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Wellness Wednesday for March 12, 2025

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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I recently bought an indoor air quality monitor after seeing some posts on Twitter about drowsiness and such being caused by high CO2 levels in living spaces.

I've discovered a few things:

  • My apartment's ventilation is atrocious, even if I have the air handler going. Root cause is still unknown.
  • Opening up my balcony door will drop the CO2 ppm down by 100s. One day I woke up at about 1700 ppm CO2 and watched as it steadily dropped down to 600 ppm after opening up the door. I've been opening the door for a few minutes at a time and that's enough to flush the room.
  • Opening the room up does make it feel less stuffy. Hard to tell if this is legit or a classic placebo or me convincing myself that this $200 purchase was well worth it.

I think one "fun" idea to check if CO2 levels actually harm me is taking random, blinded samples of my drowsiness/mood/etc levels and overlaying them on the CO2-time plot.

Years ago, I bought a CO2 monitor after reading something about indoor air quality (maybe gwern? I don't remember). Even just cracking the window makes a huge difference in the CO2 level. Sometimes I notice a difference in my drowsiness/motivation, sometimes I don't.

What I really need is some kind of magic vent over the window that lets the air freely circulate but keeps the warmth inside.

I bought a CO2 monitor after reading something about indoor air quality (maybe gwern? I don't remember)

Slate Star Codex articles: 1 2 (archives: 1 2)

Yeah, that would have been it! Though I was not one of the 129 in the survey.