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Wellness Wednesday for August 27, 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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Goals from last month went pretty well! I set up a cold-turkey block on my computer that will lock the internet behind a 1000 character random passcode after 9pm. I can get through it if I need to, but it's a pain in the ass and usually get me to turn of my computer at 8:30 pm every night to avoid having to deal with it in the morning. Scheduling also has gone pretty well, although I need to have better follow-through with lab stuff. Sleep has also been pretty good, but I'm always waking up at 4 am quite hungry. The temporary solution has been to eat a banana and go back to sleep, but I'm trying to prevent this from happening in the first place by shifting my diet away from simple carbs.

Systems goals for next month

  1. Take some time at the beginning of each week and month to plan out what I’m going to do for that week/month. This doesn’t have to be a prison, but it should be a guide. I should have a pretty good reason to deviate from the plan because (I think) I am getting to be much more soft with my expectations for myself so a lot of buffer is built into the schedule.
  2. Run a few self-experiments. The big one I’m conducting this month is trying to increase the amount of fat (and a little more protein) in my diet. This isn’t going to be very rigorous, but the outcome I’m hoping to see is to stop waking up in the middle of the night hungry. The other experiments are stuff I’ve talked about in my natural oura ring experiments: rerunning correlation between bedtime/wake time and other health variables corrected for wake-up time, correlating external variables (Anki pass rate, workout performance) with sleep.
  3. Make sure I’m spending a bit more alone time. I think August was perhaps too social for me: there has rarely been a night where I’m not doing something with some group of friends. This is causing my intellectual goals and chore backlog to suffer a little bit. Tentative goal is to have 2 nights a week with NO plans.