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:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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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.
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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.
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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).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
So does NoFap/Semen Retention actually do anything? Or is it all a bunch of bullshit?
Positive vs negative discipline.
Positive discipline is doing things that are good but that require the completion of a behavior; working out, reading more, writing more, learning a new skill, whatever.
Negative discipline is abstaining from things - mostly that are bad from you - but, more generally, that you want to abstain from for whatever reason in order to shift habits. Drinking and drugs, obviously, are the big ones. But this is also dieting, masturbation, social media consumption, etc.
Positive discipline activities give you a generous feeling of accomplishment and instant reward. "I worked out today!" Negative discipline is more complex - while it creates, for me, a sense of "momentum" and the feeling that I'm "on a streak", if I focus too much on it it warps into an "oh no, don't break the streak!" feeling of anxiety or anticipation. So, the mental model I use is to treat it like a savings or investment account - set it up to be automatic, then don't think about it. Check in on the "balance" every once in a while and smile as it will often be larger than you remember.
Do people really feel this way about exercise? To me it always feels like pointless effort for a reward that never comes. It's a hopeless fight to slow the pace of inevitable regression.
Yes, the happy chemicals after picking up the heavy things or covering a long distance makes me happy. The heavy things also have numbers on them, and if you keep doing it, you can watch the numbers go up.
The analogy I make to guys who don't lift but are into vidya is, it's like an RPG but IRL. (With a few exceptions) When you first start 2pl8 (100 kg) bench is like the first world boss. You'll get smacked down if you approach it without enough XP or skill. But once you level up a bit it just becomes random fodder you blow by in your warmups. You get to pick where to devote training/XP to, strength, size, endurance, etc. And have manna (recovery) you have to manage.
The inevitable regression does suck, but the meta is always changing. You'll see influencers go from "functional" training to pure strength. Then to bodybuilding/aesthetics. Then they'll pick up running. I suspect it's because one training modality does become stale when you saturate that attribute or regress. But having good general physical preparedness lets you transition to all sorts of things as your life evolves.
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