A Therapeutic Journey – by Alain de Botton

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We’ve often featured The School of Life’s videos here on 10almonds, and most of those are written by (and often voiced by) Alain de Botton.

This book lays out the case for mental health being also just health, that no person is perfectly healthy all the time, and sometimes we all need a little help. While he does suggest seeking help from reliable outside sources, he also tells a lot about how we can improve things for ourselves along the way, whether by what we can control in our environment, or just what’s between our ears.

In the category of limitations, the book is written with the assumption that you are in a position to have access to a therapist of your choice, and in a sufficiently safe and stable life situation that there is a limit to how bad things can get.

The style is… Alain de Botton’s usual style. Well-written, clear, decisive, instructive, compassionate, insightful, thought-provoking.

Bottom line: this isn’t a book for absolutely everyone, but if your problems are moderate and your resources are comfortable, then this book has a lot of insights that can make your life more easy-going and joyful, without dropping the seriousness when appropriate.

Click here to check out A Therapeutic Journey, and perhaps begin one of your own!

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  • 100 Things Productive People Do – by Nigel Cumberland

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    This is a book of a hundred small chapters (the book is 396 pages, so 2–3 pages per chapter) which makes for a feeling of quick reading, and definitely gives an option of “light bites”, dipping into the book here and there.

    Cumberland offers a wide range of practical wisdom here, and while the book is (per the title) focused on productivity, it also includes all due weight to not burning out and/or breaking down. Because things productive people do does not, it turns out, include working themselves directly into an early grave.

    But—despite the author’s considerable and obvious starting point of social privilege—nor is this a tome of “offer your genius leadership and otherwise just coast while everyone does your work for you”, either. This is a “brass tacks” book and highly relatable whether your to-do list most prominently features “personally manage the merger of these Fortune 500 companies” or “sort out that junk in the spare room”

    Bottom line: we’d be surprised if this book with 100 pieces of advice failed to bring you enough value to more than pay for itself!

    Pick up your copy of 100 Things Productive People Do from Amazon today!

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  • Cost of living: if you can’t afford as much fresh produce, are canned veggies or frozen fruit just as good?

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    The cost of living crisis is affecting how we spend our money. For many people, this means tightening the budget on the weekly supermarket shop.

    One victim may be fresh fruit and vegetables. Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) suggests Australians were consuming fewer fruit and vegetables in 2022–23 than the year before.

    The cost of living is likely compounding a problem that exists already – on the whole, Australians don’t eat enough fruit and vegetables. Australian dietary guidelines recommend people aged nine and older should consume two serves of fruit and five serves of vegetables each day for optimal health. But in 2022 the ABS reported only 4% of Australians met the recommendations for both fruit and vegetable consumption.

    Fruit and vegetables are crucial for a healthy, balanced diet, providing a range of vitamins and minerals as well as fibre.

    If you can’t afford as much fresh produce at the moment, there are other ways to ensure you still get the benefits of these food groups. You might even be able to increase your intake of fruit and vegetables.

    New Africa/Shutterstock

    Frozen

    Fresh produce is often touted as being the most nutritious (think of the old adage “fresh is best”). But this is not necessarily true.

    Nutrients can decline in transit from the paddock to your kitchen, and while the produce is stored in your fridge. Frozen vegetables may actually be higher in some nutrients such as vitamin C and E as they are snap frozen very close to the time of harvest. Variations in transport and storage can affect this slightly.

    Minerals such as calcium, iron and magnesium stay at similar levels in frozen produce compared to fresh.

    Another advantage to frozen vegetables and fruit is the potential to reduce food waste, as you can use only what you need at the time.

    A close up of frozen vegetables (peas, carrot and corn).
    Freezing preserves the nutritional quality of vegetables and increases their shelf life. Tohid Hashemkhani/Pexels

    As well as buying frozen fruit and vegetables from the supermarket, you can freeze produce yourself at home if you have an oversupply from the garden, or when produce may be cheaper.

    A quick blanching prior to freezing can improve the safety and quality of the produce. This is when food is briefly submerged in boiling water or steamed for a short time.

    Frozen vegetables won’t be suitable for salads but can be eaten roasted or steamed and used for soups, stews, casseroles, curries, pies and quiches. Frozen fruits can be added to breakfast dishes (with cereal or youghurt) or used in cooking for fruit pies and cakes, for example.

    Canned

    Canned vegetables and fruit similarly often offer a cheaper alternative to fresh produce. They’re also very convenient to have on hand. The canning process is the preservation technique, so there’s no need to add any additional preservatives, including salt.

    Due to the cooking process, levels of heat-sensitive nutrients such as vitamin C will decline a little compared to fresh produce. When you’re using canned vegetables in a hot dish, you can add them later in the cooking process to reduce the amount of nutrient loss.

    To minimise waste, you can freeze the portion you don’t need.

    Fermented

    A jar of red peppers in oil.
    Fermented vegetables are another good option. Angela Khebou/Unsplash

    Fermentation has recently come into fashion, but it’s actually one of the oldest food processing and preservation techniques.

    Fermentation largely retains the vitamins and minerals in fresh vegetables. But fermentation may also enhance the food’s nutritional profile by creating new nutrients and allowing existing ones to be absorbed more easily.

    Further, fermented foods contain probiotics, which are beneficial for our gut microbiome.

    5 other tips to get your fresh fix

    Although alternatives to fresh such as canned or frozen fruit and vegetables are good substitutes, if you’re looking to get more fresh produce into your diet on a tight budget, here are some things you can do.

    1. Buy in season

    Based on supply and demand principles, buying local seasonal vegetables and fruit will always be cheaper than those that are imported out of season from other countries.

    2. Don’t shun the ugly fruit and vegetables

    Most supermarkets now sell “ugly” fruit and vegetables, that are not physically perfect in some way. This does not affect the levels of nutrients in them at all, or their taste.

    A mother and daughter preparing food in the kitchen.
    Buying fruit and vegetables during the right season will be cheaper. August de Richelieu/Pexels

    3. Reduce waste

    On average, an Australian household throws out A$2,000–$2,500 worth of food every year. Fruit, vegetables and bagged salad are the three of the top five foods thrown out in our homes. So properly managing fresh produce could help you save money (and benefit the environment).

    To minimise waste, plan your meals and shopping ahead of time. And if you don’t think you’re going to get to eat the fruit and vegetables you have before they go off, freeze them.

    4. Swap and share

    There are many websites and apps which offer the opportunity to swap or even pick up free fresh produce if people have more than they need. Some local councils are also encouraging swaps on their websites, so dig around and see what you can find in your local area.

    5. Gardening

    Regardless of how small your garden is you can always plant produce in pots. Herbs, rocket, cherry tomatoes, chillies and strawberries all grow well. In the long run, these will offset some of your cost on fresh produce.

    Plus, when you have put the effort in to grow your own produce, you are less likely to waste it.

    Evangeline Mantzioris, Program Director of Nutrition and Food Sciences, Accredited Practising Dietitian, University of South Australia

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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  • Five Flavors & Five Benefits

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    Five Flavors Of Good Health

    Schisandra chinensis, henceforth Schisandra, is also called the “five flavor fruit”, for covering the culinary bases of sweet, salt, bitter, sour, and pungent.

    It can be eaten as a fruit (small red berries), juiced from the fruit, or otherwise extracted into supplements (dried powder of the fruit being a common one).

    It has long enjoyed usage in various traditional medicines, especially in China and Siberia.

    So, what are its health claims, and how does the science stack up?

    Menopause

    Most of the studies are mouse studies, and we prefer studies on humans, so here’s a small (n=36) randomized clinical trial that concluded…

    ❝Schisandra chinensis can be a safe and effective complementary medicine for menopausal symptoms, especially for hot flushes, sweating, and heart palpitations❞

    ~ Dr. Joon Young Park & Dr. Kye Hyun Kim

    Read more: A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of Schisandra chinensis for menopausal symptoms

    Antioxidant (and perhaps more)

    Like many berries, it’s a good source of lignans offering antioxidant effects:

    Antioxidant Effects of Schisandra chinensis Fruits and Their Active Constituents

    Lignans usually have anticancer effects too (which is reasonably, given what is antioxidant is usually anticancer and anti-inflammatory as well, by the same mechanism) but those have not yet been studied in schisandra specifically.

    Antihepatotoxicity

    In other words, it’s good for your liver. At least, so animal studies tell us, because human studies haven’t been done yet for this one. The effect is largely due to its antioxidant properties, but it seems especially effective for the liver—which is not surprising, giving the liver’s regeneration mechanism.

    Anyway, here’s a fascinating study that didn’t even need to use the fruit itself, just the pollen from the plant, it was that potent:

    Antioxidant and hepatoprotective effects of Schisandra chinensis pollen extract on CCl4-induced acute liver damage in mice

    Athletics enhancer

    While it’s not yet filling the shelves of sports nutrition stores, we found a small (n=45) study with healthy post-menopausal women who took either 1g of schisandra (experimental group) or 1g of starch (placebo group), measured quadriceps muscle strength and resting lactate levels over the course of a 12 week intervention period, and found:

    ❝Supplementation of Schisandra chinensis extract can help to improve quadriceps muscle strength as well as decrease lactate level at rest in adult women ❞

    ~ Dr. Jin Kee Park et al.

    Read more: Effect of Schisandra Chinensis Extract Supplementation on Quadriceps Muscle Strength and Fatigue in Adult Women: A Randomized, Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled Trial

    Anti-Alzheimers & Anti-Parkinsons

    The studies for this are all in vitro, but that’s because it’s hard to find volunteers willing to have their brains sliced and looked at under a microscope while they’re still alive.

    Nevertheless, the results are compelling, and it seems uncontroversial to say that schisandra, or specifically Schisandrin B, a compound it contains, has not only anti-inflammatory properties, but also neuroprotective properties, and specifically blocks the formation of excess amyloid-β peptides in the brain (which are critical for the formation of amyloid plaque, as found in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients):

    The influence of Schisandrin B on a model of Alzheimer’s disease using β-amyloid protein Aβ1-42-mediated damage in SH-SY5Y neuronal cell line and underlying mechanisms

    Is it safe?

    For most people, yes! Some caveats:

    • As it can stimulate the uterus, it’s not recommended if you’re pregant.
    • Taking more than the recommended amount can worsen symptoms of heartburn, GERD, ulcers, or other illnesses like that.

    And as ever, do speak with our own doctor/pharmacist if unsure, as your circumstances may vary and we cannot cover all possibilities here.

    Where can I get some?

    We don’t sell it, but here for your convenience is an example product on Amazon

    Enjoy!

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Related Posts

  • The Minimum Method – by Joey Thurman
  • The Biological Mind – by Dr. Alan Jasanoff

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    How special is our brain? According to Dr. Alan Jasanoff, it’s not nearly as special as we think it is.

    In this work, he outlines the case for how we have collectively overstated the brain’s importance. That it’s just another organ like a heart or a kidney, and that who we are is as much a matter of other factors, as what goes on in our brain.

    In this reviewer’s opinion, he overcorrects a bit. The heart and kidneys are very simple organs, as organs go. The brain is not. And while everything from our gut microbiota to our environment to our hormones may indeed contribute to what is us, our brain is one thing that can’t just be swapped out.

    Nevertheless, this very well-written book can teach us a lot about everything else that makes us us, including many biological factors that many people don’t know about or consider.

    Towards the end of the book, he switches into futurist speculation, and his speculation can be summed up as “we cannot achieve anything worthwhile in the future”.

    Bottom line: if you’ve an interest in such things as how transplanting glial cells can give a 30% cognitive enhancement, and how a brain transplant wouldn’t result in the same us in a different body, this is the book for you.

    Click here to check out The Biological Mind, and learn about yours!

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  • Brain Food – by Dr. Lisa Mosconi

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    We know that we should eat for brain health, but often that knowledge doesn’t go a lot further than “we should eat some nuts… but also not the wrong nuts, which would be bad”.

    However, as Dr. Lisa Mosconi lays out for us, there’s a lot more than that!

    This book is as much a treatise of brain health in the context of nutrition, as it is a “eat this and avoid that” guide.

    Which is good, because our brains don’t exist in isolation, and nor do the nutrients that we consume. Put it this way:

    We have a tendecy to think of our diets as a set of slider-bars, “ok, that’s 104% of my daily intake of fiber, I need another 10g protein and that’ll be at 100%, I’ve had 80% of the vitamin C that I need, and…”

    Whereas in reality: much of what we eat interacts positively or negatively with other things, and thus needs to be kept in balance. And not only that, but other peri-nutritional factors play a big part too! From obvious things like hydration, to less obvious things like maintaining good gut microbiota, our brains rely on us to do a lot of things for them.

    This book is very easy-reading, though a weakness is it doesn’t tend to summarise key ideas much, give cheat-sheets, that sort of thing. We recommend reading this book with a notebook to the side, to jot down things you want to attend to in your own dietary habits.

    Bottom line: this is an excellent overview of brain health in the context of nutrition, and is more comprehensive than most “eat this for good brain health and avoid that” books.

    Click here to check out “Brain Food” on Amazon and treat your brain like it deserves!

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  • To Err Is Human; To Forgive, Healthy

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    How To Forgive (And Why)

    There’s an old saying that holding onto a grudge is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. If only it were so simple and easy as just choosing to let go!

    But it’s not, is it?

    When people have wronged us and/or wronged our loved ones, it’s hard to forgive, especially if they have not changed. For that matter, it can be hard to forgive ourselves for mistakes that we made, too.

    Either way, “drinking that poison” can be close to literal, in terms of what harboring such anger and resentment can do for our cortisol levels.

    So, what to do about it?

    If you have a dialogue with the person, our previous article on communication may help a lot.

    If you don’t, there are various other angles that can be taken:

    The Unsent Letter

    You can even send it, if you like, but it’s not the point here. The idea is to write to the person, expressing your grievances. But, (as per the above-linked article on communication) try to focus at least as much on your feelings as their actions. “When you did/said x, I felt y”, etc.

    This is important for helping you process your feelings. If you send the letter, it’s also important for the other person to be able to understand your feelings.

    Sometimes, we feel the things we do so strongly because we don’t have an outlet for them. Pouring out our emotions in such a fashion, on the other hand, means (to labor the metaphor) they’re no longer bottled up. Even just in and of itself, that can provide us a lot of relief.

    And when we the negative emotions are no longer such high pressure, it can be easier to let go of them.

    Mindfulness

    Following on from the above idea, a good strategy can be simply sitting and feeling everything you need to feel, noticing it without judgement, like a curious observer.

    Sometimes what we need is just to be heard, and that starts with hearing ourselves.

    Compassion

    There’s a Buddhist exercise that involves actively feeling compassion for three people: a loved one, a stranger, and an enemy. Many people report that it’s actually harder to feel compassion for a random stranger, than an enemy. Why? Because we don’t know them; we don’t know what’s good and bad about them in our estimation.

    If you’re reading this because you want to be able to gain the peace of being able to forgive someone (even if that someone is yourself), then in at least some respect right now, that person is in the “enemy” category. So how do we unpack that?

    To err is human. Everybody screws up sometimes. And also, everyone has a reason (or a complex of reasons) for acting the way they do. This does not mean that those reasons excuse the behavior, but it can explain it.

    You don’t get angry at a storm for soaking you through. Even if you might not understand the physics of it in the way a meteorologist might, you understand that there were things that led to that, and you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

    So why do we get angry at someone else for wronging us? Even if we might not understand the personal background of it in the way their psychologist or therapist might, we (hopefully) understand that there were things that caused them to be the way they were, and we were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

    And ourselves? We probably know, when we made a mistake, why we made it. Maybe we were afraid, insecure, reactive, forgetful, or too focused on some other thing. Whatever it was, we did our best at the time and, apparently, our best wasn’t as good as we’d like.

    If we didn’t deserve forgiveness, we wouldn’t be critical of our past selves in the first place.

    And, the science is very clear that it’s important for our health for other reasons besides cortisol management, too.

    And as for others? They did the best they knew how. Maybe they were afraid, insecure, reactive, forgetful, or too focused on some other thing. Same story, different character.

    Remembering that can be key to “accepting the apology we never received”.

    Forgiving without forgetting

    Developing the ability to forgive is a useful tool for our own mental health. It doesn’t mean we must or even should make ourselves a doormat.

    “I forgive you” does not have to mean a clean slate; it means remembering that the thing happened, and just not holding on to the anger/resentment associated with it.

    It may be water under the bridge now, but it might have been a devastatingly destructive wave at the time, and continuing to acknowledge truth that is sensible. Just, from a position of peace now, hopefully.

    Don’t Forget…

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