Laugh Often, To Laugh Longest!
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Putting The Abs Into Absurdity
We’ve talked before about the health benefits of a broadly positive outlook on life:
Optimism Seriously Increases Longevity!
…and we’re very serious about it, but that’s about optimistic life views in general, and today we’re about not just keeping good humor in questionable circumstances, but actively finding good humor in the those moments—even when the moments in question might not be generally described as good!
After all, laughter really can be the best medicine, for example:
From the roots
First a quick recap on de-toothing the psychological aspect of threats, no matter how menacing they may be:
Hello, Emotions: Time For Radical Acceptance!
…which we can then take a step further:
What’s The Worst That Could Happen?
Choose your frame
Do you remember when that hacker hacked and publicized the US Federal no-fly list, after already hacking a nationwide cloud-based security camera company, getting access to more than 150,000 companies’ and private individuals’ security cameras, amongst various other cyber crimes, mostly various kinds of fraud and data theft?
Imagine how she (age 21) must have felt, when being indicted. What do you suppose this hacker had to say for itself under such circumstances?
❝congress is investigating now 🙂
but i stay silly :3 ❞
…the latter half of which, usually rendered “but I stay silly” or “but we stay silly” has since entered popular Gen-Z parlance, usually after expressing some negative thing, often in a state of powerlessness.
Which is an important life skill if powerlessness is something that is often likely.
It’s important for many Gen-Zs with negligible life prospects economically; it’s equally important for 60-somethings getting cancer diagnoses (statistically the most likely decade to find out one has cancer, by the way), and many other kinds of people younger, older, and in between.
Because at the end of the day, we all start powerless and we all end powerless.
Learned helplessness (two kinds)
In psychology, “learned helplessness” occurs when a person or creature gives up after learning that all and any attempts to resist a Bad Thing™ fail, perhaps even badly. A lab rat may just shut down and sit there getting electroshocked, for example. A person subjected to abuse may stop trying to improve their situation, and just go with the path of least resistance.
But, there’s another kind, wherein someone in a position of absolute powerlessness not only makes their peace with that, but also, decides that the one thing the outside world can’t control, is how they take it. Like the hacker we mentioned earlier.
Sometimes the gallows humor is even more literal, laughing at one’s own impending death. Not as a matter of bravado, but genuinely seeing the funny side.
But how?
Unfortunately, fortunately
The trick here is to “find a silver lining” that is nowhere near enough to compensate for the bad thing—and it may even be worse! But that’s fine:
“Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to do the dishes before leaving for my vacation. Fortunately, I also forgot to turn the oven off, so the house burning down covered up my messy kitchen”
Writer’s personal less drastic example: today I set my espresso machine to press me an espresso; it doesn’t have an auto-off and I got distracted and it overflowed everywhere; my immediate reaction was “Oh! I have been blessed with an abundance of coffee!”
This kind of silly little thing, on a daily basis, builds a very solid habit for life that allows one to see the funny side in even the most absurd situations, even matters of life and death (can confirm: been there enough times personally—so far so good, still alive to find the remembered absurdity silly).
The point is not to genuinely value the “silver lining”, because half the time it isn’t even one, really, and it is useless to pretend, in seriousness.
But to pretend in silliness? Now we’re onto something, and the real benefit is in the laughs we had along the way.
Because those worst moments? Are probably when we need it the most, so it’s good to get some practice in!
Want more ways to find the funny and make it a life habit?
We reviewed a good book recently:
The Humor Habit: Rewire Your Brain To Stress Less, Laugh More, And Achieve More’er – by Paul Osincup
Stay silly!
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Yoga for Better Sleep – by Mark Stephens
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The book has, as you might expect:
- postural exercises
- breathing exercises
- meditation exercises
Instructions given in all of the above categories are clear and easy to follow, and there are photographic illustrations too where appropriate.
What sets it apart from many books of this kind is that it also has chapters dedicated to various specific circumstances; the many actual reasons people seriously struggle to sleep; not just “screentime too late”, but for example deprepression, sleep apnea, hyperarousal, or even just aging.
As well as the comprehensive exercises, there are also many tips, tricks, hacks, and workarounds—it’s a practical guidebook with practical advice.
While the book is about yogic practices, the author also does tackle this holistically, acknowledging that there are many factors going on, and that yogic practices should be one more string to our sleep-improving bow—as we continue with other general good advice for good sleep too, have medical tests if it seems appropriate, that kind of thing. Basically, to have one’s assorted approaches work together with synergistic effect.
Bottom line: this book will quite possibly put you to sleep! But only in the best possible way.
Click here to check out Yoga for Better Sleep, and get those valuable Zs in, healthily!
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Brain Wash – by Dr. David Perlmutter, Dr. Austin Perlmutter, and Kristen Loberg
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You may be familiar with the lead author of this book, Dr. David Perlmutter, as a big name in the world of preventative healthcare. A lot of his work has focused specifically on carbohydrate metabolism, and he is as associated with grains and he is with brains. This book focuses on the latter.
Dr. Perlmutter et al. take a methodical look at all that is ailing our brains in this modern world, and systematically lay out a plan for improving each aspect.
The advice is far from just dietary, though the chapter on diet takes a clear stance:
❝The food you eat and the beverages you drink change your emotions, your thoughts, and the way you perceive the world❞
The style is explanatory, and the book can be read comfortably as a “sit down and read it cover to cover” book; it’s an enjoyable, informative, and useful read.
Bottom line: if you’d like to give your brain a gentle overhaul, this is the one-stop-shop book to give you the tools to do just that.
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How Emotions Are Made – by Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett
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We’ve previously reviewed Dr. Barrett’s (also good) book Seven And A Half Lessons About The Brain, and this one is very different, and of more practical use:
The main thrust of the book is: the bioessentialist model of emotions is flawed; there is also no Platonic perfect form of any given emotion, and in fact emotions are constructed by the brain as a learned adaptive response.
She argues this from the dual vectors of on the one hand hard sciences of affective neuroscience and clinical psychology, and on the other hand sociology and anthropology.
In the category of criticism: Dr. Barrett, a very well-known and well-respected cognitive neuroscientist, is not an expert on sociology and anthropology, and some of her claims there are verifiably false.
However, most of the book is given over the psychophysiology, which is entirely her thing, and she explains it clearly and simply while backing everything up with mountains of data.
The usefulness of this book is chiefly: if we understand that emotions are not innate and are instead constructed adaptive (and sometimes maladaptive) neurological responses to stimuli and associations, we can set about rewiring things a little in accord with what’s actually more beneficial to us. The book also outlines how.
Bottom line: if you’d like to be able to not merely manage emotions as they are, but also prune and/or grow them from the stem up, then this book provides a robustly scientific approach for doing that.
Click here to check out How Emotions Are Made, and get more discerning about yours!
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Immunity – by Dr. William Paul
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This book gives a very person-centric (i.e., focuses on the contributions of named individuals) overview of advances in the field of immunology—up to its publication date in 2015. So, it’s not cutting edge, but it is very good at laying the groundwork for understanding more recent advances that occur as time goes by. After all, immunology is a field that never stands still.
We get a good grounding in how our immune system works (and how it doesn’t), the constant arms race between pathogens and immune responses, and the complexities of autoimmune disorders and—which is functionally in an overlapping category of disease—cancer. And, what advances we can expect soon to address those things.
Given the book was published 8 years ago, how did it measure up? Did we get those advances? Well, for the mostpart yes, we have! Some are still works in progress. But, we’ve also had obvious extra immunological threats in years since, which have also resulted in other advances along the way!
If the book has a downside, it’s that sometimes the author can be a little too person-centric. It’s engaging to focus on human characters, and helps us bring information to life; name-dropping to excess, along with awards won, can sometimes feel a little like the book was co-authored by Tahani Al-Jamil.
Nevertheless, it certainly does keep the book from getting too dry!
Bottom line: this book is a great overview of immunology and immunological research, for anyone who wants to understand these things better.
Click here to check out Immunity, and boost your knowledge of yours!
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Being Mortal – by Dr. Atul Gawande
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Maybe you want to “live forever or die trying”, and that’s an understandable goal… But are you prepared for “or die trying” being the outcome?
This is not a cheerful book, if you’re anything like this reviewer, you will need a little towel or something to mop up the tears while you read. But it’s worth it.
Dying is one thing; fighting for life is even generally considered a noble endeavor. Suffering alone isn’t fun, losing independence can feel humiliating, and seeing someone who was always a tower of strength, now a frail shadow of their former self, reduced to begging for something that they’re “not allowed”, can be worse.
Do we want that for ourselves? For our loved ones? Can there be a happy medium between that, and the alternative to indeed “go gentle into that good night”?
Dr. Gawande, a surgeon well-acquainted with death and dying, thinks so. But it involves work on our part, and being prepared for hard decisions.
- What is most important to us, and what tradeoffs are we willing to make for it?
- What, even, is actually an option to us with the resources available?
- Can we make peace with a potentially bad lot? And… Should we?
- When is fighting important, and when is it self-destructive?
These (and others) are all difficult questions posed by Dr. Gawande, but critical ones.
We don’t usually quote other people’s reviews when reviewing books here, but let’s consider the following words from the end of a long review on Amazon:
❝If “dying as we lived” is some kind of standard for how we should go, then maybe alone and medicalized makes some sense right now after all.❞
Bottom line: we all deserve better than that. And if we don’t take the time to think about what’s most important, then time will take it from us. This very insightful book may not have all the answers, but it has the questions, and it can help a lot in exploring them and deciding what matters most to us in the end, really.
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Improve Your Insulin Sensitivity!
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We’ve written before about blood sugar management, for example:
10 Ways To Balance Blood Sugars ← this one really is the most solid foundation possible; if you do nothing else, do these 10 things!
And as for why we care:
Good (Or Bad) Health Starts With Your Blood
…because the same things that cause type 2 diabetes, go on to cause many other woes, with particularly strong comorbidities in the case of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, as well as heart disease of various kinds, and a long long laundry list of immune dysfunctions / inflammatory disorders in general.
In short, if you can’t keep your blood sugars even, the rest of your health will fall like so many dominoes.
Getting a baseline
Are you counting steps? Counting calories? Monitoring your sleep? Heart rate zones? These all have their merits:
- Steps: One More Resource Against Osteoporosis!
- Calories: Is Cutting Calories The Key To Healthy Long Life?
- Sleep: A Head-To-Head Of Google and Apple’s Top Apps For Getting Your Head Down
- Heart Rate Zones: Heart Rate Zones, Oxalates, & More
But something far fewer people do unless they have diabetes or are very enthusiastic about personal health, is to track blood sugars:
Here’s how: Track Your Blood Sugars For Better Personalized Health
And for understanding some things to watch out for when using a continuous glucose monitor:
Continuous Glucose Monitors Without Diabetes: Pros & Cons
Writer’s anecdote: I decided to give one a try for a few months, and so far it has been informative, albeit unexciting. It seems that with my diet (mostly whole-foods plant based, though I do have a wholegrain wheat product about twice per week (usually: flatbread once, pasta once) which is… Well, we could argue it’s whole-food plant based, but let’s be honest, it’s a little processed), my blood sugars don’t really have spikes at all; the graph looks more like gently rolling low hills (which is good). However! Even so, by experimenting with it, I can see for myself what differences different foods/interventions make to my blood sugars, which is helpful, and it also improves my motivation for intermittent fasting. It also means that if I think “hmm, my energy levels are feeling low; I need a snack” I can touch my phone to my arm and find out if that is really the reason (so far, it hasn’t been). I expect that as I monitor my blood sugars continuously and look at the data frequently, I’ll start to get a much more intuitive feel for my own blood sugars, in much the same way I can generally intuit my hormone levels correctly after years of taking-and-testing.
So much for blood sugars. Now, what about insulin?
Step Zero
If taking care of blood sugars is step one, then taking care of insulin is step zero.
Often’s it’s viewed the other way around: we try to keep our blood sugars balanced, to reduce the need for our bodies to produce so much insulin that it gets worn out. And that’s good and fine, but…
To quote what we wrote when reviewing “Why We Get Sick” last month:
❝Dr. Bikman makes the case that while indeed hyper- or hypoglycemia bring their problems, mostly these are symptoms rather than causes, and the real culprit is insulin resistance, and this is important for two main reasons:
- Insulin resistance occurs well before the other symptoms set in (which means: it is the thing that truly needs to be nipped in the bud; if your fasting blood sugars are rising, then you missed “nipping it in the bud” likely by a decade or more)
- Insulin resistance causes more problems than “mere” hyperglycemia (the most commonly-known result of insulin resistance) does, so again, it really needs to be considered separately from blood sugar management.
This latter, Dr. Bikman goes into in great detail, linking insulin resistance (even if blood sugar levels are normal) to all manner of diseases (hence the title).
You may be wondering: how can blood sugar levels be normal, if we have insulin resistance?
And the answer is that for as long as it is still able, your pancreas will just faithfully crank out more and more insulin to deal with the blood sugar levels that would otherwise be steadily rising. Since people measure blood sugar levels much more regularly than anyone checks for actual insulin levels, this means that one can be insulin resistant for years without knowing it, until finally the pancreas is no longer able to keep up with the demand—then that’s when people finally notice.❞
You can read the full book review here:
Now, testing for insulin is not so quick, easy, or accessible as testing for glucose, but it can be worthwhile to order such a test—because, as discussed, your insulin levels could be high even while your blood sugars are still normal, and it won’t be until the pancreas finally reaches breaking point that your blood sugars show it.
So, knowing your insulin levels can help you intervene before your pancreas reaches that breaking point.
We can’t advise on local services available for ordering blood tests (because they will vary depending on location), but a simple Google search should suffice to show what’s available in your region.
Once you know your insulin levels (or even if you don’t, but simply take the principled position that improving insulin sensitivity will be good regardless), you can set about managing them.
Insulin sensitivity is important, because the better it is (higher insulin sensitivity), the less insulin the pancreas has to make to tidy up the same amount of glucose into places that are good for it to go—which is good. In contrast, the worse it is (higher insulin resistance), the more insulin the pancreas has to make to do the same blood sugar management. Which is bad.
What to do about it
We imagine you will already be eating in a way that is conducive to avoiding or reversing type 2 diabetes, but for anyone who wants a refresher,
See: How To Prevent And Reverse Type 2 Diabetes
…which yes, as well as meaning eating/avoiding certain foods, does recommend intermittent fasting. For anyone who wants a primer on that,
See: Intermittent Fasting: Methods & Benefits
There are also drugs you may want to consider:
Metformin Without Diabetes, For Weight-Loss & More
And “nutraceuticals” that sound like drugs, for example:
Glutathione’s Benefits: The Usual And The Unique ← the good news is, it’s found in several common foods
You may have heard the hype about “nature’s Ozempic”, and berberine isn’t exactly that (works in mostly different ways), but its benefits do include improving insulin sensitivity:
Berberine For Metabolic Health
Lastly, while eating for blood sugar management is all well and good, do be aware that some things affect insulin levels without increased blood sugar levels. So even if you’re using a CGM, you may go blissfully unaware of an insulin spike, because there was no glucose spike on the graph—and in contrast, there could even be a dip in blood sugar levels, if you consumed something that increased insulin levels without providing glucose at the same time, making you think “I should have some carbs”, which visually on the graph would even out your blood sugars, but invisibly, would worsen the already-extant insulin spike.
Read more about this: Strange Things Happening In The Islets Of Langerhans: When Carbs, Proteins, & Fats Switch Metabolic Roles
Now, since you probably can’t test your insulin at a moment’s notice, the way to watch out for this is “hmm, I ate some protein/fats (delete as applicable) without carbs and my blood sugars dipped; I know what’s going on here”.
Want to know more?
We heartily recommend the “Why We Get Sick” book we linked above, as this focuses on insulin resistance/sensitivity itself!
However, a very good general primer on blood sugar management (and thus, by extension, at least moderately good insulin management), is:
Glucose Revolution: The Life-Changing Power of Balancing Your Blood Sugar – by Jessie Inchauspé
Enjoy!
Don’t Forget…
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