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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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As others have said some judgement is helpful (example: a doctor telling you that you drink too much alcohol and it will cause health problems). It can help you see self-deceptive or self-destructive behavior that you can’t see on your own.

However, some judgement is unhelpful or mean-spirited. In that case here are some techniques to make you care less about judgement from other people:

  • Remind yourself of times when you were right and others judged you as wrong. This increases the confidence in your own judgement and decreases the confidence in the judgment from others.
  • Remind yourself that only you know what it feels like to be you in a specific situation (perspectival knowing). Nobody else has that same way of knowing the situation and therefore you are in the best position to make judgements about the situation.
  • Assume the person passing judgement is jealous/stupid/evil. Therefore, the judgement has far less weight.
  • Exposure therapy – Finding practice situations (without real consequences) where you will likely face negative judgments and practice not caring about it. It will desensitize you to judgement from others.

To reiterate another comment: judgement is something you need carefully and thoughtfully balance. If you are too dismissive of judgement it can lead you to having delusions of grandeur.