Upcycling On.

An incredibly productive weekend has me feeling a bit better. My depressions have been deep, from time to time, even in sobriety, but they last for briefer durations. Reminds me a bit of what my sister Aimee once told me about quitting smoking: the cravings never go away, and they never get any less powerful. They get further between, and the duration diminishes. I still get cigarette cravings, and they’re still astonishingly powerful. But they only last a minute, and they’re weeks or months apart. As opposed to, say, three years ago when they were several times a day and lasted up to an hour.

So I feel like I’m cycling up. Since I wrote the last post, I’ve seen my trainer, which is always good for my mood. She absolutely ruined me with weighted lunges. My ass was sore for days. Then, Saturday, I ran my fastest 10K ever. Still not a race, I remain unsure if I want to do one. But I am aiming for running 10K in less than an hour sometime this year. Saturday I did it in 1:01:13. So I’m only about 2% off my goal. And it’s absolutely true in my experience, that exercise when feeling sad or stressed can ward off serious depressive episodes. And guess what? There’s SCIENCE!*

So a couple of days of vigorous exercise decidedly improved my mood. As did spending most of the weekend working on the validation process for my East Coasty University simulation project. It’s going well and I’m able to come up with good graphs. They’re not all perfect, I’m certainly not done with the validation. But I’m working hard at it and making progress.

And of course, in the midst of writing this post, I received notice that my most recent paper was rejected by a big fancy journal. Sigh. I’ll survive. The reviewer comments were generally complimentary. I’ll turn it around fast and get it back out there. This is a good paper, with a good result. It’ll get published. Last time it went to a diabetes journal. This time, I think I’ll submit to an ophthalmology journal. Maybe it’s time for a jog around the block.

I’m having my big meeting at 3 today with my new chief of staff, hopefully to refocus some of my work on direct hospital impact. It’ll mean more quality work, which I like, and less hard-nosed focus on grants and papers, though I will still aim at producing papers and writing grants. I like the world of science, and academic achievement, even though it’s gruesomely exhausting a lot of the time. I will be pleased to be able to just do some engineering, write it up, and submit it.

So. Resubmitting paper now. Hopefully the next journal will like it.

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* Mata J, Hogan CL, Joormann J, Waugh CE, Gotlib IH. (2012) “Acute Exercise Attenuates Negative Affect Following Repeated Sad Mood Inductions in Persons Who Have Recovered From Depression.” J Abnorm Psychol. 2012 Sep 17. [Epub ahead of print]