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Wellness Wednesday for May 1, 2024

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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Imo, pretend you don't care about the clutter, focus on the stuff she feels guilty not having time to do stuff with. Sort the set-asides into bins for her, and stick them outside. Out of sight, no stress, eventually get rid of most of it.

Tell her you'll do the stock together next time you buy a lamb or half a cow. Doing a big batch is way more efficient than boiling two chicken thigh bones and a wing.

I hoard stuff too, but it's great. There's a complete set of backup kitchen appliances wrapped up in an outbuilding. When my fridge-freezer broke this week, I just rolled a smaller one in on a dolly and moved all the important food into it. Now I've got the regular one fixed the backup can go back out to the barn for a few more years.

Hoarding reduces stress if you do it right, but letting it build up low-productivity tasks is awful. Getting the "upcycling pile" turned into "upcycling garbage bins" is the key.