site banner

Wellness Wednesday for June 14, 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).

1
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

This reminds me of the Internal Double Crux chapter of the CFAR Participant Handbook. Here are the notes I had:

Resolve conflicting beliefs by incorporating information from conflicting models.

For example, You want to run but you also want to watch Netflix.

  • Rather than summarizing this situation as "I'm just lazy" or "I struggle to stay motivated", it is instead productive to think: in addition to my belief that it is good to run, I apparently also have a belief that it's good to watch Netflix.

The part of you that wants to run is good at paying attention to your long-term goals, your social standing, your health, and your sense of yourself as a strong and capable person. The part of you that wants to watch Netflix is good at paying attention to your short-term urges, your energy levels, your sense of comfort, and whether or not the new Game of Thrones episode seems likely to be good.

…In order to build a maximally detailed understanding of the world and correctly strategize across all of your needs and goals, you've got to bring all of your models to the table…