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Wellness Wednesday for May 17, 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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If you're like me, you spend a lot of time trying to talk yourself down from temptations. I think I've found a general method that has more or less solved the problem.

Instead of asking whether you can or can't do something (eg. eat cake), ask only if you can say yes to doing it, or give no answer at present. The problem with "yes or no" is that deciding 'no' implicitly begins a power struggle, where one has to enforce the answer rather than merely understand the issue.

"Yes or no answer" removes the difficulty and makes objective thinking easier, and while it doesn't always stop the problem, it tends to put one in a better position over time. My thoughts are much more accurate and powerful when I try this: instead of "but it's against the rules I set!" I think things like "the laws of health won't go away just because I want them to." You can always try the normal way afterwards.