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:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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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.
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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.
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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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I think I've figured out how to use my phone less and not carry it everywhere: getting a phone I strongly dislike (instead of mildly dislike).
I got a new phone because my old phone (6yo Pixel 4) was getting unstable, the battery life was getting absurdly bad, and Verizon offered me a $0 Pixel 10 Pro with a 3-year price contract (I'm not changing carriers, so makes no difference to me).
I strongly dislike the new phone, primarily because it's larger and heavier. The original Pixel was the perfect size. The 4 was too big but overall tolerable. This one is even worse. It is uncomfortably large and heavy in a pocket and I feel like I need a purse to haul the stupid thing around. So far it's been easy to leave it at my desk (work or home) and not take it places.
With my old phone, I would usually not take it along when doing stuff with friends, so I had plenty of the "sitting quietly while everyone else is deeply absorbed in their phone and not talking to anyone" experience. I guess I'll get to have more of that.
Does anybody know why phones keep increasing in size? I'd say 85% or more of the people that I know complain about how uncomfortable and inconvenient they are, but they keep growing. There must be some incentive on the design and production side that I don't understand. More room for batteries or something, maybe?
Ah great, so I am not the only one annoyed by this. I had been looking for a decent small phone for years, and looks like they just died out. Really, if I want to enjoy iMAX-sized cinematic productions, that extra inch is not going to help me. But they make it heavier and less convenient to carry in my pocket. I'd gladly support manufacturing smaller ones with my money, but there seems to be no market at all there. Maybe those newer flippers though, have to check them out. I used to have a flipper phone for years, before modern mega-bricks became the standard.
I would pay $2000 for an iPhone 17 Pro Mini.
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If you look at the way people actually use smartphones, they spend several hours texting, watching videos, and playing games for every hour they spend talking. These are all activities that benefit from a larger screen, so phones have evolved to become as large as possible while still (barely) fitting inside a pocket or purse.
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Bigger screens for watching videos. As phones become more and more of a computer replacement, the incentive to maximize screensize goes up.
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Just want to thank @TowardsPanna for the recommendation to read This is Natto. Completely changed my relationship to sleep and wakefulness and I've been sleeping much better since.
The big shift has been one of mindset. Rather than obsessively think about numbers, I just give myself ample opportunity to sleep, remove all trackers/watches from the room and sleep and wake up when my body feels like it. If I wake up in the middle of the night or "too early", no biggie, I just do stuff I want to do until sleepiness returns or I think it's time to just get up.
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I had the second phase of my dental implant done yesterday - the "endosseous implant". Essentially, the implant specialist drills a hole in your skull and then literally hammers a very expensive, titanium drywall anchor into it.
Recovery is not so bad as the extraction, but they have me on the Panic Attack Antibiotic and dexamethasone this time.
In an effort to mitigate the panic attacks a bit, the dentist has adjusted the dosage. She also said the dexamethasone should help with that response a bit (or potentially make it waaaaay worse).
Dexamethasone is interesting. All the chronic pains I deal with from auto immune issues are absolutely gone, but I'm paying the price with peculiar mental side effects. I feel agitated and energetic, but not anxious, depressed, or angry. This is annoying because I have been explicitly instructed to take it easy for a few days when all I really want to do is rearrange my house and build a shelf.
I'm allowing myself to turn my heat up, knowing that I'm going to be calorie-deficient again for a while. I've also bought a very warm robe. Thanks to everyone who talked me into it last time.
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