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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Well, TIFU.
Today I managed to achieve the incredible feat of making it to work over two hours late. I was so smashed that I slept for 11 hours, through an alarm, and made it to work at 11:35 AM. Was expecting to be raked over the coals once I got there and apologised, but instead my superior repeatedly told me it was alright and that she was just worried if something had happened to me.
While I am usually a very reliable worker and often work close to 50 hour weeks (for a job that pays far lower than the median Australian salary), I don't feel good about it. At all. I stayed three hours after close of business just to try and make up for it and got off work at 8pm, something I was told I didn't have to do but did anyway. I feel especially bad because my superiors are genuinely nice to me and even though the job is tiring, requires a lot of task juggling, and doesn't pay very much at all, that's not their fault and I would really like to not disappoint them.
Interesting, this has never happened to me.
You understand this is going on your permanent record, right?
Yeah, I've had colleagues show up about this late, and even more than my irritation, I'm genuinely baffled. What the fuck is going on? How is it even possible to sleep through an alarm? Obviously, different people have very different reactions to the world, but this just seems completely impossible to me. I'm not claiming that I'm a paragon of responsibility, I've had to take a sick day for a hangover, but I still woke up, put the day in the system, and canceled meetings.
Not only have I slept through alarms, I went through a period where I would dream that I was waking up in my room, walk over to the alarm clock, be unable to shut it off, realize I was dreaming, wake up and go to turn off the alarm clock, realize I was still dreaming, and so on. I think the worst instance was three layers deep.
It helps to be extremely tired, and to make a habit of hitting the snooze button and otherwise increase your exposure to the alarm sound while on the edge of sleep.
False awakenings are fun and fascinating experiences. I used to have them here and there, though I haven't had one in a long time. I too had the habit of hitting the snooze button while in the half-awake state, and that half-awake state I think is a big factor in making these happen, along with the related phenomenon of lucid dreams.
I think there's a common idea, popularized in part by Inception, of dreams-within-dreams, where your dream-self falls asleep and dreams, and that dream-self can sleep and dream, and so forth, and when you awaken, you awaken to the previous dream layer, then awaken from that, and so forth, until you awaken to reality (presumably, anyway). I don't know how much research there is in this, but my pet theory is that it's nothing like that, and that it's all just one "layer" of dreaming. Dreams are, almost by definition, fictional experiences we have in our minds while we sleep, and at some point, we might have the fictional experience of awakening during the dream. This, when viewed retrospectively through our memories, then cleaves our dream to what came before that experience of awakening and what came after, with the former being the 2nd layer of dream, dream-within-a-dream. But, in fact, we hadn't fallen asleep while dreaming like how Leonardo DiCaprio's character fell asleep while riding a fictional van in a fictional cityscape contained within a dream in Inception. This would also be why we can shoot up multiple "levels" of dreams in a night and remember those (to whatever extent we remember dreams, which is a whole other issue), but we don't go down the "levels" by actively going to bed and falling asleep in a dream (at least, I haven't experienced this or heard other people mention this).
I've also independently slept through 3 separate alarms intentionally placed in 3 different places in my bedroom before, but not for reasons related to false awakenings. I just had bad sleeping habits and was a heavy sleeper.
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