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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I'm also breaking this rule but it has been very enjoyable. Being able to listen to audiobooks at work has paradoxically increased my reading pace by a lot. Sure you can read much faster than you can listen to someone read aloud, but 6-8 hours of slow listening each day still adds up to more than however many hours I could realistically devote to sitting down and reading after work when I'm tired and have the internet to distract me.
I'm still pessimistic about the use of audiobooks for denser stuff like history and philosophy, but another hack that works here is to bring a kindle to the gym and spend 40 minutes reading on the exercise bike. You can read between sets while lifting too (24 2-3 minute rest periods is a decent chunk of time) but I'm not confident that all the stopping and starting is good for comprehension.
It just depends what you are looking to get out of it. I've listened to plenty of non-fiction history audiobooks, and it's entertaining and I learn a lot from it, but the takeaways are going to be narrower than if I really put the effort into a book on paper. I'm not going, to by any means, memorize all the facts in an audiobook. I'm less likely to remember particular facts or names, so it varies by book. Europe's Tragedy was hard to follow on tape, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich was excellent.
I'm a big audiobook guy but that tends to be a different category for me, and I still try to read in print.
In my case, unless I set out to study it, this is also true for reading. My problem with audiobooks is more practical: I get distracted by something, the audiobook plays on regardless, I realise I've missed a few steps in the argument/missed some important turn of events and fumble about on my phone's touchscreen trying not to accidentally jump back 20 minutes. With reading getting distracted usually just means you stop reading for however long your attention is elsewhere.
I might take your recommendation and give it a shot, I haven't noticed myself getting distracted too often with this recent run of fiction audiobooks so maybe I've just gotten used to the format over time.
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