Grandma & Grandpa's Farm

Thursday, May 1, 2008

My Daily Strength

A Social Network for Support

Truly for my daily strength I turn to God and in turn God has given me what I need. This includes the loving friends and family I have. It also includes resources that are made available to me like the one I am writing about today.

DailyStrength.org is a Social Networking site with a difference. Its purpose is to be used as a support site for people with various issues including various health issues, conditions, and syndromes - most are recognized ones and some still aren't. It also addresses issues like abused spouses and children, people going through divorces, people facing the loss of loved ones and that sort of situation. The mental health issues of depression, and anxiety in their many disguises are dealt with too.

DailyStrength - Free Online Support Groups

When you join Daily Strength you have the opportunity to join different support groups for the various issues. At that time you may enter the treatments you've taken and how successful they were, or you might disclose as little as you wish. The Support Groups have a wealth of information including forums to do with the support issue. There are in the support groups:

  • Discussions
  • Recommendations
  • Advice
  • News & Info
  • Treatments
  • Members
  • Goals
  • Stories
  • Groups

It can be good to be able to discuss what you have experienced and are going through with others who have gone through the same thing. Daily Strength has many features of other social networking sites like photo and video albums, private messages, friend lists and the like. It also has a hug book that you can use to encourage friends and even strangers with. People tend to use the available option to have an avatar image to represent them on the site. The site actually is posting medical information and has Doctors posting and watching the forums to give advice.

What has me writing in my Blog today is the feature called a "Goal" which is exactly what the word says. There can be many sorts of goals like losing weight, keeping your blood pressure within normal levels, not yelling at your kids, exercising more, etc. but my current goal is to write an article a day here. I mentioned that two weeks ago and have kept up with it. The feature for that includes being able to email friends and relatives for support in reaching your goal as well as the neat signature badge and the Blog badge at the bottom of this Blog.

So far so good, but I do need some encouragement. I could use readers of course, but I am writing this as an exercise in writing and commitment so readership is secondary. I do mean to keep it interesting and perhaps informative - even useful to some.

I'll still keep working on my novels, but this will be a bit of a spur to keep me going.

I do recommend Daily Strength to people. You can keep anonymity here as much as you would care to. Daily Strength gives you a place to talk about some issues when you might even fear having burnt out your family and friends about it. They might not understand some of the weird symptoms and maybe some aren't so weird after all.

Later
~ Darrell

DailyStrength - Free Online Support Groups

2 comments:

Darrell Wade said...

I do wonder just what they are going to put on the scale on the progress meter. I mean I put the goal as open ended and starting on April 17th. I also set the units as days.

I am really curious what that little bar will measure. I hope I can remember to include it in a signature line.

Darrell Wade said...

The Goal is tracked as Span in Days. I set it for a one year goal from April 17 2008 to April 16 2009

Right now I am 4% of the way, but the slider only goes in increments of 5% and I wanted to show some progress.