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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I'm in my early thirties, dad of a 2 year old, and I want to start really shifting my habits to establish a real enduring sense of contentment, happiness, health, agency and the like to define the rest of my thirties. What physical and mental activities are worth pursuing, what to purchase or do to pursue those things against an NYC upper-middle class budget? I'd like to explore outside of the baseline of diet and exercise as those are no-brainers.
I've spent some time over the past couple months getting back into meditation (after fizzling out with TMI-based meditation, which I think is honestly poor instruction for westerners in retrospect), particularly into the development of the brahmaviharas (this lesswrong post really convinced me of the power of these efforts: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BfTW9jmDzujYkhjAb/you-are-probably-underestimating-how-good-self-love-can-be)
I've been doing a couple meditations a day, one walking and one formal sit, alongside some more casual attempts at cultivation of brahmavihara cofactors. I just sort of say the phrases internally with some kind of intention, and I've coalesced around something like:
... these have been generally good, though I'm setting a very light intention when internally saying the phrases, as overefforting was a big problem in the past. I do not concern myself with whether any feelings arise, sometimes they do and sometimes they don't.
I'm looking to really pile onto this and my exercise habits with a bunch else to make my life fuller, richer, more mystical, to make time move slower, to increase my perceptive skills patience and kindness, and prevent health issues from developing as best as I can.
I realize I'm being a bit vague here, and that's partially on purpose: I want to discover what I can do for myself to make life better if I'm willing to put in time and money and effort to do so.
My suggestion: More friends.
We are social creatures, and a kid/wife isn't a substitute for a healthy social life.
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