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Wellness Wednesday for October 18, 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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I remember a phase change in early childhood. I was a rather introverted kid, refusing to interact with strangers or even family outside my immediate one.

One day, an aunt of mine tried talking to me, and I remember mentally going fuck it, what's the harm? and engaged in a bit of polite conversation. She was extremely surprised, pleasantly so, and I recall feeling gratified by the positive feedback, along the lines of "huh, that wasn't bad at all, maybe I should talk to people?", and I did so from there on out. I'd say that's a change from an utter introvert to an ambivert.

A more recent example was college, where I made an effort to make friends, not that I tried particularly hard, but it seems I'm an interesting enough guy that I had friends who would look for me and drag me along to places even if I was perfectly content being a shut-in.