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Wellness Wednesday for September 16, 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).

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Anyone have any tips for avoiding waking up anxious? I'm sleeping an appropriate amount and the heart rate metrics that my ring tracks all look good but I'm waking up feeling like there's a murderer in my house or something.

Do you also track sleep apnea? For me, not controlling it (still able to manage it by adjusting sleep position here) makes me wake up in a panic with my brain being filled with anxious thoughts about my own mortality. And I'm not an anxious person at all.

I do not. How would I go about this?

Your ring probably gets a bunch of useful information already, especially if it tracks SpO2; most of those I saw already had a feature to help in detecting it, but otherwise if it charts your SpO2 during your sleep, look for slow, gradual loss of oxygenation in your blood over many seconds/multiple minutes, dipping below your baseline %, until a sudden jump back to your baseline. You also said you got a girlfriend recently? Ask her to check when she's awake in bed while you're asleep if she notices you ever stop breathing for a while.

Of course, either one of those indicators should be a prompt to consult to get a proper diagnosis.

SpO2 sensors on wearables tend to be very bad AFAIK. Check your specific sensor @thejdizzler.