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:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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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.
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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.
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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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My wife and I cope with long to-do lists in opposite ways. I avoid anything that’s not critical and like to make steady progress slowly. I’m happy as long as there’s forward progress, and as long as something’s not getting worse (e.g. the house is a little less cluttered than last week), I’m satisfied with the positive direction.
The wife on the other hand gets anxious and starts buzzing around the house. And anything she wants done now that she herself can’t get to, she assigns to me. These feel like shit tests to me, and I frankly don’t know how to deal with them.
I can tell that this contribution gap is a major turn-off for her, and is even leading to some resentment. Cleaning dishes are expressly my responsibility, and if I leave them in the sink too long, she’ll jump in and do them herself, which we both hate for different reasons.
I’m trying to foster more initiative to beat her to the punch on some of these things. I want to take a more aggressive approach to my to-dos in general anyway, but man, it feels like I’m trying self-improvement on hard mode.
She will go ahead and order plane tickets for an upcoming vacation before I can think to. Well shit, she got the details sent to her email inbox. Hey honey, when’s the flight? Hey, what terminal? Can you print out my ticket for me? I know she would love for me to take care of all of this, but I get beat to it every time because she’s unwilling to wait. And to her it starts looking like I just won’t do these things for us.
Like I said, I’m trying to be more proactive. But damn.
You'll never beat raw neuroticism. I have this problem with my wife all the time. I like to wait until after all the dishes get dirtied before I start washing them. Like say, after dinner. For a multitude of reasons. I have terrible skin, and getting my hands soapy and wet, then dry, then soapy and wet, then dry, over and over and over again through the day causes them to crack and bleed. I hate the context switching from whatever I'm doing to just wash one single fork and plate. I want to see all the dishes that are going to need to fix into the dishwasher so I can plan how I'll fit them all in there.
All of these reasons fall of deaf ears. Having anything in the sink makes my wife anxious, and somehow that's my problem. I'm being lazy if I don't do the dishes before she even sees them.
Do you not have gloves for washing up? If you have sensitive skin (as I do), some shopping might be necessary to find a pair that doesn't irritate your hands, but it's better than getting them wet.
I've tried to use gloves, but I always end up dropping everything constantly instead. I haven't found a size that fits right. They're either too big with extra dangly bits at the tips of each finger that cause me to fumble, or they are too small and I can't get them over the widest part of my hand.
But then there is the fact that putting on gloves to wash a single plate and fork adds one extra obnoxious step to what is already a tedious task not worth the context switch for me.
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