Stop Pain Spreading
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Put Your Back Into It (Or Don’t)!
We’ve written before about Managing Chronic Pain (Realistically!), and today we’re going to tackle a particular aspect of chronic pain management.
- It’s a thing where the advice is going to be “don’t do this”
- And if you have chronic pain, you will probably respond “yep, I do that”
However, it’s definitely a case of “when knowing isn’t the problem”, or at the very least, it’s not the whole problem.
Stop overcompensating and address the thing directly
We all do it, whether in chronic pain, or just a transient injury. But we all need to do less of it, because it causes a lot of harm.
Example: you have pain in your right knee, so you sit, stand, walk slightly differently to try to ease that pain. It works, albeit marginally, at least for a while, but now you also have pain in your left hip and your lumbar vertebrae, because of how you leaned a certain way. You adjust how you sit, stand, walk, to try to ease both sets of pain, and before you know it, now your neck also hurts, you have a headache, and you’re sure your digestion isn’t doing what it should and you feel dizzy when you stand. The process continues, and before long, what started off as a pain in one knee has now turned your whole body into a twisted aching wreck.
What has happened: the overcompensation due to the original pain has unduly stressed a connected part of the body, which we then overcompensate for somewhere else, bringing down the whole body like a set of dominoes.
For more on this: Understanding How Pain Can Spread
“Ok, but how? I can’t walk normally on that knee!”
We’re keeping the knee as an example here, but please bear in mind it could be any chronic pain and resultant disability.
Note: if you found the word “disability” offputting, please remember: if it adversely affects your abilities, it is a disability. Disabilities are not something that only happen to other people! They will happen to most of us at some point!
Ask yourself: what can you do, and what can’t you do?
For example:
- maybe you can walk, but not normally
- maybe you can walk normally, but not without great pain
- maybe you can walk normally, but not at your usual walking pace
First challenge: accept your limitations. If you can’t walk at your usual walking pace without great pain and/or throwing your posture to the dogs, then walk more slowly. To Hell with societal expectations that it shouldn’t take so long to walk from A to B. Take the time you need.
Second challenge: accept help. It doesn’t have to be help from another person (although it could be). It might be accepting the help of a cane, or maybe even a wheelchair for “flare-up” days. Society, especially American society which is built on ideas of self-sufficiency, has framed a lot of such options as “giving up”, but if they help you get about your day while minimizing doing further harm to your body, then they can be good and even health-preserving things. Same goes for painkillers if they help you from doing more harm to your body by balling up tension in a part of your body in a way that ends up spreading out and laying ruin to your whole body.
Speaking of which:
How Much Does It Hurt? Get The Right Help For Your Pain
After which, you might want to check out:
The 7 Approaches To Pain Management
and
Science-Based Alternative Pain Relief
Third challenge: deserves its own section, so…
Do what you can
If you have chronic pain (or any chronic illness, really), you are probably fed up of hearing how this latest diet will fix you, or yoga will fix you, and so on. But, while these things may not be miracle cures…
- A generally better diet really will lessen symptoms and avoid flare-ups (a low-inflammation diet is a great start for lessening the symptoms of a lot of chronic illnesses)
- Doing what exercise you can, being mindful of your limitations yes but still keeping moving as much as possible, will also prevent (or at least slow) deterioration. Consider consulting a physiotherapist for guidance (a doctor will more likely just say “rest, take it easy”, whereas a physiotherapist will be able to give more practical advice).
- Getting good sleep may be a nightmare in the case of chronic pain (or other chronic illnesses! Here’s to those late night hyperglycemia incidents for Type 1 Diabetics that then need monitoring for the next few hours while taking insulin and hoping it goes back down) but whatever you can do to prioritize it, do it.
Want to read more?
We reviewed a little while ago a great book about this; the title sounds like a lot of woo, but we promise the content is extremely well-referenced science:
…and if your issue is back pain specifically, we highly recommend:
Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection – by Dr. John Sarno
Take care!
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8 Signs Of Iodine Deficiency You Might Not Expect
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Health Coach Kait (BSc Nutrition & Exercise) is a certified health and nutrition coach, and today she’s here to talk about iodine—which is important for many of our body functions, from thyroid hormone production to metabolic regulation to heart rate management, as well as more superficial-but-important-too things like our skin and hair.
Kait’s hitlist
Here’s what she recommends we look out for:
- Swollen neck: even a slightly swollen neck might indicate low iodine levels (this is because that’s where the thyroid glands are)
- Hair loss: iodine is needed for healthy hair growth, so a deficiency can lead to hair loss / thinning hair
- Dry and flaky skin: with iodine’s role in our homeostatic system not being covered, our skin can dry out as a result
- Feeling cold all the time: because of iodine’s temperature-regulating activities
- Slow heart rate: A metabolic slump due to iodine deficiency can slow down the heart rate, leading to fatigue and weakness (and worse, if it persists)
- Brain fog: trouble focusing can be a symptom of the same metabolic slump
- Fatigue: this is again more or less the same thing, but she said eight signs, so we’re giving you the eight!
- Irregular period (if you normally have such, of course): because iodine affects reproductive hormones too, an imbalance can disrupt menstrual cycles.
For more on each of these, as well as how to get more iodine in your diet, enjoy:
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Further reading
You might also like to read:
- A Fresh Take On Hypothyroidism
- Foods For Managing Hypothyroidism (incl. Hashimoto’s)
- Eat To Beat Hyperthyroidism!
Take care!
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Relationships: When To Stick It Out & When To Call It Quits
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.
Like A Ship Loves An Anchor?
Today’s article may seem a little bit of a downer to start with, but don’t worry, it picks up again too. Simply put, we’ve written before about many of the good parts of relationships, e.g:
Only One Kind Of Relationship Promotes Longevity This Much!
…but what if that’s not what we have?
Note: if you have a very happy, secure, fulfilling, joyous relationship, then, great! Or if you’re single and happy, then, also great! Hopefully you will still find today’s feature of use if you find yourself advising a friend or family member one day. So without further ado, let’s get to it…
You may be familiar with the “sunk cost fallacy”; if not: it’s what happens when a person or group has already invested into a given thing, such that even though the thing is not going at all the way they hoped, they now want to continue trying to make that thing work, lest their previous investment be lost. But the truth is: if it’s not going to work, then the initial investment is already lost, and pouring out extra won’t help—it’ll just lose more.
That “investment” in a given thing could be money, time, energy, or (often the case) a combination of the above.
In the field of romance, the “sunk cost fallacy” keeps a lot of bad relationships going for longer than perhaps they should, and looking back (perhaps after a short adjustment period), the newly-single person says “why did I let that go on?” and vows to not make the same mistake again.
But that prompts the question: how can we know when it’s right to “keep working on it, because relationships do involve work”, as perfectly reasonable relationship advice often goes, and when it’s right to call it quits?
Should I stay or should I go?
Some questions for you (or perhaps a friend you might find yourself advising) to consider:
- What qualities do you consider the most important for a partner to have—and does your partner have them?
- If you described the worst of your relationship to a close friend, would that friend feel bad for you?
- Do you miss your partner when they’re away, or are you glad of the break? When they return, are they still glad to see you?
- If you weren’t already in this relationship, would you seek to enter it now? (This takes away sunk cost and allows a more neutral assessment)
- Do you feel completely safe with your partner (emotionally as well as physically), or must you tread carefully to avoid conflict?
- If your partner decided tomorrow that they didn’t want to be with you anymore and left, would that be just a heartbreak, or an exciting beginning of a new chapter in your life?
- What things would you generally consider dealbreakers in a relationship—and has your partner done any of them?
The last one can be surprising, by the way. We often see or hear of other people’s adverse relationship situations and think “I would never allow…” yet when we are in a relationship and in love, there’s a good chance that we might indeed allow—or rather, excuse, overlook, and forgive.
And, patience and forgiveness certainly aren’t inherently bad traits to have—it’s just good to deploy them consciously, and not merely be a doormat.
Either way, reflect (or advise your friend/family member to reflect, as applicable) on the “score” from the above questions.
- If the score is good, then maybe it really is just a rough patch, and the tools we link at the top and bottom of this article might help.
- If the score is bad, the relationship is bad, and no amount of historic love or miles clocked up together will change that. Sometimes it’s not even anyone’s fault; sometimes a relationship just ran its course, and now it’s time to accept that and turn to a new chapter.
“At my age…”
As we get older, it’s easy for that sunk cost fallacy to loom large. Inertia is heavy, the mutual entanglement of lives is far-reaching, and we might not feel we have the same energy for dating that we did when we were younger.
And there may sometimes be a statistical argument for “sticking it out” at least for a while, depending on where we are in the relationship, per this study (with 165,039 participants aged 20–76), which found:
❝Results on mean levels indicated that relationship satisfaction decreased from age 20 to 40, reached a low point at age 40, then increased until age 65, and plateaued in late adulthood.
As regards the metric of relationship duration, relationship satisfaction decreased during the first 10 years of the relationship, reached a low point at 10 years, increased until 20 years, and then decreased again.❞
Source: Development of Relationship Satisfaction Across the Life Span: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
And yet, when it comes to prospects for a new relationship…
- If our remaining life is growing shorter, then it’s definitely too short to spend in an unhappy relationship
- Maybe we really won’t find romance again… And maybe that’s ok, if w’re comfortable making our peace with that and finding joy in the rest of life (this widowed writer (hi, it’s me) plans to remain single now by preference, and her life is very full of purpose and beauty and joy and yes, even love—for family, friends, etc, plus the memory of my wonderful late beloved)
- Nevertheless, the simple fact is: many people do find what they go on to describe as their best relationship yet, late in life ← this study is with a small sample size, but in this case, even anecdotal evidence seems sufficient to make the claim reasonable; probably you personally know someone who has done so. If they can, so can you, if you so wish.
- Adding on to that last point… Later life relationships can also offer numerous significant advantages unique to such (albeit some different challenges too—but with the right person, those challenges are just a fun thing to tackle together). See for example:
An exploratory investigation into dating among later‐life women
And about those later-life relationships that do work? They look like this:
this one looks like the title says it all, but it really doesn’t, and it’s very much worth at least reading the abstract, if not the entire paper—because it talks a lot about the characteristics that make for happy or unhappy relationships, and the effect that those things have on people. It really is very good, and quite an easy read.
See again: Healthy Relationship, Healthy Life
Take care!
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How Likely Are You To Live To 100?
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How much hope can we reasonably have of reaching 100?
Yesterday, we asked you: assuming a good Health-Related Quality of Life (HRQoL), how much longer do you hope to live?
We got the above-depicted, below-described, set of responses:
- A little over 38% of respondents hope to live another 11–20 years
- A little over 31% hope to live another 31–40 years
- A little over 7% will be content to make it to the next decade
- One (1) respondent hopes to live longer than an additional 100 years
This is interesting when we put it against our graph of how old our subscribers are:
…because it corresponds inversely, right down to the gap/dent in the 40s. And—we may hypothesize—that one person under 18 who hopes to live to 120, perhaps.
This suggests that optimism remains more or less constant, with just a few wobbles that would probably be un-wobbled with a larger sample size.
In other words: most of our education-minded, health-conscious subscriber-base hope to make it to the age of 90-something, while for the most part feeling that 100+ is overly optimistic.
Writer’s anecdote: once upon a time, I was at a longevity conference in Brussels, and a speaker did a similar survey, but by show of hands. He started low by asking “put your hands up if you want to live at least a few more minutes”. I did so, with an urgency that made him laugh, and say “Don’t worry; I don’t have a gun hidden up here!”
Conjecture aside… What does the science say about our optimism?
First of all, a quick recap…
To not give you the same information twice, let’s note we did an “aging mythbusting” piece already covering:
- Aging is inevitable: True or False?
- Aging is, and always will be, unstoppable: True or False?
- We can slow aging: True or False?
- It’s too early to worry about… / It’s too late to do anything about… True or False?
- We can halt aging: True or False?
- We can reverse aging: True or False?
- But those aren’t really being younger, we’ll still die when our time is up: True or False?
You can read the answers to all of those here:
Age & Aging: What Can (And Can’t) We Do About It?
Now, onwards…
It is unreasonable to expect to live past 100: True or False?
True or False, depending on your own circumstances.
First, external circumstances: the modal average person in Hong Kong is currently in their 50s and can expect to live into their late 80s, while the modal average person in Gaza is 14 and may not expect to make it to 15 right now.
To avoid extremes, let’s look at the US, where the modal average person is currently in their 30s and can expect to live into their 70s:
United States Mortality Database
Now, before that unduly worries our many readers already in their 70s…
Next, personal circumstances: not just your health, but your socioeconomic standing. And in the US, one of the biggest factors is the kind of health insurance one has:
SOA Research Institute | Life Expectancy Calculator 2021
You may note that the above source puts all groups into a life expectancy in the 80s—whereas the previous source gave 70s.
Why is this? It’s because the SOA, whose primary job is calculating life insurance risks, is working from a sample of people who have, or are applying for, life insurance. So it misses out many people who die younger without such.
New advances in medical technology are helping people to live longer: True or False?
True, assuming access to those. Our subscribers are mostly in North America, and have an economic position that affords good access to healthcare. But beware…
On the one hand:
The number of people who live past the age of 100 has been on the rise for decades
On the other hand:
The average life expectancy in the U.S. has been on the decline for three consecutive years
COVID is, of course, largely to blame for that, though:
❝The decline of 1.8 years in life expectancy was primarily due to increases in mortality from COVID-19 (61.2% of the negative contribution).
The decline in life expectancy would have been even greater if not for the offsetting effects of decreases in mortality due to cancer (43.1%)❞
Source: National Vital Statistics Reports
The US stats are applicable to Canada, the UK, and Australia: True or False?
False: it’s not quite so universal. Differences in healthcare systems will account for a lot, but there are other factors too:
- Life expectancy in Canada fell for the 3rd year in a row. What’s happening?
- UK life expectancy lagging behind rest of G7 except the US
- Australians are living longer but what does it take to reach 100 years old?
Here’s an interesting (UK-based) tool that calculates not just your life expectancy, but also gives the odds of living to various ages (e.g. this writer was given odds of living to 87, 96, 100).
Check yours here:
Office of National Statistics | Life Expectancy Calculator
To finish on a cheery note…
Data from Italian centenarians suggests a “mortality plateau”:
❝The risk of dying leveled off in people 105 and older, the team reports online today in Science.
That means a 106-year-old has the same probability of living to 107 as a 111-year-old does of living to 112.
Furthermore, when the researchers broke down the data by the subjects’ year of birth, they noticed that over time, more people appear to be reaching age 105.❞
Pop-sci source: Once you hit this age, aging appears to stop
Actual paper: The plateau of human mortality: demography of longevity pioneers
Take care!
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How To Ease Neck Pain At Home
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.
Dr. Bang is offering exercises to alleviate neck pain, which pain can be a real… Well, if only there were a good phrase for expressing how troublesome pain in that part of the body can be.
To be clear, he’s a doctor of chiropractic, not a medical doctor, but his advice has clearly been helping people alleviate pain, so without further ado, he advises the following things:
- Taking the head and neck slowly and carefully through the full range of motion available
- Contracting the neck muscles while repeating the above exercise, three times each way
- Backing off a little if it hurts at any point, but noting where the limits lie
- Repeating again the range of motion exercise, this time adding gentle resistance
- Holding each end of this for twenty seconds before releasing and doing the other side, three times each way
- Finally, stabilizing the head centrally and pushing into one’s hands, as an isometric strengthening exercise
He demonstrates each part clearly in this short (5:58) video:
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Want to know more about chiropractic?
You might like our previous main feature:
Is Chiropractic All It’s Cracked Up To Be?
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
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Missing Microbes – by Dr. Martin Blaser
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You probably know that antibiotic resistance is a problem, but you might not realize just what a many-headed beast antibiotic overuse is.
From growing antibiotic superbugs, to killing the friendly bacteria that normally keep pathogens down to harmless numbers (resulting in death of the host, as the pathogens multiply unopposed), to multiple levels of dangers in antibiotic overuse in the farming of animals, this book is scary enough that you might want to save it for Halloween.
But, Dr. Blaser does not argue against antibiotic use when it’s necessary; many people are alive because of antibiotics—he himself recovered from typhoid because of such.
The style of the book is narrative, but information-dense. It does not succumb to undue sensationalization, but it’s also far from being a dry textbook.
Bottom line: if you’d like to understand the real problems caused by antibiotics, and how we can combat that beyond merely “try not to take them unnecessarily”, this book is very worthy reading.
Click here to check out Missing Microbes, and learn more about yours!
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Learn to Age Gracefully
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Celeriac vs Celery – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing celeriac to celery, we picked the celeriac.
Why?
Yes, these are essentially the same plant, but there are important nutritional differences:
In terms of macros, celeriac has more than 2x the protein, and slightly more carbs and fiber. Both are very low glycemic index, so the higher protein and fiber makes celeriac the winner in this category.
In the category of vitamins, celeriac has more of vitamins B1, B3, B5, B6, C, E, K, and choline, while celery has more of vitamins A and B9. An easy win for celeriac.
When it comes to minerals, celeriac has more copper, calcium, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc, while celery is not higher in any minerals. Another obvious win for celeriac.
Adding these sections up makes for a clear overall win for celeriac, but by all means enjoy either or both!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
What’s Your Plant Diversity Score?
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
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