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).
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I'm having a hard time differentiating between the two. When I read
I was thinking I was the former, but then reading
has me second guessing myself and now I think it's the latter. I think "lowest-effort available alternative" is what's really confusing me. I'm guessing scrolling social media is a "lowest-effort available alternative", but is playing a video game that? Maybe it depends on the game? Maybe going back to that "comfort game" counts, but playing a new game doesn't? Does going to a movie theater or playing a tcg count? I'm guessing that one doesn't as low effort.
When I'm not working, I'm usually on the computer where I browse social media or play video games. If I'm really into a game, I will play that a lot, otherwise I'm usually on social media, mostly youtube. I am the type who gets super into things, so if I'm super into a game, I will play it a ton, research a ton about it, think about it a lot, etc. Similarly, if I find a nice youtube video or other social media post, I will go through all the creator's stuff to find more, or I will find more content on that topic. Around once a week or two, I will go out and do something. Usually it's to play a TCG, sometimes a movie, sometimes other things, and that's not including going to the therapist/psychiatrist.
So I'm thinking of "discipline" as a broader and longer term thing that's about persisting at overcoming obstacles in a structured and intentional way over time. This persistence takes, as one of its prereqs, at least the occasional availability of "energy", the immediate capacity to exert effort to overcome obstacles here and now.
It takes discipline (for many people) to keep a clean house day in and day out. It takes energy to get up right now and wash the dishes. If you rarely or never have the energy to get up and wash the dishes, you're missing one of the key parts of the discipline of keeping a clean house.
But it also takes energy to do things that aren't necessarily part of any pattern of discipline -- it takes energy to organize friends for an outing, or to ride your bike to the bodega, or to refine a tactic in a competitive videogame.
Set aside whether you're willing or able to pursue a sustained program of efforts for the sake of delayed or diffuse rewards -- the realm of discipline. In the more basic sense of energy, do you feel like you have the inclination to exert moderate immediate efforts for moderate near term rewards? Or do you consider exerting such efforts, but think "that sounds like too much work" and accept known low rewards for the sake of lowering effort?
Like being on time -- you're preparing to leave for work, and you get the moderate reward of getting there on time if you leave now instead of leaving in 10 minute. This isn't necessarily a matter of discipline and long term thinking -- this is "right now, is it too much effort to get up and leave for the sake of being less stressed out 10 minutes from now?"
Potentially it's a matter of discipline if there's a lot of earlier preparation that has to go into being ready to leave on time. But if it's just "I'm going to watch YouTube for another 10 minutes at the cost of being late", that seems like a different problem. What's it feel like to you?
Or say at your shitty min wage job you were actually paid daily for performance in some legible way, so that if you were able to do "50% more work" in your next shift than you normally do, by some measurable outcomes, you'd take home 50% more money at the end of that day. Does that opportunity sound appealing or aversive?
Okay, this is making much more sense. I definitely have the energy, but not the discipline. I will sometimes cook even when I can order food, but never consistently. I will sometimes randomly clean my room, but never consistently. I will spend hours troubleshooting a game so I can pirate it or make the mods work, and then not even play it afterwords (does anyone else do this? I know "spend hours modding skyrim and then play for 30 minutes and quit" is a thing, but I haven't heard anything similar about trying to get a pirated game to work). I also do walk to the corner store when I want a specific drink instead of just grabbing what's in my fridge and I do spend time reviewing and thinking about my play in competitive video games. So, I think I do have the energy, but not the discipline.
That's good! Developing discipline is much more tractable if you have, in principle, the energy to do the shit you need to do!
Not that it's trivial, but at least it does sound like you're asking the right question.
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