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).
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
"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.
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