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.
Notes -
This is gonna sound like dumb self-help book advice, but I mean it entirely in earnest:
You can't stop it from bothering you. Comments and insults like that carry a certain amount of pain that is unavoidable. You don't actually have that much control over how you react to stimuli on a fundamental level; it would be like asking how you can make it not hurt when a needle stabs you. And no, this isn't a "you can't change how you feel but you can change your reaction to it" either, because that's actually still just trying to cheat yourself out of the original problem; the hope for some people is that if you "change your reaction" enough it'll stop hurting. But there's actually no way out. It'll just always hurt and that's it.
What you can do is change your beliefs about the situation, and stop viewing the pain as a bad thing or as something to be overcome. Because right now you're giving yourself two problems: there's the original pain, and the meta-belief that you're doing something wrong because you haven't found a way to overcome the pain yet. You can ditch the meta-belief and get rid of that problem, leaving you with only the one original problem, which is an improvement.
So the next time someone insults you, you'll still feel bothered. But at least you won't have to make it any worse than it already is.
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