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Wellness Wednesday for July 1, 2026

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.

New Year's resolution check-in:

  • Scheduled my fifteenth blog post of the year to go live two days ago, lightly edited from a comment I posted here.
  • Only went to the gym once last week: in my defense, I was busy preparing for my holiday. I've been away since June 28th and won't be back until July 11th, during which time I'm taking a break from the gym: regular programming resumes on the 13th. Can deadlift 1.84x my bodyweight for 3 reps, squat 1.28x for 6 reps and bench press .87x for 6 reps.
  • Have not consumed any pornography since waking up on January 1st. Nearly at the halfway mark.

How goes it @self_made_human, @thejdizzler, @birb_cromble, @ThomasdelVasto and @falling-star?

  1. Work. Still feeling a bit unmotivated this summer. Heading to the UK for a class on July 4th (very patriotic of me).
  2. Fitness: Did 2x tempo sessions again last week and 61 miles. Up to 28% of Baltimore City. Weight has finally dropped to 168. Guess I was holding on to a bit of water weight for a while which allowed a sudden loss. This gives me some hope I can get into the low 160s high 150s by the Chicago marathon.
  3. Intellectual Stuff: attended a degrowth/abundance salon which was very inspiring, although I worry that most of the people there made it into a bit of an echo chamber! Hoping to read a bit more this month. Also realized how filled with typos many of my posts and texts have been. Something to work on in the next few months.
  4. Finances: -7% savings rate this month which while bad could have been a lot worse with increased travel and rent expenses.
  5. Dating. No dating apps continues to be nice. Kissed the girl I made pizza with at the end of the date. Not sure if there's a connection, but we both want to hang out again.
  6. Tarot. No session.
  7. Socializing: Still feeling a little unbalanced on the socialization side.
  8. Screen time: 1.4 hours phone. I'm honestly not thinking about this much, but I could scroll on instagram and Strava much less than I do.
  9. Mental health: Pretty good, although I wake up to a cortisol spike a bit too early I the morning. Would like to be able to get to bed a little earlier than I do.

Spending is $1524.36 lower than this time last year. I had a few quarterly and yearly bills come due that bumped up my spending more than I would have liked. Nonetheless, I preservere.

Basking in the glory of being an ACX finalist on my first and only entry - you fellas wish. Also dying of terrible musculosketal (partially psychosomatic pain). Hearteningly for my resolution, I've been doing push-ups to help with it so I hit my exercise goal? However, ibuprofen and paracetamol combined seem to do the trick. It's never been this bad, ever:

I had a lovely weekend that involved champagne (a gift, for clearing the Paper B). I was well rested and well fed. And yet, on Monday, I was as stiff as a board, half my muscles screaming at me to not go to the ward - the other half screaming to leave once I was there. But there is no problem that sufficient analgesia and stimulants can't solve, or there are, but I haven't found them quite yet. There are probably drugs for those too. At least I am spending my annual leave in bulk, and I fucking need it.