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Wellness Wednesday for March 20, 2024

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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I'm not exactly sure how you are currently giving advice. There is a big spectrum of advice giving between "polite carefully phrased bits of advice" and "yelling at them for being an idiot".

I personally don't respond well to the more aggressive bits of advice. And I agonize over the carefully phrased bits of advice and take them very seriously.

Your friend might not be like that. Perhaps if your current method of giving advice is not working it would make sense to upgrade the aggressiveness. Usually if you are already too aggressive then the friendship is not going to last.

Of course you could already be on the edge of aggressiveness, and your friend is just not willing to accept the advice.


I hear them on hating dishes. I hate them too. Would still be way cheaper to just buy disposable dishes and eat microwave meals at home. Alternatively a maid that comes in and cleans/does dishes might strangely be cheaper than eating out constantly.

On the drinking ... maybe just try and get them to go to a doctor more often. That way you can outsource your nagging to a professional. I visit a doctor a few times a year and get told every time to drink less, and it usually helps for a month or two.

Also see if you can meet his family and get them to nag him. Or maybe his family is all just as bad as him and that is where he gets the habits. In that case maybe get him away from his family.