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).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
See for me, I like drinking occasionally well enough, but when I read the recent headlines about alcohol and cancer, the studies were about women who had two drinks every night. Which is a level I literally can't imagine, not so much because I don't drink that much, as because I can't manage to do anything that consistently. I can't remember to wear a wedding ring every day, or take vitamins, let alone have two drinks every single night.
@ActuallyATleilaxuGhola , if you could quit with no problems I wouldn't worry about alcoholism, but I would put 5 drinks a night at a problematic level if you weren't able to quit it.
My final push to quit for a while was listening to the Huberman Lab podcast about alcohol. It's not just "not good" for you, it's not just "bad" for you, it's really, really damaging to your body (gut, liver, and brain) in ways that AIUI scientists didn't even fully appreciate until relatively recently, even at what are commonly considered "safe" levels like a 1-2 drinks a night.
I realized that while I used to be able to accommodate a bit of light drinking in my life because my life had more "slack," I was now older and had significant responsibilities at work and home, so I really didn't have excess time and energy to spend on alcohol anymore.
ETA: I read that Huberman is known for playing fast and loose with the facts, so it might be wise to take the podcast with a teaspoon of salt.
More options
Context Copy link
That level is almost certainly associated with real risks for liver and cardiovascular diseases, but my bigger worry would just be trajectory. It seems to me that if someone can't go down from five drinks per night, there is a pretty significant chance that they will eventually go up instead, and that this is a ratchet.
I was just thinking during my recent holiday illness how much it would suck to have a nicotine addiction and need to figure out how to manage that on top of being unable to eat or sleep.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link