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Wellness Wednesday for March 29, 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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Not infrequently someone here will ask for advice on improving their social skills, and I guess this week it's my turn.

My question: can anyone offer testimonials of having significantly altered their personality through conscious effort? I've become increasingly skeptical that certain kinds of change are possible.

I am 30, socially retarded, and have tried much of the usual advice, including

  • joining hobby groups (sports, dance, music, improv, rationalists, board games) - never made any lasting friends

  • improving fitness / grooming / appearance - this is in progress and I expect I'll continue to work on this

  • talking to strangers - doesn't go well (nor particularly poorly, just awkwardly)

My concern is that hanging out with people who are not very close friends is 1) difficult, in that I suck at establishing rapport, thinking of things to say, responding with appropriate emotion, 2) extremely tiring, and therefore 3) just unpleasant. This is true even if the people are super nerdy and share the same interests as me. One has to keep track of the words, body language, and emotional states of both oneself and one's interlocutor, and that is too much for my brain to handle. Literally there will be moments when I realize I should probably stop staring at the floor and make some normal brief eye contact, and in the second it takes me to adjust, I will lose track of the other person's sentence, and therefore be unable to respond appropriately.

Roughly from 2016 to 2019, I aggressively (by my standards) sought out chances to practice socializing and attended more meetups / hobby groups than I wanted to. Looking back, I don't think my social skills improved much, and socializing didn't ever get more fun or bearable. I did, however, get better at noticing the social skills I lack. Some things I've learned are

  • the chasm between how normal extroverts experience life and how I do is even wider than I thought

  • the facility and graceful precision with which sociable people can smooth over a bad joke, off-color statement, or awkward silence is incredible

  • the returns to social skills in every aspect of life - friends, dating, career, learning, general wellbeing - are much greater than I realized

I am now trying to decide whether I should redouble my efforts in this area (which is tiring and demoralizing) or essentially give up, and just live my life in the way that is natural to me: avoid talking to people whenever possible, one or two close friends excepted, never leave home except for work and necessary errands, and accept that I'll miss out on the benefits of human connection.

Other facts about me:

  • My coworkers are brilliant, most clearly smarter than me. In general this makes small talk more difficult since the bar for a comment being passably interesting is higher.

  • I am temperamentally boring and don't really enjoy most activities people find fun, especially if they involve leaving the house. Books and movies are good enough for me.

  • I started taking Vyvanse recently, which probably doesn't help here. But my social problems predate Vyvanse.

My question: can anyone offer testimonials of having significantly altered their personality through conscious effort? I've become increasingly skeptical that certain kinds of change are possible.

Yes, even in my final year of undergrad at the age of 21 I was far less conscientous and noticeably more awkward than I am now. The first was solved by working a bunch of kitchen and manual labour jobs where I got very good at not being late for things. I think functioning on 4 hours sleep is a trainable skill. I still mess up my focus sometimes by drinking or gaming (the latter has effects even when you're not playing), but in general I can go to a library and study for 4 hours without any deadline to motivate me.

The second I can partly attribute to drugs like MDMA and LSD (but the afterglow wears off eventually), partly picking the low hanging fruit of just meeting more people, and partly as a result of me no longer treating social situations as tests I have to pass or fail but opportunities to meet someone I really get along with. The latter is important as I still think I'd be just as awkward today in a room full of people I don't have anything in common with, but I have been pleasantly surprised at the results of no longer being afraid to tell jokes that are funny rather than pleasing or of giving my real opinions to people (with some sugar-coating or self-censorship depending on what I know about them of course). There are a lot more people I can easily get along with than I thought, I was just not doing a good enough job of going out on a limb and raising a flag for them to spot me. There is a risk with being genuine like this, not everyone will like you, but even the most socially savvy people I know have a few enemies.

I think functioning on 4 hours sleep is a trainable skill.

My personal experience would strongly disagree ;)

During my internship, I had multiple stretches of less than 6 hours of sleep, and I never got any better at handling it. That's a big negative for a doctor, the very best can function acceptably even in utter sleep deprivation.

That's acceptable and not optimal, because countless studies show that doctors and surgeons fuck up orders of magnitude more when they're sleep deprived. Yet the machismo in the profession persists..

I won't disagree, but that's far more complex work than I've ever had to do.