Red Light Therapy Every Day For 5 Years (Plus New Research)!
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And how to get the most out of the correct kind of device:
There’s no stopping this red light
Over the past 5 years, the use of red light therapy (RLT) has moved from being a fringe “biohack” to a more mainstream, research-backed tool.
It’s not new, though! RLT originated in the 1960s when a Hungarian scientist observed improved wound healing and hair growth in rodents exposed to low-level red light.
Now here in the modern era, strong evidence supports red light therapy for wound healing, collagen production, skin health, and treating hair loss, nerve damage in extremities, and age-related macular degeneration.
Going down the list, less certain but promising applications include muscle recovery, ameliorating depression symptoms, managing the pain of conditions ranging from osteoarthritis to fibromyalgia, and improving metabolic and cardiovascular health.
How it works: it’s not magic; red and near-infrared light stimulate mitochondria by interacting with cytochrome c oxidase, increasing ATP production and thus cellular energy. Other mechanisms include reactive oxygen species signaling for tissue repair and nitric oxide release to improve oxygen availability.
What kind of device is best: simpler devices with red (around 660nm) and near-infrared (around 830nm) wavelengths are more effective than more complex devices with additional wavelengths (including multicolored lights).
This is particularly important as wavelengths above 1000nm or below 500nm can irritate sensitive skin and (ironically) cause redness rather than calming effects.
As with many things, consistent use—ideally daily or at least 5 times per week—is necessary to see noticeable benefits.
And of course, results are best supported by a broader routine including skincare (e.g. tretinoin), diet, exercise, and sleep, rather than relying on RLT to do all the work alone. Your body is, after all, a system of systems, and works best when treated holistically!
For more on all of this, enjoy:
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Casting Yourself In A Healthier Light ← our main feature about RLT
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Move Like You’re 20
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Five ways to do it:
Youthful movements
For the most part, people’s joints don’t age simply because of time passing, but because we stop moving those joints properly, leading to stiffness, weakness, and reduced coordination between the joints.
In particular, sitting for many hours per day reduces not just mobility, but also how well the joints function together as a system.
So, consider practising these 5 movements:
- 90/90 hip rotations: sit on the floor with your feet slightly wider than shoulder-width, keep your chest up and your core engaged, rotate both knees side to side without shifting your hips to maintain 90° angles in your legs, and repeat.
- Deep squat hold: lower into a deep squat with your feet slightly wider than shoulder-width and your toes slightly turned out, keep your chest upright and your spine neutral while preventing your knees from collapsing inward, and hold (longer is better; aim for at least a few minutes as soon as you comfortably can).
- Cat–cow spine mobility: start on all fours with your hands under your shoulders and your knees under your hips, alternate between dropping your belly and lifting your chest, then rounding your back and tucking your chin, holding each position for 5 seconds and repeating.
- Half-kneeling open book: kneel with one leg forward at 90°, keep your hips stable and your spine neutral, rotate your front-side arm in a half circle while following your hand with your eyes, pause for 2 to 3 seconds, and repeat.
- Ankle dorsiflexion drill: from a half-kneeling position with your front foot flat, lean forwards and drive your front knee forwards without lifting your heel, hold for 5 seconds, and repeat.
For more on each of these plus visual demonstrations, enjoy:
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Mobility For Now & For Later: Train For The Marathon That Is Your Life!
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Undoing The Damage Of Life’s Hard Knocks
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Sometimes, What Doesn’t Kill Us Makes Us Insecure
We’ve written before about Complex PTSD, which is much more common than the more popularly understood kind:
Given that C-PTSD affects so many people (around 1 in 5, but really, do read the article above! It explains it better than we have room to repeat today), it seems like a good idea to share tips for managing it.
(Last time, we took all the space for explaining it, so we just linked to some external resources at the end)
What happened to you?
PTSD has (as a necessity, as part of its diagnostic criteria) a clear event that caused it, which makes the above question easy to answer.
C-PTSD often takes more examination to figure out what tapestry of circumstances (and likely but not necessarily: treatment by other people) caused it.
Often it will feel like “but it can’t be that; that’s not that bad”, or “everyone has things like that” (in which case, you’re probably one of the one in five).
The deeper questions
Start by asking yourself: what are you most afraid of, and why? What are you most ashamed of? What do you fear that other people might say about you?
Often there is a core pattern of insecurity that can be summed up in a simple, harmful, I-message, e.g:
- I am a bad person
- I am unloveable
- I am a fake
- I am easy to hurt
- I cannot keep my loved ones safe
…and so forth.
For a bigger list of common insecurities to see what resonates, check out:
Basic Fears/Insecurities, And Their Corresponding Needs/Desires
Find where they came from
You probably learned bad beliefs, and consequently bad coping strategies, because of bad circumstances, and/or bad advice.
- When a parent exclaimed in anger about how stupid you are
- When a partner exclaimed in frustration that always mess everything up
- When an employer told you you weren’t good enough
…or maybe they told you one thing, and showed you the opposite. Or maybe it was entirely non-verbal circumstances:
- When you gambled on a good idea and lost everything
- When you tried so hard at some important endeavour and failed
- When you thought someone could be trusted, and learned the hard way that you were wrong
These are “life’s difficult bits”, but when we’ve lived through a whole stack of them, it’s less like a single shattering hammer-blow of PTSD, and more like the consistent non-stop tap tap tap that ends up doing just as much damage in the long run.
Resolve them
That may sound a bit like a “and quickly create world peace” level of task, but we have tools:
Ask yourself: what if…
…it had been different? Take some time and indulge in a full-blown fantasy of a life that was better. Explore it. How would those different life lessons, different messages, have impacted who you are, your personality, your behaviour?
This is useful, because the brain is famously bad at telling real memories from false ones. Consciously, you’ll know that one was an exploratory fantasy, but to your brain, it’s still doing the appropriate rewiring. So, little by little, neuroplasticity will do its thing.
Tell yourself a better lie
We borrowed this one from the title of a very good book which we’ve reviewed previously.
This idea is not about self-delusion, but rather that we already express our own experiences as a sort of narrative, and that narrative tends to contain value judgements that are often not useful, e.g. “I am stupid”, “I am useless”, and all the other insecurities we mentioned earlier. Some simple examples might be:
- “I had a terrible childhood” → “I have come so far”
- “I should have known better” → “I am wiser now”
- “I have lost so much” → “I have experienced so much”
So, replacing that self-talk can go a long way to re-writing how secure we feel, and therefore how much trauma-response (ideally: none!) we have to stimuli that are not really as threatening as we sometimes feel they are (a hallmark of PTSD in general).
Here’s a guide to more ways:
How To Get Your Brain On A More Positive Track (Without Toxic Positivity)
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Unleashing My Superpowers – by Dr. Patience Mpofu
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Dr. Patience Mpofu is on a mission to provide women and girls with the inside-information, knowledge, resources, and strategies to break through the glass ceiling. She writes from her experience in STEM, but her lessons are applicable in any field.
Her advices range from the internal (how to deal with imposter syndrome) to the external (how to overcome cultural biases); she also explains and illustrates the importance of both role models and mentors.
While a lot of the book is half instruction manual, half memoir of her incredible life and career (to illustrate her points), and is well-worth reading—and/or perhaps worth gifting to a girl you know with ambitions in STEM?
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Is couples counselling right for me, and will the therapist take sides? An expert explains
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Should we do couples counselling? Are we happy? Are we both pulling in the same direction? How can we get our spark back?
These kinds of questions are normal in a society that places such importance on coupledom, despite there being no handbook or one-size-fits all approach.
Many people seek out couples counselling when going through a rough patch, or wondering how to improve their relationship. And no doubt the hit show Couples Therapy has boosted public interest in this type of counselling.
So, how do you decide if it’s right for you – and what should you expect?
Antoni Shkraba Studio/Pexels Should we get couples counselling?
Relationship satisfaction changes over time. Research shows even knowing this can help couples navigate the usual ups and downs of life together.
Some research also shows couples therapy can help lower relationship distress (which might include things such as frequent arguments or feeling dissatisfied in your relationship).
It may be suitable for some couples who want to work through infidelity or stressors such as caregiving responsibilities.
Others may seek out preventative couples counselling, which is focused on finding ways to improve communications before your relationship reaches crisis point.
Does it work? Well, some research has found certain types of counselling did help cut the divorce rate among newlyweds – but so too did getting couples to simply watch romance movies together and discuss the themes with their partner.
Overall, much depends on your motivation for seeking counselling and the mindset you’re bringing to it. Ask yourself: what do I want to work on, and what do I hope to achieve?
If your goal is to get someone to “take your side”, counselling may not help. A good couples counsellor should remain neutral, and they’re not there to take sides.
Many who seek couples counselling do so because they’re arguing and disagreeing a lot with their partner. If that’s you, it might help to let go of notions about who is “right” and move beyond anger. Instead, the focus in counselling may be on finding new conflict resolution skills.
Counselling may help with:
- improving communication skills
- making better connections with each other
- exploring the couples’ hopes for the future
- identifying what’s blocking them from achieving these goals.
Couples counselling isn’t always about staying together. Some use it to explore how to separate in a way that centres the needs of children.
Others may have specific issues with intimacy or sex. In that case, a sexual health counsellor or sex therapist may be more suitable than a standard couples counsellor. You can find one via professional organisations.
With a sex therapist, you and your partner might talk about things such as:
- mismatched libidos
- bodily changes, for example, to do with ageing
- expectations around sex
- communication around sex
- making adjustments to the way you interact to resolve these issues.
Importantly, though, not everyone needs therapy, or would benefit from it.
It’s no silver bullet.
Not for everyone
The problems or harms in some relationships will not be resolved through talking therapy. The most obvious is where violence and/or coercive control is used: safety planning, not couples counselling, is more appropriate.
And it’s important to remember the problems that lead people to conflict or counselling sometimes have structural causes that can’t be “fixed” by a few therapy sessions. For instance, perhaps your relationship is suffering because you’re experiencing stress at work, financial pressures, or you’re supporting a partner with depression. These are complex structural issues.
It’s also unclear how long the benefits of couples counselling last. One study noted “many distressed couples benefit during relationship education courses but that these benefits decline when the program ends.”
Couples in contented relationships do things daily for each other, such as making a coffee for your partner. Ketut Subiyanto/Pexels How do people choose a counsellor?
There’s a wide range of therapeutic techniques.
One famous approach is called the Gottman method, where couples focus on things such as creating “love maps” recording what you know about your partner, nurturing fondness, turning toward each other instead of away and solving problems. Famously, the Gottman approach also identifies the “four horsemen” of a relationship apocalypse: criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling.
Other couples counsellors will take more of a psychological or psychoanalytical approach, informed by techniques such as cognitive behavioural therapy.
Relationships Australia provides a range of services including relationship counselling.
At the end of the day what matters most is that you and your couples counsellor “click”; if you don’t gel with yours, it’s OK to find a new one.
Love is about doing
It can be helpful to use American author bell hooks’ idea of love as a practice of “doing” rather than a passive “being”. In other words, love is about doing things (for each other, together, or for yourself to fuel your relationship) rather than just about “being in love”.
Couples in long-term, contented relationships engage in day-to-day love practices, such as making a coffee for your partner, or watching a show together.
So, consider snuggling up on the couch with your partner to watch something together. Perhaps even Couples Therapy can provide a healthy prompt to reflect on and appreciate one another in a new light.
Priscilla Dunk-West, Professor of Social Work, Victoria University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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The Whys and Hows of Cutting Meats Out Of Your Diet
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Meat in general, and red meat and processed meat in particular, have been associated with so many health risks, that it’s very reasonable to want to reduce, if not outright eliminate, our meat consumption.
First, in case anyone’s wondering “what health risks?”
The aforementioned culprits tend to turn out to be a villain in the story of every second health-related thing we write about here. To name just a few:
- Processed Meat Consumption and the Risk of Cancer: A Critical Evaluation of the Constraints of Current Evidence from Epidemiological Studies
- Red Meat Consumption (Heme Iron Intake) and Risk for Diabetes and Comorbidities?
- Health Risks Associated with Meat Consumption: A Review of Epidemiological Studies
- Associations of Processed Meat, Unprocessed Red Meat, Poultry, or Fish Intake With Incident Cardiovascular Disease and All-Cause Mortality
- Meat consumption: Which are the current global risks? A review of recent (2010-2020) evidences
Seasoned subscribers will know that we rarely go more than a few days without recommending the very science-based Mediterranean Diet which studies find beneficial for almost everything we write about. The Mediterranean Diet isn’t vegetarian per se—by default it consists of mostly plants but does include some fish and a very small amount of meat from land animals. But even that can be improved upon:
- A Pesco-Mediterranean Diet With Intermittent Fasting
- Mediterranean, vegetarian and vegan diets as practical outtakes of EAS and ACC/AHA recommendations for lowering lipid profile
- A Mediterranean Low-Fat Vegan Diet to Improve Body Weight and Cardiometabolic Risk Factors: A Randomized, Cross-over Trial
So that’s the “why”; now for the “how”…
It’s said that with a big enough “why” you can always find a “how”, but let’s make things easy!
Meatless Mondays
One of the biggest barriers to many people skipping the meat is “what will we even eat?”
The idea of “Meatless Mondays” means that this question need only be answered once a week, and in doing that a few Mondays in a row, you’ll soon find you’re gradually building your repertoire of meatless meals, and finding it’s not so difficult after all.
Then you might want to expand to “meat only on the weekends”, for example.
Flexitarian
This can be met with derision, “Yes and I’m teetotal, apart from wine”, but there is a practical aspect here:
The idea is “I will choose vegetarian options, unless it’s really inconvenient for me to do so”, which wipes out any difficulty involved.
After doing this for a while, you might find that as you get more used to vegetarian stuff, it’s almost never inconvenient to eat vegetarian.
Then you might want to expand it to “I will choose vegan options, unless it’s really inconvenient for me to do so”
Like-for-like substitutions
Pretty much anything that can come from an animal, one can get a plant-based version of it nowadays. The healthiness (and cost!) of these substitutions can vary, but let’s face it, meat is neither the healthiest nor the cheapest thing out there these days either.
If you have the money and don’t fancy leaping to lentils and beans, this can be a very quick and easy zero-effort change-over. Then once you’re up and running, maybe you can—at your leisure—see what all the fuss is about when it comes to tasty recipes with lentils and beans!
That’s all we have time for today, but…
We’re thinking of doing a piece making your favorite recipes plant-based (how to pick the right substitutions so the meal still tastes and “feels” the same), so let us know if you’d like that? Feel free to mention your favorite foods/meals too, as that’ll help us know what there’s a market for!
You can do that by hitting reply to any of our emails, or using the handy feedback widget at the bottom!
Curious to know more while you wait?
Check out: The Vegan Diet: A Complete Guide for Beginners ← this is a well-sourced article from Healthline, who—just like us—like to tackle important health stuff in an easy-to-read, well-sourced format
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Artichoke vs Beetroot – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing artichoke to beetroot, we picked the artichoke.
Why?
We’ll not be surprised if most readers picked beetroot, and if that’s you, then it’s good that you know beetroot has some very healthful properties! The thing is, while those properties are great and cannot be described as overhyped… It’s often the case that a food’s “boring” nutritional properties go underhyped.
So, let’s hype it up for artichoke:
In terms of macros, artichoke has nearly 2x the fiber, approximately the same carbs, and more than 2x the protein, winning easily in this category.
In the category of vitamins, artichoke has more of vitamins B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, C, E, and K, while beetroot has more of vitamins A and B9, giving artichoke a 9:2 victory in this round.
Looking at minerals, artichoke has more calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, and zinc, while beetroot has more manganese and selenium, yielding artichoke another convincing win, 7:2 win this time.
In other considerations, artichoke has a lot more polyphenols (especially flavonoids and phenolic acids), while beetroot has betalains, especially betanin, and plenty of benefits therefrom. So we’ll call this round a tie.
Adding up the sections makes for a clear overall win for artichoke, but by all means enjoy either or both, as diversity is good!
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