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Wellness Wednesday for November 22, 2023

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:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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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So, for some odd reason, one of the family member's staying with me started screaming in the middle of the night. Hearing an adult male yelling in my house, where I typically am the only adult male sleeping there, I shot upright...and threw out my upper back somehow or other. I'm not sure if I fell asleep in a bad position, or had a pre-existing injury, or what the hell, but right between my shoulder blades is screaming at my every time i turn my head left or right or look down.

Other than the embarrassment of realizing that in a fight-or-flight my body seems to have chosen, not even freeze, but "die." I'm treating it, and hopefully it will get better soon, but I'm kinda not sure what direction to go with working out. Anyone have good recommendations of exercises that won't strain that area of my spine? The stuff I was doing last week is all out of bounds, I'm not going to be doing KBs or Olympic lifts for a while. So I need a new plan, but I'm not sure what it is yet, and I can't think of exercises that won't implicate my upper back in any way. Like in the past, I dealt with a bad lower back strain by doing a Smolov Jr for Bench month, but I'm not sure what to do without my upper back.

I don't have any exercise advice for you but I really want to know: why was he yelling?

I have yet to get a satisfying explanation. He says he was watching a movie on his phone, half fell asleep, and scared himself when something happened on screen + being in a different place than he expected. This seems unlikely. His father thinks he got into my liquor after everyone went to bed and had some kind of alcoholic fugue, and strongly implied no more drinking this week. This would fit but nothing is missing, and he's not the kind of guy who hides the evidence. His sister, my wife, just thought it was some kind of nightmare/terror thing. Which makes sense but, dude, it was a LOT, if that happened regularly you'd know about it. From what I remember hearing I kind of felt like what he was screaming seemed like a coherent sentence moreso than hallucination, "I DON'T EVEN WANT TO FUCKING BE HERE" etc, so it seemed immediately like he was talking to a person and snapped, maybe late night facetime with a girlfriend who really pissed him off? But he has no current gf he's talking about openly.

None of these possibilities are really very explanatory.

Without additional events I would just right this off as night terrors. I've done similar things in my life (shouting while asleep) for no reason at all. It wasn't a chronic condition, just happened to be a one off weird half-sleep where your mind plays tricks. Very embarrassing, but not uncommon.

Yeah it was just super freaky. Doesn't seem to be a big deal or anything.