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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This comment may in no way help you. But it's unlikely to hurt you, either.
When my youngest son was in elementary school the group of kids who walk together to school (not a friend group--a pre-determined, decided cohort of children, one of whom has a flag) would be out there waiting around 8 o'clock. My son sometimes had an issue where as this moment approached he would get so worked up and beside himself with nervous energy that he would have to sit on the toilet. This got to the point where he would end up delaying the other kids, which is a big no-no in Japan, and his frazzled mother would go out and tell them all he would come later, they could go on.
I don't know if my solution was the best one, and it was certainly short-term, but I knew from bitter experience that getting scolded wasn't going to help him, nor was reason or threat or pleading. What did help was that every morning then I would set a deep metal bowl with ice water (like literal chunks of ice in it) and a towel. He would dunk his face for ten seconds, wipe dry, and off he went without ever making anyone wait again. I don't know how long this lasted, but it was long enough that wifey began worrying and told me I shouldn't be setting up the ice unless he asked. I knew better than that, too, though.
Eventually he didn't need the dunk, but I'll keep the ice machine full for the future.
This is all vagus nerve/parasympathetic nervous system hacking, as you alluded to, which is what reminded me.
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