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Wellness Wednesday for May 8, 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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Your description, plus the replies below, plus my personal experiences leads me to suggest an annoying hypothesis - there's just a lot of variance and any individual is going to have too small of a sample size to draw meaningful conclusions. It's true that post-viral symptoms are pretty significant in a non-trivial number of cases and can linger for a long time; it would be pretty unsurprising if Covid was worse than typical on this front simply because it's a much nastier bug than the typically circulating viruses.

But really, look how all over the map everyone is in the comments. For my part, I have gotten absolutely flattened by viruses in a couple times in the last few years and tested negative for Covid. Even after I felt better, my running performance was measurably worse for a couple months in both cases. In stark contrast, I just got a cold and it resolved quickly from a symptomatic perspective, my heart rate and HRV returned to normal quickly, and there was no measurable impact on running. Why? I don't know, shit happens. When we try to draw lessons about what's going on from like a half dozen data points, they're just not going to be very reliable lessons.

Semi-related - I got hand, foot, and mouth disease as an adult about ten years ago, and WOW is that an unpleasant virus. Do not recommend, 2/10, would not try again.