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 -
Does the urge to engage in poor coping strategies ever go away?
I'm in my 40s. When hitting a certain level of stress/burnout, I used to engage in a very particular unhealthy behavior. Thanks to some combination of aging, better choices, and limiting my ability to engage in those behaviors, it's been years since I did them. But every time I hit that level of stress, my first instinct is still, "fuck this, I'm going to go do X." Obviously, not doing X is good, but it would be nice for that impulse to go away.
Yes it can effectively go away or diminish to the point that you never engage in them unless you somehow deliberately decide to.
You can train the mind in meditation to see that ephemeral and unhealthy solutions are... dumb. Dumb in the sense that when using them you expect a real or long term fix from an ineffective behavior. You start to see that reaching for the cigarette every time is the act of a weak little ape. And you have the potential as a human to be a lot more than a poorly coded input-output machine. You can soften the pain by changing your relationship to it, thus changing how it presents. Typically, most of the problem is created by viewing the problem as a problem, or pushing against it. Everything you push against gets energy added to it and keeps going instead of just dissipating quickly. An emotion and emotionally loaded cognition lasts less than a minute; unless you just keep firing it up again and again.
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