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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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Self-consciousness includes focus on what you think of yourself rather than just on what others think of you, so it doesn't always have all the same failure modes, but it can easily be taken to excess no matter what form it takes.

For myself, I'd break down the emotional repercussions of the judgement of others into three categories. (noting that any one person's judgement can be any mix of all three)

  1. Some judgement is a matter of opinion, and opinions differ, and while it often can broaden your tastes to explore others' subjective perspective, ultimately it's not objectively bad for either of you if you still disagree afterwards. (cue Rogers & Hammerstein music here) If someone thinks it is, well, that goes in category 3.

  2. Some judgement is a matter of fact, and is correct ... and this is usually an opportunity! If you want to better yourself, you want to seek out people who can help you see your own flaws and how to overcome them, you don't want to fear that. In theory this might be an unpleasant process, because people who have insight into flawed human nature might also be rude and insulting about how they explain it, but in practice there's not generally a lot of overlap there, for obvious reasons. (among adults, at least - growing up you might have had a lot of peers who were starting to learn a few valuable insights but who had not yet counted "politeness" among them) I'm generally using "judgement" in the same negative sense that you did, but positive correct judgments can be useful too, not to help you better yourself but to help you identify negative incorrect judgments that might otherwise upset or mislead you.

  3. Some judgement is a matter of fact, and is incorrect ... and so why care about it? If someone tells you you have hideous purple hair, but you can look in the mirror and remind yourself that your hair is not purple, at that point you obviously shouldn't feel bad about yourself, you should feel sad for them. Most incorrect criticism isn't quite that blatantly wrong, but in that case just dissect it and save any bits that belonged in category 2 and then you still shouldn't feel bad about the rest.

Category 2 is an opportunity, while 3 is a bit of a waste of time, so obviously you'd like their ratio to be weighted heavily towards the former, so if you're more into corrective action than corrective introspection you might start to seek out friends/coworkers/partners/etc. whose judgement usually falls into category 2 but not 3. This becomes much more urgent if your problems include others' negative actions rather than just your own negative introspection - from the way you phrased your question it sounds like you're worried about damage to your psyche, but if you have a significant other or a boss or someone whose decisions matter and they're basing those decisions on wrong judgments, then ignoring them is not a good option and you'll have to figure out whether correcting them or leaving them is more practical.