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Wellness Wednesday for November 1, 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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Make snide comments about the overly social friends to your shy friends. Hopefully not mean, at least a little ribbing. The best comment would be something that is funny if the social friend hears it and mean if said behind their back all the time.

  1. If the social ones don't hear it, their fault for excluding the rest of the table. If they do hear it it can be a light reminder that the rest of the table exists.
  2. The social ones are usually extra attuned to outside conversations about themselves, they are likely to hear it and interrupt their own conversation. Most other topics will not pull them in.
  3. The shy ones are given a relevant topic to discuss that is right in front of them. It is unique to the situation. The best conversation topics are maximally inclusive with the person you are talking with and maximally exclusive with everyone else.

Or just ignore your social friends occasionally and engage in conversation with the shy ones. You can always come back to the social friends later if the shy friend conversation fizzles out. They will definitely still be talking.