Jag har startat en blogg på engelska, som ett komplement...

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Thursday the 28th of January 2010 will not go down in history as one of my best days. I woke up with a slight hangover and morning anxiety at about 9 am. Probably highly correlated events. Not that I did something yesterday that I regret. On the contrary, yesterday at the club was fun and I danced most night to Lady Gaga-like music.

No, the anxiety has been more like a state of mind the last week. Something has not been right, and I have worried about things like travelling to France and being on TV. Things that are new and scary to me. The worry has returned again and again like a ghost, that really does not exist.

Not having anything planned for the whole day does not help, so I got dressed and went to school hoping to find my teachers. This is not an easy task, since I study on distance and only meet teachers like three times each semester. But since I live on campus, it is not difficult for me to visit their offices and see if they are home. Lucky for me, one teacher was home, and we started to discuss my paper.

The following two papers will be very important to me, since the doctoral application (I want to become Ph. D) more or less consists on these two papers. If they are high quality, there is good chance of becoming doctoral student. If they are not that high quality, I need to suck up to someone and sell my ideas, and still have a shot.

First I wanted to write about program evaluation and more specifically, how program components could be evaluated to improve the prevention programs. I study prevention science, which is a kind of social science I guess... but I really am more interested in psychology. Psychology overlap much in prevention science though.

This idea of writing about component evaluation was well recieved, but would be difficult to write about, since most prvention programs do not evaluate the components used in the program. It would be more of an argumental paper, and this would be very difficult to pull off.

However, I had a few other ideas, and one that I am really thinking about writing about is a prevelance-study about social anxiety in school-children, and how it correlates with problem behaviors like alcohol drinking and self-harm. This information could be used as background when creating prevention programs to social anxiety, whick will surely be done more in the future.

So, that was a good thing about today, and the momentum started to change. The morning anxiety was gone.

Then, like the lazo fool I am, I started to play a stupid videogame, Football Manager 2010. After an hour the anxiety started to come back, but lucky for me, it was soon gone again.

Swedish Survivor was on TV, when everything suddenly got black. And no, I am not talking about a panic attack, I am talking about a power outage. This does not happen often, and it often leads to some confusing moments about what to do. Usually the answer is: "Light some candles and hope for power to soon be back". And usually, the power soon gets back. And after an hour the power got back to us.

But during this hour I felt kind of liberated. Like nothing else mattered. It was just me (or us, I should include my girlfriend here) against nature. And I felt a rush of motivation. To work out. To take a walk. To write.

We are so used to our daily life, and our daily pleasures, and our daily troubles. It is very easy to fall into routines, either good or bad. Like in my case, my thinking fell back to everything that could go wrong with a trip to Paris, or being on TV. Instead, we should take less for granted, and try more to make the most of the day. Like the power went out, and we had to actually do something to survive.

// Mikael Glännström