Four Thousand Weeks – by Oliver Burkeman

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This is not, strictly speaking, a time management book. It’s more a “contemplating mortality and making things count while still doing the necessaries”.

Burkeman’s premise is that we get around 4,000 weeks of life, on average. If we live to 120, it’s more like 6,200. Unlucky souls may have to do the best they can with 1,000 or so.

The book is thought-provoking; consider:

  1. how was your last week?
  2. how will your next week be?
  3. what if it were your last?

Of course, we cannot necessarily liquidate all our assets and spend next week burning out in style, because then the following week comes. So, what’s the solution?

That’s something Burkeman lays out over the course of the book, with key ideas including passion projects and figuring out what can be safely neglected, but there’s far more there than we could sum up here.

Bottom line: if you ever find yourself struggling to balance what is expected of you with what is of value to you, this book can help you get the most out of your choices.

Click here to check out Four Thousand Weeks, and make yours count!

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Recommended

  • The Miracle of Flexibility – by Miranda Esmonde-White
  • Purpose – by Gina Bianchini
    This book goes beyond the typical business advice and shows you how to make a lasting impact on the world using social media.

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  • Apricot vs Banana – Which is Healthier?

    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.

    Our Verdict

    When comparing apricot to banana, we picked the banana.

    Why?

    Both are great, and it was close!

    In terms of macros, apricot has more protein, while banana has more carbs and fiber; both are low glycemic index foods, and we’ll call this category a tie.

    In the category of vitamins, apricot has more of vitamins A, C, E, and K, while banana has more of vitamins B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9, and choline, giving banana the win by strength of numbers. It’s worth noting though that apricots are one of the best fruits for vitamin A in particular.

    When it comes to minerals, apricot has slightly more calcium, iron, and zinc, while banana has a lot more magnesium, manganese, potassium, and selenium, meaning a moderate win for banana here.

    Adding up the sections makes for an overall win for banana—but of course, by all means enjoy either or both!

    Want to learn more?

    You might like to read:

    Top 8 Fruits That Prevent & Kill Cancer ← we argue for apricots as bonus number 9 on the list

    Take care!

    Share This Post

  • With Medical Debt Burdening Millions, a Financial Regulator Steps In to Help

    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.

    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.

    USE OUR CONTENT

    This story can be republished for free (details).

    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

  • Body Image Dissatisfaction/Appreciation Across The Ages

    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.

    Every second news article about body image issues is talking about teens and social media use, but science tells a different story.

    A large (n=1,327) study of people of mixed genders aged 16–88 examined matters relating to people’s body image, expecting…

    ❝We hypothesized that body dissatisfaction and importance of appearance would be higher in women than in men, that body dissatisfaction would remain stable across age in women, and that importance of appearance would be lower in older women compared to younger women. Body appreciation was predicted to be higher in men than in women.❞

    As they discovered, only half of that turned out to be true:

    ❝In line with our hypotheses, body dissatisfaction was higher in women than in men and was unaffected by age in women, and importance of appearance was higher in women than in men.

    However, only in men did age predict a lower level of the importance of appearance. Compared to men, women stated that they would invest more hours of their lives to achieve their ideal appearance.

    Contrary to our assumption, body appreciation improved and was higher in women across all ages than in men.❞

    You can read the study in full here:

    Body Dissatisfaction, Importance of Appearance, and Body Appreciation in Men and Women Over the Lifespan

    That’s a lot of information, and we don’t have the space to go into all parts of it here, fascinating as that would be. So we’re going to put two pieces of information (from the above) next to each other:

    • body dissatisfaction was higher in women than in men and was unaffected by age in women
    • body appreciation improved and was higher in women across all ages than in men

    …and resolve this apparent paradox.

    Dissatisfied appreciation

    How is it that women are both more dissatisfied with, and yet also more appreciative of, their bodies?

    The answer is that we can have positive and negative feelings about the same thing, without them cancelling each other out. In short, simply, feeling more feelings about it.

    Whether the gender-related disparity in this case comes more from hormones or society could be vigorously debated, but chances are, it’s both. And, for our gentleman-readers, note that the principle still applies to you, even if scaled down on average.

    Call to action:

    • be aware of the negative feelings of body dissatisfaction
    • focus on the positive feelings of body appreciation

    While in theory both could motivate us to action, in reality, the former will tend to inform us (about what we might wish to change), while the latter will actually motivate us in a useful way (to do something positive about it).

    This is because the negative feelings about body image tend to be largely based in shame, and shame is a useless motivator (i.e., it simply doesn’t work) when it comes to taking positive actions:

    Why Shame Only Works Negatively

    You can’t hate yourself into a body you love

    That may sound like a wishy-washy platitude, but given the evidence on how shame works (and doesn’t), it’s true.

    Instead, once you’ve identified the things about your body with which you’re dissatisfied, you can then assess:

    • what can reasonably be changed
    • whether it is important enough to you to change it
    • how to go about usefully changing it

    While weight issues are perhaps the most commonly-discussed body image consideration, to the point that often all others get forgotten, let’s look at something that’s generally more specific to adults, and also a very common cause of distress for women and men alike: hair loss/thinning.

    If your hair is just starting to thin and fall, then if this bothers you, there’s a lot that can be done about it quite easily, but (and this is important) you have to love yourself enough to actually do it. Merely feeling miserable about it, and perhaps like you don’t deserve better, or that it is somehow a personal failing on your part, will not help.

    If your hair has been gone for years, then chances are you’ve made your peace with this by now, and might not even take it back if a fairy godmother came along and offered to restore it magically. On the other hand, let’s say that you’re just coming out the other end of a 10-year-long depression, and perhaps you let a lot of things go that you now wish you hadn’t, and maybe your hair is one of them. In this case, now you need to decide whether getting implants (likely the only solution at this late stage) is worth it.

    Note that in both cases, whatever the starting point and whether the path ahead is easy or hard, the person who has dissatisfaction and/but still values themself and their body will get what they need.

    In contrast, the person who has dissatisfaction and does not value themself and their body, will languish.

    The person without dissatisfaction, of course, probably already has what they need.

    In short: identification of dissatisfaction + love and appreciation of oneself and one’s body → motivation to usefully take action (out of love, not hate)

    Now, dear reader, apply the same thinking to whatever body image issues you may have, and take it from there!

    Embodiment

    A quick note in closing: if you are a person with no body dissatisfactions, there are two main possible reasons:

    • You are genuinely happy with your body in all respects. Congratulations!
    • You have disassociated from your body to such an extent that it’s become a mere vehicle to you and you don’t care about it.

    This latter may seem like a Zen-level win, but in fact it’s a warning sign for depression, so please do examine that even if you don’t “feel” depressed (depression is often characterized by a lack of feelings), perhaps by taking the (very quick) free PHQ9 Test ← under 2 minutes; immediate results; industry-standard diagnostic tool

    Take care!

    Share This Post

Related Posts

  • The Miracle of Flexibility – by Miranda Esmonde-White
  • With Medical Debt Burdening Millions, a Financial Regulator Steps In to Help

    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.

    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.

    USE OUR CONTENT

    This story can be republished for free (details).

    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.

    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:

  • Eye Exercises That Measurably Improve Your Vision

    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.

    Our eyesight, like most of the rest of our body’s functions, will decline if not adequately maintained. Modern lifestyles see most of us indoors for most of the day (which means a reduced maximum focal length) and often looking at screens (even further reduced focal length), which means that part of our eyes responsible for focus will tend to atrophy and wither. And if we want to see something better, we adjust the settings instead of adjusting our eyes. However, it is perfectly possible to recover our clear youthful vision:

    See the results for yourself (and see them clearly!)

    The exercises that gave him the results he showed between the two tests, are:

    1. Blink for 30 seconds
    2. Focus on something in front and (keeping your focus on that stationary point) move your head left & right, upwards & downwards, and diagonally
    3. Take a break and blink for 30 seconds
    4. Keep your head still while you move your eyes left & right, upwards & downwards, and diagonally
    5. Focus on something in front while you move move your head left & right, upwards & downwards, and diagonally

    This should temporarily improve your vision immediately, because of what has been going on in the capillaries in and around your eyes, but sustained results require sustained (i.e. daily) practice. This is because the vasculature is only part of the mechanism; it’s also a matter of improving the muscles responsible for focusing the eyes—and like any muscles, it’s not a case of “do it once and enjoy the results forever”. So, even just 2–3 minutes each day is recommended.

    For more on all of this plus a visual demonstration, enjoy:

    Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

    Want to learn more?

    You might also like to read:

    Are Your Glasses Making Your Eyesight Worse?

    or, if you are very serious about having excellent vision for life:

    Vision for Life, Revised Edition – by Dr. Meir Schneider ← this one’s a book, and a very good one at that

    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:

  • Edam vs Gouda – Which is Healthier?

    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.

    Our Verdict

    When comparing edam to gouda, we picked the edam.

    Why?

    There’s not a lot between them, but there are some differences:

    In terms of macros, their numbers are all close enough that one may beat the other by decimal place rounding, so we’ll call this a tie. Same goes for their fat type breakdowns; per 100g they both have 18g saturated, 8g monounsaturated, and 1g polyunsaturated.

    In the category of vitamins, edam has slightly more of vitamins A, B1, B2, and B3, while gouda has slightly more of vitamins B5 and B9. A modest 4:2 win for edam.

    When it comes to minerals, edam has more calcium, iron, and potassium, while gouda is not higher in any minerals. A more convincing win for edam.

    In short, enjoy either or both in moderation, but if you’re going to choose one over the other, edam is the way to go.

    Want to learn more?

    You might like to read:

    Can Saturated Fats Be Healthy?

    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: