Brave – by Dr. Margie Warrell

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Whether it’s the courage to jump out of a plane or the courage to have a difficult conversation, bravery is an important quality that we often don’t go far out of our way to grow. At least, not as adults.

Rather than viewing bravery as a static attribute—you either have it or you don’t—psychologist Dr. Margie Warrell makes the case for its potential for lifelong development.

The book is divided into five sections:

  1. Live purposefully
  2. Speak bravely
  3. Work passionately
  4. Dig deep
  5. Dare boldly

…and each has approximately 10 chapters, each a few pages long, the kind that can easily make this a “chapter-a-day” daily reader.

As a quick clarification: that “speak bravely” section isn’t about public speaking, but is rather about speaking up when it counts. Life is too short for regrets, and our interactions with others tend to be what matters most in the long-run. It makes a huge difference to our life!

Dr. Warrell gives us tools to reframe our challenges and tackle them. Rather than just saying “Feel the fear and do it anyway”, she also delivers the how, in all aspects. This is one of the main values the book brings, as well as a sometimes-needed reminder of how and why being brave is something to which we should always aspire… and hold.

Bottom line: if you’d like to be more brave—in any context—this book can help. We only get one life; might as well live it.

Click here to check out Brave and give your life a boost!

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Recommended

  • The Origin of Everyday Moods – by Dr. Robert Thayer
  • Are You Making This Alcohol Mistake?
    Rethink that daily glass of wine: new studies link even moderate drinking to brain shrinkage, cognitive decline, and increased health risks. Say goodbye to old health myths!

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  • 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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  • Is Vitamin C Worth The Hype? (Doctorly Investigates)

    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.

    Double Board-Certified Dermatologists Dr. Muneeb Shah & Dr. Luke Maxfield weigh in on vitamin C; is it worth the hype?

    Yes it is, but…

    There are some caveats, for example:

    • It’s best to apply vitamin C on clean, dry skin and let it set before layering other products.
    • Avoid mixing with oxidants like benzoyl peroxide (cancels out antioxidant effects).
    • Avoid combining with copper (may negate brightening benefits).
    • Do not use with hypochlorous acid (oxidative reactions cancel out benefits).
    • Be cautious with retinol due to irritation risks.

    However, used correctly, it does give very worthy benefits, and they recommend:

    • Morning use: acts as an antioxidant, pairs well with sunscreen for better protection from sun and environmental damage.
    • Night use: maximizes functions like improving tone, collagen production, texture, and reducing wrinkles.

    That’s not to say that at night it stops being an antioxidant or during the day it isn’t critical for collagen synthesis, but it is to say: because of the different things our bodies typically encounter and/or do during the day or night, those are the best times to get the most out of those benefits.

    They also review some popular products; here are some notes on their comments about them:

    • Skinceuticals C E Ferulic: research-backed, $180, effective but potentially irritating.
    • Skinceuticals Phloretin CF: includes 0.5% salicylic acid, good for acne-prone skin.
    • Dermatology Vitamin C E Ferulic: relatively more affordable ($70), fragrance-free, includes peptides and ceramides.
    • Drunk Elephant C-Firma: powder-to-serum formula, sued for patent infringement.
    • Paula’s Choice C15 Booster: reformulated, fragrance-free, similar to Skinceuticals.
    • Neutrogena Vitamin C Capsules: stabilized 20% ascorbic acid, single-use, travel-friendly.
    • La Roche-Posay Vitamin C Serum: contains fragrance and alcohol, not ideal for sensitive skin.
    • Matter of Fact Vitamin C Serum: includes ascorbic acid and ferulic acid, oily texture for dry skin.
    • Medik8 Super C Ferulic: stable 30% ethyl ascorbic acid, lightweight texture.
    • Naturium Vitamin C Complex: multi-form Vitamin C with niacinamide, alpha arbutin, and turmeric.
    • Timeless Vitamin C Serum: affordable ($20), 20% ascorbic acid with E and ferulic acid.

    For more on all of this, enjoy:

    Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

    Want to learn more?

    You might also like:

    More Than Skin-Deep: Six Ways To Eat For Healthier Skin ← this one’s about a lot more than just vitamin C 😎

    Take care!

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  • Superfood Kale & Dill Pâté

    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.

    Most of us could do with eating more greens a lot of the time, but it’s not always easy to include them. This kale and dill pâté brings a healthy dose of green in luxurious style, along with abundant phytochemicals and more!

    You will need

    • 2 handfuls kale, stalks removed
    • 1 cup soft cheese (you can use our Healthy Plant-Based Cream Cheese recipe if you like)
    • 2 tbsp fresh dill, chopped
    • 1 tsp capers
    • 1 tsp black pepper, coarse ground
    • ½ tsp MSG, or 1 tsp low-sodium salt

    Method

    (we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)

    1) Steam the kale for about 5 minutes or until wilted and soft. Run under cold water to halt the cooking process.

    2) Combine all the ingredients, including the kale you just blanched, in a food processor and blitz to make a smooth pâté.

    3) Serve with oatcakes or vegetable sticks, or keep in the fridge to enjoy it later:

    Enjoy!

    Want to learn more?

    For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:

    Brain Food? The Eyes Have It!

    Take care!

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Related Posts

  • The Origin of Everyday Moods – by Dr. Robert Thayer
  • With Medical Debt Burdening Millions, a Financial Regulator Steps In to Help

    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.

    When President Barack Obama signed legislation in 2010 to create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, he said the new agency had one priority: “looking out for people, not big banks, not lenders, not investment houses.”

    Since then, the CFPB has done its share of policing mortgage brokers, student loan companies, and banks. But as the U.S. health care system turns tens of millions of Americans into debtors, this financial watchdog is increasingly working to protect beleaguered patients, adding hospitals, nursing homes, and patient financing companies to the list of institutions that regulators are probing.

    In the past two years, the CFPB has penalized medical debt collectors, issued stern warnings to health care providers and lenders that target patients, and published reams of reports on how the health care system is undermining the financial security of Americans.

    In its most ambitious move to date, the agency is developing rules to bar medical debt from consumer credit reports, a sweeping change that could make it easier for Americans burdened by medical debt to rent a home, buy a car, even get a job. Those rules are expected to be unveiled later this year.

    “Everywhere we travel, we hear about individuals who are just trying to get by when it comes to medical bills,” said Rohit Chopra, the director of the CFPB whom President Joe Biden tapped to head the watchdog agency in 2021.

    “American families should not have their financial lives ruined by medical bills,” Chopra continued.

    The CFPB’s turn toward medical debt has stirred opposition from collection industry officials, who say the agency’s efforts are misguided. “There’s some concern with a financial regulator coming in and saying, ‘Oh, we’re going to sweep this problem under the rug so that people can’t see that there’s this medical debt out there,’” said Jack Brown III, a longtime collector and member of the industry trade group ACA International.

    Brown and others question whether the agency has gone too far on medical billing. ACA International has suggested collectors could go to court to fight any rules barring medical debt from credit reports.

    At the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court is considering a broader legal challenge to the agency’s funding that some conservative critics and financial industry officials hope will lead to the dissolution of the agency.

    But CFPB’s defenders say its move to address medical debt simply reflects the scale of a crisis that now touches some 100 million Americans and that a divided Congress seems unlikely to address soon.

    “The fact that the CFPB is involved in what seems like a health care issue is because our system is so dysfunctional that when people get sick and they can’t afford all their medical bills, even with insurance, it ends up affecting every aspect of their financial lives,” said Chi Chi Wu, a senior attorney at the National Consumer Law Center.

    CFPB researchers documented that unpaid medical bills were historically the most common form of debt on consumers’ credit reports, representing more than half of all debts on these reports. But the agency found that medical debt is typically a poor predictor of whether someone is likely to pay off other bills and loans.

    Medical debts on credit reports are also frequently riddled with errors, according to CFPB analyses of consumer complaints, which the agency found most often cite issues with bills that are the wrong amount, have already been paid, or should be billed to someone else.

    “There really is such high levels of inaccuracy,” Chopra said in an interview with KFF Health News. “We do not want to see the credit reporting system being weaponized to get people to pay bills they may not even owe.”

    The aggressive posture reflects Chopra, who cut his teeth helping to stand up the CFPB almost 15 years ago and made a name for himself going after the student loan industry.

    Targeting for-profit colleges and lenders, Chopra said he was troubled by an increasingly corporate higher-education system that was turning millions of students into debtors. Now, he said, he sees the health care system doing the same thing, shuttling patients into loans and credit cards and reporting them to credit bureaus. “If we were to rewind decades ago,” Chopra said, “we saw a lot less reliance on tools that banks used to get people to pay.”

    The push to remove medical bills from consumer credit reports culminates two years of intensive work by the CFPB on the medical debt issue.

    The agency warned nursing homes against forcing residents’ friends and family to assume responsibility for residents’ debts. An investigation by KFF Health News and NPR documented widespread use of lawsuits by nursing homes in communities to pursue friends and relatives of nursing home residents.

    The CFPB also has highlighted problems with how hospitals provide financial assistance to low-income patients. Regulators last year flagged the dangers of loans and credit cards that health care providers push on patients, often saddling them with more debt.

    And regulators have gone after medical debt collectors. In December, the CFPB shut down a Pennsylvania company for pursuing patients without ensuring the debts were accurate.

    A few months before that, the agency fined an Indiana company working with medical debt for violating collection laws. Regulators said the company had “risked harming consumers by pressuring or inducing them to pay debts they did not owe.”

    With their business in the crosshairs, debt collectors are warning that cracking down on credit reporting and other collection tools may prompt more hospitals and doctors to demand patients pay upfront for care.

    There are some indications this is happening already, as hospitals and clinics push patients to enroll in loans or credit cards to pay their medical bills.

    Scott Purcell, CEO of ACA International, said it would be wiser for the federal government to focus on making medical care more affordable. “Here we’re coming up with a solution that only takes money away from providers,” Purcell said. “If Congress was involved, there could be more robust solutions.”

    Chopra doesn’t dispute the need for bigger efforts to tackle health care costs.

    “Of course, there are broader things that we would probably want to fix about our health care system,” he said, “but this is having a direct financial impact on so many Americans.”

    The CFPB can’t do much about the price of a prescription or a hospital bill, Chopra continued. What the federal agency can do, he said, is protect patients if they can’t pay their bills.

    KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

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    KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

    Subscribe to KFF Health News’ free Morning Briefing.

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  • The Science Of Sounds

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    We Think You Might Like The Sound Of This…

    We’ve written before about the benefits of mindfulness meditation, and how to do it.

    We also reviewed a great book on a related topic:

    This is Your Brain On Music – by Dr. Daniel Levitin

    (yes, that’s the same neuroscientist that we featured as an expert talking about The Five Keys of Aging Healthily)

    But what happens when we combine the two?

    Mantra meditation & music

    Most scientific studies that have been undertaken with regard to meditation tend to focus on mindfulness meditation. It’s easy, effective, and (which makes a difference when it comes to publication bias) is a very safe bet when it comes to funding.

    However, today we’re going to look at mantra meditation, which has a lot in common, neurologically speaking, with music. Indeed, when the two were compared separately in a randomized control trial:

    ❝Daily mantra meditation or classical music listening may be beneficial for cognitive outcomes and quality of life of breast cancer survivors with cancer-related cognitive impairment.

    The cognitive benefits appear to be sustained beyond the initial intervention period.❞

    ~ Dr. Ashley Henneghan et al.

    Read in full: Sustained Effects of Mantra Meditation Compared to Music Listening on Neurocognitive Outcomes of Breast Cancer Survivors: A Brief Report of a Randomized Control Trial

    One possible reason for some of the similar benefits is the vagus nerve—whether intoning a mantra, or humming along to music, the vibrations can stimulate the vagus nerve, which in turn activates the parasympathetic nervous system, resulting in body-wide relaxation:

    The Vagus Nerve (And How You Can Make Use Of It)

    How effective is mantra meditation?

    According to a large recent narrative review, it depends on your goal:

    ❝Based on the studies in the four important areas presented, there is no doubt of a strong connection between mantra meditation and human health.

    Strong evidence has been found that practicing mantra meditation is effective in relieving stress and in coping with hypertension.

    For the other two areas: anxiety and immunity, the evidence is inconclusive or not strong enough to firmly support the claim that the mantra meditation can be used to reduce anxiety or to improve immunity. ❞

    ~ Dr. Dr. Ampere Tseng

    Read in full: Scientific Evidence of Health Benefits by Practicing Mantra Meditation: Narrative Review

    this is a very interesting read if you do have the time!

    How do I practice mantra meditation?

    The definition is broad, but the critical criteria are:

    1. You meditate
    2. …using a mantra

    Lest that seem flippant: those really are the two key points!

    Meditation comes in various forms, and mantra meditation is a form of focussed meditation. While some focussed meditation forms may use a candle or some other focal point, in mantra meditation, the mantra itself provides the focus.

    You may be wondering: what should the mantra be?

    Classic and well-tested mantras include such simple things as the monosyllabic Sanskrit “Om” or “Ham”. We’re a health science newsletter, so we’ll leave esoteric meanings to other publications as they are beyond our scope, but we will say that these result, most naturally, in the humming sound that we mentioned earlier stimulates the vagus nerve.

    But that’s not the only way. Practitioners of religions that have repetitive prayer systems (e.g. anything that uses prayer beads, for example) also provide the basis of focused meditation, using a mantra (in this case, usually a very short oft-repeated prayer phrase).

    How long is needed for benefits?

    Most studies into mantra meditation have used timed sessions of 15–30 minutes, with 20 minutes being a commonly-used session length, once per day. However…

    • Vagus nerve benefits should appear a lot more quickly than that (under 5 minutes) in the case of mantras that cause that vibration we mentioned.
    • Repetitive spoken prayers (or similar repeated short phrases, for the irreligious) will generally effect relaxation in whatever period of time it takes for your brain to be fully focused on what you are doing now, instead of what you were thinking about before. If using counting beads, then you probably already know what number works for you.

    (again, as a health science publication, we cannot comment on any otherworldly benefits, but the worldly benefits seem reason enough to consider these practices for their potential therapeutic effects)

    10almonds tip: for any meditative practice that you want to take approximately a given period of time, we recommend investing in a nice sand timer like this one, as this will not result in a jarring alarm going off!

    Like to jazz things up a little?

    Enjoy: Meditation That You’ll Actually Enjoy ← Meditation games!

    Prefer to keep things to the basics?

    Enjoy: No Frills, Evidence-Based Mindfulness ← The simplest scientific approach

    Take care!

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  • The Starch Solution – by Dr. John McDougall & Mary McDougall

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    Carb-strong or carb-wrong? We’ve written about this ourselves before, and it comes down to clarifying questions of what and how and why. Even within the general field of carbs, even within the smaller field of starch, not all foods are equal. A slice of white bread and a baked potato are both starchy, but the latter also contains fiber, vitamins, minerals, and suchlike.

    The authors make the case for a whole-foods plant-based diet in which one need not shy away from starchy foods in general; one simply must enjoy them discriminately—whole grains, and root vegetables that have not been processed to Hell and back, for examples.

    The style is “old-school pop-sci” but with modern science; claims are quite well-sourced throughout, with nine pages of bibliography at the end. Right after the ninety-nine pages of recipes!

    Bottom line: if you’re a carb-enjoyer, all is definitely not lost healthwise, and in fact on the contrary, this can be the foundation of a very healthy and nutrient-rich diet.

    Click here to check out The Starch Solution, and enjoy the foods you love, healthily!

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