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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   1502 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for November 19, 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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Although my wife thought this was coddling

Wait, she thought shoving a kid head first into ice-cold water counted as coddling him? Is that a Japanese thing?

"You gotta stop waterboarding the kids, George, you'll spoil them rotten!"

Ha. I may have inadvertently painted a more violent picture than the reality. There was no head shoving. I placed bowl on table and bid him dunk his head, which he did on his own. After a few weeks of doing this almost every day my wife's worry was that I was providing an emotional crutch where it would be better to simply power through on force of will alone. Which, of course is the right attitude. Thankfully he was able to eventually realize that what was happening to him was within his own control and the ice water bowl was no longer needed.

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