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.
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I've booked a week off work starting on Saturday (well, Sunday technically because I'm doing a night shift on Friday night). However, as it approaches, I don't really know why I bothered. I don't really have anything I want to do, and if anything, I'm worried I'm going to spend the whole week sitting around feeling depressed.
Other than work and the gym (which makes me hate myself as often as not), I find it very hard to actually care about anything or feel motivated. I feel basically no desire to talk to my friends, or to meet new people either. I don't really have any desire for sex and I don't have any hopes of having a relationship either.
I'm not the biggest alpha male 'round these parts by any means, but honestly if you go to the gym and aren't making progress, and you have no functioning sex drive, consider T supplementation or at least getting levels checked.
I just tried some herbal shit that may or may not be real, and the change in my workout progress was noticeable. It's hard to reduce to one thing, I didn't isolate any variables, but it's got me giving credibility to the theories that most variation in workout progress is just downstream of genetic/environmental effects on T.
I've had my testosterone checked before, and it's within the medically defined normal range, but close to the bottom end. Certainly, I have some of the symptoms, difficulty with moods, lack of drive, etc. T supplementation is certainly tempting, but that's part of the reason I haven't done it. Would it be looking for a quick fix?
That said, having read your own posting, I have ordered some supplements touted as test boosters.
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Nowadays many people feel a pressure to use time off from work to do something fun or leisurely. For some people, and I'm expecting this is particularly common to people who like this website, it can be helpful to accept that something fun might be something that other people consider work, like learning a new skill. Is there anything that you wish you knew how to do that you could start learning via YouTube tutorials? For me it was finally learning to code python.
I spent years trying to maximize my fun through various ways, but more recently trying to maximize my learning and challenging my brain has actually made me feel like I'm having a lot more fun on a day-to-day basis then when I was cramming as many leisure activities into one day as possible.
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It sometimes helps me to do something I've never done before. Like travel or psychedelics, doing something novel can help shake up your brain and get you out of old thought habits.
Here are some ideas, it can be very simple:
cook a meal you've never tried before (or get takeout that you haven't tried before)
travel to the gym via different mode or route. Do a routine you've not done before.
go for a walk, if you don't normally.
rearrange your room/house. tidy up. buy some new art or a new rug
open netflix and watch a highly-acclaimed film/series that you haven't seen before
visit a local place you've never been to before, a park, an art gallary, then have lunch somewhere new to you
go to the cinema and watch something you wouldn't normally watch. (If you normally buy popcorn, get a hotdog instead)
get a cheap room in the next town over, and spend a day or two there
Really the challenge is only "something new".
Also, you should try to do things even if you don't feel like it (perhaps you know this already). Do things as an experiment and see what happens. You should make a schedule for the week, perhaps just pick one activity per day. Look up Behavioural Activation - when you feel low, you do less, which makes you feel low. But if you do more, you might feel better. So you should do things even if you don't completely feel like doing them, because the act of doing is itself the medicine.
Thanks for the suggestions.
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Why not go on a solo camping trip or do something to shake yourself up a bit? Meditate or do some psychedelics?
I think that if anything, introspection is a danger. It's too easy for me to get sucked into negative thought patterns when idle. Psychedelics seem more promising but I don't know the first thing about them or sourcing them.
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I just got into my first ever real relationship at 29 years old. It's literally less than two weeks old. In some ways I feel better, but in other ways I feel disappointed. Having a girlfriend didn't fix me. If you had a girlfriend your week off would most likely be full of activities, but maybe you wouldn't care much about them. You exchange one set of problems/anxieties for another when your life changes.
Well, there's never any guarantee that any change will lead to happiness, but the conclusion can't be that change is pointless.
I'm not really in much of a position to give relationship advice, but I don't think it's the right perspective to see a partner as someone to 'fix' you. They're just someone that you like, that you desire, that you want to make happy, and that feels the same way about you. And if in the process that changes you, that can happen too, but it probably won't if you overthink it.
Increasingly I suspect this kind of suspicion of desire is a trap for me. Trying to avoid wanting things or asserting my own desires has left me at 31 with nothing, not even much in the way of fond memories.
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