The Dark Side Of Memory (And How To Make Your Life Better)
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How To Stop Revisiting Those Memories
We’ve talked before about putting the brakes on negative thought spirals (and that’s a really useful technique, so if you weren’t with us yet for that one, we do recommend hopping back and reading it!).
We’ve also talked about optimizing memory, to include making moments unforgettable.
But what about the moments we’d rather forget?
First, a quick note: we have no pressing wish or need to re-traumatize any readers, so if you’ve a pressing reason to think your memories you’d rather forget are beyond the scope of a few hundred words “one quick trick” in a newsletter, feel free to skip this section today.
One more quick note: it is generally not considered healthy to repress important memories. Some things are best worked through consciously in therapy with a competent professional.
Today’s technique is more for things in the category of “do you really need to keep remembering that one time you did something embarrassing 20 years ago?”
That said… sometimes, even when it does come to the management of serious PTSD, therapy can (intentionally, reasonably) throw in the towel on processing all of something big, and instead seek to simply look at minimizing its effect on ongoing life. Again, that’s best undertaken with a well-trained professional, however.
For more trivial annoyances, meanwhile…
Two Steps To Forgetting
The first step:
You may remember that memories are tied to the senses, and the more senses are involved, the more easily and fully we remember a thing. To remember something, therefore, we make sure to pay full attention to all the sensory experience of the memory, bringing in all 5 senses if possible.
To forget, the reverse is true. Drain the memory of color, make it black and white, fuzzier, blurrier, smaller, further away, sterile, silent, gone.
You can make a habit of doing this automatically whenever your unwanted memory resurfaces.
The second missing step:
This is the second step, but it’s going to be a missing step. Memories, like paths in a forest, are easier to access the more often we access them. A memory we visit every day will have a well-worn path, easy to follow. A memory we haven’t visited for decades will have an overgrown, sometimes nearly impossible-to-find path.
To labor the metaphor a little: if your memory has literal steps leading to it, we’re going to remove one of the steps now, to make it very difficult to access accidentally. Don’t worry, you can always put the step back later if you want to.
Let’s say you want to forget something that happened once upon a time in a certain workplace. Rather than wait for the memory in question to come up, we’re going to apply the first step that we just learned, to the entire workplace.
So, in this example, you’d make the memory of that workplace drained of color, made black and white, fuzzier, blurrier, smaller, further away, sterile, silent, gone.
Then, you’d make a habit of doing that whenever that workplace nearly comes to mind.
The result? You’re unlikely to accidentally access a memory that occurred in that workplace, if even mentally wandering to the workplace itself causes it to shrivel up and disappear like paper in fire.
Important reminder
The above psychological technique is to psychological trauma what painkillers are to physical pain. It can ease the symptom, while masking the cause. If it’s something serious, we recommend enlisting the help of a professional, rather than “self-medicating” in this fashion.
If it’s just a small annoying thing, though, sometimes it’s easier to just be able to refrain from prodding and poking it daily, forget about it, and enjoy life.
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Minimize The Harm Of Antibiotics
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It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!
In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!
As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!
So, no question/request too big or small 😎
❝Am booked in for a hip replacement, and of course the doc wants to give antibiotics around the surgery, but I know that’s very bad. That being said, I’d also like to not die of sepsis, so is there any way to get the best of both worlds?❞
Not dying of sepsis is also one of our favorite things to do! Indeed, sometimes antibiotics are a necessary evil.
Let’s quickly recap for everyone why antibiotics really mustn’t be used unnecessarily.
- What most people know about: it creates antibiotic resistance, and thus helps breed dangerous pathogenic superbugs, à la MRSA et al. That’s a problem for everyone, including the person who took the antibiotics.
- What most people don’t know about: because it’s a “scorched earth” tactic that kills most bacteria, friend and foe alike, the problem isn’t just that it devastates your gut microbiome by killing helpful bacteria, it’s also about a secondary consequence of that, which is that it leaves the coast clear for pathogenic fungi which aren’t touched by antibiotics at all, being an entirely different kind of life.
Consider for a moment how bad that is: you just went scorched earth on your gut, killing everything good or bad… Apart from the fungus that likes to put its roots through your intestinal wall, make holes there, and interface with your nervous system, and is usually kept in check and stopped from doing that by friendly bacteria.
You wiped out the friendly bacteria that normally hold it back, and now the completely unbothered fungus is alone in there wondering “Did something happen? Oh well, free lunch!”
See for example: Candida albicans as a commensal and opportunistic pathogen in the intestine
And for that matter: Candida albicans-Induced Epithelial Damage Mediates Translocation through Intestinal Barriers
(That’s scientist-speak for “Candida puts holes in your intestines, and stuff can then go through those holes”)
And that’s just C. albicans, never mind things like C. diff. that can just outright kill you easily. This one’s not a fungus, it’s a spore-forming bacterium, but it’s also untroubled by antibiotics so it enjoys a similar launch into overgrowth when you kill its competitors.
For more details, see Four Ways Antibiotics Can Kill You
Now, how to minimize/mitigate that
First of all, of course, avoid antibiotics unless you really need them. Hip surgery is indeed a case of “really need them”.
By the way, in the US, most antibiotic resistance comes not from the direct use of antibiotics in humans, but from the heavy use of antibiotics in the farming of non-human animals (including fish, but cows and pigs are the biggest hosts) that are then eaten by humans, so that’s one more reason to skip the meat, too.
However, people do often errantly take antibiotics for things that antibiotics can’t really help with (e.g. most respiratory tract infections), so please consult with your doctor and only take them if they advise it’s truly necessary.
Secondly, IV is better than oral, unless your doctor has a very good reason to prescribe oral (e.g. “there is a pathogenic bacterial overgrowth in your gastrointestinal tract and we are going to kill it”), because:
- better distribution through your circulation anyway
- less impact on your gut than putting it directly into your gut (who would have guessed that?)
Thirdly, less is better than more, in the sense of: there’s normally a course of antibiotics, and for perioperative prophylactic purposes (i.e. what will be the case for your hip surgery), two or three days of IV is likely to be sufficient to avoid infection, and allows for a much better rebound of healthy gut bacteria than if you take seven days of antibiotics, for example:
❝The effect of antibiotics on gut microbiota is produced after antibiotics treatments over one week.
The recovery of gut microbiota to the state of pre-antibiotics may require over two weeks of antibiotics withdrawal.❞
Read in full: Assessment of the impact of intravenous antibiotics treatment on gut microbiota in patients ← this paper used data from heart surgeries, but the principle for your gut health is exactly the same
Lastly, prepare your gut in advance. By this we mean: the healthier your gut microbiome is when you go in, the more chance there is of a healthy rebound when you come out.
So, prioritize your gut health in the weeks (ideally, months, you really can’t start too early) before your surgery, and maximize your beneficial microbiota diversity, such as by:
- enjoying plenty of fiber (prebiotics)
- enjoying fermented foods (e.g. kimchi, sauerkraut, kefir, etc)
- taking probiotic supplements (but see the link below for how to not waste these by sabotaging them)
A lot of people do make certain common mistakes when taking probiotics, so here’s how to avoid those mistakes: Stop Sabotaging Your Gut
Want to learn more?
Here’s an in-depth guide to avoiding many all-too-popular contaminants of foods, including antibiotics:
Healthy Living in a Contaminated World – by Dr. Donald Hoernschemeyer
And, on a side-note, you might also like to check out:
Good luck with your surgery!
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How Are You?
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Answering The Most Difficult Question: How Are You?
Today’s feature is aimed at helping mainly two kinds of people:
- “I have so many emotions that I don’t always know what to do with them”
- “What is an emotion, really? I think I felt one some time ago”
So, if either those describe you and/or a loved one, read on…
Alexithymia
Alexi who? Alexithymia is an umbrella term for various kinds of problems with feeling emotions.
That could be “problems feeling emotions” as in “I am unable to feel emotions” or “problems feeling emotions” as in “feeling these emotions is a problem for me”.
It is most commonly used to refer to “having difficulty identifying and expressing emotions”.
There are a lot of very poor quality pop-science articles out there about it, but here’s a decent one with good examples and minimal sensationalist pathologization:
Alexithymia Might Be the Reason It’s Hard to Label Your Emotions
A somatic start
Because a good level of self-awareness is critical for healthy emotional regulation, let’s start there. We’ll write this in the first person, but you can use it to help a loved one too, just switching to second person:
Simplest level first:
Are my most basic needs met right now? Is this room a good temperature? Am I comfortable dressed the way I am? Am I in good physical health? Am I well-rested? Have I been fed and watered recently? Does my body feel clean? Have I taken any meds I should be taking?
Note: If the answer is “no”, then maybe there’s something you can do to fix that first. If the answer is “no” and also you can’t fix the thing for some reason, then that’s unfortunate, but just recognize it anyway for now. It doesn’t mean the thing in question is necessarily responsible for how you feel, but it’s good to check off this list as a matter of good practice.
Bonus question: it’s cliché, but if applicable… What time of the month is it? Because while hormonal mood swings won’t create moods out of nothing, they sure aren’t irrelevant either and should be listened to too.
Bodyscanning next
What do you feel in each part of your body? Are you clenching your jaw? Are your shoulders tense? Do you have a knot in your stomach? What are your hands doing? How’s your posture? What’s your breathing like? How about your heart? What are your eyes doing?
Your observations at this point should be neutral, by the way. Not “my posture is terrible”, but “my posture is stooped”, etc. Much like in mindfulness meditation, this is a time for observing, not for judging.
Narrowing it down
Now, like a good scientist, you have assembled data. But what does the data mean for your emotions? You may have to conduct some experiments to find out.
Thought experiments: what calls to you? What do you feel like doing? Do you feel like curling up in a ball? Breaking something? Taking a bath? Crying?
Maybe what calls to you, or what you feel like doing, isn’t something that’s possible for you to do. This is often the case with anxiety, for example, and perhaps also guilt. But whatever calls to you, notice it, reflect on it, and if it’s something that your conscious mind considers reasonable and safe for you to do, you can even try doing it.
Your body is trying to help you here, by the way! It will try (and usually succeed) to give you a little dopamine spike when you anticipate doing the thing it wants you to do. Warning: it won’t always be right about what’s best for you, so do still make your own decisions about whether it is a good idea to safely do it.
Practical experiments: whether you have a theory or just a hypothesis (if you have neither make up a hypothesis; that is also what scientists do), you can also test it:
If in the previous step you identified something you’d like to do and are able to safely do it, now is the time to try it. If not…
- Find something that is likely to (safely) tip you into emotional expression, ideally, in a cathartic way. But, whatever you can get is good.
- Music is great for this. What songs (or even non-lyrical musical works) make you sad, happy, angry, energized? Try them.
- Literature and film can be good too, albeit they take more time. Grab that tear-jerker or angsty rage-fest, and see if it feels right.
- Other media, again, can be completely unrelated to the situation at hand, but if it evokes the same emotion, it’ll help you figure out “yes, this is it”.
- It could be a love letter or a tax letter, it could be an outrage-provoking news piece or some nostalgic thing you own.
Ride it out, wherever it takes you (safely)
Feelings feel better felt. It doesn’t always seem that way! But, really, they are.
Emotions, just like physical sensations, are messengers. And when a feeling/sensation is troublesome, one of the best ways to get past it is to first fully listen to it and respond accordingly.
- If your body tells you something, then it’s good to acknowledge that and give it some reassurance by taking some action to appease it.
- If your emotions are telling you something, then it’s good to acknowledge that and similarly take some action to appease it.
There is a reason people feel better after “having a good cry”, or “pounding it out” against a punchbag. Even stress can be dealt with by physically deliberately tensing up and then relaxing that tension, so the body thinks that you had a fight and won and can relax now.
And when someone is in a certain (not happy) mood and takes (sometimes baffling!) actions to stay in that mood rather than “snap out of it”, it’s probably because there’s more feeling to be done before the body feels heard. Hence the “ride it out if you safely can” idea.
How much feeling is too much?
While this is in large part a subjective matter, clinically speaking the key question is generally: is it adversely affecting daily life to the point of being a problem?
For example, if you have to spend half an hour every day actively managing a certain emotion, that’s probably indicative of something unusual, but “unusual” is not inherently pathological. If you’re managing it safely and in a way that doesn’t negatively affect the rest of your life, then that is generally considered fine, unless you feel otherwise about it.
If you do think “I would like to not think/feel this anymore”, then there are tools at your disposal too:
- How To Manage Chronic Stress
- How To Set Anxiety Aside
- How To Stop Revisiting Those Memories
- How To Stay Alive (When You Really Don’t Want To)
Take care!
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The Four Pillar Plan – by Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
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Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, a medical doctor, felt frustrated with how many doctors in his field focus on treating the symptoms of disease, rather than the cause. Sometimes, of course, treating the symptom is necessary too! But neglecting the cause is a recipe for long-term woes.
What he does differently is take lifestyle as a foundation, and even that, he does differently than many authors on the topic. How so, you may wonder?
Rather than look first at exercise and diet, he starts with “relax”. His rationale is reasonable: diving straight in with marathon training or a whole new diet plan can be unsustainable without this as a foundation to fall back on.
Many sources look first at exercise (because it can be a very simple “prescription”) before diet (often more complex)… but how does one exercise well with the wrong fuel in the tank? So Dr. Chatterjee’s titular “Four Pillars” come in the following order:
- Relax
- Eat
- Move
- Sleep
He also goes for “move” rather than “exercise” as the focus here is more on minimizing time spent sitting, and thus involving a lot of much more frequent gentle activities… rather than intensive training programs and the like.
And as for sleep? Yes, that comes last because—no matter how important it is—the other things are easier to directly control. After all, one can improve conditions for sleep, but one cannot simply choose to sleep better! So with the other three things covered first, good sleep is the fourth and final thing to fall into place.
All in all, this is a great book to cut through the catch-22 problem of lifestyle factors negatively impacting each other.
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Dates vs Tangerine – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing dates to tangerines, we picked the dates.
Why?
Of these two seasonal snacks, there’s a clear winner:
In terms of macros, dates have more than 4x the fiber, about 5x the carbs, and 3x the protein, making them the more macronutrient-dense choice by far, and due to the fiber content, the glycemic index is still very favorable.
In the category of vitamins, dates have more of vitamins B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9, and K, while tangerines have more of vitamins A, C, and E, yielding a 7:3 win to dates in this round.
Looking at minerals, dates have more copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc, while tangerines are not higher in any minerals, although they are equal for calcium. Still, all things considered, it’s a landslide for dates in this category.
Adding up the sections makes for a clear overall win for dates, but by all means do enjoy either or both, as diversity is great!
Want to learn more?
You might like:
From Apples to Bees, and High-Fructose Cs: Which Sugars Are Healthier, And Which Are Just The Same? ← for any wondering about the sugariness of dates, and why they’re just fine regardless 😎
Enjoy!
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Habits of a Happy Brain – by Dr. Loretta Graziano Breuning
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There are lots of books on “happy chemicals” and “how to retrain your brain”, so what makes this one different?
Firstly, it focuses on four “happy chemicals”, not just one:
- Serotonin
- Dopamine
- Oxytocin
- Endorphins
It also looks at the role of cortisol, and how it caps off each of those just a little bit, to keep us just a little malcontent.
Behavioral psychology tends to focus most on dopamine, while prescription pharmaceuticals for happiness (i.e., most antidepressants) tend to focus on serotonin. Here, Dr. Breuning helps us understand the complex interplay of all of the aforementioned chemicals.
She also clears up many misconceptions, since a lot of people misattribute the functions of each of these.
Common examples include “I’m doing this for the serotonin!” when the activity is dopaminergic not serotoninergic, or considering dopamine “the love molecule” when oxytocin, or even something else like phenylethylamine would be more appropriate.
The above may seem like academic quibbles and not something of practical use, but if we want to biohack our brains, we need to do better than the equivalent of a chef who doesn’t know the difference between salt and sugar.
Where things are of less practical use, she tends to skip over or at least streamline them. For example, she doesn’t really discuss the role of post-dopamine prolactin in men—but the discussion of post-happiness cortisol covers the same ground anyway, for practical purposes.
Dr. Breuning also looks at where our evolved neurochemical responses go wrong, and lays out guidelines for such challenges as overcoming addiction, or embracing delayed gratification.
Bottom line: this book is a great user-manual for the brain. If you’d like to be happier and more effective with fewer bad habits, this is the book for you.
Click here to check out Habits of a Happy Brain, and get biohacking yours!
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Bamboo Shoots vs Red Cabbage – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing bamboo to red cabbage, we picked the bamboo.
Why?
Both have their merits!
In terms of macros, bamboo has slightly more fiber and protein, while red cabbage has slightly more carbs; the numbers are close though, so we could call this round a tie if not a small nominal win for bamboo.
In the category of vitamins, bamboo has more of vitamins B1, B3, B5, B7, and E, while red cabbage has more of vitamins A, B9, C, and K, yielding a modest 5:4 win to bamboo here.
Looking at minerals, bamboo has more copper, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc, while red cabbage has more calcium, iron, and magnesium, making this one a 6:3 win for bamboo.
In other considerations, red cabbage is higher in polyphenols, so that’s a point in its favor.
Adding up the sections makes for a clear overall win for bamboo, but by all means do enjoy either or both, as diversity is best!
Want to learn more?
You might like:
Don’t Be Bamboozled By Bamboo! ← including how to eat bamboo, for those unfamiliar with such, as we have been asked about it 🙂
Enjoy!
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