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).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Are there any actually good life coaching services? Less "go get it tiger" and more "here's a supplement schedule, a personal trainer, and an apprenticeship in a good field for you in exchange for 40% of your earnings for the next 10 years."
I'm currently unemployed. A new software development job looks out of reach without college, and college looks out of reach given my current work ethic. Changing my work ethic would be ideal but it seems like it will take something drastic--stimulants are insufficient. Really all I have going for me is that I'm reasonably intelligent and have 5 years of experience doing software development in crypto (less transferable to normal software development than you'd expect). Not even sure what steps to take next, as I seem to be incapable of maintaining healthy habits for more than a few days at a time.
If I can get my act together I think I can degree-hack and then get an entry-level software dev job. But I've been unemployed for a couple months now and even with all my efforts focused on building a doable daily schedule, one where I code as much as a full-time job will require (e.g. 2-4 hours) it is so far still out of reach.
Yes and no.
The traditional answer is therapy - therapists should not be providing you with advice but can help you explore your motivations and challenges and keep on top of deficiencies. If you know what to do, why can't you do it type things.*
For more directly what you are asking for, yes absolutely this exists but it is out of your price range. Anyone organized and persuasive enough to actually do this well is facing a steep opportunity cost, and working on contingency makes little sense because very few people can be handed success and make something of it.
If you come from a good background the traditional approach was to leverage your parent's network.
I do imagine with the amount of scams, gig economy nonsense and outright LLMs around these days you can probably find something somewhere but I would use caution.
Although speaking of LLMs - this might actually be a legitimately helpful use case.
*And this is a question that really needs to be answered.
Therapists don't come close to trying to answer that question in my experience. If I ever bring up that I want to accomplish a normal amount in a day, the conversation immediately becomes either "where did those expectations come from" or "you must be depressed, depression is the only reason anyone ever fails to execute."
Do you actually have an agency in mind? I'd be happy to dump my life savings into this (a few hundred thousand) if I thought it likely to work.
Those questions are part of the chain of reasoning required to figure out what is wrong and address it. Depression is often a cause. Although, therapy quality is annoyingly variable.
I mean it sounds like you know what to do right? So just do it. ...but it isn't that simple. Paying someone to tell you what to do has the same issue.
"Where did those expectations come from" is not part of the chain of reasoning required to figure out how to meet those expectations. And I'm not depressed. I have never talked to a therapist who tried any other tactic, who seemed remotely interested in actually finding a root cause or solving a problem. Have you?
What I need is self-sustaining habits, a system capable of motivating me to both get my work done and maintain the system itself.
Object level: "Just do it". I can do this sometimes, but normally don't.
Enabler level 1: Say, Adderall. If I do this then I will always "just do it", until my sleep debt grows out of control, at which point I seem to lose motivation and spend a day or two playing stimulant-enhanced videogames before realizing this isn't working.
Level 2: The habits and systems that make my level 1 enabler work. Adderall usually fails due to sleep debt, so this would be no blue light after 6 pm, alarm set for 5 am, exercise every morning, daily check-ins where if I feel I'm falling behind on sleep I don't take the adderall at all. If level 1 is instead some kind of reward system, e.g. "work for two hours to earn four hours of creative writing time or a movie night" then level 2 would be making the reward happen.
I'm confident there exists some combination of habits, coping mechanisms, reward systems, psychological tricks, attitude adjustments, if necessary medication, and if necessary external feedback/results, which will render me a very productive person. But I've tried 170 times now (since I started counting), each time a serious try analyzing what went wrong and what can be improved with the last try, what broader tactics work and don't work, etc. and now feel like a solution is simply not attainable without some kind of professional help. And all the professionals are useless, they'll address step-one things like "have you tried improving your diet, sleep, and exercise? Have you tried setting a timer for 5 minutes and working when you feel demotivated?" and then if you have done step 1 they are stumped.
The next step is probably to do a deep (and agressive) dive into chemical pathways etc. until I find a cocktail that works; this just feels wrong and more likely to backfire than other approaches.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link