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Wellness Wednesday for November 8, 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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You got there, apologized, and worked hard; a sincere apology does a lot to defuse anger. I remember reading an anecdote about martial arts classes. Often, when someone is late, they get told to warm themselves up and are given some number of pushups "as punishment". But the important thing about the pushups is once they're done, they're done. The student is to let go of the shame of being late, and the instructor is to let go of any frustration towards the tardy student.

You probably feel like shit right now. While it is correct to be ashamed of getting smashed and missing work, it is not correct to blow that all out of proportion. You've apologised, and you've done your pushups. Let it go, and be on time from now on. Work hard and work well, but don't flog yourself into further slip-ups. That's better than carrying around anxiety over this.