to think more positively.  I've noticed since being married that not all humans talk negatively to themselves all day.  It seems to really increase confidence and self love to think and talk positively about yourself.  This is a hard one.  It seems too vague to just say, "Ok think nice things" or "Remember to talk good about yourself to yourself!"  So I looked around for something to help.  I didn't have to look far.  My mom, who is a therapist, posted a link to a site that takes you through the steps to "detox" your brain.  The method and website was developed by Dr. Caroline Leaf.  She sells books about brain stuff, "Switch on Your Brain", "Who Switched Off Your Brain?",  etc.  She has developed a 21 day brain detox program where she takes you through the process of tearing down specific toxic thoughts, all while building up and creating positive healthy thoughts.  Each day, you watch a video and do some exercises to do just that.  After reading about the program, I decided it was exactly what I needed.

It may be, but UGHHHHHH!  Not fun.  Not at all.  Something about the method really turned me off.  I should probably have read "Switch on Your Brain" first because each time I would sit down to do the thinking exercises, I couldn't concentrate.  I could get my brain to think or focus on the things I was supposed to.  Also, each time we think our specific negative thought, you are supposed to do an active reach, which the method by which we change our negative thought into a positive one.  We are supposed to do our active reach 7 times per day.  But I found that unless I am having a bad day, I don't think my toxic thought 7 times a day.  That is a good thing until you see me on my bad days.  :] So all this has made it really tough to stick with it.  I am on day 12 of 21.  I have been all over the place with it and am not sure that it is working.  I'm going to keep plugging away at it though because Dr. Leaf is very convincing about how important it is to detox your mind.  Here is an example of how much so.