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Wellness Wednesday for October 30, 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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I think I recommend that you stop trying to goad yourself with rewards. If the only reason you’re doing something is a reward, it’s only going to work so long as the rewards are worth the pain. And of course the other part is that you’re setting yourself up to see the task as an unpleasant thing to be suffered through so you can get to the reward.

Try just scheduling the task and removing any obstacles to doing that task at that time. If you’re exercising, for example, schedule that, and just … exercise. Make sure it’s a kind of exercise you like, or listen to music while doing it, but do it, and stop when the session is over. Put the gym clothes on a chair in the bedroom and keep the weights there and so on to make it easy to just start doing it automatically. And sooner or later, you’ll just automatically do it. You’ll get to the point where working out at 3pm on MWF is just something you do.

Another thing to try is get a group of people and just start doing things together. If you’re working on programming than a group learning to program will be muc( better than just doing it alone.

I don't directly reward myself for the reasons you've outlined. There's virtually no conceivable reward that is actually "worth" getting started with work in the morning. Generally the system is mostly its own reward--if I follow it then I get to exercise in the evening, for example, because I've gotten enough work done over the day. Normally I never feel like hiking because I feel like I lack the time, but with a system it becomes possible because I know I've gotten a reasonable amount of work done by the time I go.

So, the rewards aren't just direct "10 points for 1 hour of work," it's more "keep in mind that if you keep the system you get to go on hikes every day or two" which is much more motivating.

Scheduling is good, and actually my top priority right now. I think keeping a steady work and sleep schedule would solve most of my problems. The only obstacle keeping me from it is work--if I haven't gotten enough work done then I really don't want to commit to doing anything else that requires attention or effort. If I could just get my work done consistently I'm sure everything else would fall into place.