Usually in the form of asking questions:

1. “Does this task take 5 minutes to do and do you have 5 minutes to spare?”

If the answer is yes, then just do it. It has helped me keep things tidy a bit better rather than spending a full day cleaning up everything. Now, if tasks get left, rather than a full day cleaning & tidying it’s only an hour or so.

My space being tidier has brought me some much needed stress relief.

2. “Do you need this item right now? Can it wait until the end of the month when you get paid?”

Struggling with impulse purchases so this question has helped me stop spending as recklessly though I do relapse sometimes but nowhere near as bad as I was.

3. “Got paid? Great! Have you money-potted your paycheck?”

Further aiding my financial responsibility efforts, every time I get paid I use my bank’s money-pot feature to portion it out to make sure rent, bills, phone, food, transport, subscriptions, activities, etc. are budgeted appropriately. The rest is stuffed into savings to resist the temptation to spend it.

4. “What would a healthy and active person do?”

To lose weight and improve my fitness, everytime I want to get something unhealthy for lunch or dinner I ask “would someone who’s trying to lose weight eat that?” or “would a healthy person chose that fizzy drink or have water instead?”. On my way home from work I go to the gym and on the days when I don’t feel like it I ask “Would someone who’s active skip going to the gym? Sure they would if they’re feeling unwell and sick, are you feeling ill and sick? Ok you’re tired, but can you at least do 5 minutes on the treadmill?” because I don’t want to be breaking that habit that has been going really well for the last 8 months.

Honestly at the moment my life has been a bit of a rollercoaster so I’ve not been asking myself these questions and been slipping on the good habits recently, speaking of which…

5. “Did you keep the habits up? No, that’s ok you stumbled a bit there. Now what small changes can you make to make the good ones easier to do and the bad ones harder to do?”

At the end of the day, I’ll take the path of least resistance so I’ve got to make sure that path is the one that will lead me to the outcomes I want. I’ll be having a think about these this weekend because I am determined to get back on track, so I’m going to sit myself down and work through it like a friend would.

Which leads me to the final question:

6. “Would a friend talk/act that way to you?”

I struggle with self-confidence, self-esteem, and self-worth. Some days I really feel like I just have no value and the self-loathing is immense so when I get overly critical and verbally/physically beat myself up I try to hold onto a moment of calm and ask that question to myself. I don’t need to answer it because I know the answer and just need a moment to just breathe and chill to try and break the negative thought spiral.

So I just went and watched that specific scene because you do raise some good points here.

If the computers know he woke up why release him instead of just killing him?

It looks like the machine that releases him is a different one from the usual Sentinels we see elsewhere in the films so I assume it’s just there to monitor the humans in the pods. It is probably programmed to just dispose of humans into the sewer that either wake up due to technical issues or that die in the pod by yanking their neck using the grabby arm and unscrewing the neural spike. Flushing the live/dead body down is just the last step in it’s process because even if they wake up alive in the pod, once they’re flushed down they aren’t going to be fed nutrients to keep them alive and these vat grown humans barely use their muscles so they can’t swim well and will most likely drown quickly. Why bother wasting energy making sure they’re dead when they most likely will die anyway?

If they did know he did woke up, and didn’t kill him because he’s the one… Wouldn’t the crew find it unusual how easy it was to get him?

I don’t think the machines knew he was The One at that stage because he was yet to perform any of the feats that the “prophecy” laid out. I don’t think I could explain the whole prophecy thing they go over in the third film well enough but from the sounds of it, until Neo can see the Matrix for what it truly is the machines don’t know if he’s the one or not so until he gets shit by Agent Smith and comes back to life to the machines he’s just another human that broke free and being a bit of a pest like the rest of them.

I agree that they’d try to help if they could but I think we’d have to assume that getting someone plugged back into the Matrix permanently would carry a much greater risk for the crew required to carry out this operation than is acceptable.

I think this assumption is reasonable because:

1. When Neo leaves the matrix, within a minute of “waking up” a machine quickly arrives to unscrew his neural connection and flush him down the waste disposal at the back of the pod he was “asleep” in. So we can assume that there’s constant monitoring of the pods and lots of machines to quickly dispose of humans that wake up.

2. The humans want to stay as far away from the machines as possible, hence why they use a dish to broadcast a signal from a hidden portion of the world outside of Zion so they can jack into the Matrix remotely and disconnect when they need to move to avoid detection. Getting inside of one of these human pod farms likely would be a nigh-on impossible task as can be seen when A. Neo and Trinity fly into the heart of machine territory in the 3rd film and B. Morpheus and the crew wait until after Neo gets flushed out into what most of the time is a corpse sewer to fish him out.

3. During the whole explanation of the matrix from Morpheus we can see that as soon as a human is grown enough to be picked they’re moved into one of these pods. So even if they somehow manage to sneak into one of these facilities without being detected by one of the innumerable monitoring machines they’d either need to A. Time it perfectly between a dead person being flushed out before the pod is repopulated with a new young person from the farms. Or B. Swap Cypher in when someone else wants to come out, when they state in the film that spending enough time in the Matrix to extract someone is already a risky operation.

4. They might not be rule tyrants but Zion clearly has a leadership hierarchy and risking a whole crew and a ship which has information on how to find and get into Zion in it’s systems would likely be a completely unacceptable risk to Zion management who already don’t like Morpheus’ recklessness for chasing the prophecy by freeing Neo in his 20s when they normally only free people when they’re younger.

Mushroom MUSHROOM!