Mrs Helicopter Writes

I really struggled today. I didn’t seem to be able to achieve anything I wanted to. I thought today would be really straight forward. Nope. My brain chose chaos. Let us take stock and see what in the “escalation of nonsense” enfolded… Original Plan for Wednesday 8th May 2024 Run with Joni on scooter to school Run home (via another 2km) Shower Cycle to work Meet A (colleague 1), set up work on my laptop whilst I do file sorting Meet B (colleague 2) to have lunch, chat work stuff & catch up Come home Chill Cook dinner TV & bedtime nonsense The end If only life was so simple. The plan changed whilst Joni was eating breakfast. I got it into my head that I wanted to re-join the gym I was a member of last year. I’ve been having too many wine nights and I think I could go to gym classes in the evening instead. Alleviate the wine guilt and improve fitness. Win win. This sets up a stupid chain of events which I retrospectively recognise as being caused by IMPULSIVENESS. I remember a cl...

If you're someone who struggles to sleep *flings hand up* then you are possibly obsessed, like me, with how other people sleep. How do people sleep? How can anyone EVER sleep?!  You may be one of those super lucky people who can sleep on a chicken’s lip! You put your head on the pillow and poof! You're asleep! You absolute lucky dabber. My relationship with sleep has always been weird. Apparently, I slept well as a baby. I was a very early riser, but I needed my bed early. I remember in Junior school my bedtime was always earlier than my friends. Boo! No Adrian Mole for me! But if I got overtired, I would get really nauseous and often actually vom. (Bad times for my vom-averse mother!)  As an adult I've had lots of bouts of bad sleep especially during stressful periods. I remember visiting a lavender farm in Oz and left convinced that the "sleep balm" I'd bought held the key to the secrets of sleep! It didn't. My pregnancies were tricky, and sleep was ...

Have you been seeing a lot of posts about adult ADHD and how it presents in women? How it presents so differently to boys and can be masked so much that many women are only now just discovering they have it? Dopamine Chasing on a swing, or am I??? According to my newsfeed of Instagram, TikTok and Facebook, almost every adult woman I know is seeking or has got an ADHD diagnosis. How could it be that prevalent and so badly missed by medical science? *Hollow laugh* I mean, we know the answer to that don’t we. #womensproblems However, it’s very possible you can’t relate at all to what I am writing. You’ve not seen many, if any posts about adult ADHD and you definitely don’t relate to the characteristics that can nod to a diagnosis. The wonder of the algorithm! One of the things about ADHD is that people diagnosed have lower levels of dopamine, the reward-pleasure chemical in your brain. And one way of seeking dopamine hits is social media. So, my chicken and egg situation with “how ...

This is going to be a bit of an unusual post for me. Normally I launch straight into my opinions about parenting or some outrage about human rights. Today I’m going down a more personal route. I am going to write to about health. What advice would I give a friend who was looking to get healthier? I am being careful with my words here for a number of reasons. Obviously I am talking about losing weight. My real life friends know weight is something I struggle with constantly. I have done since I was in my late teens. I’m actually even cautious to use the words “struggle” when it comes to weight because I don’t want to convey a message of negativity to those who are large and happy. I’m a massive champion of body positivity. There are lots of reasons people are overweight / obese and none of them are laziness or greed, the common misconceptions. So I applaud anyone who out and out rejects societal pressure to adhere to a specific “acceptable” BMI and embraces their size/shape wi...