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.
No email address required.
Notes -
There are different shoulds with different meanings, so we can’t know what is behind the should without more information.
“I should pick up the new video game” may involve simply “I want to play the video game as it is pleasing”
“I should work out” may involve “I know intellectually that working out will ultimately lead to more enjoyment, yet it’s hard to appreciate this as it is so displeasing”
“I should work out” may alternatively involve “I am going to criticize myself for not doing something which will bring me more value”; or is may involve many other things
Even “worthy of love and respect” is hopelessly vague:
A parental or divine love means “I am treating myself reasonably and with the greater good in mind, knowing I don’t have to sweat and stress myself
By love we may mean “highest self-valuation”, and this in turn can be reinforced through either positive reward or fear of hating oneself depending frame of mind
Respect may mean dignity, as in basic respect, or it may mean an aspired-to respect
For a lot of these, there’s a juggling of pain and reward. A person looking out the window saying “I should go on a run” may have has feelings about this utterance change in real time as he watches the weather and thermometer change. We can never know whether our future pleasure is actually secured when we invest some displeasure. “I should try to get that girl’s number” can quickly lead to “I should never have tried to get that girl’s number”.
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