I love hangovers.

Believe it or not, this is (at least partially) true.

I love a good party. Even now I still enjoy immersing myself in an environment full of people enjoying themselves - I enjoy the atmosphere of others enjoying themselves. No doubt this is one of the many reasons I enjoyed my Virgin Voyages cruise recently as I wrote in another article. But let me take you back a few years - for each of us the distance in time will vary.

I imagine most around these here parts are old enough to have already experienced a full-on party life. One of the downsides, especially if you enjoy the odd drink as part of your social fluttering, is the hangover. Hangovers are NOT fun. I'm not talking about the hangover where you chuck a couple of dispersible pills in a glass of water and get on with your day. I'm talking about the hangovers that make you go back to bed at 11 am and sob quietly under the blankets, all the while imploring the Gods of the Party to give you a break, and please make it stop. Those hangovers are awful.

I used to have a few of those. When I was at University I made some brilliant friends - many of whom I have, for one reason or another, lost touch with. Our nights out were always legendary, and often started on a random day of the week and rolled through multiple nights and days. Life was full of laughter, drink, fun and brightness, offset, of course, by the odd terrible hangover.

I started to say that I enjoyed hangovers by way of trying to persuade myself that I did, at least that's what I like to think. In hindsight I think this actually started as a way of me trying to make light of the situation and appear as an oddball, as I normally do, searching for opportunities to laugh at things. So my "I enjoy hangovers" became me trying to prove that this was the case. I made myself get up, I made myself show energy levels that most around me shook their heads at, proclaiming me a twisted idiot. I made myself go out of the house and, metaphorically and literally, run around in parkland waving my hands in the air. I did this for years.

Over time I started to believe my own PR. I actually started to enjoy the time that most would spend crying into a blanket, and the phrase became truth, at least for me. I imagine those around me would rather I had just fallen down a deep hole, but I started to actually enjoy myself. Over the years this morphed into various guises; me shopping with a hangover - buying things that, without the tailwind of alcohol, I would not normally dream of buying; me getting all creative and designing weird and wonderful things... you get the picture.

Years later and hangovers don't hold fear for me, even though I very rarely have cause to suffer them - in fact it feels like when I'm really hungover my creativity increases and my willingness to try weird new ideas is much less fettered than otherwise. Why is this relevant right now, and why (on Earth) am I posting about it on LinkedIn ?

Because, right now, there's something I dread more than I've ever dreaded a hangover, even before applying a positive mental attitude to them - and that is sitting down at my computer to try and find work. How do I get past this? I'm going to try to take a leaf out of my own, historic, book and start to enjoy the process, and talk about the ups rather than the downs, and focus on the positives, few though they may be.

In time maybe I'll start to enjoy looking for work, although waving my hands around at interview is, quite possibly, a bad idea.