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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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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How do you stop yourself from just doing stuff constantly?
I'm pretty much always doing something, every minute of the day. This has helped give me a structured and productive life but it also feels unhealthy / manic and at times I'm basically self-inflicting exhaustion.
If I don't have work I'll invent new work for myself to do, even if it's just typing up essays for here. Once I've come up with something new it soon becomes a pretty rigid part of my life. For instance, I used to workout once a day but if I had some extra time I would do a second workout just to be as productive as possible. After enough of this nowadays the second workout feels non-negotiable even though objectively it's pretty unecessary and often I don't have the time. Or if I have a spare moment I'll start cooking meals for the future. Or I used to read fiction when I was younger but now it feels irresponsible to read anything but non-fiction where I can learn something. Not that I seem to have much time to read anymore anyway, but if I'm hanging out with someone and they step out to the bathroom I'll pull out my phone and start studying something on Wikipedia or a think tank or whatever. The idea of not filling idle moments with something ostensibly productive is alien to me. If someone asks me to participate in something at work or in a social outing I will essentially always say yes regardless of whether I have bandwidth or interest and this results in me having basically no time to myself. I used to try meditation to balance it out but then I turned that into another non-negotiable chore.
The plus side of this is that I'm a productive person, I do well at work, have an active social life, and I guess also have a lot of output on an obscure forum. The downsides are...not devastating or anything, but I generally feel tired and stressed and stretched thin. It seems like an unnatural way to live, but I find the idea of not feeling productive to be almost more exhausting.
I was going to suggest getting married or having kids. I'm forced to sit on the couch and watch idiotic television for, often, 2 hours a night.
Idle time doing nothing is overrated. The instagram memes that urge you to "practice self-care" by sitting on your ass all day are public squeals of inferiority and copium.
The maximum amount of unproductive pleasure you should force yourself to partake in is taking time to read before bed or on the couch with your coffee. I, too, toned down my fiction in recent years, and regret having to chew through a ton of dry junk to avoid pleasure. You're allowed to dabble in fun books too. Remember, very little of that non-fiction is going to be useful. My 8-hour slog through the history of Insurance got me a fraction of a brownie point with an executive this one time. Not worth it.
This may be the last bit of adjustment that may be worth making. Get comfortable being silent and thinking, even if someone's not in the bathroom. It can even be planning for the meal you'll cook in the future, but every human should be able to disconnect for the time it takes someone else to pee. No silver bullet besides practice.
Ironically I've thought about doing this for sort of the opposite reason - I figure if I'm going to keep myself busy anyway I might as well be doing something genuinely productive like raising kids haha.
This is something I actually want to start doing, at least before I go to bed, in party because I assume it might also be a healthier way to prepare for sleep than screentime.
Wise words.
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