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Self Improvement
A community which focusses on improving yourself. This can be in many different ways - from improving physical health or appearance, to improving mental health, creating better habits, overcoming addictions, etc.
While material circumstances beyond our control do govern much of our daily lives, people do have agency and choices to make, whether that is as "simple" as disciplining yourself to not doomscroll, to as complex as recreating yourself to have many different hobbies and habits.
This is not a place where all we do is talk about improving "productivity" (in a workplace context) and similar terms and harmful lifestyles like "grindset". Self-improvement here is intended to make you a generally better and happier person, as well as a better communist, and any other roles you may have in your life.
Rules and guidelines:
- Posts should be about self-improvement. This is obviously a wide category, and can range from advice, to finding resources, to self-posts about needing to improve in a certain area, or how you have improved, and many other things.
- Use content warnings when discussing difficult subjects.
- Do not make medical decisions solely because of a discussion you have had with any person here (e.g. whether to take or not take medications; diagnoses; etc.) as we do not vet people. All medical problems should be discussed with a real-life medical professional.
- Do not post harmful advice here. If this is seen, then please report it and we shall remove it. If you are unsure about whether it's precisely harmful advice or not but feel uneasy about it, please report it anyway.
- Do not insult other users and their lifestyles or their habits (unless they ask, I suppose). This is a place for self-improvement. Critique and discussion about a course of action is encouraged over shit-flinging. Don't talk down to people.
You mentioned reading theory. Some styles of text are just hard to read and it takes practice to get fast. I had to read a lot of scientific papers and immerse myself in the concepts and lingo before I could parse through them quickly. It might make sense to just read theory as slow as you need to to absorb the concepts and get comfortable.
As for subvocalizing, I think I would draw a distinction between speaking the words in your head and hearing the words in your head. When I speak the words in my head I find that it slows me down, probably because it engages the speech production part of my brain too much. But even when I stop speaking the words in my head and just scan my eyes across the text, I still hear the words in my head in a more passive way. And it's strange, because if I heard real audio at that speed it would sound weird, but when it's just in your head somehow it feels normal. You're not having to actually parse a real audio signal, your imagination is just ghosting over the sounds of the words as they enter your brain.
Maybe I would read even faster if I stopped hearing words entirely, I don't know.
I will say that subvocalization literally is reading aloud to yourself. Your larynx flutters when you subvocalize and so iirc the current theory is that it's a way of promoting comprehension and retention because you are processing it through both audio and visual centers of the brain