The Polyvagal Theory – by Dr. Stephen Porges
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Do you ever find that your feelings (or occasionally: lack thereof) sometimes can seem mismatched with the observed facts of your situation? This book unravels that mystery—or rather, that stack of mysteries.
Dr. Porges’ work on this topic is, by the way, the culmination of 40 years of research. While he’s not exactly a household name to the layperson, he’s very respected in his field, and this book is his magnum opus.
Here he explains the disparate roles of the two branches of the vagus nerve (hence: polyvagal theory). At least, the two branches that we mammals have; non-mammalian vertebrates have only one. This makes a big difference, because of the cascade of inhibitions that this allows.
The answer to the very general question “What stops you from…?” is usually found somewhere down this line of cascade of inhibitions.
These range from “what stops you from quitting your job/relationship/etc” to “what stops you from freaking out” to “what stops you from relaxing” to “what stops you from reacting quickly” to “what stop you from giving up” to “what stops you from gnawing your arm off” and many many more.
And because sometimes we wish we could do something that we can’t, or wish we wouldn’t do something that we do, understanding this process can be something of a cheat code to life.
A quick note on style: the book is quite dense and can be quite technical, but should be comprehensible to any layperson who is content to take their time, because everything is explained as we go along.
Bottom line: if you’d like to better understand the mysteries of how you feel vs how you actually are, and what that means for what you can or cannot wilfully do, this is a top-tier book
Click here to check out Polyvagal Theory, and take control of your responses!
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6 Ways To Look After Your Back
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Back To Back
When people think about looking after their back, often thought does not go much further than sitting with good posture, and perhaps even standing with good posture. And those things are important, but:
1) People’s efforts to have good posture often result in overcorrecting creating an anterior pelvic tilt that causes lower back problems.
Quick tip: if you’re sticking your butt out, you’re doing it wrong (no matter how great your butt is). Instead, to find the correct posture, go up on your tip-toes for a moment, then imagine a plumb-line down the center of your body, thus perpendicular to the floor, going all the way down to the ground. Now, slowly return your heels to the ground, but as you do so, keep your spine aligned to the plumb-line, so you’re not moving backwards as you drop, just directly down. This will land you in perfect posture.
Unless you have scoliosis. In which case, it’ll get you as close to good posture as is likely attainable from any quick tip.
2) There’s a lot more to looking after our back than just good posture!
Here are 5 other important things to do:
Be strong
Do strength-training for your back. How to do that is beyond the scope of today’s feature, but there are many good guides and also personal trainers that can be found.
Start off easy and work up, but do start. The stronger your back is, the less likely a momentary lapse in concentration is to throw out your back because you picked something up with imperfect form.
See also: Resistance Is Useful! (Especially As We Get Older)
Stretch intentionally
Many back injuries occur as a result of stretching and/or twisting awkwardly, so if you ensure your basic mobility and range of motion is good, the less likely it is that unthinkingly twisting around 270° to see where that wasp was going will slip a disk.
The more you stretch intentionally (carefully, please), the more you will be able to stretch unintentionally without injury.
See also: Building & Maintaining Mobility
Stand when you can, walk when you can
We humans have outrun our evolution in a lot of ways, and/but one thing our bodies are definitely not well-adapted for is sitting. Unless we are sitting in a low squat the way you might often see an orang-utan sitting, sitting is not a good way of being for us. Even sitting seiza-style or cross-legged is passable for a short while, not for too long.
So, while there sure are times we need to sit (especially if you’re driving!) minimizing those times is ideal. There are a lot of activities that are traditionally done sitting, where there’s no need for it to be so. For example, your writer here sits for the day’s main meal, but takes any smaller meal standing (and when guests visit for a coffee or such, I’ll offer them the couch while I myself prop up the fireplace). Standing desks are also great if you spend a lot of time at the computer for any reason.
See also: The Doctor Who Wants Us To Exercise Less & Move More
Rest when you need to
You can’t stand all the time! But know this: if you want to rest your legs, lying down is a lot better for your back (and internal organs) than sitting.
Taking a 5 minute break lying on your couch, or bed, or floor, is a perfectly good option and only social convention says otherwise.
If you want a compromise option, though? A recliner chair, in the reclined position, is a better for your back than being scrunched up in the Economy Class Flight position.
PS: About that bed situation…
What Mattress Is Best, By Science?
Kill pain before it kills you
Painkillers aren’t great for the health per se, but pain (or rather, our bodily responses to such) can be worse. Half the time, when it comes to musculoskeletal problems, things get a lot worse a lot more quickly because of how we overcompensate due to the pain. So, take your pain seriously, and remember, the right amount of pain is zero.
If you’re thinking “but pain relief option xyz isn’t good for me”, we strongly recommend checking out:
The 7 Approaches To Pain Management
Take care!
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Where to Get Turmeric?
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It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? You can always hit “reply” to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom!
In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!
As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!
So, no question/request too big or small
“I liked the info on Turmeric. The problem for me is that I do not like black pepper which should be ingested with the turmeric for best results. Is black pepper sold in capsule form?”
Better than just black pepper being sold in capsule form, it’s usually available in the same capsules as the turmeric. As in: if you buy turmeric capsules, there is often black pepper in them as well, for precisely that reason. Check labels, of course, but here’s an example on Amazon.
“I would like to read more on loneliness, meetup group’s for seniors. Thank you”
Well, 10almonds is an international newsletter, so it’s hard for us to advise about (necessarily: local) meetup groups!
But a very popular resource for connecting to your local community is Nextdoor, which operates throughout the US, Canada, Australia, and large parts of Europe including the UK.
In their own words:
Get the most out of your neighborhood with Nextdoor
It’s where communities come together to greet newcomers, exchange recommendations, and read the latest local news. Where neighbors support local businesses and get updates from public agencies. Where neighbors borrow tools and sell couches. It’s how to get the most out of everything nearby. Welcome, neighbor.
Curious? Click here to check it out and see if it’s of interest to you
“It was superb !! Just loved that healthy recipe !!! I would love to see one of those every day, if possible !! Keep up the fabulous work !!!”
We’re glad you enjoyed! We can’t promise a recipe every day, but here’s one just for you:
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Undoing The Damage Of Life’s Hard Knocks
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Sometimes, What Doesn’t Kill Us Makes Us Insecure
We’ve written before about Complex PTSD, which is much more common than the more popularly understood kind:
Given that C-PTSD affects so many people (around 1 in 5, but really, do read the article above! It explains it better than we have room to repeat today), it seems like a good idea to share tips for managing it.
(Last time, we took all the space for explaining it, so we just linked to some external resources at the end)
What happened to you?
PTSD has (as a necessity, as part of its diagnostic criteria) a clear event that caused it, which makes the above question easy to answer.
C-PTSD often takes more examination to figure out what tapestry of circumstances (and likely but not necessarily: treatment by other people) caused it.
Often it will feel like “but it can’t be that; that’s not that bad”, or “everyone has things like that” (in which case, you’re probably one of the one in five).
The deeper questions
Start by asking yourself: what are you most afraid of, and why? What are you most ashamed of? What do you fear that other people might say about you?
Often there is a core pattern of insecurity that can be summed up in a simple, harmful, I-message, e.g:
- I am a bad person
- I am unloveable
- I am a fake
- I am easy to hurt
- I cannot keep my loved ones safe
…and so forth.
For a bigger list of common insecurities to see what resonates, check out:
Basic Fears/Insecurities, And Their Corresponding Needs/Desires
Find where they came from
You probably learned bad beliefs, and consequently bad coping strategies, because of bad circumstances, and/or bad advice.
- When a parent exclaimed in anger about how stupid you are
- When a partner exclaimed in frustration that always mess everything up
- When an employer told you you weren’t good enough
…or maybe they told you one thing, and showed you the opposite. Or maybe it was entirely non-verbal circumstances:
- When you gambled on a good idea and lost everything
- When you tried so hard at some important endeavour and failed
- When you thought someone could be trusted, and learned the hard way that you were wrong
These are “life’s difficult bits”, but when we’ve lived through a whole stack of them, it’s less like a single shattering hammer-blow of PTSD, and more like the consistent non-stop tap tap tap that ends up doing just as much damage in the long run.
Resolve them
That may sound a bit like a “and quickly create world peace” level of task, but we have tools:
Ask yourself: what if…
…it had been different? Take some time and indulge in a full-blown fantasy of a life that was better. Explore it. How would those different life lessons, different messages, have impacted who you are, your personality, your behaviour?
This is useful, because the brain is famously bad at telling real memories from false ones. Consciously, you’ll know that one was an exploratory fantasy, but to your brain, it’s still doing the appropriate rewiring. So, little by little, neuroplasticity will do its thing.
Tell yourself a better lie
We borrowed this one from the title of a very good book which we’ve reviewed previously.
This idea is not about self-delusion, but rather that we already express our own experiences as a sort of narrative, and that narrative tends to contain value judgements that are often not useful, e.g. “I am stupid”, “I am useless”, and all the other insecurities we mentioned earlier. Some simple examples might be:
- “I had a terrible childhood” → “I have come so far”
- “I should have known better” → “I am wiser now”
- “I have lost so much” → “I have experienced so much”
So, replacing that self-talk can go a long way to re-writing how secure we feel, and therefore how much trauma-response (ideally: none!) we have to stimuli that are not really as threatening as we sometimes feel they are (a hallmark of PTSD in general).
Here’s a guide to more ways:
How To Get Your Brain On A More Positive Track (Without Toxic Positivity)
Take care!
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Good to Go – by Christie Aschwanden
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Many of us may more often need to recover from a day of moving furniture than running a marathon, but the science of recovery can still teach us a lot. The author, herself an endurance athlete and much-decorated science journalist, sets out to do just that.
She explores a lot of recovery methods, and examines whether the science actually backs them up, and if so, to what degree. She also, in true science journalism style, talks to a lot of professionals ranging from fellow athletes to fellow scientists, to get their input too—she is nothing if not thorough, and this is certainly not a book of one person’s opinion with something to sell.
Indeed, on the contrary, her findings show that some of the best recovery methods are the cheapest, or even free. She also looks at the psychological aspect though, and why many people are likely to continue with things that objectively do not work better than placebo.
The style is very easy-reading jargon-free pop-science, while nevertheless being backed up with hundreds of studies cited in the bibliography—a perfect balance of readability and reliability.
Bottom line: for those who wish to be better informed about how to recover quickly and easily, this book is a treasure trove of information well-presented.
Click here to check out Good To Go, and always be good to go!
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The Truth About Handwashing
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Washing Our Hands Of It
In Tuesdays’s newsletter, we asked you how often you wash your hands, and got the above-depicted, below-described, set of self-reported answers:
- About 54% said “More times per day than [the other options]”
- About 38% said “Whenever using the bathroom or kitchen
- About 5% said “Once or twice per day”
- Two (2) said “Only when visibly dirty”
- Two (2) said “I prefer to just use sanitizer gel”
What does the science have to say about this?
People lie about their handwashing habits: True or False?
True and False (since some people lie and some don’t), but there’s science to this too. Here’s a great study from 2021 that used various levels of confidentiality in questioning (i.e., there were ways of asking that made it either obvious or impossible to know who answered how), and found…
❝We analysed data of 1434 participants. In the direct questioning group 94.5% of the participants claimed to practice proper hand hygiene; in the indirect questioning group a significantly lower estimate of only 78.1% was observed.❞
Note: the abstract alone doesn’t make it clear how the anonymization worked (it is explained later in the paper), and it was noted as a limitation of the study that the participants may not have understood how it works well enough to have confidence in it, meaning that the 78.1% is probably also inflated, just not as much as the 94.5% in the direct questioning group.
Here’s a pop-science article that cites a collection of studies, finding such things as for example…
❝With the use of wireless devices to record how many people entered the restroom and used the pumps of the soap dispensers, researchers were able to collect data on almost 200,000 restroom trips over a three-month period.
The found that only 31% of men and 65% of women washed their hands with soap.❞
Source: Study: Men Wash Their Hands Much Less Often Than Women (And People Lie About Washing Their Hands)
Sanitizer gel does the job of washing one’s hands with soap: True or False?
False, though it’s still not a bad option for when soap and water aren’t available or practical. Here’s an educational article about the science of why this is so:
UCI Health | Soap vs. Hand Sanitizer
There’s also some consideration of lab results vs real-world results, because while in principle the alcohol gel is very good at killing most bacteria / inactivating most viruses, it can take up to 4 minutes of alcohol gel contact to do so, as in this study with flu viruses:
In contrast, 20 seconds of handwashing with soap will generally do the job.
Antibacterial soap is better than other soap: True or False?
False, because the main way that soap protects us is not in its antibacterial properties (although it does also destroy the surface membrane of many bacteria and for that matter viruses too, killing/inactivating them, respectively), but rather in how it causes pathogens to simply slide off during washing.
Here’s a study that found that handwashing with soap reduced disease incidence by 50–53%, and…
❝Incidence of disease did not differ significantly between households given plain soap compared with those given antibacterial soap.❞
Read more: Effect of handwashing on child health: a randomised controlled trial
Want to wash your hands more than you do?
There have been many studies into motivating people to wash their hands more (often with education and/or disgust-based shaming), but an effective method you can use for yourself at home is to simply buy more luxurious hand soap, and generally do what you can to make handwashing a more pleasant experience (taking a moment to let the water run warm is another good thing to do if that’s more comfortable for you).
Take care!
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One in twenty people has no sense of smell – here’s how they might get it back
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During the pandemic, a lost sense of smell was quickly identified as one of the key symptoms of COVID. Nearly four years later, one in five people in the UK is living with a decreased or distorted sense of smell, and one in twenty have anosmia – the total loss of the ability to perceive any odours at all. Smell training is one of the few treatment options for recovering a lost sense of smell – but can we make it more effective?
Smell training is a therapy that is recommended by experts for recovering a lost sense of smell. It is a simple process that involves sniffing a set of different odours – usually essential oils, or herbs and spices – every day.
The olfactory system has a unique ability to regenerate sensory neurons (nerve cells). So, just like physiotherapy where exercise helps to restore movement and function following an injury, repeated exposure to odours helps to recover the sense of smell following an infection, or other cause of smell loss (for example, traumatic head injury).
Several studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of smell training under laboratory conditions. But recent findings have suggested that the real-world results might be disappointing.
One reason for this is that smell training is a long-term therapy. It can take months before patients detect anything, and some people may not get any benefit at all.
In one study, researchers found that after three months of smell training, participation dropped to 88%, and further declined to 56% after six months. The reason given was that these people did not feel as though they noticed any improvement in their ability to smell.
Cross-modal associations
To remedy this, researchers are now investigating how smell training can be improved. One interesting idea is that information from our other senses, or “cross-modal associations”, can be applied to smell training to promote odour perception and improve the results.
Cross-modal associations are described as the tendency for sensory cues from different sensory systems to be matched. For example, brightness tends to be associated with loudness. Pitch is related to size. Colours are linked to temperature, and softness is matched with round shapes, while spiky shapes feel more rough. In previous studies, these associations have been shown to have a considerable influence on how sensory information is processed. Especially when it comes to olfaction.
Recent research has shown that the sense of smell is influenced by a combination of different sensory inputs – not just odours. Sensory cues such as colour, shape, and pitch are believed to play a role in the ability to correctly identify and name odours, and can influence perceptions of odour pleasantness and intensity.
In one study, participants were asked to complete a test that measured their ability to discriminate between different odours while they were presented with the colour red or yellow, an outline drawing of a strawberry or a lemon, or a combination of these colours and shapes. The results suggested that corresponding odour and colour associations (for example, the colour red and strawberry) were linked to increased olfactory performance compared with odours and colours that were not associated (for example, the colour yellow and strawberry).
People who associated strawberries with the colour red performed better on smell tests. GCapture/Shutterstock While projects focusing on harnessing these cross-modal associations to improve treatments for smell loss are underway, research has already started to deliver some promising results.
In a recent study that aimed to investigate whether the effects of smell training could be improved with the addition of cross-modal associations, participants watched a guidance video containing sounds that matched the odours that they were training with. The results suggest that cross-modal interactions plus smell training improved olfactory function compared to smell training alone.
The results reported in recent studies have been promising and offer new insights into the field of olfactory science. It is hoped that this will soon lead to the development of more effective treatment options for smell recovery.
In the meantime, smell training is one of the best things you can do for a lost sense of smell, so patients are encouraged to stick with it so that they give themselves the best chance at recovery.
Emily Spencer, PhD Candidate, Olfaction, Edinburgh Napier University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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