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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Notes -
Feeling a little depressed the past week. Not really bad but it kind of came out of nowhere since my mood has mostly been good over the past few months. Was in the gym and couldn't even finish my workout. Not really much of a reason for it, just dredged up some really unpleasant thoughts. I suppose I'm a bit anxious about gaining weight and not getting the results I want.
More pleasantly, I started learning to ride a bike today. I've always been very embarrassed and self-conscious about not being able to ride a bike, but a friend very nicely agreed to help me. It's something I hope to be competent in by the time I go to New Zealand.
The bike thing is cool. If you have a good place to ride bikes can be insanely fun.
I don't know how experienced your friend is in teaching adults to ride, or how far you've gotten. But assuming you're still at the literally learning how to balance the bike stage you might consider taking the peddles off and lowering the saddle to use it as a balance bike for a hour or two. Demonstrated here starting from 5:28, but the whole video is worth watching if you are brand new to riding a bike. I don't think adults learn it that much slower than kids, they just tend to have more fear since they are falling from higher. If you are a beginner in the new to the trail sense he also has a good series, would also recommend KyleAprilRideMTB in that case.
Oh, I got balance and coasting fairly quickly and after about 20 minutes was pedalling short distances (about 50 metres or so) and did a few turns. Very wobbly and I found it stressful or lost control of my direction and had to brake, but definitely a good start. I've ridden a bike before only once about 12 years ago.
My friend helped mostly by giving me a push to get some initial speed.
Sounds like your well on your way. Even if it was 12 years ago the muscle memory for riding a bike is very weirdly persistent... Still recommend the video for a very rough description of how the dynamics work, somewhere around the 2:20 mark. If you ever have trouble with the getting started part I recommend this page.
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I learned to ride a bike as an adult a few years ago. Learning it was pretty much just falling off of the thing for two or three hours. I think it was just one day of that. The next day I got on it and was able to ride it, though not particularly well. It didn't turn out to be as hard as I thought. I hope it's the same for you. Good luck, but you won't need luck, just determination.
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