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).
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
What's your take on dopamine detox?
Everyone's got a story about how they read so much back in the 90's/00's. But they pick up a book now, and... it's just not entertaining. We all know we can dopamine detox and make reading enjoyable again, but the corollary is quitting the hyper-stimulating activities everyone does nowadays. No TikTok, no Twitter, no mindlessly playing games while listening to podcasts. You'll be (roughly) just as stimulated after detoxing, but you'll be disconnected from the root of modern culture. Your opinions on culture will be less accurate because you're simply out of touch, like boomers reading newspapers.
OTOH, dopamine detox has huge benefits. Your mind isn't constantly bombarded with stimulation, so you can perceive subtleties and "flavor" in art more, like when you remove sugar from coffee. You perceive the world in a slower, calmer, more rational, interconnected way. You're around people less, so when you meet people IRL you're much friendlier and happy to see them. There is probably some balance to the dopamine situation, but it's hard to spot, so we mostly stimulate ourselves as hard as possible from FOMO, scared of falling behind the world.
I have given it some thought and keep returning to the same question - what exactly am I trying to solve for? What do I think I'm depriving myself of by playing XCOM2 while listening to a podcast instead of reading a book or sitting in quiet meditation? As near as I can tell, the main thing I'm missing out on with this choice is some aesthetic sensibility that reading the book is what a smart, educated, in-control person should do.
To each their own, but when I do my best to look at my life objectively, I just don't see anything important that I'm missing out on with entertainment choices. I'm fit, healthy, monetarily comfortable, have great friends, a loving wife, and a generally placid, upbeat demeanor that friends and colleagues tell me they appreciate. While I do have some sense of nostalgia for the days when I consumed books voraciously instead of occasionally picking one up that catches my eye, I'm hard-pressed to figure out what would be different if I read more and listened to podcasts less. I like podcasts! I still learn things! When they're interesting enough, I go dig into the relevant information.
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