It’s On Me – by Dr. Sara Kuburic
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This isn’t about bootstrapping and nor is it a motivational pep talk. What it is, however, is a wake-up call for the wayward, and that doesn’t mean “disaffected youth” or such. Rather, therapist Dr. Sara Kuburic tackles the problem of self-loss.
It’s about when we get so caught up in what we need to do, should do, are expected to do, are in a rut of doing… That we forget to also live. After all, we only get one shot at life so far as we know, so we might as well live it in whatever way is right for us.
That probably doesn’t mean a life of going through the motions.
The writing style here is personal and direct, and it makes for quite compelling reading from start to finish.
Bottom line: if ever you find yourself errantly sleepwalking through life and would like to change that, this is a book for you.
Click here to check out It’s On Me, and take control of what’s yours!
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The Green Roasting Tin – by Rukmini Iyer
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You may be wondering: “do I really need a book to tell me to put some vegetables in a roasting tin and roast them?” and maybe not, but the book offers a lot more than that.
Indeed, the author notes “this book was slightly in danger of becoming the gratin and tart book, because I love both”, but don’t worry, most of the recipes are—as you might expect—very healthy.
As for formatting: the 75 recipes are divided first into vegan or vegetarian, and then into quick/medium/slow, in terms of how long they take.
However, even the “slow” recipes don’t actually take more effort, just, more time in the oven.
One of the greatest strengths of this book is that not only does it offer a wide selection of wholesome mains, but also, if you’re putting on a big spread, these can easily double up as high-class low-effort sides.
Bottom line: if you’d like to eat more vegetables in 2024 but want to make it delicious and with little effort, put this book on your Christmas list!
Click here to check out The Green Roasting Tin, and level-up yours!
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The Vagus Nerve (And How You Can Make Use Of It)
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The Vagus Nerve: The Brain-Gut Highway
The longest cranial nerve is the vagus nerve; it runs all the way from your brain to your colon. It’s very important, and (amongst other tasks) it largely regulates your parasympathetic nervous system, and autonomous functions like:
- Breathing
- Heart rate
- Vasodilation & vasoconstriction
- Blood pressure
- Reflex actions (e.g. coughing, sneezing, swallowing, vomiting, hiccuping)
That’s great, but how does knowing about it help us?
Because of vagal maneuvers! This means taking an action to stimulate the vagus nerve, and prompt it to calm down various bodily functions that need calming down. This can take the form of:
- Massage
- Electrostimulation
- Diaphragmatic breathing
Massage is perhaps the simplest; “vagus” means “wandering”, and the nerve is accessible in various places, including behind the ears. That’s the kind of thing that’ easier to show than tell, though, so we’ll include a video at the end.
Electrostimulation is the fanciest, and has been used to treat migraines and cluster headaches. Check out, for example:
Update on noninvasive neuromodulation for migraine treatment-Vagus nerve stimulation
Diaphragmatic breathing means breathing from the diaphragm—the big muscular tissue that sits under your lungs. You might know it as “abdominal breathing”, and refers to breathing “to the abdomen” rather than merely to the chest.
Even though your lungs are obviously in your chest not your abdomen, breathing with a focus on expanding the abdomen (rather than the chest) when breathing in, will result in much deeper breathing as the diaphragm allows the lungs to fill downwards as well as outwards.
Why this helps when it comes to the vagus nerve is simply that the vagus nerve passes by the diaphragm, such that diaphragmatic breathing will massage the vagus nerve deep inside your body.
More than just treating migraines
Vagus nerve stimulation has also been researched and found potentially helpful for managing:
- Depression, inflammation, and heart disease
- Diabetes and glycemic issues in general
- Multiple sclerosis and autoimmune disease in general
- Alzheimer’s disease and dementia in general
- Rheumatoid arthritis (we already mentioned inflammation and autoimmune diseases, but this is an interesting paper so we included it)
All this is particularly important as we get older, because vagal response reduces with age, and vagus nerve stimulation, which improves vagal tone, makes it easier not just to manage the aforementioned maladies, but also simply to relax more easily and more deeply.
See: Influence of age and gender on autonomic regulation of heart
We promised a video for the massage, so here it is:
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Outlive – by Dr. Peter Attia
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We know, we know; this diet, that exercise, don’t smoke or drink, get decent sleep”—a lot of books don’t go beyond this level of advice!
What Dr. Attia offers is a multi-vector approach that covers the above and a lot more.
Themes of the book include:
- The above-mentioned things, of course
- Rethinking medicine for the age of chronic disease
- The pros and cons of…
- caloric restriction
- dietary restriction
- intermittent fasting
- Pre-emptive interventions for…
- specific common cause-of-death conditions
- specific common age-related degenerative conditions
- The oft-forgotten extra pillar of longevity: mental health
The last one in the list there is covered mostly in the last chapter of the book, but it’s there as a matter of importance, not as an afterthought. As Dr. Attia puts it, not only are you less likely to take care of your physical health if you are (for example) depressed, but also… “Longevity is meaningless if your life sucks!”
So, it’s important to do things that promote and maintain good physical and mental health.
Bottom line: if you’re interested in happy, healthy, longevity, this is a book for you.
Click here to check out Dr. Attia’s “Outlive” on Amazon today!
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It’s Not A Bloody Trend – by Kat Brown
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This one’s not a clinical book, and the author is not a clinician. However, it’s not just a personal account, either. Kat Brown is an award-winning journalist (with ADHD) and has approached this journalistically.
Not just in terms of investigative journalism, either. Rather, also with her knowledge and understanding of the industry, doing for us some meta-journalism and explaining why the press have gone for many misleading headlines.
Which in this case means for example it’s not newsworthy to say that people have gone undiagnosed and untreated for years and that many continue to go unseen; we know this also about such things as endometriosis, adenomyosis, and PCOS. But some more reactionary headlines will always get attention, e.g. “look at these malingering attention-seekers”.
She also digs into the common comorbidities of various conditions, the differences it makes to friendships, families, relationships, work, self-esteem, parenting, and more.
This isn’t a “how to” book, but there’s a lot of value here if a) you have ADHD, and/or b) you spend any amount of time with someone who does.
Bottom line: if you’d like to understand “what all the fuss is about” in one book, this is the one for ADHD.
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The Biological Mind – by Dr. Alan Jasanoff
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How special is our brain? According to Dr. Alan Jasanoff, it’s not nearly as special as we think it is.
In this work, he outlines the case for how we have collectively overstated the brain’s importance. That it’s just another organ like a heart or a kidney, and that who we are is as much a matter of other factors, as what goes on in our brain.
In this reviewer’s opinion, he overcorrects a bit. The heart and kidneys are very simple organs, as organs go. The brain is not. And while everything from our gut microbiota to our environment to our hormones may indeed contribute to what is us, our brain is one thing that can’t just be swapped out.
Nevertheless, this very well-written book can teach us a lot about everything else that makes us us, including many biological factors that many people don’t know about or consider.
Towards the end of the book, he switches into futurist speculation, and his speculation can be summed up as “we cannot achieve anything worthwhile in the future”.
Bottom line: if you’ve an interest in such things as how transplanting glial cells can give a 30% cognitive enhancement, and how a brain transplant wouldn’t result in the same us in a different body, this is the book for you.
Click here to check out The Biological Mind, and learn about yours!
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Gravitas – by Caroline Goyder
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A no-nonsense guide to (more than!) public speaking that isn’t just “tell jokes in your speech and imagine the audience naked”.
Because this isn’t just about speech-writing or speech delivery, so much as giving you important life skills. The kind that weren’t taught in school, but that nevertheless make a huge impact on success… whether you’re giving a presentation or hosting a party or negotiating a deal or just attending a social event. Or making a phonecall, even.
Whereas a lot of books of this kind treat “the audience” as a nebulous and purely responsive passive crowd of extras, Goyder does better. People are individuals, even if they’re all facing the same way for a moment. She works with that! She also teaches how to deal with not just hecklers, but also simply those people who sap your confidence and find fault with you and anything you do or say.b
Bottom line is: if you for whatever reason communicate with people, and would like them to think better of you, this is the book for you.
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