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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10 Tips To Reduce Morning Pain & Stiffness With Arthritis
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Physiotherapist and osteoarthritis specialist Dr. Alyssa Kuhn has professional advice:
Just the tips
We’ll not keep them a mystery; they are:
- Perform movements that target the range of motion in stiff joints, especially in knees and hips, to prevent them from being stuck in limited positions overnight.
- Use relaxation techniques like a hot shower, heating pad, or light reading before bed to reduce muscle tension and stiffness upon waking.
- Manage joint swelling during the day through gentle movement, compression sleeves, and self-massage .
- Maintain a balanced level of activity throughout the day to avoid excessive stiffness from either overactivity or, on the flipside, prolonged inactivity.
- Use pillows to support joints, such as placing one between your knees for hip and knee arthritis, and ensure you have a comfortable pillow for neck support.
- Eat anti-inflammatory foods prioritizing fruits and vegetables to reduce joint stiffness, and avoid foods high in added sugar, trans-fats, and saturated fats.
- Perform simple morning exercises targeting stiff areas to quickly relieve stiffness and ease into your daily routine.
- Engage in strength training exercises 2–3 times per week to build stronger muscles around the joints, which can reduce stiffness and pain.
- Ensure you get 7–8 hours of restful sleep, as poor sleep can increase stiffness and pain sensitivity the next day. 10almonds note: we realize there’s a degree of “catch 22” here, but we’re simply reporting her advice. Of course, do what you can to prioritize being able to get the best quality sleep you can.
- Perform gentle movements or stretches before bed to keep joints limber, focusing on exercises that feel comfortable and soothing.
For more on each of these plus some visual demonstrations, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
- Avoiding/Managing Osteoarthritis
- Avoiding/Managing Rheumatoid Arthritis
- Managing Chronic Pain (Realistically!)
Take care!
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The Off-Button For Your Brain
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The Off-Button For Your Brain
We evolved our emotions for our own benefit as a species. Even the “negative” ones:
- Stress keeps us safe by making sure we take important situations seriously
- Anger keeps us safe by protecting us from threats
- Disgust keeps us safe by helping us to avoid things that might cause disease
- Anxiety keeps us safe by ensuring we don’t get complacent
- Guilt keeps us safe by ensuring we can function as a community
- Sadness keeps us safe by ensuring we value things that are important to us, and learn to become averse to losing them
- …and so on
But that’s not always useful. What was once a very good response to a common source of fear (for example, a sabre-toothed tiger) is no longer a helpful response to a modern source of fear (for example, an important interview).
Sometimes it’s good to take the time and energy to process our feelings and the event(s) that prompted those feelings. Sometimes, we don’t have that luxury.
For example, if you are stressed about your workload? Then staying awake half the night thinking about it is only going to make your problems worse the next day.
So, how to switch that off, or at least put a pause on it?
The human mind tends to have a “negative bias”, evolved for our own protection. If something is “good enough”, we don’t need to worry about it, so we move on to the next thing, until we find something that is a problem, then we dwell on that. That’s not always helpful, and the good news is, there’s a way to flip the switch on this process:
Identifying the positive, and releasing the rest
This exercise can be done when you’re trying to sleep, or at any time you need a calmer, quieter mind.
Take a moment to notice whatever you’re experiencing.
If it’s something that feels good, or neutral, identify it with a single word. For example:
- Warmth
- Soft
- Security
- Smile
- Peace
If it’s something that feels bad, then instead of identifying it, simply say (or think) to yourself “release”.
You can’t fight bad feelings with force, and you can’t “just not think about them”, but you can dismiss them as soon as they arrive and move onto the next thing. So where your train of thought may previously have been:
It’s good to be in bed ➔ I have eight hours to sleep before my meeting ➔ Have I done everything I was supposed to? ➔ I hope that what I’ve done is good enough ➔ [Mentally rehearsing how the meeting might go] ➔ [various disaster preparations] ➔ What am I even going to wear? ➔ Ugh I forgot to do the laundry ➔ That reminds the electricity bill is due ➔ Etc
Now your train of thought may be more like:
Relief ➔ Rest ➔ But my meeti—release ➔ If I—release ➔ soft ➔ comfort ➔ release ➔ pillow ➔ smile ➔ release ➔ [and before you know it you’re asleep]
And if you do this in a situation where you’re not going to sleep? Same process, just a more wakeful result, for example, let’s move the scene to an office where your meeting will shortly take place:
Five minutes to go ➔ What a day ➔ Ok, I’d better clear my head a bit ➔ release ➔ release ➔ breath ➔ light ➔ chair ➔ what if—release ➔ prepared ➔ ready ➔ calm ➔ [and before you know it you’re impressing your work associate with your calm preparedness]
In summary:
If you need to stop a train of thought, this method may help. Especially if you’re in a situation where you can’t use some external distraction to keep you from thinking about the bad thing!
You’re probably still going to have to deal with the Bad Thing™ at some point—you’ve just recognized that now isn’t the time for that. Mentally postpone that so that you will be well-rested when you choose to deal with the Bad Thing™ later at your convenience.
So remember: identify the positive (with a single word), and anything else, just release.
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Best Salt for Neti Pots?
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❓ Q&A With 10almonds Subscribers!
Q: What kind of salt is best for neti pots?
A: Non-iodised salt is usually recommended, but really, any human-safe salt is fine. By this we mean for example:
- Sodium chloride (like most kitchen salts),
- Potassium chloride (as found in “reduced sodium” kitchen salts), or
- Magnesium sulfate (also known as epsom salts).
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100 Things Productive People Do – by Nigel Cumberland
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This is a book of a hundred small chapters (the book is 396 pages, so 2–3 pages per chapter) which makes for a feeling of quick reading, and definitely gives an option of “light bites”, dipping into the book here and there.
Cumberland offers a wide range of practical wisdom here, and while the book is (per the title) focused on productivity, it also includes all due weight to not burning out and/or breaking down. Because things productive people do does not, it turns out, include working themselves directly into an early grave.
But—despite the author’s considerable and obvious starting point of social privilege—nor is this a tome of “offer your genius leadership and otherwise just coast while everyone does your work for you”, either. This is a “brass tacks” book and highly relatable whether your to-do list most prominently features “personally manage the merger of these Fortune 500 companies” or “sort out that junk in the spare room”
Bottom line: we’d be surprised if this book with 100 pieces of advice failed to bring you enough value to more than pay for itself!
Pick up your copy of 100 Things Productive People Do from Amazon today!
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The Good, The Bad, & The Vigorously Debated
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This week in health news sees some pretty varied topics:
One more reason to care about the gut-brain axis
Stroke is a top killer in much of the industrialized world, usually making it into the top-few list on a per-country basis. And, it’s rising in prevalence, too. This is partly because our longevity is increasing so age-related things kill us more often, statistically, than age-unrelated things. But that’s only part of the reason; another is that our lifestyle (on the national level) is becoming more conducive to stroke. Diet is a large contributor to that, and gut health has now been identified as a key factor.
What recent research has shown is that minutes after a stroke occurs, normal gut anatomy is disrupted, and cells responsible for gut barrier integrity are eroded, and bugs from the gut get into the blood, and arrive at the (newly damaged) brain vasculature, where the blood-brain barrier is often also compromised on account of the stroke.
Because of this, critical to reducing post-stroke neuroinflammation (something that makes stroke damage more severe and recovery a lot harder) is improving the gut’s ability to heal itself quickly.
This can be helped with a dose of Insulin-like Growth Factor (IGF-1), but there are other things that can help or hinder, and those other things are modifiable by us as individuals in our lifestyle choices (e.g. a gut-healthy diet with plenty of fiber, and avoiding gut-unhealthy things like sugar and alcohol that feed C. albicans growths that will put roots through your intestines and make holes as they do), because the better/worse your gut barrier integrity is to start with, the easier/harder it will be for your gut to repair itself quickly:
Read in full: Healing the gut can reduce long-term impact of stroke
Related: Stop Sabotaging Your Gut
How about that seasonal lead-spiced hot drink?
Lead contamination in ground spices has become a bit of an issue, ground turmeric has had quite some flak in this regard, and now the spotlight is on cinnamon.
These reports, by the way, do not specify what kind of cinnamon (i.e. cassia vs Ceylon), however, clicking through to assorted sources and then doing our own digging finds that all cinnamon products we found listed as contaminated, were cassia cinnamon. This is unsurprising, as a) it’s cheaper b) it’s the kind most readily found on shelves in the US. That said, when it comes to Ceylon (sweet) cinnamon, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, so that doesn’t mean they got the all-clear on lead contamination, but rather, that they haven’t received the same scrutiny as yet.
It’s worth noting that cinnamon sticks have been found to have less contamination than ground cinnamon, though.
It’s also worth noting that since some adulterated products have had lead added deliberately in increase the weight and darken the color, this is more likely to happen to cassia cinnamon than sweet cinnamon because cassia cinnamon is visibly darker, so adding a darkening agent to sweet cinnamon would just make it look like cassia (which no seller would want to do since cassia is the cheaper of the two).
Read in full: Why lead-tainted cinnamon products have turned up on shelves, and what questions consumers should ask
Related: Sweet Cinnamon vs Regular Cinnamon – Which is Healthier? ← this also covers toxicity issues, by the way
A matter of life and death
Assisted dying is currently legal in 10/40 US states, and Canada. Over in the UK, it’s being debated (and voted on) in Parliament today, at time of writing.
While bodily autonomy discussions are usually quite straightforward arguments between the very separate camps of
- “my body, my choice” vs
- “they shouldn’t be allowed to do that”,
…this one comes with a considerable middleground, because
- “people should have to right to end things without extra suffering and on their own terms”, and
- “many disabled people fear being placed in a position of having justify why they are not exercising their right to die when it might be cheaper and easier for others if they did”
…are positions with a lot of potential overlap.
In any case, we know most of our readers are in the US, but with a 10/40 split in US states (and some recent controversies in Canada), it’s likely a topic that’ll come up for most people at some point, so it’s good to understand it, and this is as good an opportunity as any:
Read in full: How would the assisted dying bill work and what issues might it create?
Related: Managing Your Mortality ← this talks about psychological/social considerations, as well as end-of-life care, palliative care (which is not quite the same thing!) and euthanasia in various forms, including the unofficial kind that you might want to be aware of if you want to avoid that happening.
Take care!
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How Internal Organs Can Be Affected By Spicy Foods (Doctor Explains)
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.
Capsaicin has an array of health-giving properties in moderation, but consumed in immoderation and/or without building up tolerance first, can cause problems—serious health issues such as heart attacks, brain spasms, torn esophagus, and even death can occur.
Heating up
Capsaicin, the compound that gives peppers their “heat”, is a chemical irritant and neurotoxin that activates pain receptors (TRPV1) tricking the brain into sensing heat, leading to a burning sensation, sweating, and flushing. The pain signal can also trigger the fight-or-flight response, causing a surge of adrenaline. Endorphins are eventually released, creating a pain-relief effect similar to a runner’s high, and ultimately it reduces systemic inflammation, boosts the metabolism, and increases healthy longevity.
However, in cases of extreme consumption and/or lack of preparation, woe can befall, for example:
- A man ruptured his esophagus after vomiting from eating a ghost pepper.
- A participant experienced severe brain blood vessel constriction (reversible cerebral vasoconstriction syndrome) after eating a Carolina reaper.
- A 25-year-old suffered permanent heart damage from cayenne pepper pills due to restricted blood flow.
- A teenager died after the “one chip challenge,” although the cause of death was undetermined.
So, what does moderation and preparation look like?
Moderation can be different to different people, since genetics do play a part—some people have more TRPV1 receptors than other people. However, for all people (unless in case of having an allergy or similar), acclimatization is important, and a much bigger factor than genetics.
Writer’s anecdote: on the other hand, when my son was a toddler I once left the room and came back to find him cheerfully drinking hot sauce straight from the bottle, so it can be suspected that genetics are definitely relevant too, as while I did season his food and he did already enjoy curries and such, he didn’t exactly have a background of entering chili-eating competitions.
Still, regardless of genes (unless you actually have a medical condition that disallows this), a person who regularly eats spicy food will develop an increasing tolerance for spicy food, and will get to enjoy the benefits without the risks, provided they don’t suddenly jump way past their point of tolerance.
On which note, in this video you can also see what happens when Dr. Deshauer goes from biting a jalapeño (relatively low on the Scoville heat scale) to biting a Scotch bonnet pepper (about 10x higher on the Scoville heat scale):
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Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
Capsaicin For Weight Loss And Against Inflammation
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
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