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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Having struggled on and off with motivation and generally down feelings, I recently started journaling. I've only been at it for a few weeks, but it seems to be helping. I feel more energized after writing something down, and it's more motivating than my 'passive" entertainment options of reading and watching films.
Do others have a similar routine around writing, or similar experiences? I know the stoics are all about it.
I do keep a daily journal, but it's just a basic description of events.
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I used to do some hand-written journaling, but starting a daily digital journaling and note-keeping has been helpful to me and my mental clarity. Don't know how I ever lived without it. I make several notes per day in Standard Notes (a pretty good app). It's satisfying in itself to create and keep an overview over all things important to past, present and future me.
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I've kept a regular handwritten journal for the past 8 years. I started doing it while entering sobriety, initially as a way to track cravings and triggers, but eventually as a way to track thought/emotional patterns, self-narrative, and as a reference for the important events of my life. I had a viciously negative inner voice for years that manifested with self-destructive behaviors. By writing my daily thoughts and behaviors onto the page was I able to view my experiences with a different perspective and write counter-narratives to the negative voices. Countering the negative self talk wasn't easy because I believed the negativity was right, but eventually the positive counter-narratives and affirmations became reflexive when any negative self talk came about and I lost the negativity.
Nowadays when I am brought into an emotional state of intense anxiety or panic, I reference my journals to see how I'd been triggered similarly in the past and see how the prior events played out while also gleaning any coping mechanisms that were effective. Similarly for depression.
My journals are some of my most important possessions. I find that when I go back and read my journals, I like myself a lot more than on a regular day and have much more compassion for myself and what I struggle through regularly. There were days when I used the journal as motivation, wanting to go out and do things that were worthy of writing down and that I would enjoy reading in the future. The journal also encourages me to treat every day as a different experience and to break up the mundane routines as much as possible. Finally, they're an archive of all the stuff I've done, and as I get older, it's nice to be able to go to the journals and get dates for certain events and place them all in a time line, as it becomes all to easy to forget.
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I've never been good about journaling, but I do like writing on websites as a way of putting my thoughts out there. Even if I don't write down about 80% of my thoughts, the process of putting them into a pre-written-draft in my head seems helpful.
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