Pelvic Floor Exercises (Not Kegels!) To Prevent Urinary Incontinence
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It’s a common threat, and if you think it couldn’t happen to you, then well, just wait. Happily, Dr. Christine Pieton, PT, DPT, a sport & women’s health physical therapist, has advice:
On the ball!
Or rather, we’re going to be doing ball-squeezing here, if you’ll pardon the expression. You will need a soccer-ball sized ball to squeeze.
Ball-squeeze breathing: lie on your back, ball between your knees, and inhale deeply, expanding your torso. Exhale, pressing your knees into the ball, engaging your abdominal muscles from lower to upper. Try to keep your spine long and avoid your pelvis tucking under during the exhalation.
Ball-squeeze bridge: lie on your back, ball between your knees, inhale to prepare, and then exhale, pressing up into a bridge, maintaining a firm pressure on the ball. Inhale as you lower yourself back down.
Ball-squeeze side plank: lie on your side this time, ball between your knees, supporting forearm under your shoulder, as in the video thumbnail. Inhale to prepare, and then exhale, lifting your hip a few inches off the mat. Inhale as you lower yourself back down.
Ball-squeeze bear plank: get on your hands and knees, ball between your thighs. Lengthen your spine, inhale to prepare, and exhale as you bring your knees just a little off the floor. Inhale as you lower yourself back down.
For more details and tips on each of these, plus a visual demonstration, plus an optional part 2 video with more exercises that aren’t ball-squeezes this time, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
Psst… A Word To The Wise About UTIs
Take care!
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Healing Your Gut: Anastasia’s Journey and Tips
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Anastasia Gurova shares her inspiring journey from chronic gut issues to vibrant health.
A Personal Journey to Gut Health
In the below video, Anastasia shares her long struggle with gut problems, including SIBO, IBS, and gastritis. She talks about ending up in the hospital with severe bloating, only to find that a range of medical approaches didn’t provide her with any lasting relief. This led her to explore the importance of the microbiome and its crucial role in gut health, which is what we’ll be focusing on in this overview.
Key Insights and Tips
The most valuable parts of Anastasia’s story for 10almonds readers are, in our opinion, the solutions she discovered to her gut issues. You’ll have to watch her video to discover all of them, but here are some of our favorites:
- Reintroduce Whole Grains and Legumes: Despite the popularity of grain-free diets, Anastasia found significant improvements in her gut health by adding whole grains like quinoa, oats, and buckwheat back into her diet. These foods provide essential fibers that feed beneficial gut bacteria.
- Soaking and Fermenting Foods: To make grains and legumes more digestible, Anastasia recommends soaking them overnight. This is similar to the common technique people use on oats. She also includes fermented foods like sauerkraut, kimchi, and yogurt in her diet, which introduce beneficial bacteria to the gut.
- Resistant Starches: Foods like cooked and cooled rice, potatoes, and green bananas contain resistant starches that promote healthy gut bacteria. Anastasia emphasizes incorporating these into meals to support gut health.
- Mindful Eating: Anastasia found that taking time to chew food thoroughly and savor each bite helped improve her digestion. She avoids distractions like TV while eating and pays attention to the textures and flavors of her meals.
- Avoid Overly Restrictive Diets: Anastasia warns against overly restrictive diets like keto and strict SIBO diets that cut out all carbs and fiber. These can worsen gut health by starving beneficial bacteria.
That’s Only The Beginning
Anastasia’s video goes far beyond what we’ve covered in this short introduction; she provides a detailed look at the steps she took, from dietary changes to lifestyle adjustments, and offers tips that anyone can apply. Plus, she explains the science behind these changes, which, of course, we love.
Enjoy the video! (It would be remiss for us to not bring up our general intro to gut health, or our more specific article on the gut-brain connection)
Good luck on your gut-health journey!
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The Brain As A Work-In-Progress
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And The Brain Goes Marching On!
In Tuesday’s newsletter, we asked you “when does the human brain stop developing?” and got the above-depicted, below-described, set of responses:
- About 64% of people said “Never”
- About 16% of people said “25 years”
- About 9% of people said “65 years”
- About 5% of people said “13 years”
- About 3% of people said “18 years”
- About 3% of people said “45 years”
Some thoughts, before we get into the science:
An alternative wording for the original question was “when does the human brain finish developing”; the meaning is the same but the feeling is slightly different:
- “When does the human brain stop developing?” focuses attention on the idea of cessation, and will skew responses to later ages
- When does the human brain finish developing?” focuses on attention on a kind of “is it done yet?” and will skew responses to earlier ages
Ultimately, since we had to chose one word or another, we picked the shortest one, but it would have been interesting if we could have done an A/B test, and asked half one way, and half the other way!
Why we picked those ages
We picked those ages as poll options for reasons people might be drawn to them:
- 13 years: in English-speaking cultures, an important milestone of entering adolescence (note that the concept of a “teenager” is not precisely universal as most languages do not have “-teen” numbers in the same way; the concept of “adolescent” may thus be tied to other milestones)
- 18 years: age of legal majority in N. America and many other places
- 25 years: age popularly believed to be when the brain is finished developing, due to a study that we’ll talk about shortly (we guess that’s why there’s a spike in our results for this, too!)
- 45 years: age where many midlife hormonal changes occur, and many professionals are considered to have peaked in competence and start looking towards retirement
- 65 years: age considered “senior” in much of N. America and many other places, as well as the cut-off and/or starting point for a lot of medical research
Notice, therefore, how a lot of things are coming from places they really shouldn’t. For example, because there are many studies saying “n% of people over 65 get Alzheimer’s” or “n% of people over 65 get age-related cognitive decline”, etc, 65 becomes the age where we start expecting this—because of an arbitrary human choice of where to draw the cut-off for the study enrollment!
Similarly, we may look at common ages of legal majority, or retirement pensions, and assume “well it must be for a good reason”, and dear reader, those reasons are more often economically motivated than they are biologically reasoned.
So, what does the science say?
Our brains are never finished developing: True or False?
True! If we define “finished developing” as “we cease doing neurogenesis and neuroplasticity is no longer in effect”.
Glossary:
- Neurogenesis: the process of creating new brain cells
- Neuroplasticity: the process of the brain adapting to changes by essentially rebuilding itself to suit our perceived current needs
We say “perceived” because sometimes neuroplasticity can do very unhelpful things to us (e.g: psychological trauma, or even just bad habits), but on a biological level, it is always doing its best to serve our overall success as an organism.
For a long time it was thought that we don’t do neurogenesis at all as adults, but this was found to be untrue:
How To Grow New Brain Cells (At Any Age)
Summary of conclusions of the above: we’re all growing new brain cells at every age, even if we be in our 80s and with Alzheimer’s disease, but there are things we can do to enhance our neurogenic potential along the way.
Neuroplasticity will always be somewhat enhanced by neurogenesis (after all, new neurons get given jobs to do), and we reviewed a great book about the marvels of neuroplasticity including in older age:
Our brains are still developing up to the age of 25: True or False?
True! And then it keeps on developing after that, too. Now this is abundantly obvious considering what we just talked about, but see what a difference the phrasing makes? Now it makes it sound like it stops at 25, which this statement doesn’t claim at all—it only speaks for the time up to that age.
A lot of the popular press about “the brain isn’t fully mature until the age of 25” stems from a 2006 study that found:
❝For instance, frontal gray matter volume peaks at about age 11.0 years in girls and 12.1 years in boys, whereas temporal gray matter volume peaks at about age at 16.7 years in girls and 16.2 years in boys. The dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, important for controlling impulses, is among the latest brain regions to mature without reaching adult dimensions until the early 20s.❞
Source: Structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Adolescent Brain
There are several things to note here:
- The above statement is talking about the physical size of the brain growing
- Nowhere does he say “and stops developing at 25”
However… The study only looked at brains up to the age of 25. After that, they stopped looking, because the study was about “the adolescent brain” so there has to be a cut-off somewhere, and that was the cut-off they chose.
This is the equivalent of saying “it didn’t stop raining until four o’clock” when the reality is that four o’clock is simply when you gave up on checking.
The study didn’t misrepresent this, by the way, but the popular press did!
Another 2012 study looked at various metrics of brain development, and found:
- Synapse overproduction into the teens
- Cortex pruning into the late 20s
- Prefrontal pruning into middle age at least (they stopped looking)
- Myelination beyond middle age (they stopped looking)
Source: Experience and the developing prefrontal cortex ← check out figure 1, and make sure you’re looking at the human data not the rat data
So how’s the most recent research looking?
Here’s a 2022 study that looked at 123,984 brain scans spanning the age range from mid-gestation to 100 postnatal years, and as you can see from its own figure 1… Most (if not all) brain-things keep growing for life, even though most slow down at some point, they don’t stop:
Brain charts for the human lifespan ← check out figure 1; don’t get too excited about the ventricular volume column as that is basically “brain that isn’t being a brain”. Do get excited about the rest, though!
Want to know how not to get caught out by science being misrepresented by the popular press? Check out:
How Science News Outlets Can Lie To You (Yes, Even If They Cite Studies!)
Take care!
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Unbroken – by Dr. MaryCatherine McDonald
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We’ve reviewed books about trauma before, so what makes this one different? Mostly, it’s the different framing.
Dr. McDonald advocates for a neurobiological understanding of trauma, which really levels the playing field when it comes to different types of trauma that are often treated very differently, when the end result in the brain is more or less the same.
Does this mean she proposes a “one-size fits all” approach? Kind of!
Insofar as she offers a one-size fits all approach that is then personalized by the user, but most of her advices will go for most kinds of trauma in any case. This is particularly useful for any of us who’ve ever hit a wall with therapists when they expect a person to only be carrying one major trauma.
Instead, with Dr. McDonald’s approach, we can take her methods and use them for each one.
After an introduction and overview, each chapter contains a different set of relevant psychological science explored through a case study, and then at the end of the chapter, tools to use and try out.
The style is very light and readable, notwithstanding the weighty subject matter.
Bottom line: if you’ve been trying to deal with (or avoid dealing with) some kind(s) of trauma, this book will doubtlessly contain at least a few new tools for you. It did for this reviewer, who reads a lot!
Click here to check out Unbroken, because it’s never too late to heal!
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The Stress Prescription (Against Aging!)
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The Stress Prescription (Against Aging!)
This is Dr. Elissa Epel, whose work has for the past 20 years specialized in the effect of stress on aging. She’s led groundbreaking research on cortisol, telomeres, and telomerase, all in the context of aging, especially in women, as well as the relationship between stress and weight gain. She was elected member of the National Academy of Medicine for her work on stress pathways, and has been recognized as a key “Influencer in Aging” by the Alliance for Aging Research.
Indeed, she’s also been named in the top 0.1% of researchers globally, in terms of publication impact.
What’s that about stress and aging?
In her words,
❝Women with the highest levels of perceived stress have telomeres shorter on average by the equivalent of at least one decade of additional aging compared to low stress women❞
Source: Accelerated telomere shortening in response to life stress
We say “in her words”, as she is the top-listed author on this paper—an honour reserved for the lead researcher of any given study/paper.
However, we’d be remiss not to note that the second-listed author is Nobel Prize Laureate Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn. What a team! Maybe we’ll do a spotlight feature on Dr. Blackburn’s work one of these days, but for now, back to Dr. Epel…
What does she want us to do about it?
She has the following advice for us:
Let go of what we can’t control
This one is simple enough, and can be as simple as learning how to set anxiety aside, and taking up the practice of radical acceptance of what we cannot control.
Be challenged, not afraid
This is about eustress, and being the lion, not the gazelle. Dr. Epel uses the example of how when lions are hunting gazelles, both are stressed, but both are feeling the physiological effects of that stress in terms of the augmentation to their immediate abilities, but only one of them is suffering by it.
We’ll let her explain how to leverage this:
TED ideas | Here’s how you can handle stress like a lion, not a gazelle | Dr. Elissa Epel
Build resilience through controlled discomfort
Don’t worry, you don’t have to get chased by lions. A cold shower will do it! This is about making use of hormesis, the body’s ability to build resilience to stressors by small doses of controlled cortisol release—as for example when one undergoes thermal shock, which sounds drastic, but for most people, a cold shower (or even an ice bath) is safe enough.
You can read more about this here:
A Cold Shower A Day Keeps The Doctor Away
Connect with nature
You don’t have to hug a tree, but you do have get to a natural (or at least, natural-seeming) environment once in a while. Simply put, we did not evolve to be in the urban or even suburban settings where most of us spend most of our time. Getting to be around greenery with at least some kind of regularity is hugely beneficial. It doesn’t have to be a national park; a nice garden or local park can suffice, and potted plants at home are better than nothing. Even spending time in virtual reality “nature” is an option:
(you can see an example there, of the kind of scenery this study used)
Breathe deeply, and rest deeply
Mindful breathing, and good quality sleep, are very strongly evidence-based approaches to reduce stress, for example:
Practice gratitude to build optimism
Optimism has a huge positive impact on health outcomes, even when other factors (including socioeconomic factors, pre-existing conditions, and general reasons for one person to be more optimistic than another) are controlled for.
Read: Optimism and Cause-Specific Mortality: A Prospective Cohort Study
There are various ways to increase optimism, and practising gratitude is one of them—but that doesn’t necessarily mean abandoning realism, either:
How To Practise (Non-Toxic) Positivity
There are other ways too, though, and Dr. Epel discusses some with her friend and colleague, Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, here:
Want to learn more from Dr. Epel?
We reviewed one of her books, The Telomere Effect, previously. It’s about what we can do to lengthen our telomeres (a key factor in health aging; effectively, being biologically younger). You also might enjoy her newer book, The Stress Prescription, as well as her blog.
Enjoy!
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Shredded Wheat vs Organic Crunch – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing Shredded Wheat to Organic Crunch, we picked the Shredded Wheat.
Why?
In this battle of the cereals, it comes down to the ingredients:
- The Shredded Wheat cereal has two ingredients: wheat (shredded), and BHT. The latter is a phenolic compound and antioxidant.
- The Organic Crunch cereal has lots of ingredients, of which the first two are wheat flour, and sugar.
This means that, per serving…
- The Shredded Wheat cereal has 7g fiber and 0g sugar
- The Organic Crunch cereal has 3g fiber and 12g sugar
Quite a difference! Sometimes, the “Organic Crunch” of a product comes from crunchy sugar.
You can check them out side-by-side here:
Shredded Wheat | Organic Crunch
Want to know more?
There’s a popular view that the only way to get fiber is to eat things that look (and potentially taste) like cardboard. Not so! There are delicious options:
Level-Up Your Fiber Intake! (Without Difficulty Or Discomfort)
Enjoy!
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White Noise vs Pink Noise
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It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? You can always hit “reply” to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom!
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
❝I live in a large city and even late at night there is always a bit of background noise. While I am pretty used to it by now, I find I don’t sleep nearly as well in the city as I do in the country. I have seen some stuff about “white noise” generators. I was wondering whether you have any thoughts about the science behind these, and whether it is something I should try out – or maybe I should be trying something completly different.❞
The science says…
❝Our data show that white noise significantly improved sleep based on subjective and objective measurements in subjects complaining of difficulty sleeping due to high levels of environmental noise. This suggests that the application of white noise may be an effective tool in helping to improve sleep in those settings.❞
That said, you might also consider “pink noise”, which is very similar to white noise (having all frequencies normally audible to the human ear), but has greater intensity of lower frequencies, creating a more deep and even sound. While white noise and pink noise are both great at “muting” external sounds like those that have been disturbing your sleep, pink noise may have an advantage in helping to stimulate deep and restful sleep:
❝This study demonstrates that steady pink noise has significant effect on reducing brain wave complexity and inducing more stable sleep time to improve sleep quality of individuals.❞
Source: Pink noise: effect on complexity synchronization of brain activity and sleep consolidation
There may be extra benefits to pink noise, too:
Acoustic Enhancement of Sleep Slow Oscillations and Concomitant Memory Improvement in Older Adults
Rest well!
Don’t Forget…
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Learn to Age Gracefully
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