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).
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I learned recently that negative ions may improve mood. This is the strangest thing I‘ve read after phytochemicals from trees improving mood, certain bacteria in dirt improving mood, and certain essential oils demonstrably increasing alertness. Apparently, in certain environments like close to a waterfall and after a heavy storm, the air contains more negatively charged particles, although I don’t exactly understand how. I have a strong memory as a kid of feeling a strange sensation under a waterfall which I chalked up to the awe and humidity, despite not really being drawn to waterfalls much, but perhaps something else was going on.
I wonder what “this feels good but it can’t be for a reason” discovery science will support next. Perhaps wearing certain fabrics, grounding (feet on grass), being safely outside during a thunderstorm, wooden homes, and maybe being in spaces where people experience strong positive emotion will have some transference effect.
Veritasium investigated this in the context of salt lamps back in 2019. IIRC, it's a combination of woo and placebo effect.
That said, it's certainly possible to have a local build-up of negatively charged particles--lightning, static shocks, and other forms of electrical discharges are the sudden neutralization of a pre-existing separation of charge.
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I’m 99% sure that “negative ions” thing is bullshit. How would that even work? Chloride is a negative ion. There’s tons of chloride in your body already. Normal homeostatic variation would swamp any additional ions you might breathe in. If they are supposed to help from outside your body, how? Any macroscopic electrostatic field would cause the ions to accelerate away from each other. If the negative ions are balanced out by positive counter ions, then whence cometh the auratic effects?
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It's important to test our assumptions ruthlessly - this is what science was based on, and where all the big and useful discoveries are made.
We scoff at our own peril.
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