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Wellness Wednesday for September 17, 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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On a related note, how do you know whether you're magnesium deficient?

How often does your leg go to sleep?

If this is a personal question and not an hypothetical question meant to answer my own question, the answer is: Pretty much never. Paresthesia is the word, by the way. (edit: douchebag aside struck through.) The last time I felt it I think I had slept on my arm too long one night.

As far as I know self-diagnosing magnesium deficiency is very, very difficult, as the symptoms (twitchiness, cramps, tremors, jaw clenching) are part of a differential diagnosis for many other conditions. But empirically, if someone noticed these symptoms and either adjusted his/her diet (spinach, quinoa, dark chocolate, whatever) to increase dietary magnesium or went on supplements like magnesium glycinate and then noticed an absence of the symptoms, then okay. I'm wondering though how anyone would know this, though there may be places online where upping one's magnesium is considered common knowledge. My concern would be kidney issues.

What's the connection here?

It's one of the symptoms of magnesium deficiency, IIRC.

For me, I can tell because I can't sleep right.

Maybe it's a placebo effect?

The red flag for being really magnesium deficient in my case was tightness or discomfort around my jaw. I noticed this when using drugs that depleted magnesium, and it was always immediately fixed by taking magnesium.