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Wellness Wednesday for October 23, 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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Regular social responsibilities are correlated to positive mood.

Well... sure? In a negative mood you're less likely to take on new responsibilities and more likely to drop existing ones.

I've heard lots of stories about how the effect is also causal in the other direction, as you're suggesting, and that makes just as much sense to me so I'd say "try it", but I'd love to know if anybody's done controlled experiments to estimate the strength of the connection in each direction. If both directions are strong enough then you get "vicious spiral" / "virtuous spiral" dynamics, where people would tend to fall into two very separate "attractors" that require major changes to get out of.