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 hate seeing iPad kids in public, and think giving a minor a smartphone is only marginally better than buying them a box of fags. I saw a note on Substack the other day that pointed out that lots of parents (or prospective parents) are concerned about their children becoming addicted to their phones, but this is blatantly hypocritical when the parents themselves are addicted to their phones. Children are imitative: if they see their parents staring at their phones all day, they're going to want to do the same.
I take this seriously, and it's indisputable that my fiancée and I spend far too much time looking at our phones. Rather than trying to address it after having children, we want to get ahead of the problem. To that end, I ordered this phone lock box from Amazon, which arrived yesterday. You simply pop your phone inside and set a timer, at the end of which it will open. We have pre-committed to not looking at screens of any kind for at least one hour (preferably more) every evening: no phones, no laptops, no TV. (Obviously our laptops don't fit inside the lock box, but for that we have each other to keep ourselves honest.)
The box arrived yesterday evening, and as soon as I returned from the gym I put both our phones inside and set the timer for an hour. It also occurred to me that I could leave our phones inside overnight, so that our phones wouldn't be the first thing we see when we wake up in the morning. This turned out to be a fortuitous decision, as last night I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn't get back to sleep, but had no choice but to read my book for an hour rather than looking at my phone. It's only been one day, but so far I think this was a wise purchase.
I've had one of these for about 5 years now. They are amazing. Don't always use it (because my discipline is weak) but it makes it much easier to resist temptation because you only have to make one decision (rather than many). Cold Turkey for laptops helps a lot (you can make it so your computer auto-shuts off after a certain time).
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