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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   2124 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for May 29, 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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This is probably a "you should reverse any advice you hear"-type thing. I suspect it's also like psychotherapy, where a minority of the population really struggles with emotional regulation and needs to work rationally on their perceptions of the world, while most people do OK and would probably just be harmed and paralyzed by a more psychoanalytical approach to their life.

Some people probably desperately need to be told to stop worrying about the dumb things they think people care about, while others probably desperately need to be told they're screwing up and they need to start worrying about the way people perceive them. These two groups just need different things, and would be harmed by following advice necessary for the other.

@DuplexFields's advice last week is probably judicious for the first group, while @MaiqTheTrue's rejoinder serves as a necessary corrective for the second:

Sometimes I think self-improvement ideas can overfit just because the techniques are developed for those settings are developed to rehabilitate the sick and don’t necessarily carry that baggage for those who are not sick... I think a lot of mental health advice ends up that way: designed to help people with severe problems, and works pretty well there, then gets applied to the general population and not only doesn’t help, but can create the problems that it was intended to prevent.

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