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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To me the sting of defeat is always worse than the joy of victory. I’m a very non-competitive person, usually the first to turn down any kind of casual tournament or game. I never play PvP. I always concede first where it’s an option, unless I know with great certainty that I’m going to win.
It’s not that I don’t like winning, it’s that to me the joy of it is far more fleeting than defeat Where I Really Tried, which stings and which I think about long after the event. Recalling defeats hurts as if the loss was yesterday, while recalling triumphs doesn’t seem to capture any of the pleasure of the moment of victory. Being a loser in some competition doesn’t make me angry and aggressively motivated the way it seems to do to a lot of people. I can concede and feel no seething jealousy, no particular resentment, and whether I win or lose I usually forget about it quickly, unless it really feels serious in which case, as mentioned, losing is always worse than winning is great.
I don’t mean to sound like one of those depressives for whom every happiness seems temporary and every setback permanent, because I’d say I’m a pretty happy person. It’s more that I think I just don’t get as much out of both victory and defeat as other people do. Neither particularly motivates me, my happiest memories are all things like conversations with friends and loved ones, entertaining experiences, falling in love, that kind of thing. I can’t recall one real moment of personal triumph in the competitive sense that sticks with me, stuff like getting the job I wanted or getting into a good college was ten minutes of happiness (although really more like relief) before I continued with my day.
I think I’d like to become more competitive, but this attitude is holding me back from doing so. Has anyone made themselves more competitive?
I am naturally very competitive, so I don't have much advice for changing your base level of competitiveness, but I have sharply improved my acceptance and happiness in defeat. When I was young, I really, really, really hated losing. Intensely. To the point where losing would make me angry, make me lash out verbally in stupid and unpleasant ways. I'm mainly thinking of basketball, where I'm lucky that I never got punched in the face on the court for not knowing when to just shut up and take the L. Nonetheless, it was bad enough that I find it outright embarrassing in retrospect. Not in the, "who cares, it's just a game" sense, because games matter, and being passionate about them is good, but because taking an L with some grace is an admirable trait in and of itself.
Anyway, fast forward to my 20s, when I picked up endurance sports. One of the great things about running is that it's incredibly humbling. When you lose, you lose. You can't tell yourself that you should have made that jumper, or that you got fouled and it was bullshit. You're just slower, and it's obvious. Nonetheless, if you're racing against someone that's at a similar talent and training level, it's going to come down to a combination of tactics, pain tolerance, and determination. As corny as it sounds, sometimes whether you win or lose will come down to who wants it more. When you suffer that way in a race and know that the other guy did too, it changes your relationship to either winning or losing to him, because you know he went through the same thing. Whether I win or lose, I always feel a deep sense of camaraderie with the guy that I'm racing against.
Along the way, something funny happened. In learning to lose with grace and be quick with a fist bump for an opponent, I also learned to admire what someone is doing when they beat me. Maybe they paced better, maybe they had more kick, maybe they're just plain tougher. This spilled over to other things. Lose at a video game? Wow, gg, quick reflexes bro. Lose at trivia? Lol, how wild that you knew that. Lose at pool? OK, that one actually still pisses me off, but we can't be perfect.
So, my advice would be to try doing something really hard, whether winning or losing is a genuinely taxing experience that you will feel some sense of triumph for having partaken in at all.
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