Hello Sleep – by Dr. Jade Wu

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We’ve reviewed other sleep books before, so what makes this one stand out?

Mostly, it’s because this one takes quite a different approach.

While still giving a nod to the sensible advice you’ve already read in many places (including here at 10almonds), Dr. Wu looks to help the reader avoid falling into the trap (or: help the reader get out of the trap, if already there) of focussing so much on getting better sleep that it becomes an all-consuming stressor that takes up much of the day thinking about it, and guess what, much of the night too, because you’re busy working out how sleep-deprived you’re going to be tomorrow.

Instead, Dr. Wu recommends to work with your body rather than against it, worry less, and ultimately sleep better. Of course, the “how” of this is what makes most of the book.

She does also give chapters on things that may be different for you, based on such things as hormones, age, or medical conditions.

The writing style is pop-science but with frequent references to scientific papers as appropriate, making good science very accessible.

Bottom line: if you’ve tried everything else and/but good sleep still eludes you, this book will help you to end the battle and make friends with your sleep (a metaphor the author uses throughout the book, by the way).

Click here to check out Hello Sleep, and indeed get better sleep!

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Recommended

  • Healing Trauma – by Dr. Peter Levine
  • Slow-Cooker Moroccan Tagine
    Master the art of tagine with a slow cooker using red onions, red peppers, and a touch of ras el-hanout for an authentic taste.

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  • Prevention Is Better Than Cure

    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.

    Preventative healthcare is the theme this week:

    New year, new risks

    The start of a new year is a great time to update adult vaccinations, including the flu shot, any COVID-19 boosters, and vaccines for pneumonia, shingles, and tetanus—when was your last booster, after all? Vaccination recommendations vary by age and health conditions, so do check what’s appropriate in your case. Key vaccines include the pneumonia vaccine for those 65 and older, the shingles vaccine for adults over 50, and the Tdap vaccine every 10 years to protect against tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis (whooping cough), especially for new parents and grandparents, to protect infants:

    Read in full: Why it’s important to update adult vaccinations for a new year

    Related: The Truth About Vaccines

    The heart-healthiest swap you can do

    Based on a large (n=202,863, of which 160,123 women and 42,740 men) dataset, a higher plant-to-animal protein ratio is associated with significantly lower risks of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and coronary artery disease (CAD), with diets lower in meat (especially if lower in red meat) and instead rich in plant-based proteins like legumes, nuts, and whole grains reducing CVD risk by 19% and coronary artery disease risk by 27%. Which is quite considerable.

    Substituting even small amounts of animal protein (especially if it’s red meat) with plant protein further enhances heart health:

    Read in full: Higher plant-to-animal protein ratio linked to lower risk for CVD, CAD among U.S. adults

    Related: Plant vs Animal Protein: Head to Head

    Let’s keep pan-resistant superbugs at bay

    Researchers want to warn us about the threat of pan-resistant bacteria, which could render all known antibiotics ineffective, leading to a sharp rise in global infection-related deaths.

    To be clear, we don’t have anything pan-resistant yet, but antibiotic-resistant superbugs are getting close, and in the long term, are likely to win the evolutionary arms race if we don’t change things to diverge considerably from our current path. Modeling a hypothetical pan-resistant E. coli strain, researchers predicted U.S. sepsis deaths could increase 18- to 46-fold within five years of its emergence.

    The study calls for urgent action, including stricter antibiotic stewardship, new drug development, and monitoring technologies, emphasizing that without intervention, the global impact could be catastrophic:

    Read in full: A public health emergency is waiting at the bottom of the antibiotic resistance cliff

    Related: Stop Sabotaging Your Immune System ← see also (linked therein), 4 ways antibiotics can kill you

    Take care!

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  • Scattered Minds – by Dr. Gabor Maté

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    This was not the first book that Dr. Maté sat down to write, by far. But it was the first that he actually completed. Guess why.

    Writing from a position of both personal and professional experience and understanding, Dr. Maté explores the inaptly-named Attention Deficit Disorder (if anything, there’s often a surplus of attention, just, to anything and everything rather than necessarily what would be most productive in the moment), its etiology, its presentation, and its management.

    This is a more enjoyable book than some others by the same author, as while this condition certainly isn’t without its share of woes (often, for example, a cycle of frustration and shame re “why can’t I just do the things; this is ruining my life and it would be so easy if I could just do the things!”), it’s not nearly so bleak as entire books about trauma, addiction, and so forth (worthy as those books also are).

    Dr. Maté frames it specifically as a development disorder, and one whereby with work, we can do the development later that (story of an ADHDer’s life) we should have done earlier but didn’t. In terms of practical advice, he includes a program for effecting this change, including as an adult.

    The style is easy-reading, in small chapters, with ADHD’d-up readers in mind, giving a strong sense of speeding pleasantly through the book.

    Bottom line: when it’s a book by Dr. Gabor Maté, you know it’s going to be good, and this is no exception. Certainly read it if you, anyone you care about, or even anyone you just spend a lot of time around, has ADHD or similar.

    Click here to check out Scattered Minds, and unscatter yours!

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  • Can We Side-Step Age-Related Alienation?

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    When The World Moves Without Us…

    We’ve written before about how reduced social engagement can strike people of all ages, and what can be done about it:

    How To Beat Loneliness & Isolation

    …but today we’re going to talk more about a specific aspect of it, namely, the alienation that can come with old age—and other life transitions too, but getting older is something that (unless accident or incident befall us first) all of us will definitely do.

    What’s the difference?

    Loneliness is a status, alienation is more of a process. It can be the alienation in the sense of an implicit “you don’t belong here” message from the world that’s geared around the average person and thus alienates those who are not that (a lack of accessibility to people with disabilities can be an important and very active example of this), and it can also be an alienation from what we’ve previously considered our “niche” in the world—the loss of purpose many people feel upon retirement fits this bill. It can even be a more generalized alienation from our younger selves; it’s easy to have a self-image that doesn’t match one’s current reality, for instance.

    Read more: Estranged by Time: Alienation in the Aging Process

    So, how to “un-alienate”?

    To “un-alienate”, that is to say, to integrate/reintegrate, can be hard. Some things may even be outright impossible, but most will not be!

    Consider how, for example, former athletes become coaches—or for that matter, how former party-goers might become party-hosts (even if the kind of “party” might change with time, give or take the pace at which we like to live our lives).

    What’s important is that we take what matters the most to us, and examine how we can realistically still engage with that thing.

    This is different from trying to hold on grimly to something that’s no longer our speed.

    Letting go of the only thing we’ve known will always be scary; sometimes it’s for the best, and sometimes what we really need is just more of a pivot, like the examples above. The crux lies in knowing which:

    • Is our relationship with the thing (whatever it may be) still working for us, or is it just bringing strife now?
    • If it’s not working for us, is it because of a specific aspect that could be side-stepped while keeping the rest?
    • If we’re going to drop that thing entirely (or be dropped by it, which, while cruel, also happens in life), then where are we going to land?

    This latter is one where foresight is a gift, because if we bury our heads in the sand we’re going to land wherever we’re dropped, whereas if we acknowledge the process, we can make a strategic move and land on our feet.

    Here’s a good pop-science article about this—it’s aimed at people around retirement age, but honestly the advice is relevant for people of all ages, and facing all manner of life transitions, e.g. career transitions (of which retirement is of course the career transition to end all career transitions), relationship transitions (including B/B/B/B: births, betrothals/break-ups, and bereavements) health transitions (usually: life-changing illnesses and/or disabilities—which again, happens to most of us if something doesn’t get us first), etc. So with all that in mind, this becomes more of a “how to reassess your life at those times when it needs reassessing”:

    How to Reassess Your Life in Retirement

    But that doesn’t mean that letting go is always necessary

    Sometimes, the opposite! Sometimes, the age-old advice to “lean in” really is all the situation calls for, which means:

    • Be ready to say “yes” to things, and if nobody’s asking, be ready to “hey, do you wanna…?” and take a “build it and they will come” approach. This includes with people of different ages, too! Intergenerational friendships can be very rewarding for all concerned, if done right. Communities that span age-ranges can be great for this—they might be about special interests (this writer has friends ranging through four generations from playing chess, for instance), they could be religious communities if we be religious, LGBT groups if that fits for us, even mutual support groups such as for specific disabilities or chronic illness if we have such—notice how the very things that might isolate us can also bring us together!
    • Be open-minded to new experiences; it’s easy to get stuck in a rut of “I’ve never done that” and mistake that self-assessment for an uncritical assumption of “I’m not the kind of person who does that”. Sometimes, you really won’t be! But at least think about it and entertain the possibility, before dismissing it out of hand. And, here’s a life tip: it can be really good to (within the realms of safety, and one’s personal moral principles, of course) take an approach of “try anything once”. Even if we’re almost certain we won’t like it, and even if we then turn out to indeed not like it, it can be a refreshing experience—and now we can say “Yep, tried that, not doing that again” from a position of informed knowledge. That’s the only way we get to look back on a richly lived life of broad experiences, after all, and it is never too late for such.
    • Be comfortable prioritizing quality over quantity. This goes for friends, it goes for activities, it goes for experiences. The topic of “what’s the best number of friends to have?” has been a matter of discussion since at least ancient Greek times (Plato and Aristotle examined this extensively), but whatever number we might arrive at, it’s clear that quality is the critical factor, and quantity after that is just a matter of optimizing.

    In short: make sure you’re investing—in your relationships, in your areas of interest, in your community (whatever that may mean for you personally), and most of all, and never forget this: in yourself.

    Take care!

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Related Posts

  • Healing Trauma – by Dr. Peter Levine
  • Habits of a Happy Brain – by Dr. Loretta Graziano Breuning

    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 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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  • Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights? – by Alex Hutchinson

    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.

    This is a book of questions and answers, myths and busts, and in short, all things exercise.

    It’s laid out as many micro-chapters with questions as headers. The explanations are clear and easy to understand, with several citations (of studies and other academic papers) per question.

    While it’s quite comprehensive (weighing in at a hefty 300+ pages), it’s not the kind of book where one could just look up any given piece of information that one wants.

    Its strength, rather, lies in pre-emptively arming the reader with knowledge, and correcting many commonly-believed myths. It can be read cover-to-cover, or just dipped into per what interests you (the table of contents lists all questions, so it’s easy to flip through).

    Bottom line: if you’ve found the world of exercise a little confusing and would like it demystifying, this book will result in a lot of “Oooooh” moments.

    Click here to check out Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights?, and know your stuff!

    PS: the short answer to the titular question is “mix it up and keep it varied”

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  • Cacao vs Carob – Which is Healthier?

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    Our Verdict

    When comparing cacao to carob, we picked the cacao.

    Why?

    It’s close, and may depend a little on your priorities!

    In terms of macros, the cacao has more protein and fat, while the carob has more carbohydrates, mostly sugar. Since people will not generally eat this by the spoonful, and will instead either make drinks or cook with it, we can’t speak for the glycemic index or general health impact of the sugars. As for the fats, on the one hand the cacao does contain saturated fat; on the other, this merely means that different saturated fat will usually be added to the carob if making something with it. Still, slight win for the carob on the fat front. Protein, of course, is entirely in cacao’s favor.

    In the category of vitamins and minerals, they’re about equal on vitamins, while cacao wins easily on the mineral front, boasting more copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, and phosphorus.

    While both have a generous antioxidant content, this one’s another win for cacao, with about 3x the active polyphenols and flavonoids.

    In short: both are good, consumed in moderation and before adding unhealthy extra ingredients—but we say cacao comes out the winner.

    If you’re looking specifically for the above-depicted products, by the way, here they are:

    Cacao powder | Carob powder

    Want to learn more?

    You might like to read:

    Enjoy!

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