site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   1102 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for November 12, 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).

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Having a bit of a conundrum. Screen time in the first few hours of the day sets the tone for me for the rest of the day. If I scroll social media in the early AM hours, I am likely to do so the rest of the day. Easy enough habit to stop though right? Unfortunately a lot of my AM exercise is screen dependent. I use Zwift for indoor cycling, and often need to text friends for AM running. How do I get around this?

For the friends issue I'm thinking I can just lock in the night before and not worry about canceling. Zwift seems a bit more difficult.

Meditate for at least 30 minutes right after getting up, to invigorate consciousness and agency; be aware of what the mind tries to establish.

Have you tried setting your phone display to grayscale (either in the morning only or even all day)? I've been doing that for a few weeks and anecdotally it helps prevent absent minded screen checking.

Zwift on TV, early morning texting on a smartwatch that you put in a drawer at 9am?

I'm coming up on two weeks since I had that molar surgically extracted and the bone graft done. Here are a few notes for anyone who might have to deal with it in the future:

  1. You're going to sleep a lot the first day. Set alarms to stay hydrated and take ibuprofen.
  2. The "soft foods" restriction absolutely sucks. You're going to have a difficult time getting enough calories. Dairy is your friend here. Rich mashed potatoes have kept me from losing too much weight. A protein shake also isn't a terrible idea: in addition to the protein, they tend to be fortified with a ton of other micronutrients.
  3. Since you're calorie deficient and burning what energy you do consume to heal, you're going to be cold all the damned time. Layer up.
  4. Don't bend over for the first 48 hours unless you enjoy bleeding.
  5. You will be cold ALL THE DAMNED TIME. I write this from underneath a thermal base layer, long Johns, sweatpants, a waffle long sleeved shirt, a hooded sweatshirt, fingerless gloves, and a blanket and I am still cold.
  6. Don't take a hot bath for the first 48 hours. It makes the affected area more uncomfortable.
  7. Discomfort is going to peak around 48-72 hours. It will get better from there.
  8. The stitches are rough and have a pretty good chance of abrading your tongue. This will be especially bad on the first day before the anesthesia wears off. When you can, try to sleep on your side so that your tongue falls away from them rather than on to them.
  9. On the first night, try sleeping as close to sitting up as you can manage. It'll really help keep the swelling down.

I'm open to questions if anybody has something similar on the horizon or they're just morbidly curious.

Welp. Exam's in 4 hours. I've studied on and off for 6 months, and very hard (by my standards) for at least 2. I've been a complete shut-in for two weeks.

My performance is at the point where I'll probably pass, but that's not a guarantee. A minor fluctuation in cut-offs (due to the scoring system and thresholds) could still make all the difference. The MRCPsych Paper A can vary from 40% to 60+% percent pass rates from batch to batch. Hopefully they'll be a little more lenient this time, as the last go had the most failures of recent history. I can kinda see through the matrix now, when it comes to awkward questions and terrible phrasing.

I'd have liked to go into it right after a full night's rest, but my sleep cycle wouldn't allow for it. Still, I'm hardly sleep deprived. Wish me luck folks, I could use some right about now.

Edit:

Reassuringly, the actual exam had me go what the fuck at roughly the same rate as the dozen mocks I did. Maybe even better! I could have wrapped up the whole paper in 45 minutes instead of 3 hours, but I opted to take a leisurely two just to triple check, not that that made much of a difference.

I would say that >50% of the questions had answers that I could have answered in my sleep. For the rest, I had far more 50:50 tossups between two plausible seeming options out of the five per question than I did examples of total ignorance. I did spot a few questionable questions, such as 5 different options for a description of schizophrenic mannerism, of which one was perhaps slightly less wrong than the rest. Most of the time, my intuition lead me the right way even where I wasn't completely certain of the correct answer.

Then there are the stupid questions:

Which test is required before prescribing atomoxetine and Ritalin (separate questions)? The correct answer would be none, because there isn't a single test that is strictly required or even strongly suggested according to standard guidance. That wasn't an option, so I opted for blood pressure (almost certainly correctly) because well, they're stimulants, but that's almost totally irrelevant in practice.

Then they asked us about the method of action of vortioexetine, presumably regarding its antidepressant effects. The answer is "nobody fucking knows", but sadly that wasn't a choice either. I went for 5-HT1A agonism because well, it does do that, and it's a common mechanism for many antidepressants. Sigh.

With the benefit of hindsight, I think I achieved the desirable goal of minimizing regret. I didn't make any stupid mistakes, or unforced errors. Where I was wrong, it was usually due to arcane trivia or genuine ignorance. Many claim that the mocks are harder than the real deal, and I'd say that's probably true for this one. The typical passing score is low 60s, I already did better on average on most mocks, and I estimate >=70% on the actual paper. Which is very likely a pass! Still too early to celebrate, but I'm not touching another fucking textbook till the results are out.

Thanks to everyone who wished me well, I appreciate it <3

Then there are the stupid questions:

I feel like I have stepped into the role of nagging elder relative at this point buttttttttttttt.

Medical board exam questions usually come in two flavors: 1. "We are required by weight of history and other requirements to put this in here" (which usually involves historically important acknowledge of ye old white men and deprecated theories, as well as political drivel), and 2. "No really I need to know you know this for practice" (at times especially because people aren't actually doing it).

Vitals monitoring is common for a ton of meds some of which isn't really that important some of which really really is (like say venlafaxine). In the times of Telehealth reminding doctors they actually should be doing this is kinda important. Depending on clinical specifics cardiac monitoring is also not unreasonable for ADHD meds. Granted the necessity of this is probably a bit reduced in a less.....um, lawsuit laden? environment but that doesn't mean that on paper you shouldn't be doing these things.

Perhaps most importantly they told you that none wasn't an answer so that tells you that there is something you misunderstood, didn't know, or that they were hiding behind "most likely." It's not worth fighting them about in your own head, especially because you were able to figure out the trick.

Likewise yes yes we don't really know how anti-depressants work, but you can just say the receptor of interest and move on with your life lol.

Anyway bitching like this is usually a sign that you passed, and these exams are mostly designed to make you feel like "wtf" walking out after them.

Good luck!

Almost everyone I knew in law school had at least one exam that they thought they failed that they actually did really well on. Your feelings coming out rarely have much to do with how you did.

if you prepared well, then may the exam paper be tough. if you prepared less, then may the exam paper be lenient.

with complete effort, attain victory.

Is having it easy every time not an option? Oh well, I did work at it, and I'm reasonably optimistic about the outcome. Thank you!

Nah. When I am well prepared, I want the hardest paper. Best way to flush out the laggards.

https://i.imgur.com/5ykMQmK.png

I tried to open this without a VPN and got the "content not viewable in your region", which isn't a great omen haha. Thanks nonetheless!

Weird. It's just imgur. And I promise it's perfectly SFW!

It's a UK thing, Imgur got into legal trouble for not following new age restriction laws, and opted to pick up their ball and go home. I don't even blame them.

(I did use a VPN to actually look, in fact, I keep it on almost all the time!)

Best of luck. 頑張って！

Sorry, I don't speak Spanish. (Thank you though!)

Good luck! You're a smart dude and worked hard, I'm sure you got this!

I wish I was smarter so I didn't have to work like a donkey, but thank you!

Luck

Thank you!

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats