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Wellness Wednesday for December 27, 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 once looked into animal studies on exercise and I remember there were papers showing a similar result. Mouses that exercised did not live longer, but they were healthier: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/2046-2395-2-14

It’s not impossible IMO that exercise is a consequence of a healthy organism, whose energy is so abundant that it wants to get rid of the excess through physical expenditure. Anyone who has experienced childhood or owned a young dog should be familiar with the phenomenon. Exercise intervention studies would have been compromised by the fact that the already-healthier people would have been more keen to sign up, or if it were randomized more keen to accept, and more keen to remain in the study. When I was young, randomly running required about 5% of the willpower it does for me now — because I was a well-trained athlete as a child? No, just an organism with a lot of health energy to spare.