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).
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One thing I noticed about a decade or two ago is that Q-tips and similar products always have instructions that explicitly tell you not to put it into your ear, only swab around the entrance. Presumably it's to avoid legal liability or something, but I don't think I've ever encountered anyone, including myself, who heeds this instruction, to the extent that it's actually unusual for someone to use Q-tips for something other than poking into their ears. It does feel, so, so right, though I admit I always have a bit of a dissatisfied ticklish feeling afterward.
I've never put a Q-tip in my ear. Not once. Naive me, until I read online, I thought basically all right-thinking people heeded this advice. Perforated ear drums seem like too big a deal to risk.
I've been cleaning inside of my ears with broken off wooden skewers and wads of cotton wool since.. well moving away from home where it was q-tips.
Trust me, even gently poking at the eardrum with something soft is excruciating, I can't imagine perforating it.
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I've had no real issues 99.9% of the times I've used them in the ear canal, barring this particular incident with the leftover alcohol, and one time my mom cheaped out and bought the cheapest Chinese variant on Amazon.
The latter dislodged in my ear, and after I didn't pay too much attention, developed into a bad case of otitis media that had the ENT doctor who examined me suspect it was a fungal infection until the syringing brought out a moldy lump of cotton that had been festering in there for 6 months. So do check if all of it came back out with the wax!
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