Get Better Sleep: Beyond “Sleep Hygiene”
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Better Sleep, Better Life!
This is Arianna Huffington. Yes, that Huffington, of the Huffington Post. But! She’s also the CEO of Thrive Global, a behavior change tech company with the mission of changing the way we work and live—in particular, by challenging the idea that burnout is the required price of success.
The power of better sleep
Sleep is a very important, but most often neglected, part of good health. Here are some of Huffington’s top insights from her tech company Thrive, and as per her “Sleep Revolution” initiative.
Follow your circadian rhythm
Are you a night owl or a morning lark? Whichever it is, roll with it, and plan around that if your lifestyle allows for such. While it is possible to change from one to the other, we do have a predisposition towards one or the other, and will generally function best when not fighting it.
This came about, by the way, because we evolved to have half of us awake in the mornings and half in the evenings, to keep us all safe. Socially we’ve marched onwards from that point in evolutionary history, but our bodies are about a hundred generations behind the times, and that’s just what we have to work with!
Don’t be afraid (or ashamed!) to take naps
Naps, done right, can be very good for the health—especially if we had a bad night’s sleep the previous night.
Thrive found that workers are more productive when they have nap rooms, and (following on a little from the previous point) are allowed to sleep in or work from home.
See also: How To Nap Like A Pro (No More “Sleep Hangovers”!)
Make sure you have personal space available in bed
The correlation between relationship satisfaction and sleeping close to one’s partner has been found to be so high that it’s even proportional: the further away a couple sleeps from each other, the less happy they are. But…
Partners who got good sleep the previous night, will be more likely to want intimacy on any given night—at a rate of an extra 14% per extra hour of sleep the previous night. So, there’s a trade-off, as having more room in bed tends to result in better sleep. Time to get a bigger bed?
What gets measured, gets done
This goes for sleep, too! Not only does dream-journaling in the morning cue your subconscious to prepare to dream well the following night, but also, sleep trackers and sleep monitoring apps go a very long way to improving sleep quality, even if no extra steps are consciously taken to “score better”.
We’ve previously reviewed some of the most popular sleep apps; you can check out for yourself how they measured up:
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Learn to Age Gracefully
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Radical Longevity – by Dr. Ann Gittleman
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Dr. Gittleman takes a comprehensive approach, advising us about avoiding AGEs, freeing up fascia, stimulating cellular rejuvenation, the mind-gut connection, keeping the immune system healthy, and more.
The “plan” promised by the subtitle involves identifying the key factors of nutrition and lifestyle most impactful to you, and adjusting them accordingly, in a multistep, author-walks-the-reader-by-the-hand process.
There’s also, for those who prefer it, a large section (seven chapters) on a body part/system by body part/system approach, e.g. brain health, heart health, revitalizing skin, reversing hair loss, repairing bones, muscles, joints, etc.
The writing style is quite casual,butalso with a mind to education, with its call-out boxes, bullet-point summaries, and so forth. There is a “select references” section, but if one wants to find studies, it’s often necessary to go looking, as there aren’t inline citations.
Bottom line: we’d love to see better referencing, but otherwise this is a top-tier anti-aging book, and a lot more accessible than most, without skimping on depth and breadth.
Click here to check out Radical Longevity, and get rejuvenating radically!
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How Too Much Salt May Lead To Organ Failure
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Salt’s Health Risks… More Than Just Heart Disease!
It’s been well-established for a long time that too much salt is bad for cardiovascular health. It can lead to high blood pressure, which in turn can lead to many problems, including heart attacks.
A team of researchers has found that in addition to this, it may be damaging your organs themselves.
This is because high salt levels peel away the surfaces of blood vessels. How does this harm your organs? Because it’s through those walls that nutrients are selectively passed to where they need to be—mostly your organs. So, too much salt can indirectly starve your organs of the nutrients they need to survive. And you absolutely do not want your organs to fail!
❝We’ve identified new biomarkers for diagnosing blood vessel damage, identifying patients at risk of heart attack and stroke, and developing new drug targets for therapy for a range of blood vessel diseases, including heart, kidney and lung diseases as well as dementia❞
~ Newman Sze, Canada Research Chair in Mechanisms of Health and Disease, and lead researcher on this study.
See the evidence for yourself: Endothelial Damage Arising From High Salt Hypertension Is Elucidated by Vascular Bed Systematic Profiling
Diets high in salt are a huge problem in Canada, North America as a whole, and around the world. According to a World Health Organization (WHO) report released March 9, Canadians consume 9.1 grams of salt per day.
Read: WHO global report on sodium intake reduction
You may be wondering: who is eating over 9g of salt per day?
And the answer is: mostly, people who don’t notice how much salt is already in processed foods… don’t see it, and don’t think about it.
Meanwhile, the WHO recommends the average person to consume no more than five grams, or one teaspoon, of salt per day.
Read more: Massive efforts needed to reduce salt intake and protect lives
The American Heart Association, tasked with improving public health with respect to the #1 killer of Americans (it’s also the #1 killer worldwide—but that’s not the AHA’s problem), goes further! It recommends no more than 2.3g per day, and ideally, no more than 1.5g per day.
Some handy rules-of-thumb
Here are sodium-related terms you may see on food packages:
- Salt/Sodium-Free = Less than 5mg of sodium per serving
- Very Low Sodium = 35mg or less per serving
- Low Sodium = 140mg or less per serving
- Reduced Sodium = At least 25% less sodium per serving than the usual sodium level
- Light in Sodium or Lightly Salted = At least 50% less sodium than the regular product
Confused by milligrams? Instead of remembering how many places to move the decimal point (and potentially getting an “out by an order of magnitude error—we’ve all been there!), think of the 1.5g total allowance as being 1500mg.
See also: How much sodium should I eat per day? ← from the American Heart Association
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The AFib Cure – by Dr. John Day & Dr. Jared Bunch
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The authors—cardiologists and AFib specialists—make the case that if you have atrial fibrillation, you do in fact have more options than “take these pills and suffer”.
To be clear: they’re not anti-medication per se and they also acknowledge that for some people the meds may still have their place (safety first, and all), but they do fall on the side of “it would be nice to not have to, if possible, so let’s see what we can do”.
Rather, they recommend lifestyle adjustments (no surprises there), and certain biomarker optimizations (this is where it gets more in-depth), which have a good record of reducing symptoms to the point of remission and freedom from medications.
The book is first a primer on the topic of AFib, and then a how-to manual of fixing the problems that you now understand, by biomarker monitoring, lifestyle optimization, and if those things don’t work, ablative therapy which they argue is safer, easier, and more successful than you might think.
The style is clear and easy to understand, with frequent scholarly citations throughout. On the downside, the tone can sometimes be a little on the pushy side for this reviewer’s tastes, but if one overlooks that, it doesn’t detract from the useful content.
Bottom line: if you or a loved one have AFib and would like more treatment/management options than have hitherto been presented, this book will give you that.
Click here to check out The AFib Cure, and look after your heart!
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The Five Pillars Of Longevity
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The Five Pillars Of Longevity
This is Dr. Mark Hyman. He’s a medical doctor, and he’s the board president of clinical affairs of the Institute for Functional Medicine. He’s also the founder and medical director of the UltraWellness Center!
What he’d like you to know about is what he calls the “Five Pillars of Longevity”.
Now, here at 10almonds, we often talk about certain things that science finds to be good for almost any health condition, and have made a habit of referencing what we call “The Usual Five Things™” (not really a trademark, by the way—just a figure of speech), which are:
- Have a good diet
- Get good exercise
- Get good sleep
- Reduce (or eliminate) alcohol consumption
- Don’t smoke
…and when we’re talking about a specific health consideration, we usually provide sources as to why each of them are particularly relevant, and pointers as to the what/how associated with them (ie what diet is good, how to get good sleep, etc).
Dr. Hyman’s “Five Pillars of Longevity” are based on observations from the world’s “Blue Zones”, the popular name for areas with an unusually high concentration of supercentenarians—Sardinia and Okinawa being famous examples, with a particular village in each being especially exemplary.
These Five Pillars of Longevity partially overlap with ours for three out of five, and they are:
- Good nutrition
- Optimized workouts
- Reduce stress
- Get quality sleep
- Find (and live) your purpose
We won’t argue against those! But what does he have to say, for each of them?
Good nutrition
Dr. Hyman advocates for a diet he calls “pegan”, which he considers to combine the paleo and vegan diets. Here at 10almonds, we generally advocate for the Mediterranean Diet because of the mountains of evidence for it, but his approach may be similar in some ways, since it looks to consume a majority plant diet, with some unprocessed meats/fish, limited dairy, and no grains.
By the science, honestly, we stand by the Mediterranean (which includes whole grains), but if for example your body may have issues of some kind with grains, his approach may be a worthy consideration.
Optimized workouts
For Dr. Hyman, this means getting in three kinds of exercise regularly:
- Aerobic/cardio, to look after your heart health
- Resistance training (e.g. weights or bodyweight strength-training) to look after your skeletal and muscular health
- Yoga or similar suppleness training, to look after your joint health
Can’t argue with that, and it can be all too easy to fall into the trap of thinking “I’m healthy because I do x” while forgetting y and/or z! Thus, a three-pronged approach definitely has its merits.
Reduce stress
Acute stress (say, a cold shower) is can confer some health benefits, but chronic stress is ruinous to our health and it ages us. So, reducing this is critical. Dr. Hyman advocates for the practice of mindfulness and meditation, as well as journaling.
Get quality sleep
Quality here, not just quantity. As well as the usual “sleep hygiene” advices, he has some more unorthodox methods, such as the use of binaural beats to increase theta-wave activity in the brain (and thus induce more restful sleep), and the practice of turning off Wi-Fi, on the grounds that Wi-Fi signals interfere with our sleep.
We were curious about these recommendations, so we checked out what the science had to say! Here’s what we found:
- Minimal Effects of Binaural Auditory Beats for Subclinical Insomnia: A Randomized Double-Blind Controlled Study
- Spending the night next to a router – Results from the first human experimental study investigating the impact of Wi-Fi exposure on sleep
In short: probably not too much to worry about in those regards. On the other hand, worrying less, unlike those two things, is a well-established way improve sleep!
(Surprised we disagreed with our featured expert on a piece of advice? Please know: you can always rely on us to stand by what the science says; we pride ourselves on being as reliable as possible!)
Find (and live!) your purpose
This one’s an ikigai thing, to borrow a word from Japanese, or finding one’s raison d’être, as we say in English using French, because English is like that. It’s about having purpose.
Dr. Hyman’s advice here is consistent with what many write on the subject, and it’d be an interesting to have more science on, but meanwhile, it definitely seems consistent with commonalities in the Blue Zone longevity hotspots, where people foster community, have a sense of belonging, know what they are doing for others and keep doing it because they want to, and trying to make the world—or even just their little part of it—better for those who will follow.
Being bitter, resentful, and self-absorbed is not, it seems a path to longevity. But a life of purpose, or even just random acts of kindness, may well be.
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Thriving Beyond Fifty – by Will Harlow
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We’ve featured this author sometimes in our video section; he’s an over-50s specialist physiotherapist with a lot of very functional advice to offer.
In this book, Harlow focusses heavily on three things: mobility, strength, endurance.
You may not want to be a gymnast, powerlifter, or marathon-runner, but these things are important for us all to maintain to at least a fair degree:
- Mobility can be the difference between tweaking one’s shoulder getting something from a high shelf, or not
- Strength can be the difference between being able to get back up, or not
- Endurance can be the difference between coming back from a long day on your feet and thinking “that was a good day; I’m looking forward to tomorrow now”, or not
One of the greatest strengths of this book is its comprehensive troubleshooting aspect; if you have a weak spot, chances are this book has the remedy.
As for the style, it’s quite casual/conversational in tone, but without skimping on science and detail. It’s clear, explanatory, and helpful throughout.
Bottom line: if you’d like to maintain/improve mobility, strength, and endurance, then this book is a very recommendable resource.
Click here to check out Thriving Beyond Fifty, and keep thriving at every age!
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7 Invisible Eating Disorders
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It’s easy to assume that anyone with an eating disorder can be easily recognized by the resultantly atypical body composition, but it’s often not so.
Beyond the obvious
We’ll not keep them a mystery; the 7 invisible eating disorders discussed by therapist Kati Morton in this video are:
- OSFED (Other Specified Feeding or Eating Disorder): a catch-all diagnosis for those who don’t meet the criteria for more specific eating disorders but still have significant eating disorder behaviors.
- Atypical Anorexia: characterized by all the symptoms of anorexia nervosa (especially: intense fear of gaining weight, and body image distortion) except that the individual’s weight remains in a normal range.
- Atypical Bulimia: similar to bulimia nervosa, but the frequency or duration of binge-purge behaviors does not meet the usual diagnostic criteria and thus can fly under the radar.
- Atypical Binge-Eating Disorder: has episodes of consuming large amounts of food without compensatory behaviors (e.g. purging), but the episodes are less frequent and/or intense than typical binge-eating disorder.
- Purging Disorder: purging behaviors such as self-induced vomiting or laxative abuse without having binge-eating episodes (thus, this not being binging, and nothing obvious is happening outside of the bathroom).
- Night Eating Syndrome: consuming excessive amounts of food during the night while being fully aware of the nature of the eating episodes, which disrupts sleep and leads to guilt.
- Rumination Disorder: repeatedly regurgitating food, which may be rechewed, reswallowed, or spat out, without nausea or involuntary retching, often as a self-soothing mechanism.
For more on each of these, along with a case study-style example of each, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
Eating Disorders: More Varied (And Prevalent) Than People Think
Take care!
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