Complex PTSD – by Pete Walker

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.

We’ve written before about Complex PTSD, but there’s a lot more to be said than we can fit into an article or two.

Pete Walker, a licensed marriage and family therapist, does an excellent job and pulls no punches, starting from the book’s dedication and carrying the hard-hitting seriousness all the way through to the Appendices.

To this end, it absolutely may not be an easy book to read at times (emotionally speaking), especially if you have C-PTSD. On the other hand, you may also find it a very validating 300-odd pages of “Yes, he is telling my life story in words, now this makes sense!”

That said, it’s mostly not an anecdotes-based book and nor is it just a feelsy ride; it’s also a textbook and a how-to manual. It’s a textbook of how and why things come about the way they do, and a manual of how to effectively manage C-PTSD, and find peace. There’s no silver bullet here, but there is a very comprehensive guide, and chapters full of tools to use (and no, not the same CBT things you’ve probably read a hundred times, this is C-PTSD-specific stuff).

Bottom line: this is the C-PTSD book; if you buy only one book on the topic, make it this one.

Click here to check out Complex PTSD: From Surviving To Thriving, and indeed thrive!

Don’t Forget…

Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!

Recommended

  • Young Forever – by Dr. Mark Hyman
  • This Week In Brain News
    Bad breath may predict brain health, cannabis use impacts memory, and new tech decodes thoughts into text. Read how these findings redefine wellness and brain science.

Learn to Age Gracefully

Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:

  • America’s Health System Isn’t Ready for the Surge of Seniors With Disabilities

    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.

    The number of older adults with disabilities — difficulty with walking, seeing, hearing, memory, cognition, or performing daily tasks such as bathing or using the bathroom — will soar in the decades ahead, as baby boomers enter their 70s, 80s, and 90s.

    But the health care system isn’t ready to address their needs.

    That became painfully obvious during the covid-19 pandemic, when older adults with disabilities had trouble getting treatments and hundreds of thousands died. Now, the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Institutes of Health are targeting some failures that led to those problems.

    One initiative strengthens access to medical treatments, equipment, and web-based programs for people with disabilities. The other recognizes that people with disabilities, including older adults, are a separate population with special health concerns that need more research and attention.

    Lisa Iezzoni, 69, a professor at Harvard Medical School who has lived with multiple sclerosis since her early 20s and is widely considered the godmother of research on disability, called the developments “an important attempt to make health care more equitable for people with disabilities.”

    “For too long, medical providers have failed to address change in society, changes in technology, and changes in the kind of assistance that people need,” she said.

    Among Iezzoni’s notable findings published in recent years:

    Most doctors are biased. In survey results published in 2021, 82% of physicians admitted they believed people with significant disabilities have a worse quality of life than those without impairments. Only 57% said they welcomed disabled patients.

    “It’s shocking that so many physicians say they don’t want to care for these patients,” said Eric Campbell, a co-author of the study and professor of medicine at the University of Colorado.

    While the findings apply to disabled people of all ages, a larger proportion of older adults live with disabilities than younger age groups. About one-third of people 65 and older — nearly 19 million seniors — have a disability, according to the Institute on Disability at the University of New Hampshire.

    Doctors don’t understand their responsibilities. In 2022, Iezzoni, Campbell, and colleagues reported that 36% of physicians had little to no knowledge of their responsibilities under the 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act, indicating a concerning lack of training. The ADA requires medical practices to provide equal access to people with disabilities and accommodate disability-related needs.

    Among the practical consequences: Few clinics have height-adjustable tables or mechanical lifts that enable people who are frail or use wheelchairs to receive thorough medical examinations. Only a small number have scales to weigh patients in wheelchairs. And most diagnostic imaging equipment can’t be used by people with serious mobility limitations.

    Iezzoni has experienced these issues directly. She relies on a wheelchair and can’t transfer to a fixed-height exam table. She told me she hasn’t been weighed in years.

    Among the medical consequences: People with disabilities receive less preventive care and suffer from poorer health than other people, as well as more coexisting medical conditions. Physicians too often rely on incomplete information in making recommendations. There are more barriers to treatment and patients are less satisfied with the care they do get.

    Egregiously, during the pandemic, when crisis standards of care were developed, people with disabilities and older adults were deemed low priorities. These standards were meant to ration care, when necessary, given shortages of respirators and other potentially lifesaving interventions.

    There’s no starker example of the deleterious confluence of bias against seniors and people with disabilities. Unfortunately, older adults with disabilities routinely encounter these twinned types of discrimination when seeking medical care.

    Such discrimination would be explicitly banned under a rule proposed by HHS in September. For the first time in 50 years, it would update Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, a landmark statute that helped establish civil rights for people with disabilities.

    The new rule sets specific, enforceable standards for accessible equipment, including exam tables, scales, and diagnostic equipment. And it requires that electronic medical records, medical apps, and websites be made usable for people with various impairments and prohibits treatment policies based on stereotypes about people with disabilities, such as covid-era crisis standards of care.

    “This will make a really big difference to disabled people of all ages, especially older adults,” said Alison Barkoff, who heads the HHS Administration for Community Living. She expects the rule to be finalized this year, with provisions related to medical equipment going into effect in 2026. Medical providers will bear extra costs associated with compliance.

    Also in September, NIH designated people with disabilities as a population with health disparities that deserves further attention. This makes a new funding stream available and “should spur data collection that allows us to look with greater precision at the barriers and structural issues that have held people with disabilities back,” said Bonnielin Swenor, director of the Johns Hopkins University Disability Health Research Center.

    One important barrier for older adults: Unlike younger adults with disabilities, many seniors with impairments don’t identify themselves as disabled.

    “Before my mom died in October 2019, she became blind from macular degeneration and deaf from hereditary hearing loss. But she would never say she was disabled,” Iezzoni said.

    Similarly, older adults who can’t walk after a stroke or because of severe osteoarthritis generally think of themselves as having a medical condition, not a disability.

    Meanwhile, seniors haven’t been well integrated into the disability rights movement, which has been led by young and middle-aged adults. They typically don’t join disability-oriented communities that offer support from people with similar experiences. And they don’t ask for accommodations they might be entitled to under the ADA or the 1973 Rehabilitation Act.

    Many seniors don’t even realize they have rights under these laws, Swenor said. “We need to think more inclusively about people with disabilities and ensure that older adults are fully included at this really important moment of change.”

    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.

    Share This Post

  • Spoon-Fed – by Dr. Tim Spector

    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. Spector looks at widespread beliefs about food, and where those often scientifically disproven beliefs come from. Hint, there’s usually some manner of “follow the money”.

    From calorie-counting to cholesterol content, from fish to bottled water, to why of all the people who self-report having an allergy, only around half turn out to actually have one when tested, Dr. Spector sets the record straight.

    The style is as very down-to-earth and not at all self-aggrandizing; the author acknowledges his own mistakes and limitations along the way. In terms of pushing any particular agenda, his only agenda is clear: inform the public about bad science, so that we demand better science going forwards. Along the way, he gives us lots of information that can inform our personal health choices based on better science than indiscriminate headlines wildly (and sometimes intentionally) misinterpreting results.

    Read this book, and you may find yourself clicking through to read the studies for yourself, next time you see a bold headline.

    Bottom line: this book looks at a lot of what’s wrong with what a lot of people believe about healthy eating. Regular 10almonds readers might not find a lot that’s new here, but it could be a great gift for a would-be health-conscious friend or relative

    Click here to check out Spoon-Fed, and bust some myths!

    Share This Post

  • Be Your Future Self Now – by Dr. Benjamin Hardy

    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.

    Affirmations in the mirror are great and all, but they can only get you so far! And if you’re a regular reader of our newsletter, you probably know about the power of small daily habits adding up and compounding over time. So what does this book offer, that’s different?

    “Be Your Future Self Now” beelines the route “from here to there”, with a sound psychological approach. On which note…

    The book’s subtitle mentions “the science of intentional transformation”, and while Dr. Hardy is a psychologist, he’s an organizational psychologist (which doesn’t really pertain to this topic). It’s not a science-heavy book, but it is heavy on psychological rationality.

    Where Dr. Hardy does bring psychology to bear, it’s in large part that! He teaches us how to overcome our biases that cause us to stumble blindly into the future… rather than intentfully creating our own future to step into. For example:

    Most people (regardless of age!) acknowledge what a different person they were 10 years ago… but assume they’ll be basically the same person 10 years from now as they are today, just with changed circumstances.

    Radical acceptance of the inevitability of change is the first step to taking control of that change.

    That’s just one example, but there are many, and this is a book review not a book summary!

    In short: if you’d like to take much more conscious control of the direction your life will take, this is a book for you.

    Click here to get your copy of “Be Your Future Self Now” from Amazon!

    Share This Post

Related Posts

  • Young Forever – by Dr. Mark Hyman
  • Older, Faster, Stronger – by Margaret Webb

    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.

    The author, now in her 60s, made it her mission in her 50s to become the best runner she could. Before that, she’d been a keen runner previously, but let things slip rather in her 40s. But the book’s not about her 40s, it’s about her 50s and onwards, and other female runners in their 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and even 90s.

    There’s a lot of this book that’s about people’s individual stories, and those should certainly be enough to prompt almost any reader that “if they can do it, I can”.

    A lot, meanwhile, is about health and exercise science, training methods, and what has worked for various later-life athletes, including the author. So, it’s also partway instruction manual, with plenty of reference to science and medical considerations too.

    Bottom line: sometimes, life throws us challenges. Sometimes, the best response is “Yeah? Bet” and surprise everyone.

    Click here to check out Older, Faster, Stronger, and become all those cool things!

    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

    Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:

  • What Harm Can One Sleepless Night Do?

    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.

    We’ll not bury the lede: a study found that just one night of 24-hour sleep deprivation can alter immune cell profiles in young, lean, healthy people to resemble those of people with obesity and chronic inflammation.

    Chronic inflammation, in turn, causes very many other chronic diseases, and worsens most of the ones it doesn’t outright cause.

    The reason this happens is because in principle, inflammation is supposed to be good for us—it’s our body’s defenses coming to the rescue. However, if we imagine our immune cells as firefighters, then compare:

    • A team of firefighters who are in great shape and ready to deploy at a moment’s notice, are mostly allowed to rest, sometimes get training, and get called out to a fire from time time, just enough to keep them on their toes. Today, something in your house caught fire, and they showed up in 5 minutes and put it out safely.
    • A team of firefighters who have been pulling 24-hour shifts every day for the past 20 years, getting called out constantly for lost cats, burned toast, wrong numbers, the neighbor’s music, a broken fridge, and even the occasional fire. Today, your printer got jammed so they broke down your door and also your windows just for good measure, and blasted your general desk area with a fire hose, which did not resolve the problem but now your computer itself is broken.

    Which team would you rather have?

    The former team is a healthy immune system; the latter is the immune system of someone with chronic inflammation.

    But if it’s one night, it’s not chronic, right?

    Contingently true. However, the problem is that because the immune profile was made to be like the bad team we described (imagine that chaos in your house, now remember that for this metaphor, it’s your body that that’s happening to), the immediate strong negative health impact will already have knock-on effects, which in turn make it more likely that you’ll struggle to get your sleep back on track quickly.

    For example, the next night you may oversleep “to compensate”, but then the following day your sleep schedule is now slid back considerably; one thing leads to another, and a month later you’re thinking “I really must sort my sleep out”.

    See also: How Regularity Of Sleep Can Be Even More Important Than Duration ← A recent, large (n=72,269) 8-year prospective* observational study of adults aged 40-79 found a strong association between irregular sleep and major cardiovascular events, to such an extent that it was worse than undersleeping.

    *this means they started the study at a given point, and measured what happened for the next eight years—as opposed to a retrospective study, which would look at what had happened during the previous 8 years.

    What about sleep fragmentation?

    In other words: getting sleep, but heavily disrupted sleep.

    The answer is: basically the same deal as with missed sleep.

    Specifically, elevated proinflammatory cytokines (in this context, that’s bad) and an increase in nonclassical monocytes—as are typically seen in people with obesity and chronic inflammation.

    Remember: these were young, lean, healthy participants going into the study, who signed up for a controlled sleep deprivation experiment.

    This is important, because the unhealthy inflammatory profile means that people with such are a lot more likely to develop diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and many more things besides. And, famously, most people in the industrialized world are not sleeping that well.

    Even amongst 10almonds readers, a health-conscious demographic by nature, 62% of 10almonds readers do not regularly get the prescribed 7–9 hours sleep (i.e. they get under 7 hours).

    You can see the data on this one, here: Why You Probably Need More Sleep ← yes, including if you are in the older age range; we bust that myth in the article too!*

    *Unless you have a (rare!) mutated ADRB1 gene, which reduces that. But we also cover that in the article, and how to know whether you have it.

    With regard to “most people in the industrialized world are not sleeping that well”, this means that most people in the industrialized world are subject to an unseen epidemic of sleep-deprivation-induced inflammation that is creating vulnerability to many other diseases. In short, the lifestyle of the industrialized world (especially: having to work certain hours) is making most of the working population sick.

    Dr. Fatema Al-Rashed, lead researcher, concluded:

    ❝In the long term, we aim for this research to drive policies and strategies that recognize the critical role of sleep in public health.

    We envision workplace reforms and educational campaigns promoting better sleep practices, particularly for populations at risk of sleep disruption due to technological and occupational demands.

    Ultimately, this could help mitigate the burden of inflammatory diseases like obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases.❞

    You can read the paper in full here: Impact of sleep deprivation on monocyte subclasses and function

    What can we do about it?

    With regard to sleep, we’ve written so much about this, but here are three key articles that contain a lot of valuable information:

    …and with regard to inflammation, a good concise overview of how to dial it down is:

    How To Prevent Or Reduce Inflammation

    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

    Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:

  • The Energy Plan – by James Collins

    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.

    There’s a lot of conflicting advice out there about how we should maintain our energy levels, for example:

    • Eat fewer carbs!
    • Eat more carbs!
    • Eat slow-release carbs!
    • Eat quick-release carbs!
    • Practise intermittent fasting!
    • Graze constantly throughout the day!
    • Forget carbs and focus on fats!
    • Actually it’s all about B-vitamins!

    …and so on.

    What Collins does differently is something much less-often seen:

    Here, we’re advised on how to tailor our meals to our actual lifestyle, taking into account the day we actually have each day. For example:

    • What will our energy needs be for the day?
    • Will our needs be intense, or long, or both, or neither?
    • What kind of recovery have we had, or do we need, from previous activities?
    • Do we need to replace lost muscle glycogen, or are we looking to trim the fat?
    • Are we doing a power-up or just maintenance today?

    Rather than bidding us have a five-way spreadsheet and do advanced mathematics for every meal, though, Collins has done the hard work for us. The book explains the various principles in a casual format with a light conversational tone, and gives us general rules to follow.

    These rules cover what to do for different times of day… and also, at different points in our life (the metabolic needs of a 13-year-old, 33-year-old, and 83-year-old, are very different!). That latter’s particularly handy, as a lot of books assume an age bracket for the reader, and this one doesn’t.

    In short: a great book for anyone who wants to keep their energy levels up (throughout life’s ups and downs in activity) without piling on the pounds or starving oneself.

    Click here to check out The Energy Plan on Amazon and fuel your days better!

    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

    Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails: