The Science Of New Year’s Pre-Resolutions
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The Science Of New Year’s Pre-Resolutions
There’s a military dictum that “prior preparation and planning prevents p[retty] poor performance”, to paraphrase it very slightly.
Would it surprise you to know that soldiers going on the attack are not focused on the goal? Rather, they are focused on the process.
With drills and mnemonics, everything that can be controlled for in advance is; every action, every reaction, everything that can go wrong, and all the “if x then y” decisions in between pre-battle PREWAR and PAWPERSO and post-battle PACESDO (all mnemonic acronyms; the content is not important here but the principle is).
In short: take Murphy’s Law into account now, and plan accordingly!
The same goes for making your plans the winning kind
If you want your resolutions to work, you may need to make pre-resolutions now, so that you’re properly prepared:
- Do you want to make an exercise habit? Make sure now that you have the right clothes/shoes/etc, make sure that they fit you correctly, make sure you have enough of them that you can exercise when one set’s in the wash, etc.
- What grace will you allow yourself if tired, unwell, busy? What’s your back-up plan so that you still do what you can at those times when “what you can” is legitimately a bit less?
- If it’s an outdoors plan, what’s your plan for when it’s rainy? Snowy? Dangerously hot?
- What are the parameters for what counts? Make it measurable. How many exercise sessions per week, what duration?
- Do you want to make a diet habit? Make sure that you have in the healthy foods that you want to eat; know where you can and will get things. We’re often creatures of habit when it comes to shopping, so planning will be critical here!
- Do you want to cut some food/drink/substance out? Make sure you have a plan to run down or otherwise dispose of your current stock first. And make sure you have alternatives set up, and if it was something you were leaning on as a coping strategy of some kind (e.g. alcohol, cannabis, comfort-eating, etc), make sure you have an alternative coping strategy, too!
See also: How To Reduce Or Quit Alcohol
We promised science, so here it comes
Approach-oriented resolutions work better than avoidance-oriented ones.
This means: positively-framed resolutions work better than negatively-framed ones.
On a simple level, this means that, for example, resolving to exercise three times per week is going to work better than resolving to not consume alcohol.
But what if you really want to quit something? Just frame it positively. There’s a reason that Alcoholics Anonymous (and similar Thing Anonymous groups) measure days sober, not relapses.
So it’s not “I will not consume alcohol” but “I will get through each day alcohol-free”.
Semantics? Maybe, but it’s also science:
Why January the 1st? It’s a fresh start
Resolutions started on the 1st of January enjoy a psychological boost of a feeling of a fresh start, a new page, a new chapter.
Similar benefits can be found from starting on the 1st of a month in general, or on a Monday, or on some date that is auspicious to the person in question (religious fasts tied to calendar dates are a fine example of this).
Again, this is borne-out by science:
The Fresh Start Effect: Temporal Landmarks Motivate Aspirational Behavior
Make it a habit
Here be science:
How do people adhere to goals when willpower is low? The profits (and pitfalls) of strong habits
As for how to do that?
How To Really Pick Up (And Keep!) Those Habits
Trim the middle
No, we’re not talking about your waistline. Rather, what Dr. Ayelet Fischbach refers to as “the middle problem”:
❝We’re highly motivated at the beginning. Over time, our motivation declines as we lose steam. To the extent that our goal has a clear end point, our motivation picks up again toward the end.
Therefore, people are more likely to adhere to their standards at the beginning and end of goal pursuit—and slack in the middle. We demonstrate this pattern of judgment and behavior in adherence to ethical standards (e.g., cheating), religious traditions (e.g., skipping religious rituals), and performance standards (e.g., “cutting corners” on a task).
We also show that the motivation to adhere to standards by using proper means is independent and follows a different pattern from the motivation to reach the end state of goal pursuit❞
Read: The end justifies the means, but only in the middle
How to fix this, then?
Give yourself consistent, recurring, short-term goals, with frequent review points. That way, it’s never “the middle” for long:
The fresh start effect: temporal landmarks motivate aspirational behavior
See also:
How do people protect their long-term goals from the influence of short-term motives or temptations?
Finally…
You might like this previous main feature of ours that was specifically about getting oneself through those “middle” parts:
How To Keep On Keeping On… Long Term!
Enjoy!
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Healing Back Pain – by Dr. John Sarno
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Often when we review books with titles like this one, we preface it with a “what it’s not: a think-yourself-better book”.
In this case… It is, in fact, a think-yourself-better book. However, its many essay-length rave reviews caught our attention, and upon reading, we can report: its ideas are worth reading.
The focus of this book is on TMS, or “Tension Myoneural Syndrome”, to give it its full name. The author asserts (we cannot comment on the accuracy) that many cases of TMS are misdiagnosed as other things, from sciatica to lupus. When other treatments fail, or are simply not available (no cure for lupus yet, for example) or are unenticing (risky surgeries, for example), he offers an alternative approach.
Dr. Sarno lays out the case for TMS being internally fixable, since our muscles and nerves are all at the command of our brain. Rather than taking a physical-first approach, he takes a psychological-first approach, before building into a more holistic model.
The writing style is… A little dated and salesey and unnecessarily padded, to be honest, but the content makes it worthwhile.
Bottom line: if you have back pain, then the advice of this book, priced not much more than a box of top brand painkillers, seems a very reasonable thing to try.
Click here to check out Healing Back Pain, and see if it works for you!
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What Happens To Your Body When You Eat Raw Garlic Everyday
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Garlic’s benefits are not all in its most talked-about active compound, allicin (some are in other parts of the garlic), but the allicin is certainly very potent. However, allicin breaks down easily, which means that cooking reduces its value greatly, meaning that for health purposes, it is best consumed raw. Pickled garlic cloves are great, by the way, and you should try them if you haven’t already.
Garlic’s benefits (aside from being delicious)
Benefits that can be expected include:
- Boosts immunity: allicin enhances white blood cell function, helping fight off colds and flu
- Supports heart health: lowers blood pressure, reduces cholesterol, and prevents blood clots, reducing the risk of heart disease and stroke
- Anti-cancer properties: it contains sulfur compounds that may inhibit cancer cell growth, particularly in the digestive system
- Improves digestion: stimulates digestive enzymes and promotes gut health, helping with better nutrient absorption and digestion
- Enhances brain function: antioxidants in garlic are neuroprotective, reducing cognitive decline
- Good for your skin: its antibacterial and anti-inflammatory properties can help improve skin health
- Regulates blood sugar levels: helps regulate blood sugar and improves insulin sensitivity
- Anti-inflammatory effects: contains compounds that reduce inflammation, helping to combat inflammatory diseases such as arthritis
- Supports weight loss: stimulates metabolism, suppresses appetite, and helps break down fats, aiding in weight management
- May protect against osteoporosis: increases estrogen levels in women, potentially reducing the risk of osteoporosis (no effect on estrogen levels if you don’t have ovaries)
The daily dose that this video recommends is 1–2 cloves of garlic or 3600mg of aged garlic extract as a supplement.
For more on all of these, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
The Many Health Benefits Of Garlic
Take care!
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Type 2 Diabetic Foot Problems
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It’s Q&A Day!
Have a question or a request? You can always hit “reply” to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom!
This newsletter has been growing a lot lately, and so have the questions/requests, and we love that! 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!
As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!
So, no question/request too big or small
Q: I’d like to know more about type 2 diabetic foot problems
You probably know that the “foot problems” thing has less to do with the feet and more to do with blood and nerves. So, why the feet?
The reason feet often get something like the worst of it, is because they are extremities, and in the case of blood sugars being too high for too long too often, they’re getting more damage as blood has to fight its way back up your body. Diabetic neuropathy happens when nerves are malnourished because the blood that should be keeping them healthy, is instead syrupy and sluggish.
We’ll definitely do a main feature sometime soon on keeping blood sugars healthy, for both types of diabetes plus pre-diabetes and just general advice for all.
In the meantime, here’s some very good advice on keeping your feet healthy in the context of diabetes. This one’s focussed on Type 1 Diabetes, but the advice goes for both:
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New News From The Centenarian Blue Zones
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From Blue To Green…
We sometimes write about supercentenarians, which word is usually used in academia to refer to people who are not merely over 100 years of age, but over 110 years. These people can be found in many countries, but places where they have been found to be most populous (as a percentage of the local population) have earned the moniker “Blue Zones”—of which Okinawa and Sardinia are probably the most famous, but there are others too.
This is in contrast to, for example “Red Zones”, a term often used for areas where a particular disease is endemic, or areas where a disease is “merely” epidemic, but particularly rife at present.
In any case, back to the Blue Zones, where people live the longest and healthiest—because the latter part is important too! See also:
- Lifespan: how long we live
- Healthspan: how long we stay healthy (portmanteau of “healthy lifespan”)
Most of our readers don’t live in a Blue Zone (in fact, many live in a COVID Red Zone, a diabetes Red Zone, and a heart disease Red Zone), but that doesn’t mean we can’t all take tips from the Blue Zones and apply them, for example:
- The basics: The Blue Zones’ Five Pillars Of Longevity
- Going beyond: The Five Key Traits Of Healthy Aging
You may be wondering… How much good will this do me? And, we do have an answer for that:
When All’s Said And Done, How Likely Are You To Live To 100?
Now that we’re all caught-up…
The news from the Blues
A team of researchers did a big review of observational studies of centenarians and near-centenarians (aged 95+). Why include the near-centenarians, you ask? Well, most of the studies are also longitudinal, and if we’re doing an observational study of the impact of lifestyle factors on a 100-year-old, it’s helpful to know what they’ve been doing recently. Hence nudging the younger-end cutoff a little lower, so as to not begin each study with fresh-faced 100-year-olds whom we know nothing about.
Looking at thousands of centenarians (and near-centenarians, but also including some supercentenarians, up the age of 118), the researchers got a lot of very valuable data, far more than we have room to go into here (do check out the paper at the bottom of this article, if you have time; it’s a treasure trove of data), but one of the key summary findings was a short list of four factors they found contributed the most to extreme longevity:
- A diverse diet with low salt intake: in particular, a wide variety of plant diversity, including protein-rich legumes, though fish featured prominently also. On average they got 57% and 65% of their energy intake from carbohydrates, 12% to 32% from protein, and 27% to 31% from fat. As for salt, they averaged 1.6g of sodium per day, which is well within the WHO’s recommendation of averaging under 2g of sodium per day. As a matter of interest, centenarians in Okinawa itself averaged 1.1g of sodium per day.
- Low medication use: obviously there may be a degree of non-causal association here, i.e. the same people who just happened to be healthier and therefore lived longer, correspondingly took fewer medications—they took fewer medications because they were healthier; they weren’t necessarily healthier because they took fewer medications. That said, overmedication can be a big problem, especially in places with a profit motive like the US, and can increase the risk of harmful drug interactions, and side effects that then need more medications to treat the side effects, as well as direct iatrogenic damage (i.e. this drug treats your condition, but as the cost of harming you in some other way). Naturally, sometimes we really do need meds, but it’s a good reminder to do a meds review with one’s doctor once in a while, and see if everything’s still of benefit.
- Getting good sleep: not shocking, and this one’s not exactly news. But what may be shocking is that 68% of centenarians reported consistently getting enough good-quality sleep. To put that into perspective, only 35% of 10almonds readers reported regularly getting sleep in the 7–9 hours range.
- Rural living environment: more than 75% of the centenarians and near-centenarians lived in rural areas. This is not usually something touted as a Blue Zones thing on lists of Blue zones things, but this review strongly highlighted it as very relevant. In the category of things that are more obvious once it’s pointed out, though, this isn’t necessarily such a difference between “country folk” and “city folk”, so much as the ability to regularly be in green spaces has well-established health benefits physically, mentally, and both combined (such as: neurologically).
And showing that yes, even parks in cities make a significant difference:
Want to know more?
You can read the study in full here:
A systematic review of diet and medication use among centenarians and near-centenarians worldwide
Take care!
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How To Improve Your Heart Rate Variability
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How’s your heart rate variability?
The hallmarks of a good, strong cardiovascular system include a medium-to-low resting heart rate (for adults: under 60 beats per minute is good; under 50 is typical of athletes), and healthy blood pressure (for adults: under 120/80, while still above 90/60, is generally considered good).
Less talked-about is heart rate variability, but it’s important too…
What is heart rate variability?
Heart rate variability is a measure of how quickly and easily your heart responds to changes in demands placed upon it. For example:
- If you’re at rest and then start running your fastest (be it for leisure or survival or anything in between), your heart rate should be able to jump from its resting rate to about 180% of that as quickly as possible
- When you stop, your heart rate should be able to shift gears back to your resting rate as quickly as possible
The same goes, to a commensurately lesser extent, to changes in activity between low and moderate, or between moderate and high.
- When your heart can change gears quickly, that’s called a high heart rate variability
- When your heart is sluggish to get going and then takes a while to return to normal after exertion, that’s called a low heart rate variability.
The rate of change (i.e., the variability) is measured in microseconds per beat, and the actual numbers will vary depending on a lot of factors, but for everyone, higher is better than lower.
Aside from quick response to crises, why does it matter?
If heart rate variability is low, it means the sympathetic nervous system is dominating the parasympathetic nervous system, which means, in lay terms, your fight-or-flight response is overriding your ability to relax.
See for example: Stress and Heart Rate Variability: A Meta-Analysis and Review of the Literature
This has a lot of knock-on effects for both physical and mental health! Your heart and brain will take the worst of this damage, so it’s good to improve things for them impossible.
This Saturday’s Life Hacks: how to improve your HRV!
Firstly, the Usual Five Things™:
- A good diet (that avoids processed foods)
- Good exercise (that includes daily physical activity—more often is more important than more intense!)
- Good sleep (7–9 hours of good quality sleep per night)
- Reduce or eliminate alcohol consumption (this is dose-dependent; any reduction is an improvement)
- Don’t smoke (just don’t)
Additional regular habits that help a lot:
- Breathing exercises, mindfulness, meditation
- Therapy, especially CBT and DBT
- Stress-avoidance strategies, for example:
- Get (and maintain) your finances in good order
- Get (and maintain) your relationship(s) in good order
- Get (and maintain) your working* life in good order
*Whatever this means to you. If you’re perhaps retired, or otherwise a home-maker, or even a student, the things you “need to do” on a daily basis are your working life, for these purposes.
In terms of simple, quick-fix, physical tweaks to focus on if you’re already broadly leading a good life, two great ones are:
- Exercise: get moving! Walk to the store even if you buy nothing but a snack or drink to enjoy while walking back. If you drove, make more trips with the shopping bags rather than fewer. If you like to watch TV, consider an exercise bike or treadmill to use while watching. If you have a partner, double-up and make it a thing you do together! Take the stairs instead of the elevator. Take the scenic route when walking someplace. Go to the bathroom that’s further away. Every little helps!
- Breathe: even just a couple of times a day, practice mindful breathing. Start with even just a minute a day, to get the habit going. What breathing exercise you do isn’t so important as that you do it. Notice your breathing; count how long each breath takes. Don’t worry about “doing it right”—you’re doing great, just observe, just notice, just slowly count. We promise that regular practice of this will have you feeling amazing
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The Mindful Body – by Dr. Ellen Langer
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Fear not, this is not a “think healing thoughts” New Age sort of book. In fact, it’s quite the contrary.
The most common negative reviews for this on Amazon are that it is too densely packed with scientific studies, and some readers found it hard to get through since they didn’t find it “light reading”.
Counterpoint: this reviewer found it very readable. A lot of it is as accessible as 10almonds content, and a lot is perhaps halfway between 10almonds content in readability, and the studies we cite. So if you’re at least somewhat comfortable reading academic literature, you should be fine.
The author, a professor of psychology (tenured at Harvard since 1981), examines a lot of psychosomatic effect. Psychosomatic effect is often dismissed as “it’s all in your head”, but it means: what’s in your head has an effect on your body, because your brain talks to the rest of the body and directs bodily responses and actions/reactions.
An obvious presentation of this in medicine is the placebo/nocebo effect, but Dr. Langer’s studies (indeed, many of the studies she cites are her own, from over the course of her 40-year career) take it further and deeper, including her famous “Counterclockwise” study in which many physiological markers of aging were changed (made younger) by changing the environment that people spent time in, to resemble their youth, and giving them instructions to act accordingly while there.
In the category of subjective criticism: the book is not exceptionally well-organized, but if you read for example a chapter a day, you’ll get all the ideas just fine.
Bottom line: if you want a straightforward hand-holding “how-to” guide, this isn’t it. But it is very much information-packed with a lot of ideas and high-quality science that’s easily applicable to any of us.
Click here to check out The Mindful Body, and indeed grow your chronic good health!
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