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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   2343 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for January 11, 2023

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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A lot of this sounds very familiar, especially this:

One of the things that helps me most is to just understand that my brain is broken. I can’t trust the things it is telling me.

Which I've literally said to myself, word for word (didn't help my anxiety in my case though).

I wish I had some advice or encouragement. I was holding out (faint) hope that I'd eventually get financially stable enough to work through it with a psychiatrist, but white-knuckling is the status quo for now.

Yeah, the full story there is that my brain is always sending me warnings that something is dangerous and I need to protect myself. My previous response was to buckle in and try to figure out more about the danger and what I needed to do, and only then decide if it was a real danger. I've come to realize that that's like taking a danger warning from a 2-year-old seriously. I'm just kind of an idiot in that regard, and it's helpful to recognize that.

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