Last week I got the 4th Covid shot. The 2nd jab has been the worst for me; I felt rubbish for over a week. However, this one didn’t affect me physically as much as it did mentally. A morose brain fog hung over me for the week, but I was still able to get out and go for my morning walks.
I was able to build a respectable average of 7,436 steps per day for the week. Nearly 3,000 better than the week before. It’s still a long way to an average of 12,000 steps per day, but at least I can see that target from here.
Writing, however, took too much out of me. I wrote about 800 words, half of what I wrote the week before and nowhere near my goal of 10,000 words per week.
I have always had a more negative mindset. I set goals and then deride myself for not achieving them. 12,000 steps per day would take me about 17 hours to travel. 10,000 words is 10 hours of writing. Take 30 hours of Crappy Night Job and 10 hours of volunteering; add to that 17 hours of walking and 10 hours of writing, and you get to 67 hours for the week.
Finding a spare 27 hours to do things after work isn’t the kind of thing that can be done at the drop of a hat. It takes time to build habits, and there will be setbacks. I’m prone to see last week as a failure. It’s not an awesome sign that I failed to make significant progress so early on, but I always knew there would be hurdles. Unfortunately, this week was outside of my control. I needed to get the 4th shot, and I can’t blame my immune system for doing its job building a defence.
Every week is a chance to reset. Take the wins or the losses and move on. My brain is no different from any other human brain; we struggle to see the signal for the noise. I do know how to analyse data. I’ve got a pretty piece of paper that says so. And the more data points you have, the less the noise of any specific point can affect the R2 value. In science, you don’t come to a conclusion with just the first two data points. You need a statistically representative number of points before you can begin to analyse.
I will not spend too much time thinking about last week. Hopefully, it was an outlier.