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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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.
Why fix this at all?
A majority of today's malaise is because people don't do enough things, not too much of them. And I don't necessarily even mean the number or volume of things done, but the psychological aspect of it.
If you sit on your ass and watch youtube for 2 hours, you did something, you did a lot of something. But it feels like you did nothing.
If you are achieving the feeling of doing a lot of things, then congrats.
However, that main failure mode might be that you might be just doing inefficiently, in that case do something about that.
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