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PaperclipPerfector  17d ago (text post)   1352 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for February 4, 2026

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Does anyone have suggestions for indoor exercise when it's insanely cold out? I've been making do with an exercise bike and calisthenics, but they get boring after a while.

I cannot recommend boxing enough. Excellent sport that’s relatively easy to get into and you can do a lot of training drills by yourself with the help of some tutorials.

It’s exceptionally good for your brain as well; there’s whole layers of strategy and meta strategy involved.

It’s a natural accompaniment to chess for a reason.

It’s exceptionally good for your brain as well; there’s whole layers of strategy and meta strategy involved.

Unless you get into full contact sparing. That's not good for your brain, at all.

I did kickboxing for a while, and spared with a boxing helmet. Still got rocked badly, and declined ever going to competitions just of because how bad sparing could get. But then again, I was a superheavyweight, and those have absurd KO rates in amateur competitions. Also, the head kicks make it worse, of course. So your mileage might vary.

But yes, just the exercise is so good. It has everything: speed, power, mobility, cardio, technique, tactics and strategy. And friendly sparing is tons of fun.

Extremely true. I only do friendly sparring and killer pad work at this point for that reason. I do Thai boxing so tournaments are too hardcore for me, but I’ve been in a handful of somewhat serious fights in my life so I don’t feel the need to prove myself on that regard. I’m familiar enough with real violence not to be unduly frightened by it, and also not to relish in it either.

have like 6-7 hobbies that I cycle through periodically as an adult, Thai boxing is probably the biggest one other than mountain biking. In this instance I’m glad I never got so into it that I became super competitive and obsessed with it. I think being a modest practitioner of a martial art is truly one of the healthiest and most positive things possible.

Exactly. If you train at a gym, that might mean first finding the right one. Some gyms thrive on full contact and the camaraderie of butting heads no-holds-barred, others are 50% women and half the time is spend on speed/coordination games like "find a partner and try to tap their knee or shoulder". Both ends of the spectrum might not (exclusively) be what you need.

It’s exceptionally good for your brain as well;

How much risk of brain damage is there? I don't mean the comatose or sudden drooling vegetable kind, but lighter forms of damage/cognitive decline from getting hit in the head a lot? You see sports athletes with dementia and cognitive decline from simply heading a football and the like.

If you’re doing full contact sparring for years and years I imagine the cumulative damage could be a problem. I limit myself to friendly sparring and gruesome pad work for that exact reason.

You can get very far with just that, I wouldn’t put the cart before the horse on this one.

Got it.

Unfortunately the nearest boxing gym near me is over an hour away. I'm making due with BJJ right now, but I don't love it. It makes me wish greco roman wrestling were more popular.

I don’t currently attend a dedicated boxing gym; my gym has heavy bags of different styles for free use. I do work with a personal trainer once a week for working on some technical stuff / sparring but the other 2-3 times I’m in there I’m largely doing self directed drilling.

Then again I’ve been boxing off and on for like 15 years at this point, so I’m very familiar with all the basics.

If your gym has heavy bags and personal trainers night be worth looking into.

Have you tried following along a high intensity calisthenics exercise program on YouTube?

  1. Medium to heavy Kettlebells are strength + endurance work. The permutations of using it are high too.
  2. Heavy Clubbells for complex movements (never gets boring).
  3. Add skipping ropes or even Heavy rope work (but that tends to be unsuitable for working out within a room, unless huge rooms).
  4. Mix and match with yoga/calisthenics. +Original Strength work. +Ab-wheel.

Rowing machine (cardio type). Kettlebell.

During COVID we used the RingFit game on Nintendo Switch. Played it on the television. You can set it to an insanely difficult level (in terms of core exercises, not resistance or weight training) if you want. Of course if you don't have a Switch or a television this is useless advice. My family eventually gave up competing with me when I finished all the levels twice. Great fun if you have someone to play with, but you can exercise alone without competing.

People around here are obsessed with kettle bells. Dumbbell stuff can be fun, or various like kick boxing dance exercises styles.

What kind of calisthenics? You can try working your way towards a V-sit or a planche.

I can already do the v-sit. A planche is out of reach for me at the moment, but I can hold a peacock pose for a while. That's a decent goal. Thank you.

I pace around the living room with a book for 30 min.

I used to have vision problems. They'd diagnosed me with central serous chorioretinopathy, which is one of those conditions that sounds scary but usually isn't. The main exception: sometimes it progresses to retinal detachment and you go blind. But this seemed unlikely enough that I wasn't too worried.

For years I'd get maybe one episode annually. Fine, whatever. Then a few months ago the frequency ramped up dramatically, and I started wondering if something was wrong.

I did what any reasonable person does when they suspect their diagnosis might be incorrect: I asked several AI models. They all said roughly the same thing: this doesn't look like CSCR. The visual field defects were appearing and resolving way too quickly. Plus I was getting headaches, eye pain, and nausea, though mostly just the scotoma by itself. None of this quite fit.

Today I had another episode and finally got myself to an ophthalmologist. I came prepared. I'd used an Amsler grid to map the exact coverage of the blind spot and tracked how it progressed over time. The smoking gun: this time I had clear evidence the scotoma was bilateral, affecting both eyes instead of just one.

ChatGPT (the 5 Thinking model) had been pretty insistent this was migraine with aura (and careful to exclude more concerning pathology like a TIA/amaurosis fugax). After the ophthalmologist spent several minutes blinding me with lights so bright they photobleached my retinas (and myrdriatics, couldn't read anything closer than two feet for a while afterwards, this is why I'd been putting off the appointment), guess what conclusion they reached?

Migraine with aura.

On one hand: relief. No risk of going blind after all. On the other hand: migraines suck, and I'm pretty annoyed that multiple doctors missed this. The symptoms appearing and disappearing so quickly should have raised immediate doubts about CSCR, which takes days to resolve. Even I started questioning it once the pain showed up, though admittedly I never jumped to migraines either. But my excuse is that I'm a psychiatrist, not an ophthalmologist.

Unfortunately, I was also diagnosed with ocular hypertension, which is a risk factor for glaucoma. Uh.. You win some, you lose some? And it's helpful for your clinician to run tests on you in person? Go see a doctor too, even if ChatGPT is very helpful. It sadly lacks thumbs.

Interesting. When did this start? You say "used to" but don't specify. I'm interested because in my limited experience of migraines the people who get them have always seemed to have had them, like they say "I've had them since I was a kid" etc.

About 2 years back, and at the time I'd perceived it as unilateral and I'd been in the midst of incredibly stressful exams while under a lot of pressure. That was also the case for the second episode a year later. I never had anything similar during my childhood or adolescence.

The scotoma was also very different from my impression of what a typical aura was like (not that I'm an expert on migraines) so the initial absence of headaches in addition to that had me never consider migraines as a cause.

like they say "I've had them since I was a kid" etc.

I'm one of those. Started getting them around age 12 or so and had many as a teenager. Fortunately they've abated as I've gotten older. I haven't gotten one in 4ish years (some severe headaches in that time, but not migraines), and before that they were down to 1-2 per year.

I seem to get roughly one a year, usually around April-ish from memory, and they started when I was about 30.

Occasionally I'll get the first hints of an aura and it will subside but that usually results in getting the full experience a few days later.

Before I had one I'd always thought they were like a particularly bad headache. The headaches aren't great but I've had worse headaches, what's distressing is the aura part and having a front row seat to the perception that my visual cortex is being slowly torn apart from the inside.

Migraines are fascinating to me.

A few months ago, one of you was soliciting recommendations for how to improve his digestive health, and @prungus suggested taking psyllium husk every day. I've been taking one or two teaspoons every day for the last few weeks, and it's done wonders for me. Thanks for the recommendation!

Yeah I think I might’ve been the one asking, glad you got something out of it!

Just make sure it's not one of the sketchier / discount brands that tested high for lead

All psyllium plants like to absorb lead, but some of the metamucil-like products had a bit too much

Thanks, I'll keep an eye out when we're replenishing our supply.

Really? Teaspoons? I wouldn't expect it to do much at all unless you take 1-2 tablespoons.

I take 4 tbsp for what it’s worth. But i know other people that have seen improvement with smaller doses. I think any of it at all is way better than none

Did you consider a possible potential for getting less nutrition from your food when the gel-like husk mix envelop other things and pack them away? It is recommended to keep psyllium husk intake separated by 2 hours from medicine intake. So that suggests a reduced absorption if medicine gets caught up in the husk mix. Not sure if this goes for foods' nutrition as well.

It's dry, it swells up in the stomach.

That's what the packaging recommended.

Might be a starter dose. But hey, if it works, all the better. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

New year's resolutions check-in (nice that I can actually start crossing off resolutions I've completed):

  • Went to the gym three times last week, again yesterday evening, planning to go at lunchtime today. Can deadlift 1.78x my bodyweight for 4 reps, squat .93x for 10 reps and bench press .75x for 9 reps.
  • Managed to go the entirety of January without consuming any alcohol, fast food or fizzy drinks, though I was back at it like a demon from midnight on February 1st.
  • Have not consumed any pornography since waking up on January 1st.
  • Have completed 7/11 modules in the SQL course.
  • Practised guitar for roughly an hour every day in January.

How goes it, @thejdizzler and @oats_son?

  1. Work: Had a good week at work this week. Doing more by doing less: getting more done by putting less stuff on my calendar.
  2. Fitness: Got sick again (ugh), which has reduced both my desire to exercise and the positive feelings it gives. Still will hit 10 hours this week, but need to prioritize sleep and rest.
  3. Intellectual stuff: feeling very overwhelmed on this angle: I've committed to too many things. Marx book club will end this month, and extra time from reduced screen time has also been nice. Thinking of limiting blog posts and YouTube to one a day each to make more space for books!
  4. Finances: Made 3.8 (post tax) last month. Only spent 3.2k, which is about a 16% savings rate. Would like to get this closer to 20%.
  5. Dating: Only masturbated one time (which took 5 minutes, excellent time reduction) and not to porn. Went on a date with a medical student: there won't be a second date, partially from my end (her hobbies include "watching short form content") but mainly from her's (ghosted). I wasn't particularly interested but it still #feelsbadman. Unsurprisingly, ghosted by Argentinian chick. I continue to talk with a girl I met in Spain and a girl from swim club but I feel like those are more of friendships. I plan to not give out any likes on dating apps for the next month, and then pause my accounts.
  6. Didn't do any tarot this week.
  7. Screen time on my phone is at 45 (!!) minutes and dropping. There just isn't that much to do on there once I took away all the fun sites.
  8. Socializing: I'm overbooked on this front and need to leave 2-3 nights a week for personal projects or just catching up on self-care. I have a social activity every night this week except Monday, which is too much.

Finances: Made 3.8 (post tax) last month. Only spent 3.2k, which is about a 16% savings rate. Would like to get this closer to 20%.

For several years I've been trying to follow the savings advice laid out in The Barefoot Investor:

  1. In addition to your current account, create three savings accounts respectively called fire extinguisher, smile and splurge.
    • Fire extinguisher is your long-term savings (e.g. if you're saving up for a car, a deposit on a mortgage etc., it'll be coming out of here).
    • Smile is your short-term savings, a special treat you're saving up for that makes you smile when you think of it (e.g. a holiday, a new guitar).
    • Splurge is for when you want to treat yourself that month, before your next pay day (e.g. dates, going to the pub with your friends, fast food etc.).
    • All other expenses (groceries, utilities, rent/mortgage payments etc.) are paid out of your current account.
  2. The day you get paid, deposit 10% of your pay into smile, 10% into splurge and 20% into fire extinguisher.
  3. Do not dip into smile or fire extinguisher until using them for their intended purpose.
  4. If you're eating out, going out for drinks etc., you should only use splurge. If splurge is empty, you should not do any of these activities until you have replenished it. So if you splashed out the weekend after payday and now splurge is empty, it's quiet nights in and home cooking until your next payday.

Obviously it's a big ask to jump directly from saving 16% of your income to 30%. As an experiment on your next pay day, you might try putting 10% in splurge, 5% in smile and 5% in fire extinguisher. Then each month, increment smile and fire extinguisher by 1% apiece to steadily acclimatise yourself to this way of doing things, until you've met the target for the relevant account. (I always put 10% into smile, but have yet to manage putting more than 16% into fire extinguisher.)

The book also recommends putting two grand into an account in a completely different financial institution from your current and savings account. This is your rainy-day fund, for genuine life-or-death emergencies. The purpose of putting it into a different financial institution is to introduce friction so that you won't be tempted to dip into it to pay for your holidays. To this end, I put €2,000 in a government bond which pays out 10% interest if left to appreciate for ten years.

Thank you but I think I have a general idea of how to do this myself. I have a detailed budget with spending categories that I allocated cash to every month. I track expenses every week to make sure I'm on track. I just need to allocate more to the saving category, which means less spending on eating out/frivolities in general.

I find this kind of financial advice frustrating/annoying, but then I have to remember it's probably not meant to be combined with other financial advice. Otherwise, it turns into this bizarre combo of "max out your traditional 401k, max out your Roth, max out your HSA, and then save another 30% of your (pretax?) income on top of that!"

On certain months, rather than putting money into my fire extinguisher account, I'll invest it (or I'll do half-and-half).

So you guys have all these separate accounts and then reconcile your credit card spending at the end of the month by carefully transferring the appropriate funds from one to the other? Sounds like a lot of work.

It's all debit cards, I have one debit card associated with my current account and one associated with splurge. Salary gets paid into my current account, and on pay day I transfer funds from that into my savings accounts and the splurge account. Takes all of five minutes.

  • I don't know if it's the diet or what, but lifting weights is suffering. I HATE doing squats and don't look forward to them at all. Squatting to parallel made them a lot harder and it feels like I am working the hell out of my abs to get back up, and towards the end of the sets it feels like I'm rounding my upper back to not use abs as much. I only managed to work out once last week and I haven't worked out yet this week. However, I have done cardio 3 days in a row. I discovered that apparently if you can't jog slowly without your heart rate climbing up past 180, the stupid reddit zone 2 cardio advice isn't for you.
  • Still going strong on the diet. I ate a like, 600 calorie donut yesterday because the damn sales guy brought in donuts and one looked really good and it WASN'T really good. I ended up staying to the diet anyway, but I was pretty hungry going to bed last night. I weighed either 180.1 lbs or 180.8 lbs this morning, I don't remember. I finally ran out of potato chips and oatmeal, so now I'm gonna eat rice for a while. Need more chicken tho.
  • I could probably finish the Anki backlog tonight, if I focused for a while. I think there's like 100 card reviews left now. Still reading every day but it's slowed down a little. I got a bit busy at work, which hurts my reading.
  • I finished Undead Settlement after beating some tree boss, I guess. I almost missed the pyromancer guy.
  • No tennis yet. Dude, the tennis club is outrageous. It's $200 a year, but you don't get free court time or anything with it, you just get cheaper court rates, from like $47 per hour as a nonmember to between $31 and $37. If I just show up, would there be anyone to play with? How the hell do you start to play tennis? And why is renting a lane at a range to shoot guns cheaper? What?

There's a whiskey tasting tonight at a bar for "Whiskey and Wings Wednesday". Is that something you can go to by yourself? In a couple weeks there's trivia night at the local brewpub, pretty sure you can go to something like that by yourself...

I HATE doing squats and don't look forward to them at all. Squatting to parallel made them a lot harder and it feels like I am working the hell out of my abs to get back up, and towards the end of the sets it feels like I'm rounding my upper back to not use abs as much.

I hate squats with the fire of many thousands of suns. Between having very long legs for my height and extremely tight hips, squats are always suffering. I'm always in danger of turning a squat into a good morning when I'm getting to parallel (never mind going below parallel, never happening with my proportions and hips).

But I still do them. The weights I'm doing are just embarrassingly low.

I've found that front squats are much preferable.

Thanks to a wellness thread here, I discovered cyclist squats, which I've been finding less awful.

The weights I'm doing are just embarrassingly low.

What's your PR, out of interest?

265 (at 205 lbs), but I haven't tried to go past 225 in a while. That's in comparison to 375 deadlift and 255 bench. The amusing/shameful day when my bench surpasses my squat is not far off.

I'm chuffed that my deadlift is about the same as yours, but if it's any consolation, my squat and my bench are dramatically lower (in freedom units, 198 and 160 lbs respectively).

I was very confused at first since I thought chuffed meant angry, but it means the opposite, so I've been misinterpreting a bunch of speakers of British English for an unknown amount of time.

A number of people around here could probably come in and dwarf my numbers, so I feel unqualified to give advice, but most of my progress has come from the Wendler 5/3/1 program and associated "boring but big" program. Worth looking at if you find the various 5x5 programs not suitable.

I was very confused at first since I thought chuffed meant angry, but it means the opposite, so I've been misinterpreting a bunch of speakers of British English for an unknown amount of time.

I have a helpful mnemonic video for you.

For trivia night, show up early and ask the organizers/random people if there's a team you can join. Great way to make friends, just don't get too drunk or reveal any power levels.

There's a whiskey tasting tonight at a bar for "Whiskey and Wings Wednesday". Is that something you can go to by yourself?

Sure! I have a vague sense that whisky is something that can be drunk/savored alone, moreso than many other drinks.

Is that something you can go to by yourself?

Absolutely, do it bro. Impress some girl with your spice tolerance.

I feel confident in saying that were it not for your and @TowardsPanna's encouragement, I would not have attended this. Going to unknown social events is not in my comfort zone. I also had eaten so many calories at lunch between pizza and donuts that the safer bet would have been staying home and eating fruit.

I'm still pretty drunk, admittedly, but it's still fresh in my memory, so I'll write about it.

The whiskey flight was "Bardstown" whiskey. Rye, blended, wheated, bourbon.

  • It was a little more than a mile away. I moved to this neighborhood recently, so I was not aware of how dangerous the walk would be; it didn't seem to be very dangerous. I only saw a handful of people. I live in a rural area, though. I walked because I wasn't sure how much alcohol it would be, in the end. It turned out to be a very good decision; I was in no state to drive.
  • People at the bar will be friendly to you. I asked about "Wings and Whiskey Wednesday" and they were looking at me, smiling, explaining that the only thing they were ordering was the wings menu, pointing at it.
  • People at the bar will be friendly to you, Part 2: Both the middle-aged person next to you and the bartender will be trying to make conversation with you. The actual topic doesn't matter much, but the bartender knows a lot about whiskey, so he'll ask you what you think of each one. Everyone perceives whiskey differently, so just say whatever you think.
  • The blended whiskey was the most flavorful and the most enigmatic. Despite tasting it the most and trying to come up with an answer the most, I couldn't tell you what it tasted like. I could just tell you that it's the strongest tasting whiskey of the four that he poured. When I told him I couldn't tell him what I tasted, he suggested that he tasted cinnamon. I tried it again and found that that taste was probably present. Either way, it was my favorite whiskey. As far as I know; the answer doesn't matter, as long as you just give an answer at all. A couple people down the bar got a flight as well, and kept asking me about how it was going.
  • The people next to you can talk about anything. Try to pay attention to what they're saying. A fat guy sat next to me and seemed to talk about local things, especially local depressing things like kids dying or something. The women (in their 50s, by the way, I don't think anyone besides me was below their 30s, but I will report again on trivia night) talked about a lot of stuff. Including pickleball, in which I input my questions about tennis and tennis club prices.
  • There was a guy that showed up that worked at a local restaurant that talked up the restaurant and told me the name of a band that would play there in June. He was fun, though I didn't talk to him that much. Expect to learn more about the town.....
  • The male bartender didn't like stouts. If he did, I would have ordered another drink, along with wings. As it was, I just thanked him for not liking stouts and confessed I would have gotten even drunker if he had liked stouts, and I broke a 20 and tipped another 4 dollars in addition to the 3 I had already tipped. I don't know... I asked if he had any stouts, and he said he just had Black and Tan, and at that point I lost inclination to order any additional alcohol AND ALSO any wings, which I was sure I would order upon coming in.
  • I didn't really talk to the female bartender much, but she was friendly. She apologized for making me wait a century to get more water (with 4 whiskeys, you needed a lot of water), and I loudly exclaimed (because I was drunk) that I forgot all about it, and she laughed. I remember making other comments that made her laugh, but it's her job to be friendly, you know.
  • I got drunk. I'd guess I drank a little more than 2 ounces per drink, and it was 4 drinks for $25. Don't order a flight of whiskeys if you don't want to get drunk. Bourbon was smooth, wheated was tasty like syrup, rye was spicy, but the blended Bardstown whiskey was the spiciest of all; I tried it so many times trying to figure out what it tasted like that it became my favorite drink, somehow. I like drinks that punch me in the face. I figured that out a couple years ago when I tried a Lagavulin 8 Year and found that it was smokey, unlike any other whiskey I'd ever tried.
  • I didn't get incapacitatingly drunk. The goodbyes were easy and the male bartender laughed at my parting cuteness. I ran most of the way home. I like running fast, and playing Tarkov makes me feel cool and like I should run through town, pretending like I'm running through a war-torn Ukraine, taking in all the shops and houses while I was walking. I figure that I couldn't run like that if I was extremely drunk.

Overall, don't expect it to be difficult to make conversation. Everyone is predispositioned to want to talk to you, and they generally enjoy new faces. You don't need good conversational skills; in total, I was able to respond with mostly trivial empathetic responses, but otherwise, I talked about drinking, about certain local restaurants, about homeless people (one woman defended the homeless, but I was just happy to listen because I was quite drunk), about tennis, and about the drinking habits and experiences of family members who had gone on pub crawls.

On the other hand, if you don't want to get drunk, you should order a soda or something. Most people there had previously experienced trying to quit alcohol, and they would respect you for not drinking, in my opinion. My family is generally the same way; when I told these high-dollar stout drinkers that my brother didn't drink, they said "good!" Do not be ashamed of wanting to avoid alcohol.

Hopefully, there are more young people at the trivia night. I said "damn, man, I can't do this every week" to which the bartender replied "there will be a different brand next week". It strikes me as pretty easy to become an alcoholic. When I got home and started writing this, I cracked open a Leinenkugel's Summer Shandy, my overall favorite beer. My friends live all around the country, but none of them have ever seen or heard of a Leinenkugel's Summer Shandy. Is it truly a nationwide beer? Maybe not. Anyway, I will update you. Thanks for making me less boring in an unsustainable kind of way.

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