I Will Make You Passionate About Exercise – by Bevan Eyles
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What this isn’t: a “just do it!” motivational pep-talk.
What this is:a compassionate and thoughtful approach to help non-exercisers become regular exercisers, by looking at the real life factors of what holds people back (learning from his own early failures as a coach, by paying attention now to things he inadvertently neglected back then), both in the material/practical and in the psychological/emotional.
Further, he gives a 10-step method, for those who would like to be walked through it by the hand, making the transition to exercising regularly (and as a leisure habit, rather than as a chore) as frictionless as possible.
The style is friendly and energetic, and very easy-reading throughout.
Bottom line: if you are someone who finds exercising to be a chore, this book can definitely help you “get from here to there” in terms of finding joy in it, and finding exercise even easier than not exercising. Yes, really.
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Why Adult ADHD Often Leads To Anxiety & Depression
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ADHD’s Knock-On Effects On Mental Health
We’ve written before about ADHD in adult life, often late-diagnosed because it’s not quite what people think it is:
In women in particular, it can get missed and/or misdiagnosed:
Miss Diagnosis: Anxiety, ADHD, & Women
…but what we’re really here to talk about today is:
It’s the comorbidities that get you
When it comes to physical health conditions:
- if you have one serious condition, it will (usually) be taken seriously
- if you have two, they will still be taken seriously, but people (friends and family members, as well as yes, medical professionals) will start to back off, as it starts to get too complicated for comfort
- if you have three, people will think you are making at least one of them up for attention now
- if you have more than three, you are considered a hypochondriac and pathological liar
Yet, the reality is: having one serious condition increases your chances of having others, and this chance-increasing feature compounds with each extra condition.
Illustrative example: you have fibromyalgia (ouch) which makes it difficult for you to exercise much, shop around when grocery shopping, and do much cooking at home. You do your best, but your diet slips and it’s hard to care when you just want the pain to stop; you put on some weight, and get diagnosed with metabolic syndrome, which in time becomes diabetes with high cardiovascular risk factors. Your diabetes is immunocompromising; you get COVID and find it’s now Long COVID, which brings about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, when you barely had the spoons to function in the first place. At this point you’ve lost count of conditions and are just trying to get through the day.
If this is you, by the way, we hope at least something in the following might ease things for you a bit:
- Stop Pain Spreading
- Managing Chronic Pain (Realistically!)
- Eat To Beat Chronic Fatigue (While Having The Limitations Of Chronic Fatigue)
- When Painkillers Aren’t Helping, These Things Might
- The 7 Approaches To Pain Management
It’s the same for mental health
In the case of ADHD as a common starting point (because it’s quite common, may or may not be diagnosed until later in life, and doesn’t require any external cause to appear), it is very common that it will lead to anxiety and/or depression, to the point that it’s perhaps more common to also have one or more of them than not, if you have ADHD.
(Of course, anxiety and/or depression can both pop up for completely unrelated reasons too, and those reasons may be physiological, environmental, or a combination of the above).
Why?
Because all the good advice that goes for good mental health (and/or life in general), gets harder to actuate when one had ADHD.
- “Strong habits are the core of a good life”, but good luck with that if your brain doesn’t register dopamine in the same way as most people’s do, making intentional habit-forming harder on a physiological level.
- “Plan things carefully and stick to the plan”, but good luck with that if you are neurologically impeded from forming plans.
- “Just do it”, but oops you have the tendency-to-overcommitment disorder and now you are seriously overwhelmed with all the things you tried to do, when each of them alone were already going to be a challenge.
Overwhelm and breakdown are almost inevitable.
And when they happen, chances are you will alienate people, and/or simply alienate yourself. You will hide away, you will avoid inflicting yourself on others, you will brood alone in frustration—or distract yourself with something mind-numbing.
Before you know it, you’re too anxious to try to do things with other people or generally show your face to the world (because how will they react, and won’t you just mess things up anyway?), and/or too depressed to leave your depression-lair (because maybe if you keep playing Kingdom Vegetables 2, you can find a crumb of dopamine somewhere).
What to do about it
How to tackle the many-headed beast? By the heads! With your eyes open. Recognize and acknowledge each of the heads; you can’t beat those heads by sticking your own in the sand.
Also, get help. Those words are often used to mean therapy, but in this case we mean, any help. Enlist your partner or close friend as your support in your mental health journey. Enlist a cleaner as your support in taking that one thing off your plate, if that’s an option and a relevant thing for you. Set low but meaningful goals for deciding what constitutes “good enough” for each life area. Decide in advance what you can safely half-ass, and what things in life truly require your whole ass.
Here’s a good starting point for that kind of thing:
When You Know What You “Should” Do (But Knowing Isn’t The Problem)
And this is an excellent way to “get the ball rolling” if you’re already in a bit of a prison of your own making:
Behavioral Activation Against Depression & Anxiety
If things are already bad, then you might also consider:
- How To Set Anxiety Aside and
- The Mental Health First-Aid That You’ll Hopefully Never Need ← this is about getting out of depression
And if things are truly at the worst they can possibly be, then:
How To Stay Alive (When You Really Don’t Want To)
Take care!
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Why Everyone You Don’t Like Is A Narcissist
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We’ve written before about how psychiatry tends to name disorders after how they affect other people, rather than how they affect the bearer, and this is most exemplified when it comes to personality disorders. For example:
“You have a deep insecurity about never being good enough, and you constantly mess up in your attempt to overcompensate? You may have Evil Bastard Disorder!”
“You have a crippling fear of abandonment and that you are fundamentally unloveable, so you do all you can to try to keep people close? You must have Manipulative Bitch Disorder!”
See also: Miss Diagnosis: Anxiety, ADHD, & Women
Antisocial DiagnosesThese days, it is easy to find on YouTube countless videos of how to spot a narcissist, with a list of key traits that all mysteriously describe exactly the exes of everyone in the comments.
And these days it is mostly “narcissist”, because “psychopath” and “sociopath” have fallen out of popular favor a bit:
- perhaps for coming across as overly sensationalized, and thus lacking credibility
- perhaps because “Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD)” exists in the DSM-5 (the US’s latest “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders”), while psychopathy and sociopathy are not mentioned as existing.
You may be wondering: what do “psychopathy” and “sociopathy” mean?
And the answer is: they mean whatever the speaker wants them to mean. Their definitions and differences/similarities have been vigorously debated by clinicians and lay enthusiasts alike for long enough that the scientific world has pretty much given up on them and moved on.
Stigma vs pathology
Because of the popular media (and social media) representation of NPD, it is easy to armchair diagnose one’s relative/ex/neighbor/in-law/boss/etc as being a narcissist, because the focus is on “narcissists do these bad things that are mean to people”.
If the focus were instead on “narcissists have cripplingly low self-esteem, and are desperate to not show weakness in a world they have learned is harsh and predatory”, then there may not be so many armchair diagnoses—or at the very least, the labels may be attached with a little more compassion, the same way we might with other mental health issues such as depression.
Not that those with depression get an easy time of it socially either—society’s response is generally some manner of “aren’t you better yet, stop being lazy”—but at the very least, depressed people are not typically viewed with hatred.
A quick aside: if you or someone you know is struggling with depression, here are some things that actually help:
The Mental Health First-Aid You’ll Hopefully Never Need
The disorder is not the problem
Maybe your relative, ex, neighbor, etc really is clinically diagnosable as a narcissist. There are still two important things to bear in mind:
- After centuries of diagnosing people with mental health maladies that we now know don’t exist per se (madness, hysteria, etc), and in recent decades countless revisions to the DSM and similar tomes, thank goodness we now have the final and perfect set of definitions that surely won’t be re-written in the next few years or so ← this is irony; it will absolutely be re-written numerous times yet because of course it’s still not a magically perfect descriptor of the broad spectrum of human nature
- The disorder is not the problem; the way they treat (or have treated) you is the problem.
For example, let’s take a key thing generally attributed to narcissists: a lack of empathy
Now, empathy can be divided into:
- affective empathy: the ability to feel what other people are feeling
- cognitive empathy: the ability to intellectually understand what other people are feeling (akin to sympathy, which is the same but with the requisite of having experienced the thing in question oneself)
A narcissist (as well as various other people without NPD) will typically have negligible affective empathy, and their cognitive empathy may be a little sluggish too.
Sluggish = it may take them a beat longer than most people, to realize what an external signifier of emotions means, or correctly guess how something will be felt by others. This can result in gravely misspeaking (or inappropriately emoting), after failing to adequately quickly “read the room” in terms of what would be a socially appropriate response. To save face, they may then either deny/minimize the thing they just said/did, or double-down on it and go on [what for them feels like] the counterattack.
As to why this shutting off of empathy happens: they have learned that the world is painful, and that people are sources of pain, and so—to avoid further pain—have closed themselves off to that, often at a very early age. This will also apply to themselves; narcissists typically have negligible self-empathy too, which is why they will commonly make self-destructive decisions, even while trying to put themselves first.
Important note on how this impacts other people: the “Golden Rule” of “treat others as you would wish to be treated” becomes intangible, as they have no more knowledge of their own emotional needs than they do of anyone else’s, so cannot make that comparison.
Consider: if instead of being blind to empathy, they were colorblind… You would probably not berate them for buying green apples when you asked for red. They were simply incapable of seeing that, and consequently made a mistake. So it is when it’s a part of the brain that’s not working normally.
So… Since the behavior does adversely affect other people, what can be done about it? Even if “hate them for it and call for their eradication from the face of the Earth” is not a reasonable (or compassionate) option, what is?
Take the bull by the horns
Above all, and despite all appearances, a narcissist’s deepest desire is simply to be accepted as good enough. If you throw them a life-ring in that regard, they will generally take it.
So, communicate (gently, because a perceived attack will trigger defensiveness instead, and possibly a counterattack, neither of which are useful to anyone) what behavior is causing a problem and why, and ask them to do an alternative thing instead.
And, this is important, the alternative thing has to be something they are capable of doing. Not merely something that you feel they should be capable of doing, but that they are actually capable of doing.
- So not: “be a bit more sensitive!” because that is like asking the colorblind person to “be a bit more observant about colors”; they are simply not capable of it and it is folly to expect it of them, because no matter how hard they try, they can’t.
- But rather: “it upsets me when you joke about xyz; I know that probably doesn’t make sense to you and that’s ok, it doesn’t have to. I am asking, however, if you will please simply refrain from joking about xyz. Would you do that for me?”
Presented with such, it’s much more likely that the narcissist will drop their previous attempt to be good enough (by joking, because everyone loves someone with a sense of humor, right?) for a new, different attempt to be good enough (by showing “behold, look, I am a good person and doing the thing you asked, of which I am capable”).
That’s just one example, but the same methodology can be applied to most things.
For tricks pertaining to how to communicate such things without causing undue resistance, see:
Seriously Useful Communication Skills
Take care!
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Getting Flexible, Starting As An Adult: How Long Does It Really Take?
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Aleks Brzezinska didn’t start stretching until she was 21, and here’s what she found:
We’ll not stretch the truth
A lot of stretching programs will claim “do the splits in 30 days” or similar, and while this may occasionally be true, usually it’ll take longer.
Brzezinska started stretching seriously when she was 21, and made significant flexibility gains between the ages of 21 and 23 with consistent practice. Since then, she’s just maintained her flexibility.
There are facts that affect progress significantly, such as:
- Anatomy: body structure, age, and joint flexibility do influence flexibility; starting younger and/or having hypermobile joints does make it easier.
- Consistency: regular practice (2–3 times a week) is crucial, but avoid overdoing it, especially when sore.
- Lifestyle: weightlifting, running, and similar activities can tighten muscles, making flexibility harder to achieve.
- Hydration: staying hydrated is important for muscle flexibility.
She also recommends incorporating a variety of different stretching types, rather than just one method, for example passive stretching, active stretching, Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation (PNF) stretching, and mobility work.
For more on each of these, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like:
Jasmine McDonald’s Ballet Stretching Routine
Take care!
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Dr. Dean Ornish’s Program For Reversing Heart Disease – by Dr. Dean Ornish
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We’ve previously reviewed Dr. Ornish’s “Undo It!” which is about reversing many kinds of chronic diseases (not all, alas, but quite a few) by undercutting their common etiologies, such as inflammation, insulin resistance, and so forth.
This book is entirely consistent with that one, but the focus here is (as the title says) specifically on reversing heart disease.
Of course, it does not require you to already have heart disease—if you do, well, getting onto this is better sooner than later. If you don’t, and are “merely” in a risk zone, or even just want to be proactive about your heart health, then this book will stand you in good stead.
The book covers all the lifestyle things you’d expect it to (especially diet, but also exercise, and not just “quit smoking” but also how, things like that), and possibly some things you might not expect (chapters on more psychological factors that have a big impact on heart health).
There are recipes (157 pages of them; they are plant-based and good) and there is a 21-day meal plan to get you going.
The style is a little dated (written in the 90s), but the content doesn’t suffer for it, having been updated over the years in any case.
Bottom line: if you want a holistic approach to taking care of your heart that’s not extreme and/but is very effective, then well, you’ve found it.
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Microplastics found in artery plaque linked with higher risk of heart attack, stroke and death
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Microplastics and nanoplastics are everywhere in our environment – including in our oceans and lakes, farmland, and even Arctic ice algae.
Microplastics have also been found inside of us – with studies detecting them in various tissues including in the lungs, blood, heart and placenta. Understandably, concern is rising about the potential risks of microplastics on our health.
However, while a growing body of research has focused on microplastics and nanoplastics, there’s still a lack of direct evidence that their presence in human tissues is harmful to our health – and it’s uncertain if they are related to particular diseases.
A new study has uncovered a correlation between microplastics and heart health, though. The researchers found that people who had detectable microplastics and nanoplastics in the plaque in their arteries had a higher risk of heart attack, stroke and death.
Heart health
The researchers looked at 257 people altogether. All of the patients were already undergoing preventative surgery to remove plaque from their carotid arteries (the main arteries that supply the brain with blood). This allowed the researchers to collect plaque samples and perform a chemical analysis. They then followed up with participants 34 months later.
Of the 257 participants, 150 were found to have the presence of microplastics and nanoplastics in their arterial plaque – mainly fragments of two of the most commonly used plastics in the world, polyethylene (used in grocery bags, bottles and food packaging) and polyvinyl chloride (used in flooring, cladding and pipes).
A statistical analysis of this data found that patients with microplastics and nanoplastics in their plaque had a higher risk of suffering a heart attack, stroke or death from any cause, compared with those who had no microplastics or nanoplastics in their plaque.
The researchers also analysed the macrophages (a type of immune cell that helps remove pathogens from the body) in the patients’ arteries. They found that participants who’d had microplastics and nanoplastics in their plaque also had evidence of plastic fragments in their macrophages.
They also looked at whether certain genes associated with inflammation (which can be a sign of disease) were switched on in the participants. They found that the participants who’d had microplastics and nanoplastics in their plaque also had signs of inflammation in their genes.
The microplastics were found in samples of plaque extracted from the carotid artery. Rocos/ Shutterstock These results may suggest an accumulation of nanoplastics and microplastics in carotid plaque could partly trigger inflammation. This inflammation may subsequently change the way plaque behaves in the body, making it less stable and triggering it to form a blood clot – which can eventually block blood flow, leading to heart attacks and strokes.
Interestingly, the researchers also found the presence of nanoplastics and microplastics was more common in participants who had diabetes and cardiovascular disease. This raises a lot of questions which have yet to be answered – such as why microplastics were more common in these participants, and if there may be a correlation between other diseases and the presence of microplastics in the body.
Other health risks
This study only focused on patients who had carotid artery disease and were already having surgery to remove the build-up of plaque. As such, it’s unclear whether the findings of this study can be applied to a larger population of people.
However, it isn’t the first study to show a link between microplastics and nanoplastics with poor health. Research suggests some of this harm may be due to the way microplastics and nanoplastics interact with proteins in the body.
For example, some human proteins adhere to the surface of polystyrene nanoplastics, forming a layer surrounding the nanoparticle. The formation of this layer may influence the activity and transfer of nanoplastics in human organs.
Another study suggested that nanoplastics can interact with a protein called alpha-synuclein, which in mouse studies has been shown to play a crucial role in facilitating communication between nerve cells. These clumps of nanoplastics and protein may increase the risk of Parkinson’s disease.
My published PhD research in chicken embryos found that nanoplastics may cause congenital malformations due to the way they interact with a protein called cadherin6B. Based on the interactions myself and fellow researchers saw, these malformations may affect the embryo’s eyes and neural tube, as well as the heart’s development and function.
Given the fact that nanoplastics and microplastics are found in carotid plaque, we now need to investigate how these plastics got into such tissues.
In mice, it has been demonstrated that gut macrophages (a type of white blood cell) can absorb microplastics and nanoplastics into their cell membrane. Perhaps a similar mechanism is taking place in the arteries, since nanoplastics have been identified in samples of carotid plaque macrophages.
The findings from this latest study add to a growing body of evidence showing a link between plastic products and our health. It is important now for researchers to investigate the specific mechanisms by which microplastics and nanoplastics cause harm in the body.
Meiru Wang, Postdoctoral Researcher, Molecular Biology and Nanotoxicology, Leiden University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Herbs For Evidence-Based Health & Healing
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Herbs have been used since prehistoric times to treat injuries and illnesses, but which ones actually work, as opposed to being “old wives’ tales”?
Even today, in pharmacies herbals products may come with a disclaimer “based on traditional use only”, which, in scientific terms, means it likely performs no better than placebo.
This is a “Saturday Life Hacks” edition, not a “Research Review Monday”, so we won’t be doing any deep-dives today, and will instead keep things short and snappy. We’ll also spotlight one main benefit, rather than trying to cover all bases, as we often have room to do on a Monday!
Basil
Helps boost immunity:
Chamomile
Significantly reduces symptoms of osteoarthritis:
(This one challenged your writer’s resolve as it does so many things, it was hard to pick just one. So, she went with one that’s less known that “settling the stomach” and “relieving PMS” and “relaxation” and so forth)
Echinacea
Significantly reduces the risk of catching a cold (but won’t help once you’ve caught it):
Echinacea for preventing and treating the common cold
Elderberry
Significantly hastens recovery from upper respiratory viral infections:
Evening Primrose
Fights neuropathy, along with many other benefits:
An updated review on pharmacological activities and phytochemical constituents of evening primrose
Fennel
Antinflammatory, along with many other benefits:
Ginkgo biloba
Antioxidant effects provide anti-aging benefits:
Advances in the Studies of Ginkgo Biloba Leaves Extract on Aging-Related Diseases
Ginseng
Combats fatigue:
Ginseng as a Treatment for Fatigue: A Systematic Review
Lavender
Enjoyed for its sedative effects, which is really does have:
Evidence for Sedative Effects of the Essential Oil of Lavender after Inhalation
Sage
Helps fight HIV type 1 and Herpes simplex type 2 (and probably other viruses, but that’s what we have the science for right now):
Aqueous extracts from peppermint, sage and lemon balm leaves display potent anti-HIV-1 activity
Valerian
Inconclusive data; “traditional use only” for restful sleep.
Can’t have everything!
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