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Wellness Wednesday for March 8, 2023

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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Combining walks with music, musing, stories and reading (if on treadmill) is easier on my willpower than walking alone. This probably has to do with the evolutionary antecedents to these cognitive processes: using stories to store information on the world, music to make sense of one’s environment, etc. We could even say that walking is supposed to be associated with such informational activities.

What other evolutionary cheats are there to implement?

In the same vein as this, more strenuous exercise is always, always, always easier and more fun with another person. The "get a gym buddy to keep you accountable and motivated" advice is very real and very effective if you are one of those people who, like me, often struggles to summon the motivation to work out.

Or a study buddy or a work buddy or a whatever buddy.

Borrowing conscientiousness from the group is very effective.