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.
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You've become a (mild) alcoholic. You should take that seriously. If you keep the same or worsening pattern it may, if you have the genotype for addiction, soon be out of your control. Pay attention to the automaticity of your drinking behavior. Do you deliberately choose to take the drink each time, or has it become habit? If it happens sometimes just automatically or by habit, that should make you want to regain control over what you're actually doing. How often do you think about/look forward to the next drinking opportunity? Has your repertoire of 'excuses' for taking a drink increased? Do you imagine the alcohol will increase your enjoyment of a given situation, and ignore via confirmation bias the times when it doesn't help?
It's been slipping more from choice to habit, and that's exactly what I don't like and want to break.
I only mildly look forward to it. I've certainly noticed that if I do it too often it loses the fun. It's a mood boost and makes my enjoyment of comedy and social settings greater, and my likelihood to pursue sex with my wife much greater. I think an optimal amount of drinking for me would be like once a week. That would be my goal with this change.
Right. It's good that you are noticing it. I recommend doing 1-2 months teetotal before re-implementing a healthier drinking habit of once per week. Reset your system. If that's hard, all the more reason to do it. You'll notice things starting to change in your mind and body after 3-4 weeks. The after effects of a heavy drinking habit take a long time to clear out.
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Trajectories aren't actually inevitable and the outcome here is underdetermined. Many people just drink a bit too much and never really go beyond just drinking a bit too much.
I think it’s usually better in the case of bad habits to jump ahead before the point of having to figure out if you’re one of the ones that won’t have a major problem simply because digging out from a problem is orders of magnitude harder than stopping before it happens. An alcoholic is compulsively looking for his drink and will look for excuses to get away with drinking. Someone with a bad habit still has control.
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Right... edited and expanded.
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