Meditation That You’ll Actually Enjoy

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Meditation That You’ll Actually Enjoy

We previously wrote about…

No-Frills, Evidence-Based Mindfulness

this is a great primer, by the way, for the science and simplicity of mindfulness, along with the simplest mindfulness meditation to get you going.

Today, we’re going to have some fun with meditation.

First: The Problem

Once the usefulness and health benefits of meditation have been established, often people want to meditate, but complain they don’t have the time.

But that’s not the real reason, though, is it?

Let’s face it, a basic meditation can give benefits within two minutes. Or within two breaths, for that matter. So, it’s not really for a lack of time.

The real reason is because it doesn’t feel productive, and it’s not fun. For us to feel motivated to do a thing, usually we need at least one or the other. And even if we know it really is productive, it not feeling that way will hobble us.

So instead, let us make things a little more fun, with…

Meditation games!

As it turns out, there are good kinds of meditation with which one can have a little fun.

Catch the next thought

A common feature of many meditative practices is the experience of having fewer, or ideally no, thoughts.

But it’s hard to enact a negative, and thoughts keep coming.

So instead, make yourself comfortable, settle in, and lie in wait for thoughts. When one comes along, pounce on it in your mind. And then release it, and wait for the next.

At first, your thoughts may be coming thick and fast, but soon, you’ll find the pauses between them lengthening, and you have moments of contented not-knowing of what the next thought will be before it comes along.

This state of relaxed, ready alertness, calm and receptive, is exactly what we’re hoping to find here. But don’t worry about that while you’re busy lying in wait for the next wild thought to come along

Counting breaths

Many meditative practices involve focus on one’s breath. But it’s easy for attention to wander!

This game is a simple one. Count your breaths, not trying to change your rate of breathing at all, just letting it be, and see how high you can get before you lose count.

Breathing in and out, once, counts as one breath, by the way.

You may find that your rate of breathing naturally slows while you’re doing this. That’s fine; let it. It’ll add to the challenge of the game, because before long there will be lengthy pauses between each number.

If you lose count, just start again, and see if you can beat your high score.

This meditation game is an excellent exercise to build for sustained focus, while also improving the quality of breathing (as a side-effect of merely paying attention to it).

Hot spot, cold spot

The above two meditation games were drawn from Japanese and Chinese meditative practices, zen and qigong respectively; this one’s from an Indian meditative practice, yoga nidra. But for now, just approach it with a sense of playful curiosity, for best results.

Make yourself comfortable, lying on your back, arms by your sides.

Take a moment first to pay attention to each part of your body from head to toe, and release any tension that you may be holding along the way.

First part: mentally scan your body for where it feels warmest, or most active, or most wanting of attention (for example if there is pain, or an itch, or some other sensation); that’s your “hot spot” for the moment.

Second part: mentally scan your body for where it feels coolest, or most inert, or almost like it’s not a part of your body at all; that’s your “cold spot” for the moment.

Now, see if you can flip them. Whether you can or can’t, notice if your “hot spot” or “cold spot” moves, or if you can move them consciously.

This meditation game is a great exercise to strengthen interoception and somatic awareness in general—essential for being able to “listen to your body”!

Closing thoughts

All three practices above have very serious reasons and great benefits, but make sure you don’t skip enjoyment of the fun aspects!

Being “young at heart” is, in part, to do with the ability to enjoy—literally, to take joy in—the little things in life.

With that in mind, all we have left to say here is…

Enjoy!

Don’t Forget…

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  • World Menopause Day Health News Round-Up

    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.

    In order to provide variety in this week’s round-up, not all of this is menopause-related, but it is all important:

    Menopause & CVD

    Untreated menopause is associated with higher incidence of heart disease, and higher mortality. People often forget about how much estrogen does for us (well, for those of us with a physiology running on estrogen, anyway; gentlemen, your testosterone is fine for you), and think it is “just” a sex hormone, but it’s a lot more.

    Read in full: Menopause transition linked to increased heart disease risk

    Related: What Menopause Does To The Heart

    Extraterrestrial medical technology

    The much lower gravity in Earth orbit has allowed for tissue engineering techniques that Earth’s normal gravity imposes limitations on. This is big news, because it means that rather than replacing a whole liver, tissue implants could be grafted, allowing the extant liver to repair itself (something livers are famously good at, but they need enough undamaged base material to work with).

    Read in full: How liver tissue from the International Space Station may transform tissue engineering

    Related: How To Unfatty A Fatty Liver

    One thing and then another

    As if endometriosis weren’t unpleasant enough in and of itself, the endothelial dysfunction inherent to it also raises cardiovascular disease risk. This is important, because while endometriosis has (like many maladies predominantly affecting women) generally been shrugged off by the medical world as an unhappy inconvenience but not life-threatening, now we know it comes with extra existential risks too:

    Read in full: Understanding cardiovascular risks in endometriosis patients

    Related: What You Need To Know About Endometriosis

    Push-button meditation

    Unlike mindfulness meditation, listening to music is a very passive experience, and thus requires less effort from the user. And yet, it has been associated with lower perceived pain levels, lower self-reported anxiety levels, less opioid use, and measurably lower heart-rate.

    Read in full: Listening to music may speed up recovery from surgery, research suggests

    Related: Nobody Likes Surgery, But Here’s How To Make It Much Less Bad

    Cholesterol in menopause: quality over quantity

    Much like previous research has shown that the quantity of LDL is not nearly so predictive of health outcomes in women as it is in men, this study into HDL and menopausal women shows that quantity of HDL does not matter nearly so much as the quality of it.

    Read in full: HDL quality, not quantity, contribute to the first sign of Alzheimer’s disease in women

    Related: Statins: His & Hers? ← consistent with the above, statins (to lower LDL cholesterol) generally help more for men and produce more adverse side effects for women. So again, a case of “the actual amount of cholesterol isn’t so important for women as for men”.

    Take care!

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  • Corn Chips vs Potato Chips: Which is Healthier?

    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.

    Our Verdict

    When comparing corn chips to potato chips, we picked the corn chips.

    Why?

    First, let it be said, this was definitely a case of “lesser evil voting” as there was no healthy choice here. But as for which is relatively least unhealthy…

    Most of the macronutrient and micronutrient profile is quite similar. Both foods are high carb, moderately high fat, negligible protein, and contain some trace minerals and even some tiny amounts of vitamins. Both are unhealthily salty.

    Exact numbers will of course vary from one brand’s product to another, but you can see some indicative aggregate scores here in the USDA’s “FoodData Central” database:

    Corn Chips | Potato Chips

    The biggest health-related difference that doesn’t have something to balance it out is that the glycemic index of corn chips averages around 63, whereas the glycemic index of potato chips averages around 70 (that is worse).

    That’s enough to just about tip the scales in favor of corn chips.

    The decision thus having been made in favor of corn chips (and the next information not having been part of that decision), we’ll mention one circumstantial extra benefit to corn chips:

    Corn chips are usually eaten with some kind of dip (e.g. guacamole, sour cream, tomato salsa, etc) which can thus deliver actual nutrients. Potato chips meanwhile are generally eaten with no additional nutrients. So while we can’t claim the dip as being part of the nutritional make-up of the corn chips, we can say:

    If you’re going to have a habit of eating one or the other, then corn chips are probably the least unhealthy of the two.

    And yes, getting vegetables (e.g. in the dips) in ways that are not typically associated with “healthy eating” is still better than not getting vegetables at all!

    Check out: Level-Up Your Fiber Intake! (Without Difficulty Or Discomfort)

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  • More Things Dopamine Does For Us

    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.

    In this week’s news roundup, we have two dopamine items and one other for variety:

    The real “dopamine switch”

    Dopamine is well-known as “the reward chemical”, and indeed it is that, but it also plays a central role in many neurological processes, including:

    • Linear task processing
    • Motivation
    • Learning and memory
    • Motor functions
    • Language faculties

    Recent research has now shown its importance in cognitive flexibility, i.e. the ability to adapt to circumstances, and switch approaches appropriately to such, and generally not get stuck in a cognitive rut:

    Read in full: Scientists confirm neurobiochemical link between dopamine and cognitive flexibility

    Related: The Dopamine Myth

    You may like the sound of this

    It’s been known for a while that dopamine is involved in learning and memory (as mentioned above), but this has been established largely by associative studies, e.g. “people with lower dopamine levels learn less easily”. But scientists have now mapped out more of how it actually does that.

    One more reason to ensure we have and maintain healthy dopamine levels!

    Read in full: Songbirds highlight dopamine’s role in learning

    Related: 10 Ways To Naturally Boost Dopamine

    Resist Or Run!

    When it comes to protecting against bone loss, resistance exercise remains key, but impact-laden activities such as running (but not lower-level everyday activity) can help too. There have been studies on the extent to which walking (a load-bearing activity) may be protective against bone loss, and the results of those studies have mostly been inconclusive.

    This study looked into the incidence (or not, as the case may be) of bone-loading impacts in everyday movements, using accelerometers, and measured bone mineral density before and after testing periods. Those that had higher-intensity bone-loading movements (so, resistance training or running, for example) retained the best measures of bone density through menopause into postmenopause:

    Read in full: Everyday physical activity does not slow bone loss during menopause, finds study

    Related: The Bare-Bones Truth About Osteoporosis

    Take care!

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  • How to Use Topical Estrogen Cream For Aging Skin

    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.

    Dr. Sam Ellis, dermatologist, explains:

    Tackling the cause

    Estrogen is important for very many aspects of health beyond the sexual aspects. When it comes to skin, a drop in estrogen (usually because of menopause) leads to changes like collagen loss, dryness, reduced elasticity, and slower wound healing. Applying estrogen creams to the skin can reverse these changes.

    If your estrogen levels are already within normal pre-menopausal female ranges, by the way, there isn’t so much science to indicate its benefit when used topically. If you are already on systemic HRT (i.e., you take estrogen already to raise your blood estrogen levels and affect your body in its entirety), you may or may not gain extra benefits from the topical cream, depending on factors such as your estrogen dose, your route of administration, your cardiovascular health, and other factors.

    For those with lower estrogen and not currently on HRT, you may be wondering: can topical estrogen cream affect systemic estrogen levels? And the answer is that it mostly depends on the dose. In other words: it’s definitely possible, but for most people it’s unlikely.

    As ever, if thinking of taking up any hormonal treatment, do consult an endocrinologist and/or gynecologist, and if you have an increased breast cancer risk (for example genetically or prior history), then an oncologist too, just to be safe.

    That sounds like a lot of scary things, but mostly it’s just to be on the safe side. The dose of estrogen is very low in topical creams, and even then, only a tiny amount is used per day.

    For more on all of this, enjoy:

    Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

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    Take care!

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  • Homeopathy: Evidence So Tiny That It’s Not there?

    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.

    Homeopathy: Evidence So Tiny That It’s Not There?

    Yesterday, we asked you your opinions on homeopathy. The sample size of responses was a little lower than we usually get, but of those who did reply, there was a clear trend:

    • A lot of enthusiasm for “Homeopathy works on valid principles and is effective”
    • Near equal support for “It may help some people as a complementary therapy”
    • Very few people voted for “Science doesn’t know how it works, but it works”; this is probably because people who considered voting for this, voted for the more flexible “It may help some people as a complementary therapy” instead.
    • Very few people considered it a dangerous scam and a pseudoscience.

    So, what does the science say?

    Well, let us start our investigation by checking out the position of the UK’s National Health Service, an organization with a strong focus on providing the least expensive treatments that are effective.

    Since homeopathy is very inexpensive to arrange, they will surely want to put it atop their list of treatments, right?

    ❝Homeopathy is a “treatment” based on the use of highly diluted substances, which practitioners claim can cause the body to heal itself.

    There’s been extensive investigation of the effectiveness of homeopathy. There’s no good-quality evidence that homeopathy is effective as a treatment for any health condition.❞

    The NHS actually has a lot more to say about that, and you can read their full statement here.

    But that’s just one institution. Here’s what Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council had to say:

    ❝There was no reliable evidence from research in humans that homeopathy was effective for treating the range of health conditions considered: no good-quality, well-designed studies with enough participants for a meaningful result reported either that homeopathy caused greater health improvements than placebo, or caused health improvements equal to those of another treatment❞

    You can read their full statement here.

    The American FDA, meanwhile, have a stronger statement:

    ❝Homeopathic drug products are made from a wide range of substances, including ingredients derived from plants, healthy or diseased animal or human sources, minerals and chemicals, including known poisons. These products have the potential to cause significant and even permanent harm if they are poorly manufactured, since that could lead to contaminated products or products that have potentially toxic ingredients at higher levels than are labeled and/or safe, or if they are marketed as substitute treatments for serious or life-threatening diseases and conditions, or to vulnerable populations.❞

    You can read their full statement here.

    Homeopathy is a dangerous scam and a pseudoscience: True or False?

    False and True, respectively, mostly.

    That may be a confusing answer, so let’s elaborate:

    • Is it dangerous? Mostly not; it’s mostly just water. However, two possibilities for harm exist:
      • Careless preparation could result in a harmful ingredient still being present in the water—and because of the “like cures like” principle, many of the ingredients used in homeopathy are harmful, ranging from heavy metals to plant-based neurotoxins. However, the process of “ultra-dilution” usually removes these so thoroughly that they are absent or otherwise scientifically undetectable.
      • Placebo treatment has its place, but could result in “real” treatment going undelivered. This can cause harm if the “real” treatment was critically needed, especially if it was needed on a short timescale.
    • Is it a scam? Probably mostly not; to be a scam requires malintent. Most practitioners probably believe in what they are practising.
    • Is it a pseudoscience? With the exception that placebo effect has been highly studied and is a very valid complementary therapy… Yes, aside from that it is a pseudoscience. There is no scientific evidence to support homeopathy’s “like cures like” principle, and there is no scientific evidence to support homeopathy’s “water memory” idea. On the contrary, they go against the commonly understood physics of our world.

    It may help some people as a complementary therapy: True or False?

    True! Not only is placebo effect very well-studied, but best of all, it can still work as a placebo even if you know that you’re taking a placebo… Provided you also believe that!

    Science doesn’t know how it works, but it works: True or False?

    False, simply. At best, it performs as a placebo.

    Placebo is most effective when it’s a remedy against subjective symptoms, like pain.

    However, psychosomatic effect (the effect that our brain has on the rest of our body, to which it is very well-connected) can mean that placebo can also help against objective symptoms, like inflammation.

    After all, our body, directed primarily by the brain, can “decide” what immunological defenses to deploy or hold back, for example. This is why placebo can help with conditions as diverse as arthritis (an inflammatory condition) or diabetes (an autoimmune condition, and/or a metabolic condition, depending on type).

    Here’s how homeopathy measures up, for those conditions:

    (the short answer is “no better than placebo”)

    Homeopathy works on valid principles and is effective: True or False?

    False, except insofar as placebo is a valid principle and can be effective.

    The stated principles of homeopathy—”like cures like” and “water memory”—have no scientific basis.

    We’d love to show the science for this, but we cannot prove a negative.

    However, the ideas were conceived in 1796, and are tantamount to alchemy. A good scientific attitude means being open-minded to new ideas and testing them. In homeopathy’s case, this has been done, extensively, and more than 200 years of testing later, homeopathy has consistently performed equal to placebo.

    In summary…

    • If you’re enjoying homeopathic treatment and that’s working for you, great, keep at it.
    • If you’re open-minded to enjoying a placebo treatment that may benefit you, be careful, but don’t let us stop you.
    • If your condition is serious, please do not delay seeking evidence-based medical treatment.

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  • Hazelnuts vs Pecans – Which is Healthier?

    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.

    Our Verdict

    When comparing hazelnuts to pecans, we picked the hazelnuts.

    Why?

    In terms of macros, hazelnuts have more protein, carbs, and fiber, though the difference is not big in the latter two cases, and the glycemic indices are resultantly about the same. Meanwhile, pecans have a little more fat, but the fat is healthy in both cases. Everything taken into account, we’re calling it a tie on macros.

    When it comes to vitamins, hazelnuts have more of vitamins B3, B5, B6, B7, B9, C, E, K, and choline, while pecans have more of vitamins A, B1, and B2. An easy win for hazelnuts here.

    In the category of minerals, hazelnuts have more calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, and potassium, while pecans have more selenium and zinc. Another clear win for hazelnuts.

    In short, enjoy either or both (unless you’re allergic, in which case, don’t), but hazelnuts are ultimately the more nutritionally dense of the two.

    Want to learn more?

    You might like to read:

    Why You Should Diversify Your Nuts

    Take care!

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