Who Initiates Sex & Why It Matters
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In an ideal world, it wouldn’t matter any more than who first says “let’s get something to eat” when hungry. But in reality, it can cause serious problems on both sides:
Fear and loathing?
The person who initiates gets the special prize of an n% chance of experiencing rejection, and then what? Try again, and again, and risk seeming pushy? Or leave the ball in the other person’s court, where it may then go untouched for the next few months, because (in the most positive scenario) they were waiting for you to initiate at a better time for them?
The person who does not initiate, and/but does not want sex at that time, gets the special prize of either making their partner feel unwanted, insecure, and perhaps unloved, or else grudgingly consenting to sex that’s going to be no fun while your heart’s not in it, and thus create the same end result plus you had an extra bad experience?
So, that sucks all around:
- Initiating touch (sex or cuddling) can feel like a test of being wanted, whereupon a lack of initiation or response may be misinterpreted as a lack of love or appreciation.
- Meanwhile, non-reciprocation might stem from exhaustion or unrelated issues. For many, it’s a physiological lottery.
10almonds note: not discussed in this video, but for many couples, problems can also arise because one partner or another just isn’t showing up with the expected physical signs of physiological arousal, so even if they say (and mean!) an enthusiastic “yes”, their body’s signs get misread as a “not really, though”, resulting in one partner feeling rejected, and both feeling inadequate—on account of something that was completely unrelated to how the person actually felt about the prospect of sex*.
*Sometimes, physiological arousal will simply not accompany psychological arousal, no matter how sincere the latter. And on the flipside, sometimes the signs of physiological arousal will just show up without psychological arousal. The human body is just like that sometimes. We all must listen to our partners’ words, not their genitals!
The solution to this problem is thus the same as the solution to the rest of the problem that is discussed in the video, and it’s: good communication.
That can be easier said than done, of course—not everyone is at their most eloquent in such situations! Which is why it can be important to have those conversations first outside of the bedroom when the stakes are low/non-existent.
Even with the best communication, a more general, overarching non-reciprocity (real or perceived) of sexual desire can cause bitterness, resentment, and can ultimately be relationship-ending if a resolution that’s acceptable to everyone involved is not found.
Ultimately, the work as a couple must begin from within as individuals—addressing self-worth issues to better navigate love and intimacy.
For more on all of this, enjoy:
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Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
Relationships: When To Stick It Out & When To Call It Quits
Take care!
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10 Simple Japanese Habits For Healthier & Longer Life
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You don’t have to be Japanese or live in Okinawa to enjoy the benefits of healthy longevity. A lot of it comes down to simple habits:
Easy to implement
We’ll not keep the 10 habits a mystery; they are:
- Start the day with hot water: drinking hot water in the morning helps with hydration, warming the body, and aiding digestion.
- Enjoy a hearty breakfast: Japanese breakfasts are traditionally filling, nutritious, and help promote energy and longevity. Typical components include rice, miso soup, fish, and pickles.
- Take balanced meals: Japanese education emphasizes nutrition from a young age, promoting balanced meals with proteins, fiber, and vitamins & minerals.
- Enjoy fermented foods: fermented foods, such as nattō and soy-based condiments, support digestion, heart health, and the immune system.
- Drink green tea and matcha: both are rich in health benefits; preparing matcha mindfully adds a peaceful ritual to daily life too.
- Keep the “80% full” rule: “hara hachi bu” encourages eating until 80% full, which can improve longevity and, of course, prevent overeating.
- Use multiple small dishes: small servings and a variety of dishes help prevent overeating and ensure a diverse intake of nutrients.
- Gratitude before and after meals: saying “itadakimasu” and “gochisousama” promotes mindful eating, and afterwards, good digestion. Speaking Japanese is of course not the key factor here, but rather, do give yourself a moment of reflection before and after meals.
- Use vinegar in cooking: vinegar, often used in sushi rice and sauces like ponzu, adds flavor and offers health benefits, mostly pertaining to blood sugar balance.
- Eat slowly: Eating at a slower pace will improve digestion, and can enhance satiety and prevent accidentally overeating.
For more on all of these, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
How To Get More Out Of What’s On Your Plate
Take care!
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Passion Fruit vs Persimmon – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing passion fruit to persimmon, we picked the passion fruit.
Why?
You may be wondering: “what is this fruit passionate about?” and the answer is: delivering nutrients of many kinds!
Looking at the macros first, passion fruit has a little more protein and a lot more fiber, while persimmon has more carbs. This means that while persimmon’s glycemic index isn’t bad, passion fruit’s glycemic index is a lot lower.
In terms of vitamins, passion fruit has a lot more of vitamins A, B2, B3, B6, B9, E, K, and choline, while persimmon has more vitamin C. For the record passion fruit is also a good source of vitamin C, with a cup of passion fruit already giving a day’s daily dose of vitamin C, but persimmon gives twice that. Still, that’s a 8:1 win for passion fruit.
When it comes to minerals, passion fruit has more copper, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc, while persimmon has more calcium and iron, meaning a 6:2 win for passion fruit.
Adding up the three convincing individual victories shows a clear overall win for passion fruit.
Enjoy (passionately, even)!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
- Glycemic Index vs Glycemic Load vs Insulin Index
- Which Sugars Are Healthier, And Which Are Just The Same?
- Why You’re Probably Not Getting Enough Fiber (And How To Fix It)
Take care!
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At The Heart Of Women’s Health
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A woman’s heart is a particular thing
For the longest time (and still to a large degree now), “women’s health” is assumed to refer to the health of organs found under a bikini. But there’s a lot more to it than that. We are whole people, with such things as brains and hearts and more.
Today (Valentine’s Day!) we’re focusing on the heart.
A quick recap:
We’ve talked previously about some of these sex differences when it comes to the heart, for example:
Heart Attack: His & Hers (Be Prepared!)
…but that’s fairly common knowledge at least amongst those who are attentive to such things, whereas…
…is much less common knowledge, especially with the ways statins are more likely to make things worse for a lot of women (not all though; see the article for some nuance about that).
We also talked about:
What Menopause Does To The Heart
…which is well worth reading too!
A question:
Why are women twice as likely to die from a heart attack as their age-equivalent male peers? Women develop heart disease later, but die from it sooner. Why is that?
That’s been a question scientists have been asking (and tentatively answering, as scientists do—hypotheses, theories, conclusions even sometimes) for 20 years now. Likely contributing factors include:
- A lack of public knowledge of the different symptoms
- A lack of confidence of bystanders to perform CPR on a woman
- A lack of public knowledge (including amongst prescribers) about the sex-related differences for statins
- A lack of women in cardiology, comparatively.
- A lack of attention to it, simply. Men get heart disease earlier, so it’s thought of as a “man thing”, by health providers as much as by individuals. Men get more regular cardiovascular check-ups, women get a mammogram and go.
Statistically, women are much more likely to die from heart disease than breast cancer:
- Breast cancer kills around 0.02% of us.
- Heart disease kills one in three.
And yet…
❝In a nationwide survey, only 22% of primary care doctors and 42% of cardiologists said they feel extremely well prepared to assess cardiovascular risks in women.
We are lagging in implementing risk prevention guidelines for women.
A lot of women are being told to just watch their cholesterol levels and see their doctor in a year. That’s a year of delayed care.❞
Source: The slowly evolving truth about heart disease and women
(there’s a lot more in that article than we have room for in ours, so do check it out!)
Some good news:
The “bystanders less likely to feel confident performing CPR on a woman” aspect may be helped by the deployment of new automatic external defibrillator, that works from four sides instead of one.
It’s called “double sequential external defibrillation”, and you can learn about it here:
A new emergency procedure for cardiac arrests aims to save more lives—here’s how it works
(it’s in use already in Canada and Aotearoa)
Gentlemen-readers, thank you for your attention to this one even if it was mostly not about you! Maybe someone you love will benefit from being aware of this
On a lighter note…
Since it’s Valentine’s Day, a little more on affairs of the heart…
Is chocolate good for the heart? And is it really an aphrodisiac?
We answered these questions and more in our previous main feature:
Chocolate & Health: Fact or Fiction?
Enjoy!
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Melatonin: A Safe, Natural Sleep Aid?
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Melatonin: A safe sleep supplement?
Melatonin is a hormone normally made in our pineal gland. It helps regulate our circadian rhythm, by making us sleepy.
It has other roles too—it has a part to play in regulating immune function, something that also waxes and wanes as a typical day goes by.
Additionally, since melatonin and cortisol are antagonistic to each other, a sudden increase in either will decrease the other. Our brain takes advantage of this, by giving us a cortisol spike in the morning to help us wake up.
As a supplement, it’s generally enjoyed with the intention of inducing healthy, natural, restorative sleep.
Does it really induce healthy, natural, restorative, sleep?
Yes! Well, “natural” is a little subject and relative, if you’re taking it as a supplement, but it’s something your body produces naturally anyway.
Contrast with, for example, benzodiazepines (that whole family of medications with names ending in -azopan or -alozam), or other tranquilizing drugs that do not so much induce healthy sleep, but rather reduce your brain function and hopefully knock you out, and/but often have unwanted side effects, and a tendency to create dependency.
Melatonin, unlike most of those drugs, does not create dependency, and furthermore, we don’t develop tolerance to it. In other words, the same dose will continue working (we won’t need more and more).
In terms of benefits, melatonin not only reduces the time to fall asleep and increases total sleep time, but also (quite a bonus) improves sleep quality, too:
Meta-Analysis: Melatonin for the Treatment of Primary Sleep Disorders
Because it is a natural hormone rather than a drug with many side effects and interactions, it’s also beneficial for those who need good sleep and/but don’t want tranquilizing:
Any other benefits?
Yes! It can also help guard against Seasonal Affective Disorder, also called seasonal depression. Because SAD is not just about “not enough light = not enough serotonin”, but also partly about circadian rhythm and (the body is not so sure what time of day it is when there are long hours of darkness, or even, in the other hemisphere / other time of year, long hours of daylight), melatonin can help, by giving your brain something to “anchor” onto, provided you take it at the same time each day. See:
- Is seasonal affective disorder a disorder of circadian rhythms?
- The circadian basis of winter depression: the case for low-dose melatonin use
As a small bonus, melatonin also promotes HGH production (important for maintaining bone and muscle mass, especially in later life):
Anything we should worry about?
Assuming taking a recommended dose only (0.5mg–10mg per day), toxicity is highly unlikely, especially given that it has a half-life of only 40–60 minutes, so it’ll be eliminated quite quickly.
However! It does indeed induce sleepiness, so for example, don’t take melatonin and then try to drive or operate heavy machinery—or, ideally, do anything other than go to bed.
It can interfere with some medications. We mentioned that melatonin helps regulate immune function, so for example that’s something to bear in mind if you’re on immunosuppressants or otherwise have an autoimmune disorder. It can also interfere with blood pressure medications and blood thinners, and may make epilepsy meds less effective.
As ever, if in doubt, please speak with your doctor and/or pharmacist.
Where to get it?
As ever, we don’t sell it (or anything else), but for your convenience, here is an example product on Amazon.
Enjoy!
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Bacopa Monnieri: A Well-Evidenced Cognitive Enhancer
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Bacopa monnieri: a powerful nootropic
Bacopa monnieri is one of those “from traditional use” herbs that has made its way into science.
It’s been used for at least 1,400 years in Ayurvedic medicine, for cognitive enhancement, against anxiety, and some disease-specific treatments.
See: Pharmacological attributes of Bacopa monnieri extract: current updates and clinical manifestation
What are its claimed health benefits?
Bacopa monnieri is these days mostly sold and bought as a nootropic, and that’s what the science supports best.
Nootropic benefits claimed:
- Improves attention, learning, and memory
- Reduces depression, anxiety, and stress
- Reduces restlessness and impulsivity
Other benefits claimed:
- Antioxidant properties
- Anti-inflammatory properties
- Anticancer properties
What does the science say?
Those last three, the antioxidant / anti-inflammatory / anticancer properties, when something has one of those qualities it often has all three, because there are overlapping systems at hand when it comes to oxidative stress, inflammation, and cellular damage.
Bacopa monnieri is no exception to this “rule of thumb”, and/but studies to support these benefits have mostly been animal studies and/or in vitro studies (i.e., cell cultures in a petri dish in lab conditions).
For example:
- Inhibition of lipoxygenases and cyclooxygenase-2 enzymes by extracts isolated from Bacopa monnieri
- Assessing the anti-inflammatory effects of Bacopa-derived bioactive compounds using network pharmacology and in vitro studies
- The evolving roles of Bacopa monnieri as potential anticancer agent: a review
In the category of antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects in the brain, sometimes results differ depending on the test population, for example:
- Neuroprotective effects of Bacopa monnieri in experimental model of dementia (it worked for rats)
- Use of Bacopa monnieri in the treatment of dementia due to Alzheimer’s disease: systematic review of randomized controlled trials (it didn’t work for humans)
Anything more promising than that?
Yes! The nootropic effects have been much better-studied in humans, and with much better results.
For example, in this 12-week study in healthy adults, taking 300mg/day significantly improved visual information processing, learning, and memory (tested against placebo):
The chronic effects of an extract of Bacopa monnieri on cognitive function in healthy human subjects
Another 12-week study showed older adults enjoyed the same cognitive enhancement benefits as their younger peers:
Children taking 225mg/day, meanwhile, saw a significant reduction in ADHD symptoms, such as restlessness and impulsivity:
And as for the mood benefits, 300mg/day significantly reduced anxiety and depression in elderly adults:
In summary
Bacopa monnieri, taken at 300mg/day (studies ranged from 225mg/day to 600mg/day, but 300mg is most common) has well-evidenced cognitive benefits, including:
- Improved attention, learning, and memory
- Reduced depression, anxiety, and stress
- Reduced restlessness and impulsivity
It may also have other benefits, including against oxidative stress, inflammation, and cancer, but the research is thinner and/or not as conclusive for those.
Where to get it
As ever, we don’t sell it (or anything else), but for your convenience, here is an example product on Amazon.
Enjoy!
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Stop Overthinking – by Nick Trenton
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This book is exactly what it says on the tin. We are given twenty-three techniques to relieve stress, stop negative spirals, declutter your mind, and focus on the present, in the calm pursuit of good mental health and productivity.
The techniques are things like the RAIN technique above, so if you liked that, you’ll love this. Being a book rather than a newsletter, it also takes the liberty of going into much more detail—hence the 200 pages for 23 techniques. Unlike many books, it’s not packed in fluff either. It’s that perfect combination of “to the point” and “very readable”.
If you’ve read this far into the review and you’re of two minds about whether or not this book could be useful to you, then you just might be overthinking it
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