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).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Figured out how to "reduce stress" on Oura ring readings. Basically need to make sure I take computer breaks throughout the day. Post lunch time walk, computer-free lab meeting, etc. have added a lot of restorative time to my days. This seems to be correlated with how I'm feeling as well.
Still waking up every single day at 4am. Usually manage to go back to sleep with a low dose melatonin, but is still annoying. My leading hypothesis is something to do with blood sugar, am trying to eat more fat and protein. Any tips/thoughts appreciated.
You might balk at this, but consider going a week without taking any biometrics or monitoring at all. I'd actually suggest a month or longer. From my wild and woolly point of view the currently popular idea of "optimizing" one's physical health is more like micromanaging when maybe just grooving for a bit would be more helpful. I suspect however that this suggestion does not interest you.
It's a tough line to walk, especially because as you get closer to the optimal frontier, the quality of evidence for what is "best" declines significantly, so many folks find themselves swimming in all sorts of claims about minute details, which, even if real, may only have an extremely small effect size. E.g., people nitpicking about exact timing of protein intake and its exact composition at those times. Like, sure, if you're an elite athlete and your pay may depend on whether you can eek out an extra percent here and there, maybe it's worth trying to figure it out, but it's just not for most people. It's definitely not worth the psychological hassle of trying to wade through the various claims or attempting to micromanage a signal which may not even be high-quality enough to ever capture the phenomenon you're looking for.
On the other side, there are basic things that many people just don't grok until you collect their specific data from them and show it to them. For a couple examples, I've met people who simply did not truly comprehend that calories correspond noisily but directly to body weight or that alcohol messed up their sleep until it was shown to them with their own data.
Of course, it's always difficult to know which category you're in, because, well, you don't know what you don't know.
More options
Context Copy link
I will definitely do this November/December this year when I am not training hard. It is helpful when training to have stuff tell me when to chill out and when I can put in work.
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah agreed. I think biometrics do more harm than good personally.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link