Quit Drinking – by Rebecca Dolton
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.
Many “quit drinking” books focus on tips you’ve heard already—cut down like this, rearrange your habits like that, make yourself accountable like so, add a reward element this way, etc.
Dolton takes a different approach.
She focuses instead on the underlying processes of addiction, so as to not merely understand them to fight them, but also to use them against the addiction itself.
This is not just a social or behavioral analysis, by the way, and goes into some detail into the physiological factors of the addiction—including such things as the little-talked about relationship between addiction and gut flora. Candida albans, found in most if not all humans to some extent, gets really out of control when given certain kinds of sugars (including those from alcohol); it grows, eventually puts roots through the intestinal walls (ouch!) and the more it grows, the more it demands the sugars it craves, so the more you feed it.
Quite a motivator to not listen to such cravings! It’s not even you that wants it, it’s the Candida!
Anyway, that’s just one example; there are many. The point here is that this is a well-researched, well-written book that sets itself apart from many of its genre.
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Recommended
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
-
Felt Time – by Dr. Marc Wittmann
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.
This book goes far beyond the obvious “time flies when you’re having fun / passes slowly when bored”, or “time seems quicker as we get older”. It does address those topics too, but even in doing so, unravels deeper intricacies within.
The author, a research psychologist, includes plenty of reference to actual hard science here, and even beyond subjective self-reports. For example, you know how time seems to slow down upon immediate apparent threat of violent death (e.g. while crashing, while falling, or other more “violent human” options)? We learn of an experiment conducted in an amusement park, where during a fear-inducing (but actually safe) plummet, subjective time slows down yes, but measures of objective perception and cognition remained the same. So much for adrenal superpowers when it comes to the brain!
We also learn about what we can change, to change our perception of time—in either direction, which is a neat collection of tricks to know.
The style is on the dryer end of pop-sci; we suspect that being translated from German didn’t help its levity. That said, it’s not scientifically dense either (i.e. not a lot of jargon), though it does have many references (which we like to see).
Bottom line: if you’ve ever wished time could go more quickly or more slowly, this book can help with that.
Share This Post
-
The Disordered Mind – by Dr. Eric Kandel
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.
We don’t generally include author bios in these reviews, but it’s worth mentioning that Dr. Kandel won the Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine, for studies related to the topics in this book.
The premise in this book is as per the subtitle: what unusual brains tell us about ourselves. He assumes that the reader has a “usual” brain, but if you don’t, then all is not lost, and in fact he probably talks about your brain in the book too.
Examining the brains of people with conditions ranging from autism to Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia to Parkinson’s, or even such common things as depression and anxiety and addiction, tells us a lot about what in our brain (anatomically and physiologically) is responsible for what, and how those things can be thrown out of balance.
By inference, that also tells us how to keep things from being thrown out of balance. Even if the genetic deck is stacked against you, there are still things that can be done to avoid actual disease. After all, famously, “genes load the gun, but lifestyle pulls the trigger”.
Dr. Kandel writes in a clear and lucid fashion, such that even the lay reader can quite comfortably learn about such things as prion-folding and inhibitory neurons and repressed transcription factors and more.
Bottom line: if you’d like to understand more about what goes wrong and how and why and what it means for your so-far-so-good healthy brain, this is the book for that.
Click here to check out The Disordered Mind, and understand more!
Share This Post
-
What Are “Adaptogens” Anyway? (And Other Questions Answered)
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.
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 tried to use your calculator for heart health, and was unable to enter in my height or weight. Is there another way to calculate? Why will that field not populate?❞
(this is in reference to yesterday’s main feature “How Are You, Really? And How Old Is Your Heart?“)
How strange! We tested it in several desktop browsers and several mobile browsers, and were unable to find any version that didn’t work. That includes switching between metric and imperial units, per preference; both appear to work fine. Do be aware that it’ll only take numerical imput, though.
Did anyone else have this problem? Let us know! (You can reply to this email, or use the handy feedback widget at the bototm)
❝I may have missed it, but how much black pepper provides benefits?❞
So, for any new subscribers joining us today, this is about two recent main features:
As for a daily dosage of black pepper, it varies depending on the benefit you’re looking for, but:
- 5–20mg of piperine is the dosage range used in most scientific studies we looked at
- 10mg is a very common dosage found in many popular supplements
- That’s the mass of piperine though, so if taking it as actual black pepper rather than as an extract, ½ teaspoon is considered sufficient to enjoy benefits.
❝I loved the health benefits of pepper. I do not like pepper. Where can I get it as a supplement?❞
You can simply buy whole black peppercorns and take a few with water as though they were tablets. Your stomach acid will do the rest. Black pepper is also good for digestion, so taking it with a meal is best.
You can buy piperine (black pepper extract) by itself as a supplement in powder form, but if you don’t like black pepper, you will probably not like this powder either. We couldn’t find it readily in capsule form.
You can buy piperine (black pepper extract) as an adjunct to other supplements, with perhaps the most common/popular being turmeric capsules that also contain 10mg (or more) piperine per capsule. Shop around if you like, but here’s one that has 15mg piperine* per capsule, for example.
*They call it “Bioperine®” but that is literally just piperine. Same goes if you see “Absorbagen™”, it’s still just piperine.
❝What do you mean when you say that something is adaptogenic?❞
Simple version: it means it helps the body adapt to stress, by adjusting the body’s natural responses. Thus, adaptogenic supplements can be contrasted with tranquilizing drugs that mask stress by brute force, for example.
Technical version: adaptogenic activity refers to improving physiological stress resilience, such as by moderating and modulating hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis signaling, and/or by regulating levels of endogenic compounds involved in the cellular stress response.
Read more (technical version):
Read more (simple version):
European Medicines Agency’s Reflection Paper On The Adaptogenic Concept
Enjoy!
Share This Post
Related Posts
-
Science of Yoga – by Ann Swanson
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.
There are a lot of yoga books out there to say “bend this way, hold this that way” and so forth, but few that really explain what is going on, how, and why. And understanding those things is of course key to motivation and adherence. So that’s what this book provides!
The book is divided into sections, and in the first part we have a tour of human anatomy and physiology. This may seem almost unrelated to yoga, but is valuable necessary-knowledge to get the most out of the next section:
The next few parts are given over to yoga asanas (stretches, positions, poses, call them what you will in English) and now we are given a clear idea of what it is doing: we get to understand exactly what’s being stretched, what blood flow is being increased and how, what organs are being settled into their correct place, and many other such things.
Importantly, this means we also understand why certain things are the way they are, and why they can’t be done in some other slightly different but perhaps superficially easier way.
The style of the book is like a school textbook, really, but without patronizing the reader. The illustrations, of which there are many, are simple enough to be clear while being detailed enough to be informative.
Bottom line: if you’re ever doing yoga at home and wondering if you should cut a certain corner, this is the book that will tell you why you shouldn’t.
Click here to check out Science of Yoga, and optimize your practice!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
-
Antihistamines’ Generation Gap
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.
Are You Ready For Allergy Season?
For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, fall will be upon us soon, and we have a few weeks to be ready for it. A common seasonal ailment is of course seasonal allergies—it’s not serious for most of us, but it can be very annoying, and can disrupt a lot of our normal activities.
Suddenly, a thing that notionally does us no real harm, is making driving dangerous, cooking take three times as long, sex laughable if not off-the-table (so to speak), and the lightest tasks exhausting.
So, what to do about it?
Antihistamines: first generation
Ye olde antihistamines such as diphenhydramine and chlorpheniramine are probably not what to do about it.
They are small molecules that cross the blood-brain barrier and affect histamine receptors in the central nervous system. This will generally get the job done, but there’s a fair bit of neurological friendly-fire going on, and while they will produce drowsiness, the sleep will usually be of poor quality. They also tax the liver rather.
If you are using them and not experiencing unwanted side effects, then don’t let us stop you, but do be aware of the risks.
See also: Long-term use of diphenhydramine ← this is the active ingredient in Benadryl in the US and Canada, but safety regulations in many other countries mean that Benadryl has different, safer active ingredients elsewhere.
Antihistamines: later generations
We’re going to aggregate 2nd gen, 3rd gen, and 4th gen antihistamines here, because otherwise we’ll be writing a history article and we don’t have room for that. But suffice it to say, later generations of antihistamines do not come with the same problems.
Instead of going in all-guns-blazing to the CNS like first-gens, they are more specific in their receptor-targetting, resulting in negligible collateral damage:
Special shout-out to cetirizine and loratadine, which are the drugs behind half the brand names you’ll see on pharmacy shelves around most of the world these days (including many in the US and Canada).
Note that these two are very often discussed in the same sentence, sit next to each other on the shelf, and often have identical price and near-identical packaging. Their effectiveness (usually: moderate) and side effects (usually: low) are similar and comparable, but they are genuinely different drugs that just happen to do more or less the same thing.
This is relevant because if one of them isn’t working for you (and/or is creating an unwanted side effect), you might want to try the other one.
Another honorable mention goes to fexofenadine, for which pretty much all the same as the above goes, though it gets talked about less (and when it does get mentioned, it’s usually by its most popular brand name, Allegra).
Finally, one that’s a little different and also deserving of a special mention is azelastine. It was recently (ish, 2021) moved from being prescription-only to being non-prescription (OTC), and it’s a nasal spray.
It can cause drowsiness, but it’s considered safe and effective for most people. Its main benefit is not really the difference in drug, so much as the difference in the route of administration (nasal rather than oral). Because the drug is in liquid spray form, it can be absorbed through the mucus lining of the nose and get straight to work on blocking the symptoms—in contrast, oral antihistamines usually have to go into your stomach and take their chances there (we say “usually”, because there are some sublingual antihistamines that dissolve under the tongue, but they are less common.)
Better than antihistamines?
Writer’s note: at this point, I was given to wonder: “wait, what was I squirting up my nose last time anyway?”—because, dear readers, at the time I got it I just bought one of every different drug on the shelf, desperate to find something that worked. What worked for me, like magic, when nothing else had, was beclometasone dipropionate, which a) smelled delightfully of flowers, which might just be the brand I got, b) needs replacing now because I got it in March 2023 and it expired July 2024, and c) is not an antihistamine at all.
But, that brings us to the final chapter for today: systemic corticosteroids
They’re not ok for everyone (check with your doctor if unsure), and definitely should not be taken if immunocompromised and/or currently suffering from an infection (including colds, flu, COVID, etc) unless your doctor tells you otherwise (and even then, honestly, double-check).
But! They can work like magic when other things don’t. Unlike antihistamines, which only block the symptoms, systemic corticosteroids tackle the underlying inflammation, which can stop the whole thing in its tracks.
Here’s how they measure up against antihistamines:
❝The results of this systematic review, together with data on safety and cost effectiveness, support the use of intranasal corticosteroids over oral antihistamines as first line treatment for allergic rhinitis.❞
~ Dr. Robert Puy et al.
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
-
An unbroken night’s sleep is a myth. Here’s what good sleep looks like
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.
What do you imagine a good night’s sleep to be?
Often when people come into our sleep clinic seeking treatment, they share ideas about healthy sleep.
Many think when their head hits the pillow, they should fall into a deep and restorative sleep, and emerge after about eight hours feeling refreshed. They’re in good company – many Australians hold the same belief.
In reality, healthy sleep is cyclic across the night, as you move in and out of the different stages of sleep, often waking up several times. Some people remember one or more of these awakenings, others do not. Let’s consider what a healthy night’s sleep looks like.
Bricolage/Shutterstock Sleep cycles are a roller-coaster
As an adult, our sleep moves through different cycles and brief awakenings during the night. Sleep cycles last roughly 90 minutes each.
We typically start the night with lighter sleep, before moving into deeper sleep stages, and rising again into rapid eye movement (REM) sleep – the stage of sleep often linked to vivid dreaming.
If sleeping well, we get most of our deep sleep in the first half of the night, with REM sleep more common in the second half of the night.
Deepest sleep usually happens during the first half of the night. Verin/Shutterstock Adults usually move through five or six sleep cycles in a night, and it is entirely normal to wake up briefly at the end of each one. That means we might be waking up five times during the night. This can increase with older age and still be healthy. If you’re not remembering these awakenings that’s OK – they can be quite brief.
What does getting a ‘good’ sleep actually mean?
You’ll often hear that adults need between seven and nine hours of sleep per night. But good sleep is about more than the number of hours – it’s also about the quality.
For most people, sleeping well means being able to fall asleep soon after getting into bed (within around 30 minutes), sleeping without waking up for long periods, and waking feeling rested and ready for the day.
You shouldn’t be feeling excessively sleepy during the day, especially if you’re regularly getting at least seven hours of refreshing sleep a night (this is a rough rule of thumb).
But are you noticing you’re feeling physically tired, needing to nap regularly and still not feeling refreshed? It may be worthwhile touching base with your general practitioner, as there a range of possible reasons.
Common issues
Sleep disorders are common. Up to 25% of adults have insomnia, a sleep disorder where it may be hard to fall or stay asleep, or you may wake earlier in the morning than you’d like.
Rates of common sleep disorders such as insomnia and sleep apnoea – where your breathing can partially or completely stop many times during the night – also increase with age, affecting 20% of early adults and 40% of people in middle age. There are effective treatments, so asking for help is important.
Beyond sleep disorders, our sleep can also be disrupted by chronic health conditions – such as pain – and by certain medications.
There can also be other reasons we’re not sleeping well. Some of us are woken by children, pets or traffic noise during the night. These “forced awakenings” mean we may find it harder to get up in the morning, take longer to leave bed and feel less satisfied with our sleep. For some people, night awakenings may have no clear cause.
A good way to tell if these awakenings are a problem for you is by thinking about how they affect you. When they cause feelings of frustration or worry, or are impacting how we feel and function during the day, it might be a sign to seek some help.
If waking up in the night is interfering with your normal day-to-day activities, it may indicate a problem. BearFotos/Shutterstock We also may struggle to get up in the morning. This could be for a range of reasons, including not sleeping long enough, going to bed or waking up at irregular times – or even your own internal clock, which can influence the time your body prefers to sleep.
If you’re regularly struggling to get up for work or family needs, it can be an indication you may need to seek help. Some of these factors can be explored with a sleep psychologist if they are causing concern.
Can my smart watch help?
It is important to remember sleep-tracking devices can vary in accuracy for looking at the different sleep stages. While they can give a rough estimate, they are not a perfect measure.
In-laboratory polysomnography, or PSG, is the best standard measure to examine your sleep stages. A PSG examines breathing, oxygen saturation, brain waves and heart rate during sleep.
Rather than closely examining nightly data (including sleep stages) from a sleep tracker, it may be more helpful to look at the patterns of your sleep (bed and wake times) over time.
Understanding your sleep patterns may help identify and adjust behaviours that negatively impact your sleep, such as your bedtime routine and sleeping environment.
And if you find viewing your sleep data is making you feel worried about your sleep, this may not be useful for you. Most importantly, if you are concerned it is important to discuss it with your GP who can refer you to the appropriate specialist sleep health provider.
Amy Reynolds, Associate Professor in Clinical Sleep Health, Flinders University; Claire Dunbar, Research Associate, Sleep Health, Flinders University; Gorica Micic, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Clinical Psychologist, Flinders University; Hannah Scott, Research Fellow in Sleep Health, Flinders University, and Nicole Lovato, Associate Professor, Adelaide Institute for Sleep Health, Flinders University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
