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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   697 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for November 11, 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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Bailey: babies always cry for a reason, they have an unmet need.

Motte: emotional regulation is a reason, the need may be something that nothing can be done about.

When my infant is rocked up and down with an amplitude of 10cm on a yoga ball, he is fine/sleeping. When he is rocked up and down with an amplitude of <5cm he is screaming as if being tortured. Once asleep, cessating rocking will trigger awakening and eventual screaming within 5 minutes. I posit that he has an irrational connection to the ~1hz vertical positional vector amplitude, and not a "need" for "emotional regulation" as he rejects soothing via sweet-talking, hugging/holding, gentle touch, singing etc.

Perhaps he would better be served by a motor configuration to generate this motion than a caring father.

Mostly just ranting, the discourse around baby care is a little annoying.

More discourse to annoy you:

Put baby down for sleep while awake.

Set a timer for 3-10 minutes depending on comfort level and baby’s age.

If crying persists until the timer goes off, go comfort baby either until crying stops or until it’s clear the crying won’t stop soon. Either way put baby back down and try again. Repeat as necessary.

If swaddling, make sure the swaddle is TIGHT. Not too tight around the legs, but you’re going to need to squeeze a little breath out of baby to get it tight enough.

My baby sleeps like a champion and everyone wants to tell me how lucky I am that he’s an easy baby. The truth is it required heroic consistency, faith that these methods would work, many arguments, and gallons of my wife’s and child’s tears.

Dr. Ferber's book, "Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems" gives the following analogy:

All children learn to connect certain conditions with falling asleep. For most children, that means being in a particular bedroom, lying in a particular crib or bed, and perhaps holding a favorite stuffed animal or a special blanket. When they wake periodically during the night, as all children do between sleep cycles, most will promptly fall back to sleep, because the conditions they associate with falling asleep are still present. But if the conditions have changed, such children may not be able to fall asleep again without help reestablishing them...

Perhaps you’ve had the experience of waking during the night just enough to notice your pillow missing. Most likely, instead of going straight back to sleep, you wakened a little more, enough to find the pillow on the floor and pull it back into bed before returning to sleep. But if you couldn’t find it right away, you probably wouldn’t be able to ignore it and go back to sleep. Instead, you’d become more fully awake so you could look around for it. If you still couldn’t find it, eventually you might turn on the light, get out of bed, and begin searching the room. You might get angry and perhaps curse—showing the same kind of frustration that a child shows by crying....

To stretch the analogy a bit further, suppose you discover that someone has been sneaking into your room each night and stealing your pillow. Once you know that, you might have trouble falling asleep at bedtime for fear that the pillow will be taken away as soon as you’re asleep. Whenever you catch yourself starting to drop off to sleep, you might wake yourself up again to make sure the pillow is still there.
Now imagine that this person, instead of just taking your pillow, actually moves you from your bed to another room, without waking you. Every night you go to sleep in your bed with everything just as you like it, only to wake after your first sleep cycle on, say, the floor of the living room. Unless you’re an exceptionally tolerant sleeper, you won’t even try to go back to sleep right there; you’ll get up and head back to your bedroom. But now suppose you find your bedroom door locked from the other side. Now there’s nothing you can do but wake someone who can unlock the door for you. Once that’s been done, you can at last get back into bed and get your pillow and blanket arranged properly, thereby reestablishing the conditions that were present at bedtime. Once you calm down, you will fall back asleep—but some ninety minutes later you’ll wake up again, back on the living room floor and again locked out of your bedroom.
If that happens throughout the night every night, you will not be sleeping at all well, and neither will the person who has to keep getting up to unlock your door. Soon you might be resisting sleep in hopes of identifying the person who keeps moving you; in other words, you might have trouble falling asleep even in your own bed because you know that you’ll be moved once you fall asleep. If that happened to you every night, you would not be very happy.

Don't know how old your baby is but at a certain point with my oldest, I realized she was going to cry whatever I did. Holding her while she cried didn't seem to actually help, it just made her less able to sleep in her own bed. "Crying it out" doesn't always make sense, I mostly avoided it with the younger kids because I understood better how to avoid the sleep associations ahead of time. But sometimes it's just the reality you are faced with, the baby is crying it out, it's just a choice of if they're crying in your arms because it soothes your conscience or if it's in their bed because you're their parent teaching them how to sleep.

If you want to keep bouncing because the baby is just too young, I recommend a yoga ball.

Snoos can be purchased on Facebook marketplace place for reasonable prices, and resold for comparable prices to whatever you pay. They generate the 1hz motion that infants need so that you can sleep. I love ours.

Yeah I was going to say this sounds like a snoo situation. Have not used it personally but in laws did exactly this

Okay AI evangelists - as befitting of a gentleman of a certain age who was an early adopter of the internet, I have a large number of MP3s of variable quality. Any AI upscaling tools that can help with this? What about something that works in more or less real time?

After my rant from last week I've decided to make an appointment with a psychiatrist. It will cost some money and meds can have side effects, but, you know, I wouldn't need money and sex drive in the grave. Friday I have an appointment for inguinal hernia surgery and next week with a radiologist for my probable cervical hernia. I'm considering glp-1 agonists but nobody prescribe them here, it is still common the moral failure view of obesity.

I bought a paper planner to reduce my doomscrolling and, honestly, I like the aesthetics and it makes easier to visualize what I have to do.

I'm prioritizing my health and studies at the moment. I still don't know what to do with socialization.

I bought a paper planner to reduce my doomscrolling and, honestly, I like the aesthetics and it makes easier to visualize what I have to do.

Planning is good but equally as useful is keeping a diary of short notes that record non-routine objective accomplishments no matter how small (within reason). For example this date last year I was doing preventative maintenance to our garden fence. It's helpful when you're wondering where all the time has gone and you have a record of life's many forgettable but constructive completed tasks to refer to. Reviewing what you've done is a lot more satisfying than staring at what you still need to do.

Personally I really rate using OneNote/Obsidian or a similar note taking app over paper. I tried notepads, index cards, whiteboards and other paper formats before but it turns into a lot of re-writing when you want to do something as simple as edit a list to add or remove items. Having features like adding images or tables that you can insert rows and columns ad hoc is very useful.

I'd set yourself a time limit on any psych meds, or at least a review and reassessment. You don't want to end up relying on them long term if it's not absolutely necessary.

Good luck.

Start with the health and studies, and socialization will grow easier. It'll be easier to put yourself out there once you've built up some reserves of self-confidence and self-efficacy.

The psychiatrist can genuinely help. I've seen people have life-changing heel turns based on small doses of medication. It can be surprising what they can do. Just takes a hefty dose of patience and some trial-and-error. Best of luck.

New Year's resolution check-in:

  • Posted my twenty-fourth article of the year last Friday, adapted from a comment I posted here last December about The Last Psychiatrist, narcissism and "identifying as" a morally upstanding person. Special thanks to @gog (whose summary of TLP's opinions I quoted at length, for context) and @FiveHourMarathon (who correctly pointed out that the examples in my comment were disproportionately left-coded, despite the phenomenon I was describing being a bipartisan one; I took this criticism onboard).
  • Went to the gym three times last week. I can deadlift 1.82x my bodyweight, squat 1.33x and bench press 0.82x.
  • Have not consumed any pornography since waking up on January 1st.

How goes it @self_made_human, @thejdizzler, @birb_cromble and @ThomasdelVasto?

I think I'm going to switch to monthly updates, as I can provide a more meaningful and reflective update that way.

At this point, we would just be waiting for a year-end review then, right? I did find you guys checking in inspirational.

Nah I'll do a November update/December goals post on the first WW in December.

Haven't been doing an amazing job with my goals, probably because I have too many (although I am not single anymore which is huge), and I think the weekly update is a little distracting because it's too granular. Next year I want to have few and very concrete goals, which will probably benefit from checking in more frequently.

Shall I stop tagging you going forward?

Yup!

I've published two of my Rimworld mods, and they've received positive reception. In hindsight, I think I could have gone with catchier titles, but they were personal projects first and foremost and it was a lot of fun.

And I'd like to note that the previous AI backlash is practically non-existent now. Even on the Combat Extended discord - though that might have to do with the mods smacking people who got into shit flinging contests.

Otherwise? Stressed, waiting on the outcome of a year of very hard work under very difficult conditions. The good news is now that I don't have to be on my absolute best behavior, I can get away with putting in 80% effort instead of the 120% I'd been at for months on end. I'm glad I worked that hard, I now have consistently positive feedback over recent months to balance earlier concerns from when I was doing less well health-wise.

Quite a few of the new doctors who hadn't met when me when I was badly depressed were taken aback when they heard I had any performance concerns at all on my file. Some of them, including a new senior, offered to write me additional feedback to make up for it. I thanked them with genuine gratitude, it's just too late to matter.

Was my best good enough? I fucking hope so. We shall see if it outweighs my worst.

Spending is $2,717.25 less than the same day last year.

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