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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   1162 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for November 26, 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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Well groomed people: What do you use for nail care? Clippers and a file? Anything else?

I do like having an angled clipper as well, mostly for hangnails.

How likely is it that you were abused as a baby if you were already masturbating at 3 yrs old and while doing so, had a vision of an unfamiliar woman angrily forbidding you to think about girls and telling me to think about boys instead? I ended up straight and disregarded her command, but the vibes felt like some kind of feministic progressive trying to make me gay as a 3 year old?

I also had some UTIs at the time and a fear of bathrooms. I had some nightmares about this woman as well until I was 5-6 or so, not sexual in nature however. My parents do not recall any such person that matched my description of that woman in our lives. Although I feel like if it were anyone, it would have maybe been a preschool substitute teacher? Given that I inexplicably could not use the bathroom at my preschool and had to be held back because of it. How does one explain such a memory then? I've read that early masturbation doesn't necessarily mean abuse, and I didn't seem to have actual knowledge of how sex worked until a normal age. But this memory I have doesn't seem exactly normal either, you know? And I acquired a lot of issues as I grew up, not sexual but physical and mental and am trying to figure out why I am so objectively weird and have so many problems.

Reposting the bulk of my reply to this thread.

WRT masturbation specifically, from a therapeutic standpoint my understanding is that children can and do sometimes discover it at an early, pre-sexual age absent any sort of sexual abuse. There is even some debate about whether some observed fetal behavior/movement in the womb is actually masturbation! For whatever it's worth, while my earliest concrete memories date back to 4-5 years old, some of those memories are of masturbating. I don't remember discovering it, mind, but I do remember it as being this strange sort of urge that would come over me from time to time. Puberty/sexual awakening also happened for me at a normal age, and it was at some point during that time of my life that I connected the dots and came to understand that what I had been doing was masturbating. I've also never had a single nocturnal emission in my entire life, but then, I don't think I had any periods of complete sexual abstinence greater than six weeks or so before my mid-thirties.

From what you're saying, I'm not seeing a concrete explanation for your memory of the unfamiliar woman either. Irrespective of the wider question of sexual abuse, it certainly seems like something that a three year old would imagine all on their own.

Interesting, it is good to have someone else say that it seems like something a 3 year old could imagine on their own. I was probably just searching too hard for a cause for my issues, when I just need to make a series of good choices and such, maybe will not get any hard closure on why my issues happened, no magic bullet of knowledge/memory that will suddenly make it all make sense.

I agree that ruminating on a cause or closure might not be terribly helpful. In a larger sense, just about everyone I know well has had some straight up weird shit happen to them in life. My uncle told me stories of seeing a smiling face named Subsunk on the wall when he was a kid. He seemed to think of Subsunk as mostly an imaginary friend but he was clear that he really, physically saw Subsunk on his wall and not just in his mind's eye. For another example, my wife was all alone one day (after waking up from a nap, I think) when she heard a voice tell her out of the blue that she would be pregnant, which according to an earlier doctor, wasn't supposed to be possible for her, and she did in fact become pregnant later in life. I always personally thought that there was no such thing as "normal", but then again, being autistic I would think that, wouldn't I?

Man that's some weird stuff. Weird world I guess, maybe you are right there is no normal just a weird world. Edit: maybe the people who say they haven't seen or heard anyone see anything weird are the true weird ones?

WRT masturbation specifically, from a therapeutic standpoint my understanding is that children can and do sometimes discover it at an early, pre-sexual age absent any sort of sexual abuse. There is even some debate about whether some observed fetal behavior/movement in the womb is actually masturbation! For whatever it's worth, while my earliest concrete memories date back to 4-5 years old, some of those memories are of masturbating. I don't remember discovering it, mind, but I do remember it as being this strange sort of urge that would come over me from time to time. Puberty/sexual awakening also happened for me at a normal age, and it was at some point during that time of my life that I connected the dots and came to understand that what I had been doing was masturbating. I've also never had a single nocturnal emission in my entire life, but then, I don't think I had any periods of complete sexual abstinence greater than six weeks or so before my mid-thirties.

As for the rest of your broader post, I share several other symptoms. I am a disordered eater myself, either over or undereating depending on what's going on with me and I was a chronic undereater as a teenager. I've always had occasional problems sleeping and the most reliable sleep aid that I've found for myself has been pointing a small fan at my head and turning it on before going to sleep. That habit broke in my 20s and although I'll still sleep with an oscillating fan during the summer months, it's not something that I practice any more. I didn't have chronic tendinitis when was younger, nor did I ever experience a rash of UTIs. I do, however, have above average social anxiety, part of which manifested as keeping my head down and throwing games and the like to keep the peace with more sensitive friends, and looking back in my past, I can identify it in my behaviors then even though I didn't know what I was dealing with. In fact, I'm confident that masturbation as a young child was an unconscious coping mechanism to deal with my own otherwise high strung nature. Ultimately, my own sleep and anxiety issues are a result of being on the spectrum, which were it not for you saying that you seemed to have excellent physical coordination, I would otherwise suspect could be the case for you as well.

You seem to have a lot going on with irregularities in your life, and I sympathize with you when you say that you feel that it's unfair. It sounds like you put a lot into your own well-being, though, and that's actually pretty awesome if not a superpower in its own right and I encourage you to keep it up.

Also, I don't think I put that much into my own well-being right now. It might have sounded like that, but like I said I think I was able to induce anhedonia, which when combined with some momentum makes it seem like you are very disciplined, when you actually aren't. It's some kind of weird cheat code that nobody talks about, but if you can annihilate pleasure you can seem to do a lot of good things for yourself, but think that's a path as wide as a razor's edge and all that. I wouldn't be surprised if some of my issues were because of that forced anhedonia. Now I'm no longer anhedonic, or at least much less so, and I want to try and build discipline/will power and direct it toward improving well-being the right way, but I am definitely lacking in will power and discipline because I coasted for a long time on anhedonia.

Thank you for sharing and for the encouragement. I do have social anxiety as well actually, I hadn't considered whether or not I'm on the spectrum until now, although if good coordination removes you from that I guess I wouldn't be. I definitely sympathize with keeping the peace among sensitive friends!

I ended up deleting my other post and shortening it because I thought it was too long but I appreciate you reading through it. Interesting suggestion regarding the fan for sleeping, perhaps I will try that. I bought this book that I have yet to read called the effortless sleep method that seems promising, we'll see what it says. My main issue with the abuse thought is that I basically hallucinated an angry stranger with context/framing that I shouldn't really have been able to know as a 3 year old, but also the framing wasn't too outrageous/overtly sexual, so who knows if I somehow overheard something in media accidentally, felt some kind of shame about what I was doing subconsciously, that got incorporated into a hallucination, that's the only nice explanation I can think of. But it is reassuring that at least the masturbation itself isn't too weird at that age.

Arright, I'm going to try and stick with spectrum specific stuff here and just say that it's probably worth looking into ASD regardless but generally speaking, the cerebellum is underdeveloped in ASD folks, leading to characteristic clumsiness/physical awkwardness/gawkiness. Hope the book gives you some good stuff on getting better sleep and I'd be interested to hear what you've learned from it. WRT sleep and autism specifically, basically my understanding is that the autistic brain has a smaller reservoir for emotional stimulation while also processing emotions more slowly, and one of the ways that this manifests is in an active resting network and generally more frequent and vivid dreams compared to neurotypicals.

Interesting regarding the smaller reservoir for emotional stimulation, and more active resting network. I haven't seen it put in those words, "active resting network" before. That seems to be similar to what I experience, in that my thoughts just don't shut down even when I want to rest. Feels like I'm calculating (to what end I don't know) the previous mundane events of the day sometimes, not even in a stressed way but in a doing-arithmetic mechanical sort of way, but I can't shut it off. Unless sometimes like I said, if I do everything else right while also managing to not overthink sleep hygiene. Not sure if that's really emotional processing going on though, more just an instinctive reluctance to let go of active thinking, but perhaps processed by the cerebellum too, idk?

So I figured out how to finally avoid paying taxes on my insane NVDA gains. Lose my job! Long term capital gains are taxed at 0% up to almost $100,000 of income when you are married filing jointly.

I don't know exactly what happened, but my boss told me the government shut down pushed the small company I work for over the edge. The last 2 months are typically the time of the year we are negotiating another contract with whomever in the DoD to fund next years activities, and I guess that just didn't happen.

It sucks. I worked there 20 years. I've had a reliable income my entire adult life. I haven't kept my resume up to date at all, and I probably interview for shit, not really having kept up with the jargon. But I wasn't particularly attached to my work there, and I don't feel any particular moral outrage about it happening. I get paid out my 188 hours of accrued vacation time and 40 extra hours of severance.

My wife is pregnant. All that church we've been going to finally unblocked whatever apprehension she had about bringing another life into this world. So that adds some stress. Need to get more health insurance ASAP.

I have friends and previous coworkers willing to forward my resume along, and my wife is a former recruiter who's going to help me whip it into shape. I'm on the cusp of having escape velocity "Fuck You" money, but it's a bit premature to YOLO on working just yet. Maybe if it'd been another year and the markets had done great. Maybe 3 or 4 if they'd been just average. But right now feels like the wrong time.

Wish me luck.

My wife is pregnant.

Congratulations! And with the job no longer holding you in VA, perhaps it's time to consider exit.

Good luck. As somebody who went through it twice a couple of years ago, it's gonna suck, but it will likely be temporary. Take care of yourself, physically and psychologically, and let your wife and others help you. And just grind through the tedious and sucky part, eventually something will come up.

Good luck, sir, and congratulations on the pregnancy. Hope you make out like a bandit with the NVDA stonks and that you find something better soon!

My wife is pregnant.

In the end, this was 99% of the real importance of this post.

Congratulations!

Sell NVIDA and then short. AI bubble looks ripe to burst. Then you'll have all the fuck you money you ever need.

Good luck on the job search and with your future child!

My condolences. At least it's the whole company going down the drain instead of you being fired after 20 years of work. I hope you land on your feet and your buddies get you a good word elsewhere. Good luck!

Via David Friedman:

In 1972, when the National Institutes of Health introduced the National High Blood Pressure Education Program to help prevent hypertension, no meaningful experiments had yet been done. The best evidence on the connection between salt and hypertension came from two pieces of research. One was the observation that populations that ate little salt had virtually no hypertension. But those populations didn’t eat a lot of things—sugar, for instance—and any one of those could have been the causal factor. The second was a strain of “salt-sensitive” rats that reliably developed hypertension on a high-salt diet. The catch was that “high salt” to these rats was 60 times more than what the average American consumes.

Still, the program was founded to help prevent hypertension, and prevention programs require preventive measures to recommend. Eating less salt seemed to be the only available option at the time, short of losing weight. Although researchers quietly acknowledged that the data were “inconclusive and contradictory” or “inconsistent and contradictory”—two quotes from the cardiologist Jeremiah Stamler, a leading proponent of the eat-less-salt campaign, in 1967 and 1981—publicly, the link between salt and blood pressure was upgraded from hypothesis to fact.

In the years since, the NIH has spent enormous sums of money on studies to test the hypothesis, and those studies have singularly failed to make the evidence any more conclusive. Instead, the organizations advocating salt restriction today—the USDA, the Institute of Medicine, the CDC and the NIH—all essentially rely on the results from a 30-day trial of salt, the 2001 DASH-Sodium study. It suggested that eating significantly less salt would modestly lower blood pressure; it said nothing about whether this would reduce hypertension, prevent heart disease or lengthen life.

While influential, that trial was just one of many. When researchers have looked at all the relevant trials and tried to make sense of them, they’ve continued to support Dr. Stamler’s “inconsistent and contradictory” assessment. Last year, two such “meta-analyses” were published by the Cochrane Collaboration, an international nonprofit organization founded to conduct unbiased reviews of medical evidence. The first of the two reviews concluded that cutting back “the amount of salt eaten reduces blood pressure, but there is insufficient evidence to confirm the predicted reductions in people dying prematurely or suffering cardiovascular disease.” The second concluded that “we do not know if low salt diets improve or worsen health outcomes.”

The idea that eating less salt can worsen health outcomes may sound bizarre, but it also has biological plausibility and is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, too. A 1972 paper in The New England Journal of Medicine reported that the less salt people ate, the higher their levels of a substance secreted by the kidneys, called renin, which set off a physiological cascade of events that seemed to end with an increased risk of heart disease. In this scenario: eat less salt, secrete more renin, get heart disease, die prematurely.

With nearly everyone focused on the supposed benefits of salt restriction, little research was done to look at the potential dangers. But four years ago, Italian researchers began publishing the results from a series of clinical trials, all of which reported that, among patients with heart failure, reducing salt consumption increased the risk of death.

The articles quoted seem dated. There have been various interventional trials into sodium intake.

Meta-analysis from 2013: Effect of longer‐term modest salt reduction on blood pressure

From 2020: Effect of dose and duration of reduction in dietary sodium on blood pressure levels: systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised trials

*From 2021: Blood Pressure Effects of Sodium Reduction

*From 2022: Impact of different dietary sodium reduction strategies on blood pressure: a systematic review

Obviously you can attack one or all of those sources as illegitimate or ideologically captive. But there is evidence out there. Taubes himself reminds me to a degree of Robert Lustig, also a dude who tries to fight mainstream scientific consensus (in Lustig's case he is also convinced sugar is the ultimate baddie and calls it poison.)

It's not clear that the results are even contradictory. The argument seems to be that there is a clear dose response relationship with urinary sodium and short term blood pressure but the relationship with premature death and other negative effects of cardiovascular disease and what constitutes a "modest" reduction are not as well established.

In particular, of the three obvious interventions weight loss, blood pressure medication, and sodium restriction; sodium reduction seems to have the smallest impact and at the cost of potentially making your food significantly less palatable. There is a pretty substantial part of the population where, in quality of life adjusted terms it would not be worth it. Reducing sodium intake from something like 12 g/day to the recommended 2.3 g/day would take most of the joy they get out of eating. The expected reduction in blood pressure might be as much as 5 mmHg, but they likely would still need medication and the difference would still be entirely controllable with medication dose.

The best controlled long-term study I've seen is from the Mars500 people. They did find the expected dose response relationship. But, for normal people the reductions in intake would not feel "modest" as the He et.al. title implies. They also show that the 24 hour sodium urine measures used in most of those meta-analyses are, at best, an imperfect proxy for long term sodium intake.

All of this not medical advice. That being said, high blood pressure is very likely supper bad for you. If you have high blood pressure the modern pharmaceutical interventions are nearly perfect. Drastic sodium reduction might be marginally beneficial, or not. The aggregate evidence seems to indicate that it will produce a reduction in blood pressure, but the effect size (even in those pro reduction review papers) is likely too small small to fully resolve chronic significantly elevated blood pressure, for most people.

I didn't know the Mars500 project had been so rigorous. Is there anything interesting that came out of it?

Mostly that they didn't have to rely on urine samples or food log proxies, and they observed for long enough to avoid the transient effects on body water. I assume the transient change in plasma volume has very little benifial impact on long term health. Since it was pretty long term, they made enough samples on each individual to clearly see the effects on the longitudinal axis, which is much more what you care about at an individual intervention level.

If you look at the plots in the supplemental materials, you can very clearly see the step change in blood pressure with sodium in each individual. You can also see seasonality in urine sodium excretion that is independent of sodium intake.

The part I don't like about just using urine samples is, why isn't you null that the body reestablishes homeostasis when it increases/decreases excretion? Like obviously since your body excreats less sodium if you consume less sodium the net is smaller than the raw magnitude of adjustment you make. Why isn't the net zero over the long term? What is the proposed mechanism by which reducing sodium is improving health? A naive model of less sodium leads to less plasma leads to lower blood pressure leads to better health doesn't work, because plasma volumes return to close to normal once you body has a chance to decrease excreation and restore osmotic balance.

Helpfully they observe in highly controlled conditions over a long enough period you can see that there are indeed appreciable hormonal contributions beyond pure osmotic arguments. It is assumed that the mechical effect of lower pressure and the hormonal effects are beneficial. You can lower the mechical pressure with medication though, so the residual question is what the health effects of sodium are beyond blood pressure. That I don't know. The mainstream consensus seems to be more sodium is bad independent of blood pressure. Hard to say for sure though, since high sodium food is correlated with other things that are bad for us when they try to disentangle it in population level studies.

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