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Wellness Wednesday for November 23, 2022

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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Unemployed for a while before I start my next job. I’m staying with family and I’ve ruled out significant travel because I want to spend time with them. But I won’t be glued to them 24/7 so I have a lot of free time. How should I spend it? More importantly, how do I hold myself to whatever I decide to do instead of watching YouTube all day?

Exercise? Exercise! Go outside!

How to hold yourself to it: Loudly announce to your family what you intend to do and what they are to playfully punish you with if you don't go through with it.

Seconding this.

You may also want to try to look at it as an experiment: a couple of weeks where you can really test how far you can optimize this particular human being. How far can you drive it? Grow its muscles? Strengthen its tendons? Find the optimal sleep/eat/workout plan?

This sort of curiosity got my 5k time from 30 minutes to 23 in the span of a month. It was also great fun--both mentally and physically.