Undoing The Damage Of Life’s Hard Knocks
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Sometimes, What Doesn’t Kill Us Makes Us Insecure
We’ve written before about Complex PTSD, which is much more common than the more popularly understood kind:
Given that C-PTSD affects so many people (around 1 in 5, but really, do read the article above! It explains it better than we have room to repeat today), it seems like a good idea to share tips for managing it.
(Last time, we took all the space for explaining it, so we just linked to some external resources at the end)
What happened to you?
PTSD has (as a necessity, as part of its diagnostic criteria) a clear event that caused it, which makes the above question easy to answer.
C-PTSD often takes more examination to figure out what tapestry of circumstances (and likely but not necessarily: treatment by other people) caused it.
Often it will feel like “but it can’t be that; that’s not that bad”, or “everyone has things like that” (in which case, you’re probably one of the one in five).
The deeper questions
Start by asking yourself: what are you most afraid of, and why? What are you most ashamed of? What do you fear that other people might say about you?
Often there is a core pattern of insecurity that can be summed up in a simple, harmful, I-message, e.g:
- I am a bad person
- I am unloveable
- I am a fake
- I am easy to hurt
- I cannot keep my loved ones safe
…and so forth.
For a bigger list of common insecurities to see what resonates, check out:
Basic Fears/Insecurities, And Their Corresponding Needs/Desires
Find where they came from
You probably learned bad beliefs, and consequently bad coping strategies, because of bad circumstances, and/or bad advice.
- When a parent exclaimed in anger about how stupid you are
- When a partner exclaimed in frustration that always mess everything up
- When an employer told you you weren’t good enough
…or maybe they told you one thing, and showed you the opposite. Or maybe it was entirely non-verbal circumstances:
- When you gambled on a good idea and lost everything
- When you tried so hard at some important endeavour and failed
- When you thought someone could be trusted, and learned the hard way that you were wrong
These are “life’s difficult bits”, but when we’ve lived through a whole stack of them, it’s less like a single shattering hammer-blow of PTSD, and more like the consistent non-stop tap tap tap that ends up doing just as much damage in the long run.
Resolve them
That may sound a bit like a “and quickly create world peace” level of task, but we have tools:
Ask yourself: what if…
…it had been different? Take some time and indulge in a full-blown fantasy of a life that was better. Explore it. How would those different life lessons, different messages, have impacted who you are, your personality, your behaviour?
This is useful, because the brain is famously bad at telling real memories from false ones. Consciously, you’ll know that one was an exploratory fantasy, but to your brain, it’s still doing the appropriate rewiring. So, little by little, neuroplasticity will do its thing.
Tell yourself a better lie
We borrowed this one from the title of a very good book which we’ve reviewed previously.
This idea is not about self-delusion, but rather that we already express our own experiences as a sort of narrative, and that narrative tends to contain value judgements that are often not useful, e.g. “I am stupid”, “I am useless”, and all the other insecurities we mentioned earlier. Some simple examples might be:
- “I had a terrible childhood” → “I have come so far”
- “I should have known better” → “I am wiser now”
- “I have lost so much” → “I have experienced so much”
So, replacing that self-talk can go a long way to re-writing how secure we feel, and therefore how much trauma-response (ideally: none!) we have to stimuli that are not really as threatening as we sometimes feel they are (a hallmark of PTSD in general).
Here’s a guide to more ways:
How To Get Your Brain On A More Positive Track (Without Toxic Positivity)
Take care!
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What Are Nootropics, Really?
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What are nootropics, really?
A nootropic is anything that functions as a cognitive enhancer—in other words, improves our brainpower.
These can be sensationalized as “smart drugs”, misrepresented excitingly in science fiction, meme-ified in the mundane (“but first, coffee”), and reframed entirely, (“exercise is the best nootropic”).
So, clearly, “nootropics” can mean a lot of different things. Let’s look at some of the main categories…
The neurochemical modulators
These are what often get called “smart drugs”. They are literally drugs (have a chemical effect on the body that isn’t found in our diet), and they affect the levels of certain neurotransmitters in the brain, such as by:
- Adding more of that neurotransmitter (simple enough)
- Decreasing the rate at which we lose that neurotransmitter (re-uptake inhibitors)
- Antagonizing an unhelpful neurotransmitter (doing the opposite thing to it)
- Blocking an unhelpful neurotransmitter (stopping the receptors from receiving it)
“Unhelpful” here is relative and subjective, of course. We need all the neurotransmitters that are in our brain, after all, we just don’t need all of them all the time.
Examples: modafinil, a dopamine re-uptake inhibitor (mostly prescribed for sleep disorders), reduces the rate at which our brains scrub dopamine, resulting in a gradual build-up of dopamine that we naturally produced, so we get to enjoy that dopamine for longer. This will tend to promote wakefulness, and may also help with problem-solving and language faculties—as well as giving a mood boost. In other words, all things that dopamine is used for. Mirtazaрine, an adrenoreceptor agonist (mostly prescribed as an antidepressant), increases noradrenergic neurotransmission, thus giving many other brain functions a boost.
Why it works: our brains need healthy levels of neurotransmitters, in order to function well. Those levels are normally self-regulating, but can become depleted in times of stress or fatigue, for example.
The metabolic brain boosters
These are the kind of things that get included in nootropic stacks (stack = a collection of supplements and/or drugs that complement each other and are taken together—for example, a multivitamin tablet could be described as a vitamin stack) even though they have nothing specifically relating them to brain function. Why are they included?
The brain needs so much fuel. Metabolically speaking, it’s a gas-guzzler. It’s the single most resource-intensive organ of our body, by far. So, metabolic brain boosters tend to:
- Increase blood flow
- Increase blood oxygenation
- Increase blood general health
- Improve blood pressure (this is relative and subjective, since very obviously there’s a sweet spot)
Examples: B-vitamins. Yep, it can be that simple. A less obvious example might be Co-enzyme Q10, which supports energy production on a cellular level, and good cardiovascular health.
Why it works: you can’t have a healthy brain without a healthy heart!
We are such stuff as brains are made of
Our brains are made of mostly fat, water, and protein. But, not just any old fat and protein—we’re at least a little bit special! So, brain-food foods tend to:
- Give the brain the fats and proteins it’s made of
- Give the brain the stuff to make the fats and proteins it’s made of (simpler fats, and amino acids)
- Give the brain hydration! Just having water, and electrolytes as appropriate, does this
Examples: healthy fats from nuts, seeds, and seafood; also, a lot of phytonutrients from greens and certain fruits. Long-time subscribers may remember our article “Brain Food: The Eyes Have It!” on the importance of dietary lutein in reducing Alzheimer’s risk, for example
Why it works: this is matter of structural upkeep and maintenance—our brains don’t work fabulously if deprived of the very stuff they’re made of! Especially hydration is seriously underrated as a nootropic factor, by the way. Most people are dehydrated most of the time, and the brain dehydrates quickly. Fortunately, it rehydrates quickly as well when we take hydrating liquids.
Weird things that sound like ingredients in a witch’s potion
These are too numerous and too varied in how they work to cover here, but they do appear a lot in nootropic stacks and in popular literature on the subject.
Often they work by one of the mechanisms described above; sometimes we’re not entirely sure how they work, and have only measured their effects sufficiently to know that, somehow, they do work.
Examples: panax ginseng is one of the best-studied examples that still remains quite mysterious in many aspects of its mechanism. Lion’s Mane (the mushroom, not the jellyfish or the big cat hairstyle), meanwhile, is known to contain specific compounds that stimulate healthy brain cell growth.
Why it works: as we say, it varies so much from on ingredient to another in this category, so… Watch out for our Research Review Monday features, as we’ll be covering some of these in the coming weeks!
(PS, if there’s any you’d like us to focus on, let us know! We always love to hear from you. You can hit reply to any of our emails, or use the handy feedback widget at the bottom)
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With Medical Debt Burdening Millions, a Financial Regulator Steps In to Help
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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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Hummus vs Guacamole – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing hummus to guacamole, we picked the guacamole.
Why?
First up, let’s assume that the standards are comparable, for example that both have been made with simple whole foods. The hummus is mostly chickpeas with tahini and a little olive oil and some seasoning; the guacamole is mostly avocado with a little lime juice and some seasoning.
In terms of macronutrients, hummus has slightly more protein and fiber, 2x the carbohydrates (but they are healthy carbs), and usually slightly less fat (but the fats are healthy in both cases).
In terms of micronutrients, the hummus is rich in iron and B vitamins, and the guacamole is rich in potassium, magnesium, vitamins C, E, and K.
So far, it’s pretty much tied. What else is there to consider?
We picked the guacamole because some of its nutrients (especially the potassium, magnesium, and vitamin K) are more common deficiencies in most people’s diets than iron and B vitamins. So, on average, it’s probably the one with the nutrients that you need more of at any given time.
So, it was very very close, and it came down to the above as the deciding factor.
However!
- If you like one and not the other? Eat that one; it’s good.
- If you like both but feel like eating one of them in particular? Eat that one; your body is probably needing those nutrients more right now.
- If you are catering for a group of people? Serve both!
- If you are catering for just yourself and would enjoy both? Serve both! There’s nobody to stop you!
Want to read more?
You might like: Avocado Oil vs Olive Oil – Which is Healthier?
Enjoy!
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Inheritance – by Dr. Sharon Moalem
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We know genes make a big difference to a lot about us, but how much? And, the genes we have, we’re stuck with, right?
Dr. Sharon Moalem shines a bright light into some of the often-shadowier nooks and crannies of our genetics, covering such topics as:
- How much can (and can’t) be predicted from our parents’ genes—even when it comes to genetic traits that both parents have, and Gregor Mendel himself would (incorrectly) think obvious
- How even something so seemingly simple and clear as genetic sex, very definitely isn’t
- How traumatic life events can cause epigenetic changes that will scar us for generations to come
- How we can use our genetic information to look after our health much better
- How our life choices can work with, or overcome, the hand we got dealt in terms of genes
The style of the book is conversational, down to how there’s a lot of “I” and “you” in here, and the casual style belies the heavy, sharp, up-to-date science contained within.
Bottom line: if you’d like insight into the weird and wonderful nuances of genetics as found in this real, messy, perfectly chaotic world, this book is an excellent choice.
Click here to check out Inheritance, and learn more about yours!
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Body on Fire – by Dr. Monica Aggarwal and Dr. Jyothi Rao
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There are times when you do really need a doctor, not a dietician. But there are also times when a doctor will prescribe something for the symptom, leaving the underlying issue untouched. If only there were a way to have the best of both worlds!
That’s where Drs. Rao and Aggarwal come in. They’re both medical doctors… with a keen interest in nutrition and healthy lifestyle changes to make us less sick such that we have less need to go to the doctor at all.
Best of all, they understand—while some things are true for everyone—there’s not a one-size-fits all diet or exercise regime or even sleep setup.
So instead, they take us hand-in-hand (chapter by chapter!) through the various parts of our life (including our diet) that might need tweaking. Each of these changes, if taken up, promise a net improvement that becomes synergistic with the other changes. There’s a degree of biofeedback involved, and listening to your body, to be sure of what’s really best for you, not what merely should be best for you on paper.
The writing style is accessible while science-heavy. They don’t assume prior knowledge, and/but they sure deliver a lot. The book is more text than images, but there are plenty of medical diagrams, explanations, charts, and the like. You will feed like a medical student! And it’s very much worth studying.
Bottom line: highly recommendable even if you don’t have inflammation issues, and worth its weight in gold if you do.
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How To Kill Laziness
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Laziness Is A Scooby-Doo Villain.
Which means: to tackle it requires doing a Scooby-Doo unmasking.
You know, when the mystery-solving gang has the “ghost” or “monster” tied to a chair, and they pull the mask off, to reveal that there was no ghost etc, and in fact it was a real estate scammer or somesuch.
Social psychologist Dr. Devon Price wrote about this (not with that metaphor though) in a book we haven’t reviewed yet, but will one of these days:
Laziness Does Not Exist – by Dr. Devon Price (book)
In the meantime, and perhaps more accessibly, he gave a very abridged summary for Medium:
Medium | Laziness Does Not Exist… But unseen barriers do (11mins read)
Speaking of barriers, Medium added a paywall to that (the author did not, in fact, arrange the paywall as Medium claim), so in case you don’t have an account, he kindly made the article free on its own website, here:
Devon Price | Laziness Does Not Exist… But unseen barriers do (same article; no paywall)
He details problems that people get into (ranging from missed deadlines to homelessness), that are easily chalked up to laziness, but in fact, these people are not lazily choosing to suffer, and are usually instead suffering from all manner of unchosen things, ranging from…
- imposter syndrome / performance anxiety,
- perfectionism (which can overlap a lot with the above),
- social anxiety and/or depression (these also can overlap for some people),
- executive dysfunction in the brain, and/or
- just plain weathering “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune [and] the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to”, to borrow from Shakespeare, in ways that aren’t always obviously connected—these things can be great or small, it could be a terminal diagnosis of some terrible disease, or it could be a car breakdown, but the ripples spread.
And nor are you, dear reader, choosing to suffer (even if sometimes it appears otherwise)
Unless you’re actually a masochist, at least, in which case, you do you. But for most of us, what can look like laziness or “doing it to oneself” is usually a case of just having one or more of the above-mentioned conditions in place.
Which means…
That grace we just remembered above to give to other people?
Yep, we should give that to ourselves too.
Not as a free pass, but in the same way we (hopefully) would with someone else, and ask: is there some problem I haven’t considered, and is there something that would make this easier?
Here are some tools to get you started:
- Imposter Syndrome (And Why Almost Everyone Has It)
- Perfectionism, And How To Make Yours Work For You
- How To Set Anxiety Aside
- Mental Health First-Aid (To Get Yourself Or A Loved One Through Depression)
- Procrastination, And How To Pay Off The To-Do List Debt
- Take This Two-Minute Executive Dysfunction Test
Take care!
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