How to Be Miserable: 40 Strategies You Already Use – by Dr. Randy Paterson
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What would you do if you wanted to make your life as miserable as possible? Maybe you’d ensure you are sleep-deprived; maybe you’d adjust your diet and exercise to make disease as likely as possible. Maybe you’d be a consumer of addictive substances. But these are easy, entry-level ways to be miserable—most people do them already!
Psychologist Dr. Paterson lays out advice to take things to the next level. After covering the above, he gives many more tips, ranging from rehearsing the regrettable past, to constructing future Hells. Engaging in toxic positivity to maximize the blows when bad things happen, and insisting on perfection (to make failure more likely, if not inevitable).
But still, one can do more. In fact, the author recommends giving 100% to one’s work (he neglected to advise giving 100% when giving blood, perhaps because that would become only a short-lived problem), dropping your boundaries, and at the same time having the highest expectations of others—all the better to feel worse when they turn out to be fallible humans merely doing their best.
Each of these wise pieces of advice and many more (there are 40 strategies, after all) get a short chapter to them, explained clearly so that the reader can easily apply them in life.
There’s also a small follow-up about what to do if, for whatever reason, you’ve decided you’ve had enough of your carefully-constructed miserable lifestyle, and would like to flip the tips to try a change of pace instead.
Bottom line: this is all very effective advice, and how you choose to put this information into practice is up to you!
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Leek vs Onion – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing leek to onion, we picked the leek.
Why?
In terms of macros, leek has more fiber, carbs, and protein; not by much, but it’s a nominal win for leeks in this category.
In the category of vitamins, leek has more of vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9, C, E and K, while onions are not higher in any vitamins; a complete win for leeks here.
Looking at minerals, leek has more calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, and selenium, while onions have more zinc; another easy win for leeks.
Adding up the sections makes for a clear overall win for leeks, but by all means enjoy either or both; diversity is good!
Want to learn more?
You might like:
Enjoy!
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The Five Key Traits Of Healthy Aging
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The Five Keys Of Aging Healthily
Image courtesy of Peter Prato. This is Dr. Daniel Levitin. He’s a neuroscientist, and his research focuses on aging, the brain, health, productivity, and creativity. Also music, and he himself is an accomplished musician also, but we’re not going to be focusing on that today.
We’re going to be looking at the traits that, according to science, promote healthy longevity in old age. In other words, the things that increase our healthspan, from the perspective of a cognitive scientist.
What does he say we should do?
Dr. Levitin offers us what he calls the “COACH” traits:
- Curiosity
- Openness
- Associations
- Conscientiousness
- Healthy practices
By “associations”, he means relationships. However, that would have made the acronym “CORCH”, and decisions had to be made.
Curiosity
Leonardo da Vinci had a list of seven traits he considered most important.
We’ll not go into those today (he is not our featured expert of the day!), but we will say that he agreed with Dr. Levitin on what goes at the top of the list: curiosity.
- Without curiosity, we will tend not to learn things, and learning things is key to keeping good cognitive function in old age
- Without curiosity, we will tend not to form hypotheses about how/why things are the way they are, so we will not exercise imagination, creativity, problem-solving, and other key functions of our brain
- Without curiosity, we will tend not to seek out new experiences, and consequently, our stimuli will be limited—and thus, so will our brains
Openness
Being curious about taking up ballroom dancing will do little for you, if you are not also open to actually trying it. But, openness is not just a tag-on to curiosity; it deserves its spot in its own right too.
Sometimes, ideas and opportunities come to us unbidden, and we have to be able to be open to those too. This doesn’t mean being naïve, but it does mean having at least a position of open-minded skepticism.
Basically, Dr. Levitin is asking us to be the opposite of the pejorative stereotype of “an old person stuck in their ways”.
Associations
People are complex, and so they bring complexities to our lives. Hopefully, positively stimulating ones. Without them to challenge us (again, hopefully in a positive way), we can get very stuck in a narrow field of experience.
And of course, having at least a few good friends has numerous benefits to health. There’s been a lot of research on this; 5 appears to be optimal.
- More than that, and the depth tends to tail off, and/or stresses ensue from juggling too many relationships
- Fewer than that, and we might be only a calendar clash away from loneliness
Friends provide social stimulation and mutual support; they’re good for our mental health and even our physiological immunity (counterintuitively, by means of shared germs).
And, a strong secure romantic relationship is something that has been found time and again to extend healthy life.
Note: by popular statistics, this benefit is conferred upon men partnered with women, men partnered with men, women partnered with women, but not women partnered with men.
There may be a causative factor that’s beyond the scope of this article which is about cognitive science, not feminism, but there could also be a mathematical explanation for this apparent odd-one-out:
Since women tend to live longer than men (who are also often older than their female partners), women who live the longest are often not in a relationship—precisely because they are widows. So these long-lived widows will tend to skew the stats, through no fault of their husbands.
On the flipside of this, for a woman to predecease her (statistically older and shorter-lived) husband will often require that she die quite early (perhaps due to accident or illness unrelated to age), which will again skew the stats to “women married to men die younger”, without anything nefarious going on.
Conscientiousness
People who score highly in the character trait “conscientiousness” will tend to live longer. The impact is so great, that a child’s scores will tend to dictate who dies in their 60s or their 80s, for example.
What does conscientiousness mean? It’s a broad character trait that’s scored in psychometric tests, so it can be things that have a direct impact on health, such as brushing one’s teeth, or things that are merely correlated, such as checking one’s work for typos (this writer does her best!).
In short, if you are the sort of person who attends to the paperwork for your taxes on time, you are probably also the sort of person who remembers to get your flu vaccination and cancer screening.
Healthy practices
This means “the usual things”, such as:
- Healthy diet (Mediterranean Diet consistently scores up top)
- Good exercise (especially the tendency to keep moving in general)
- Good sleep (7–9 hours, no compromises)
- Not drinking (or at least only very moderate consumption, but the only safe amount is zero)
- Not smoking (just don’t; there is no wiggle room on this one)
Want to learn more?
You can check out his book, which we reviewed all so recently, and you can also enjoy this video, in which he talks about matters concerning healthy aging from a neuroscientist’s perspective, ranging from heart health and neurodegeneration, to the myth of failing memory, to music and lifespan and more:
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Acupuncture vs Massage, For Jaw Release!
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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!
No question/request too big or small 😎
❝I was wondering if there have been any studies showing the comparison between Acupuncture for jaw release and using Massage?❞
Thanks for asking! We will start by assuming that you are referring to myofascial release of the temporomandibular joint, and not, say, unhinging your jaw like a snake*.
*If you do want to unhinge your jaw like a snake, then a) we do not recommend that b) anecdotally, we may comment that massage can certainly achieve it if sufficiently vigorous, but we hope you’ll forgive us if for legal reasons we don’t write a how-to.
Silliness aside and addressing the more serious question, the answer is yes there has, albeit not much and the quality of evidence remains low.
First, let’s look at the evidence for massage:
❝Three studies showed significant improvements in headache intensity and frequency following TMJ or orofacial physiotherapy. One study favored the control group, and one showed no significant difference. However, variability in study quality, therapist roles, and poorly reported interventions limited comparability and prevented meta-analysis.❞
Translating from sciencese:
“We don’t know, because we got mixed results and the methodology was sloppy”
You can read the paper in full, here: The effectiveness of physiotherapy for chronic headaches in patients with temporomandibular disorders: a systematic review
And now, let’s look at the evidence for acupuncture:
❝the evidence for acupuncture for TMD management, especially for TMJ and masseter muscles pain, is weak❞
~ this after about 3,000 words detailing the litany of failures in methodology.
You can find the paper itself here: Acupuncture for treating temporomandibular joint disorders: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized, sham-controlled trials ← unfortunately, you can’t read this one in full unless you have institutional access or want to buy access from the journal. Failing that, you can trust us that it wasn’t inspiring reading.
Finally, let’s look at the evidence for each when compared head-to-head (so to speak):
❝There was moderate evidence that classical acupuncture had a positive influence beyond those of placebo (three trials, 65 participants); had positive effects similar to those of occlusal splint therapy (three trials, 160 participants); and was more effective for TMD symptoms than physical therapy (four trials, 397 participants), indomethacin plus vitamin B1 (two trials, 85 participants), and a wait-list control (three trials, 138 participants). Only two RCTs addressed adverse events and reported no serious adverse events.❞
Source: Acupuncture for temporomandibular disorders: a systematic review
👆 So this one was the most positive towards acupuncture, but even we were not able to find the full text for this one. It’s not merely paywalled like the previous one (for which we enjoy institutional access and can read it on your behalf), rather this one’s simply not there. All we can find is the abstract, so we cannot comment on the validity of their claims, and can rather only report that those are the claims they make.
In summary:
- Yes, science has been done
- No, it isn’t very compelling
About the best we can say is that if you want to try it, the (admittedly weak) evidence that exists suggests it is quite safe.
Want to learn more?
You might like our main feature on…
How Does One Test Acupuncture Against Placebo Anyway?
Take care!
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How Mood Drugs & Sleep Problems Affect Women’s Hormones
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.
…and other items from this week’s health news:
Sleep, drugs, and mixed messages
Most people know that irregular sleep, shift work, jet lag, and artificial light at night can disturb one’s circadian rhythm, but menstrual cycles? Yes, that too!
How this happens: it’s because the timing systems are deeply connected; the brain’s “master clock” interacts with reproductive systems, linking daily and monthly cycles. Furthermore, shorter daylight lengthens reproductive cycles, while longer daylight shortens them, showing sensitivity to seasonal changes—or anything your body might reasonably mistake for a seasonal change (given the ubiquity of bright lights these days).
The same study also found that mood stabilizers have hormonal side effects: lithium, used for bipolar disorder, can lengthen circadian rhythms and disrupt hormonal cycles.
You may be wondering: is this of any relevance to me, postmenopause? And the answer is: it depends, because if you’re on HRT, chances are your body will still adapt to a monthly cycle—even without ova to ovulate (and so forth), the hypothalamus will still regulate the metabolism of your estrogen, no matter whether that estrogen came from your ovaries or a pharmacy. However, the symptoms should be much less severe, and you shouldn’t experience bleeding after the first 6 months or so.
Read in full: How disrupted sleep and mood drugs impact women’s hormonal and mental health
Related: The Other Circadian Rhythms
Long COVID extra bad for many women
Long COVID, short end of the stick? It certainly seems so:
Researchers (Dr. Jacqueline Maybin et al.) have found that women with long COVID face higher risk of abnormal uterine bleeding, with symptoms like fatigue, headaches, and muscle pain worsening during perimenstrual and proliferative phases.
How this happens: Dr. Maybin and her team found a cluster of immune cells in the endometrium of affected women, pointing to inflammation as a likely mechanism rather than ovarian hormone disruption. Which is not too shocking, all things considered (long COVID being an ongoing systemic response to an infection long after it should have been necessary), but it’s good to know.
And, in terms of “what we know”, the science for this one is about as sure as science ever is about anything, as it came from three approaches—data from 12,187 women, a three-month clinical follow-up of women with long COVID, and an analysis of blood and endometrial samples.
Since long COVID affects 3–7% of the global population and is twice as common in women, this is pretty important—not just as trivia, but for practical reasons too; it means that menstrual cycle phases should be factored into long COVID biomarkers (something the researchers also called for in their paper).
Read in full: Study reveals bidirectional relationship between long COVID and menstrual disorders
Related: What Can Be Done About Long COVID?
A reasonable, yet unexpected, extra cancer risk
Researchers (Dr. Mariah Bilalaga et al.) found that nonadherence to cervical screenings (i.e., simply not getting it done when invited/recommended to do so by healthcare providers) went up since the pandemic—most likely a side effect of people initially consciously avoiding unnecessarily going to places where one might get infected, and then developing a new habit around same, whether or not the habit is consciously upheld or just habit now for many.
However, while COVID does continue to be risk, so is cancer, and recommendations are to go get screenings when invited/recommended all the same.
Somehow, awareness of the HPV vaccine (that helps prevent cervical cancer, because most cervical cancer is caused by that virus) also dropped, which hasn’t helped cervical cancer numbers stay under control, either:
Read in full: Nonadherence to cervical cancer screening increased after COVID-19 pandemic
Related: Everything you need to know about cervical cancer
Take care!
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Surprising New (Healthy!) Compounds Found In Cannabis Leaves
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…and other items from this week’s health science news:
The other cannabis chemicals
Researchers (Dr. Magriet Muller et al.) found the first evidence of rare flavoalkaloids in cannabis leaves, revealing previously overlooked medicinal compounds in plant material that’s often treated as waste.
In particular, Dr. Muller and her team identified 79 phenolic compounds across three cannabis strains, including 25 never before reported in cannabis and 16 rare flavoalkaloids that are seldom found in nature.
As regular 10almonds readers will know, flavonoids and related polyphenols are important for antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and anticancer reasons, so these newly-detected compounds look set to expand cannabis’s biomedical relevance beyond cannabinoids.
But it goes further than that in this case because of the rare flavoalkaloids, although those were concentrated mainly in the leaves of one strain, showing that chemical composition can differ dramatically even among a small number of cannabis varieties.
Read in full: Don’t toss cannabis leaves: Scientists found rare compounds with medical potential
Related: Cannabis Myths vs Reality
Back up your brain
Ok, so it’s not quite like in science fiction yet! These digital “brain twins” aren’t conscious or sentient replicas, but rather are used as predictive tools designed to model disease progression, test treatments virtually, and improve scientific understanding without direct risk to the person.
More specifically, they’re personalized computational models built from an individual’s brain data (including such things as MRI-scanned anatomy, functional activity, and connectivity maps) to simulate how that specific brain functions and changes over time. This means that instead of relying on broad population averages, clinicians can test interventions on a patient’s digital twin first, improving safety, precision, and treatment outcomes (and, once the tech is rolled out, saving costs, too).
A current example is how epilepsy research is already using patient-specific digital brain models to identify seizure origins and help guide surgery.
That said, the brain’s complexity across multiple spatial and temporal scales demands enormous computing power, making whole-brain high-resolution simulation extremely difficult for now.
Read in full: A virtual copy of your brain? Scientists say it’s closer than you think
Related: Are Brain Chips Safe?
What climate change will do to your brain health
A lot of older people consider that climate change is a younger people’s problem, if indeed a problem at all. However, researchers (Dr. Anna Ranta et al.) have found that climate change is becoming a major global brain health threat because environmental changes (especially increases in heat) raise both stroke risk and stroke mortality.
This is because increased heat can not only dehydrate your body, but also thicken your blood and increase clot formation, all of which raise the risk of ischemic stroke.
It’s not just the heat itself, though; many things that are becoming increasingly common as climate change progresses, such as rapid temperature swings, humidity shifts, barometric pressure changes, wildfires, and dust or sandstorms can elevate blood pressure, strain your cardiovascular system, and damage blood vessels, again raising stroke risk and increasing the severity when stroke does occur.
Notably, more than 20% of global strokes are attributed to air pollution, with wildfire smoke and particulate matter contributing by damaging blood vessel walls after entering your lungs and, from there, your bloodstream.
In other words, as the researchers show, climate change is increasingly a neurological and cardiovascular public health emergency, making stroke prevention partly dependent on climate change mitigation.
Read in full: Climate change a global threat to brain health, stroke experts say
Related: Stay Safe From Heat Exhaustion & Heatstroke!
Take care!
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What To Eat, Take, & Do Before & After A Surgery
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.
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!
No question/request too big or small 😎
❝Am about to have hip operation. Have been told to avoid various health supplements, but would be in interested to know your thoughts on what it is actually good to eat! Subject for an article, maybe? Keep up the good work!❞
Thank you, and indeed!
In the category of supplements, you’ve probably been warned off vitamins B7 and E, and in general supplements and/or medications that affect blood clotting (with garlic extract likely being on the list, as well as aspirin, warfarin, etc), and anti-inflammatories (be they supplements or medications). Less common specific vetoes (being generally considered under the umbrella of “things with anti-inflammatory properties”) include fish oil and glucosamine, with a similar rationale.
You may be wondering: why don’t we want anti-inflammatories?
And the answer is: because inflammation, annoying as it may be, is the initial part of the healing process, so we don’t want to compromise that (yet, at least; later becomes more reasonable again).
These supplements are best avoided for at least two weeks before surgery.
You may also have been advised to eat a “low-residual diet” for one or more days before you have to fully fast for the operation. The idea of this is to clear out your gastrointestinal tract as much as is reasonably and safely possible, because general anesthetic does not discriminate, which means various sphincters (including your esophageal sphincter and your anal sphincters*) will relax, and the surgeon doesn’t want any of the contents going where it shouldn’t (probably you don’t, either).
*yes, anal sphincters in the plural. There’s an upper and lower, or inner and outer if you prefer, sphincter. The first is entirely autonomic, and when it opens, nerves near the lower/outer sphincter signal to your brain that it’s time to go. The second is consciously controlled, except in cases where someone has a malady that prevents such.
Anyway, the low-residual diet can be simplified as: no dairy, and as little fiber as possible.
So, this latter injunction results in the opposite of a lot of normal health advice, because suddenly the recommendation list is rife with such things as white bread, plain mashed potatoes, honey/syrup, etc.
However, if you prefer, you can simply water fast beforehand if you prefer, stopping water too for the required number of hours prior to your anesthesia, of course.
In the weeks before that
Aside from the above considerations, a normal healthy diet should be fine until you get to the low residual diet phase.
However, if you want to particularly optimize things, then there are several considerations:
You want to prioritize gut health. If your gut is going to be near-emptied prior to the operation, that’s going to leave it vulnerable to pathogens. Now, the hospital will surely give you antibiotics, but those aren’t exactly great for your gut microbiome either, so prioritizing gut health (so: high fiber, consider probiotics, minimal processed food), right up until you have to switch to the low-residual diet is sensible, as it gives your gut the best chance of a swift recovery afterwards. Look at it this way: if >95% of your gut microbes are going to be nuked by antibiotics and perhaps even enemas, you want whatever’s left to have the best possible percentage of good bacteria, because that’s what’s going to be there there to repopulate.
See also: Antibiotics? Think Thrice ← which also brings up “Four Ways Antibiotics Can Kill You”; seriously, the risks of antibiotics are not to be underestimated, including the risks associated only with them working exactly as intended—let alone if something goes wrong. Now, in the case of a surgery, antibiotics are a necessary evil, but we do want to mitigate the harm as much as possible.
On which note, see: Minimize The Harm Of Antibiotics ← this was also in response to a question about a hip surgery, by the way
For more on helping things work as they should, see: Stop Sabotaging Your Gut
And we imagine regular 10almonds readers are already familiar with the more foundational: Making Friends With Your Gut (You Can Thank Us Later), but for anyone who’s not, here you go.
You want good circulation. Healing can’t happen without it, and a hip surgery carries the risk of thrombosis. Likely your hospital will be very much on top of that, but if you want to prepare yourself to minimize your risk as much as possible, then you want to:
- keep your blood pressure in a healthy range (see for example: How To Lower Your Blood Pressure (Cardiologists Explain))
- keep moving as much as you reasonably can, especially your lower body (see also: The Doctor Who Wants Us To Exercise Less, & Move More and The Best Home Exercise To Improve Circulation In Your Legs)
- consider supplementing with rutin: Rutin For Your Circulation & More but if you do, STOP at least 2 weeks before your operation, for the same reason as avoiding blood thinners and such)
After the operation
You’ll want to skip the anti-inflammatories for at least a short while after the op, but once inflammation has occurred and healing begins, you’ll probably want to dial down the inflammation.
If you’re picking something to start with, you might want to consider bromelain, as while it is an anti-inflammatory, its anti-inflammatory properties are unique to it, work by a different mechanism than others, and can even actually hasten healing once healing is occurring.
For more about this paradoxical supplement, see: Bromelain vs Inflammation & Much More
As for the rest… Rest! And get in gentle movements to rebuild your mobility. The help of a physiotherapist can work wonders in that regard.
Lastly, we’ll leave you with: How To Heal Injuries More Quickly
We also recommend checking out: Nobody Likes Surgery, But Here’s How To Make It Much Less Bad: The Insider’s Guide To Making Hospital As Comfortable As Possible
…and that featured expert’s book: Calm For Surgery – by Dr Chris Bonney
Take care, and may your op (and recovery) go smoothly!
Don’t Forget…
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