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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   1648 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for August 30, 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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How do I comfort and console others? I could do with some guidance or principles because I am never sure what to say. Some example situations:

  1. A friend goes through a breakup with a long term girlfriend.
  2. A friend calls me and is stressed about his job.
  3. A friend brings up feelings of inadequacy, and that he doesn't feel very successful in his career/life.

I don't want to say "don't worry, everything will be okay", because it is not necessarily true.

I usually try to get them to think of things from a perspective that they haven't considered. My friends aren't familiar with many rationalist-adjacent concepts so I can sometimes share a brief summary of a lesson or concept that might be applicable to their situation and is new information to them.

Generally, I try to get people to clarify their own thinking instead of giving a direct solution. I really like the Socratic Ducking Approach

  • Counter vagueness. Ask for specific examples whenever they talk about a general problem. Probe for details whenever they gloss over part of the problem, or start simplifying to fit everything into a narrative.
  • Draw out their experience. Try to get them to remember times they’ve solved a similar problem, or encourage reference class hopping (if they’re thinking of their problem as being all about social anxiety, see if they view things differently when they think about parties versus small group conversations). In general, help them gather useful data from the past, so that they can see patterns and causal relationships as clearly as possible.
  • Map out the parts of the problem. If you spot implications or assumptions, ask questions that take those implications or assumptions as true, and see if you can draw your partner toward a new insight. Try breadth-first searches before diving deep into any one part of the problem—can your partner identify their key bottleneck?

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