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Wellness Wednesday for December 14, 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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What are your thoughts on dopamine fasting?

Since the mechanisms of neurochemistry are highly nonlinear and piecewise, I am not even going to pretend I have a working understanding of whether the idea of dopamine fasting is dubious or not.

There are reasonable prescriptions, such as not masturbating twice daily, not scrolling Instagram reels for hours before sleeping, etc. But I have seen people avoiding screen time altogether or not even limiting how much music they listen to, which seems absurd to me. Well past the point of diminishing returns.


Tangentially, what are your thoughts on "eating good"?

Recently I have invested in multiple new kitchen equipment and many high-quality ingredients. Mainly because eating out is becoming less attractive with rising prices, and I have plenty of free time because of WFH so cooking is a good time pass.

This might sound like a weird "problem," but the food I have been cooking and eating recently is too good. With the help of youtube and serious eats, I am pumping out restaurant-quality food daily. I also got a large cabinet freezer so I can buy meat and seafood in bulk at the market for cheap.

This feels kind of "wrong", I am indulging, and I know it. I don't eat like a glutton and exercise a lot (walking 3-4 miles daily and lifting), so I am not concerned about getting fat, but I fell like I have pushed myself up the hedonic treadmill by getting good at cooking. More and more, I wake up and think, "what will I cook for dinner tonight?"

Thoughts?

Not only have restaurants gotten more expensive, the service has gotten worse - and it seems like that's a permanent thing. Places have discovered they can close randomly and have 2 servers for 20 tables and the general public just keeps putting up with it.

"Eating good" is a totally reasonable hobby to pick up. Why hang out with friends who proved they're spineless cowards during COVID? Instead, you can sink an hour or two into killer meals. By cooking it you're reducing its appeal to yourself anyway, so that's generally the minimum you'd eat from a meal of that quality. Hopefully you're also cooking for someone else at least. The effort I put into my top tier (honestly, some of the most flabbergastingly good) burgers is wasted even when it's just for 2 people.

The thing I've started doing which I think is the big mistake is sweet baking (belgian waffles, blueberry muffins, oatmeal cookies....). The good news is I've hit my skill ceiling, the bad news is I can now slam these things together very quickly and set myself up for a terrible calorie dense day. An additional workout or skipping lunch helps.

What's your burger recipe? I can hardly think of a burger recipe that takes much effort.

I make some pretty good burgers too. But it's just making a plain beef patty (starting with good meat), seasoning it with salt and pepper on the outside, and then blasting it on the cast iron or charcoal grill; the fire does the work.

It's not a complicated recipe, but orchestrating everything to line up correctly is annoying with the charcoal, because bun toasting doesn't work as well on it. I have a separate nonstick or flat top running for that.

It is amazing that most people don't know how to patty properly, select beef, or order toppings on the correct buns. I'm generally making a custom variant of "Big Mac Sauce" and grilling onions for one set, and a custom chipotle sauce and grilled peppers for another.

Man, I used to experiment with making hobnob biscuits, and eating the home made equivalent of a pack a week was really bad. It's a dangerous skill to learn.

And yeah, restaurants are off the table for me now, after the last $30 clearly frozen and microwaved dinner. But surely there's still good ones out there? Maybe just the ones out of my price range.

Around me, the only restaurants that are not committing daylight robbery post-covid are places where firemen, construction workers, and other manual laborers eat. And I eat out at these places 90% of the time, mainly to save time. I go to a "good" restaurant maybe 3-4 times a year.