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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Notes -
I recently stumbled on this LessWrong post about self-love that piqued my interest: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BfTW9jmDzujYkhjAb/you-are-probably-underestimating-how-good-self-love-can-be
... I, like a lot of my peers, especially software folks, experience a lot of internal self-criticism and self-loathing. I would absolutely love to change this, but finding the right playbook for fundamentally changing your relationship with yourself is challenging, to put it lightly. I'm trying to figure out what an effective "30-days of self-love" would look like to go and change the direction of the ship.
Practices like metta or any of the other brahmaviharas are no panacea at all, as a lot of the western meditative footguns fundamentally block successful performance, particularly:
... that's not even mentioning the problems with certain courses (like Finder's course) and orgs (Dhamma Sukha, the TWIM camp, loves making false, and frankly delusional claims about their method).
I've tried therapy a couple times, but the expense is killer, and I have a lot of trouble with the whole "you need to do this for years or months to see any small tangible benefit" paradigm. In fact, a lot of the therapists I've seen seem like they're much more interested in keeping therapy going versus helping me and potentially losing my business. I've tried ACT/CBT/REBTs therapies, IFS, somatic therapy, and in our therapy-as-a-universal positive society tend to try again every several years, but I always get the ick from the experience every single time and eventually fizzle out. Last time I tried IFS, I did it for 9 months but couldn't say that any behavior was any different.
I honestly wonder whether, as an adult, it's possible for me to go and change something as fundamental as my relationship with myself, but if it is, I'd really love to go and try. I think others are much better at doing something without seeing the tangible benefits, I just can't go and do something every day without seeing some kind of improvement over weeks and months.
Feeling Good by David Burns can help with this and related things. The trick is to become more aware of your own self-criticism and identify when it is valid vs inaccurate.
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