To Err Is Human; To Forgive, Healthy
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How To Forgive (And Why)
There’s an old saying that holding onto a grudge is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. If only it were so simple and easy as just choosing to let go!
But it’s not, is it?
When people have wronged us and/or wronged our loved ones, it’s hard to forgive, especially if they have not changed. For that matter, it can be hard to forgive ourselves for mistakes that we made, too.
Either way, “drinking that poison” can be close to literal, in terms of what harboring such anger and resentment can do for our cortisol levels.
So, what to do about it?
If you have a dialogue with the person, our previous article on communication may help a lot.
If you don’t, there are various other angles that can be taken:
The Unsent Letter
You can even send it, if you like, but it’s not the point here. The idea is to write to the person, expressing your grievances. But, (as per the above-linked article on communication) try to focus at least as much on your feelings as their actions. “When you did/said x, I felt y”, etc.
This is important for helping you process your feelings. If you send the letter, it’s also important for the other person to be able to understand your feelings.
Sometimes, we feel the things we do so strongly because we don’t have an outlet for them. Pouring out our emotions in such a fashion, on the other hand, means (to labor the metaphor) they’re no longer bottled up. Even just in and of itself, that can provide us a lot of relief.
And when we the negative emotions are no longer such high pressure, it can be easier to let go of them.
Mindfulness
Following on from the above idea, a good strategy can be simply sitting and feeling everything you need to feel, noticing it without judgement, like a curious observer.
Sometimes what we need is just to be heard, and that starts with hearing ourselves.
Compassion
There’s a Buddhist exercise that involves actively feeling compassion for three people: a loved one, a stranger, and an enemy. Many people report that it’s actually harder to feel compassion for a random stranger, than an enemy. Why? Because we don’t know them; we don’t know what’s good and bad about them in our estimation.
If you’re reading this because you want to be able to gain the peace of being able to forgive someone (even if that someone is yourself), then in at least some respect right now, that person is in the “enemy” category. So how do we unpack that?
To err is human. Everybody screws up sometimes. And also, everyone has a reason (or a complex of reasons) for acting the way they do. This does not mean that those reasons excuse the behavior, but it can explain it.
You don’t get angry at a storm for soaking you through. Even if you might not understand the physics of it in the way a meteorologist might, you understand that there were things that led to that, and you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
So why do we get angry at someone else for wronging us? Even if we might not understand the personal background of it in the way their psychologist or therapist might, we (hopefully) understand that there were things that caused them to be the way they were, and we were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
And ourselves? We probably know, when we made a mistake, why we made it. Maybe we were afraid, insecure, reactive, forgetful, or too focused on some other thing. Whatever it was, we did our best at the time and, apparently, our best wasn’t as good as we’d like.
If we didn’t deserve forgiveness, we wouldn’t be critical of our past selves in the first place.
And, the science is very clear that it’s important for our health for other reasons besides cortisol management, too.
And as for others? They did the best they knew how. Maybe they were afraid, insecure, reactive, forgetful, or too focused on some other thing. Same story, different character.
Remembering that can be key to “accepting the apology we never received”.
Forgiving without forgetting
Developing the ability to forgive is a useful tool for our own mental health. It doesn’t mean we must or even should make ourselves a doormat.
“I forgive you” does not have to mean a clean slate; it means remembering that the thing happened, and just not holding on to the anger/resentment associated with it.
It may be water under the bridge now, but it might have been a devastatingly destructive wave at the time, and continuing to acknowledge truth that is sensible. Just, from a position of peace now, hopefully.
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Beyond Balancing The Books – by George Marino, CPA, CFP
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We hear a lot about the importance of mindfulness, yet how can Zen-like non-attachment to the material world go well with actually surviving (let alone thriving) in a Capitalist society?
Books that try to connect the two often end up botching it badly to the level of early 2000s motivational posters.
So, what does this book do differently? Mostly it’s because rather than a motivational speech with exhortations to operate on a higher plain and manifest your destiny and all that, it gives practical, down-to-earth advice and offers small simple things you can do or change to mindfully engage with the world of business rather than operating on auto-pilot.
Basically: how to cut out the stress without cutting out your performance.
All in all, we think both your health and your productivity will thank you for it!
Take Your Business (and Brain) “Beyond Balancing The Books” Today
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Good to Go – by Christie Aschwanden
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Many of us may more often need to recover from a day of moving furniture than running a marathon, but the science of recovery can still teach us a lot. The author, herself an endurance athlete and much-decorated science journalist, sets out to do just that.
She explores a lot of recovery methods, and examines whether the science actually backs them up, and if so, to what degree. She also, in true science journalism style, talks to a lot of professionals ranging from fellow athletes to fellow scientists, to get their input too—she is nothing if not thorough, and this is certainly not a book of one person’s opinion with something to sell.
Indeed, on the contrary, her findings show that some of the best recovery methods are the cheapest, or even free. She also looks at the psychological aspect though, and why many people are likely to continue with things that objectively do not work better than placebo.
The style is very easy-reading jargon-free pop-science, while nevertheless being backed up with hundreds of studies cited in the bibliography—a perfect balance of readability and reliability.
Bottom line: for those who wish to be better informed about how to recover quickly and easily, this book is a treasure trove of information well-presented.
Click here to check out Good To Go, and always be good to go!
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Water-based Lubricant vs Silicon-based Lubricant – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing water-based lubricant to silicon-based lubricant, we picked the silicon-based.
Why?
First, some real talk about vaginas, because this is something not everyone knows, so let’s briefly cover this before moving onto the differences:
Yes, vaginas are self-lubricating, but a) not always and b) not always sufficiently, especially as we get older. Much like with penile hardness (or lack thereof), there’s a lot of stigma associated with vaginal dryness, and there really needn’t be, because the simple reality is that we don’t live in the fictitious world of porn, and here in the real world, anatomy and physiology can be quite arbitrary at times.
It is this writer’s firm opinion that everyone (or: everyone who is sexual, anyway) should have good quality lube at home—regardless of one’s gender, relationship status, or anything else.
Ok, with that in mind, onwards:
The water-based lube has nine ingredients: water, glycerin, cytopentasioxane, propylene glycol, xantham gum, phenoxyethanol, dimethiconol, triethanolamine, and ethylhexylglycerine.
All of these ingredients are considered body-safe in the doses present, and/but most of them will be absorbed into the skin, especially via the relatively permeable membrane that is the inside of the vagina (or anus—while the microbiome is very different, tissue-wise these are very similar).
While this is not meaningfully toxic, there’s a delicate balance going on in there, and this can upset that balance a little.
Also, because the lube is absorbed into the skin, you’ll then need more, which means either a moment’s inconvenience to add more, or else the risk of chafing, which isn’t fun.
The silicon lube has four ingredients: dimethicone, dimethiconol, cyclomethicone, and tocopheryl acetate.
Note: “tocopheryl acetate” is vitamin E
…which reminds us: just because something is hard to spell, doesn’t mean it’s necessarily bad for us.
What are the other three ingredients, though? They are all silicon compounds, all inert, and all with molecules too big to be absorbed into our skin. Basically they all slide right off, which is entirely the point of lube, after all.
It not being absorbed into our skin is good for our health; it’s also convenient as it means a tiny bit of lube goes a long way.
Any downsides to silicon-based lube?
There are two, and neither are health-related:
- It can damage silicon toys if not cleaned quickly and thoroughly, the silicon of the lube may bond with the silicon of the toy after a while.
- Because it doesn’t just disappear like water-based lube, you might want to put a towel down if you don’t want your bed to be slippy afterwards! The towel can then be put in the laundry as normal.
Want to try it out? Here it is on Amazon
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Natural Remedies and Foods for Osteoarthritis
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It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? You can always hit “reply” to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom!
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
❝Natural solutions for osteoarthritis. Eg. Rosehip tea, dandelion root tea. Any others??? What foods should I absolutely leave alone?❞
We’ll do a main feature on arthritis (in both its main forms) someday soon, but meanwhile, we recommend eating for good bone/joint health and against inflammation. To that end, you might like these main features we did on those topics:
- We Are Such Stuff As Fish Are Made Of (collagen for bone and joint health)
- The Bare-Bones Truth About Osteoporosis (eating for bone health generally)
- Keep Inflammation At Bay (dietary tips for minimizing inflammation—also, our all-time most popular article to date!)
Of these, probably the last one is the most critical, and also will have the speediest effects if implemented.
Don’t Forget…
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You Are the One You’ve Been Waiting For – by Dr. Richard Schwartz
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As self-therapy approaches go, the title here could be read two ways: as pop-psychology fluff, or a suggestion of something deeper. And, while written in a way to make it accessible to all, we’re happy to report the content consists of serious therapeutic ideas, presented clearly.
Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a large, internationally recognized, and popular therapeutic approach. It’s also an approach that lends itself quite well to self-therapy, as this book illustrates.
Dr. Schwartz kicks off by explaining not IFS, but the problem that it solves… We (most of us, anyway) have over the course of our lives tried to plug the gaps in our own unmet psychological needs. And, that can cause resentment, strain, and can even be taken out on others if we’re not careful.
The real meat of the book, however, is in its illustrative explanations of how IFS works, and can be applied by an individual. The goal is to recognize all the parts that make us who we are, understand what they need in order to be at peace, and give them that. Spoiler: most what they will need is just being adequately heard, rather than locked in a box untended.
One of the benefits of using this book for self-therapy, of course, is that it requires a lot less vulnerability with a third party.
But, speaking of which, what of these intimate relationships the subtitle of the book referenced? Mostly the benefits to such come from a “put your own oxygen mask on first” angle… but the book does also cover discussions between intimate partners, and approaches to love, including what the author calls “courageous love”.
Bottom line: this is a great book if you want to do some “spring-cleaning of the soul” and live a little more lightly as a result.
Don’t Forget…
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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!
Don’t Forget…
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Learn to Age Gracefully
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