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Wellness Wednesday for November 5, 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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If you aim to be an elite athlete, that makes sense. If you aim to be a reasonably healthy person with good fitness, this will get you in trouble. If you are not enjoying something, you are spending your willpower every time you do it. And however determined you are, the willpower is a limited resource. For which a lot of things are competing every day. If you do not enjoy it, you will start finding excuses not to do it. You will start unconsciously arranging things so that you would do less of it. And you will feel shitty about it, because you would know the excuses are bullshit, but you will still do it because that's the nature of human brain. And feeling shitty about it would drive you to do even less of it, maybe get rid of it altogether - with a very good and strong reason of course! - so that you stop feeling shitty. That's not a good way to do things. I mean, you can power through it - but statistically, the majority of chances are you won't. I am a big proponent of "do what works for you, and fuck any third-party opinions", but my experience tells me things I don't enjoy doing are much less sustainable than things I do enjoy doing. Even if it means I'd sacrifice some reps and some lbs for it - it's better to have some consistent reps than end up with no reps at all because you grew depressed by the whole thing.

the willpower is a limited resource

This concept isn't holding up well to replication btw

Not that anyone really knows the answer, but studies (Carol Dweck?) have shown you can be psy-op'd or placebo'd into having more after it's been "depleted"

Personally, I think willpower and energy/tiredness are inversely correlated. Your willpower is worse at the end of the day because your brain is fatigued.