Tis To Season To Be SAD-Savvy

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.

Seasonal Affective Disorder & SAD Lamps

For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s that time of the year; especially after the clocks recently went back and the nights themselves are getting longer. So, what to do in the season of 3pm darkness?

First: the problem

The problem is twofold:

  1. Our circadian rhythm gets confused
  2. We don’t make enough serotonin

The latter is because serotonin production is largely regulated by sunlight.

People tend to focus on item 2, but item 1 is important too—both as problem, and as means of remedy.

Circadian rhythm is about more than just light

We did a main feature on this a little while back, talking about:

  • What light/dark does for us, and how it’s important, but not completely necessary
  • How our body knows what time it is even in perpetual darkness
  • The many peaks and troughs of many physiological functions over the course of a day/night
  • What that means for us in terms of such things as diet and exercise
  • Practical take-aways from the above

Read: The Circadian Rhythm: Far More Than Most People Know

With that in mind, the same methodology can be applied as part of treating Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Serotonin is also about more than just light

Our brain is a) an unbelievably powerful organ, and the greatest of any animal on the planet b) a wobbly wet mass that gets easily confused.

In the case of serotonin, we can have problems:

  • knowing when to synthesize it or not
  • synthesizing it
  • using it
  • knowing when to scrub it or not
  • scrubbing it
  • etc

Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) are a class of antidepressants that, as the name suggests, inhibit the re-uptake (scrubbing) of serotonin. So, they won’t add more serotonin to your brain, but they’ll cause your brain to get more mileage out of the serotonin that’s there, using it for longer.

So, whether or not they help will depend on you and your brain:

Read: Antidepressants: Personalization Is Key!

How useful are artificial sunlight lamps?

Artificial sunlight lamps (also called SAD lamps), or blue light lamps, are used in an effort to “replace” daylight.

Does it work? According to the science, generally yes, though everyone would like more and better studies:

Interestingly, it does still work in cases of visual impairment and blindness:

How much artificial sunlight is needed?

According to Wirz-Justice and Terman (2022), the best parameters are:

  • 10,000 lux
  • full spectrum (white light)
  • 30–60 minutes exposure
  • in the morning

Source: Light Therapy: Why, What, for Whom, How, and When (And a Postscript about Darkness)

That one’s a fascinating read, by the way, if you have time.

Can you recommend one?

For your convenience, here’s an example product on Amazon that meets the above specifications, and is also very similar to the one this writer has

Enjoy!

Don’t Forget…

Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!

Recommended

  • Food and exercise can treat depression as well as a psychologist, our study found. And it’s cheaper
  • Daily, Weekly, Monthly: Habits Against Aging
    Dr. Anil Rajani shares daily to monthly tips on youthful skincare, from mediation and retinol use to luxury spa treatments and protective SPF50 sunscreen.

Learn to Age Gracefully

Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:

  • Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics – by Dan Harris

    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.

    If you already meditate regularly, this book isn’t aimed at you (though you may learn a thing or two anyway—this reviewer, who has practiced meditation for the past 30 years, learned a thing!).

    However, if you’re—as the title suggests—someone who hasn’t so far been inclined towards meditation, you could get the most out of this one. We’ll say more on this (obviously), but first, there’s one other group that may benefit from this book:

    If you have already practiced meditation, and/or already understand and want its benefits, but never really made it stick as a habit.

    Now, onto what you’ll get:

    • A fair scientific overview of meditation as an increasingly evidence-based way to reduce stress and increase both happiness and productivity
    • A good grounding in what meditation is and isn’t
    • A how-to guide for building up a consistent meditation habit that won’t get kiboshed when you have a particularly hectic day—or a cold.
    • An assortment of very common (and some less common) meditative practices to try
    • Some great auxiliary tools to build cognitive restructuring into your meditation

    We don’t usually cite other people’s reviews, but we love that one Amazon reviewer wrote:

    ❝I am 3 weeks into daily meditation practice, and I already notice that I am no longer constantly wishing for undercarriage rocket launchers while driving. I will always think your driving sucks, but I no longer wish you a violent death because of it. Yes, I live in Boston❞

    ~ J. Flaherty

    Bottom line: if you’re not already meditating daily, this is definitely a book for you. And if you are, you may learn a thing or two anyway!

    Click here to get your copy of Meditation For Fidgety Skeptics from Amazon today!

    Share This Post

  • 10 Ways To Balance Blood Sugars

    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.

    “Let Them Eat Cake”, She Said…

    This is Jessie Inchauspé, a French biochemist and author. She’s most known for her best-selling “Glucose Revolution: The Life-Changing Power Of Balancing Your Blood Sugar”.

    It’s a great book (which we reviewed recently) and you absolutely should read it, but meanwhile, we’re going to distill at least the most critical core ideas, 10almonds style. In this case, her “ten hacks”:

    Eat foods in the right order

    The order is:

    1. Fiber first
    2. Protein and fat second
    3. Starches and sugars last

    What happens here is… the fiber perks up the gut bacteria, the protein and fat will then be better-digested next, and the starches and sugars will try to jump the line, but they can’t because the fiber is a physical speedbump and the proteins and fats are taking the prime place for being digested. So instead, the starches and sugars—usually responsible for blood sugar spikes—get processed much more gradually, resulting in a nice even curve.

    Add a green starter to all your meals

    We know what you’re thinking: “that’s just the first one again”, but no. This is an extra starter, before you get to that. If you’re the cook of the household, this can absolutely simply mean snacking on green ingredients while cooking.

    Stop counting calories

    Especially, she advises: stop worrying about extra calories from fats, such as if doing an oil-and-vinegar dressing for salad—which she also recommends, because all three components (the oil, the vinegar, and the salad) help even out blood sugar levels.

    Flatten your breakfast curve

    For many, breakfast is the starchiest meal of the day, if not the sugariest. Inchauspé recommends flipping this (ideally) or softening it (if you really must have a carb-based breakfast):

    • Top choices include: a warm vegetable salad, fish, or eggs (or tofu if you don’t do animal products).
    • Next-best include: if you must have toast, make sure to have butter (and/or the aforementioned egg/tofu, for example) to give your digestion an extra thing to do.
    • Also: she recommends skipping the juice in favour of home-made breakfast smoothies. That way, instead of basically just sugar with some vitamins, you’re getting a range of nutrients that, if you stack it right, can constitute a balanced meal itself, with fiber + protein + fat + carbs.

    As an extra note from the 10almonds team: come to think of it, today’s sponsor’s product would be a great choice for this “mixed nutrient breakfast” idea! But more on that later

    Have any type of sugar—they’re all the same

    They’re technically not, but the point is that your body will immediately take them apart and then they will be just the same. Whether it’s the cheapest white sugar or the most expensive organic lovingly hand-reared free-range agave nectar, your body is going to immediately give it the chop-shop treatment (a process so quick as to be practically instantaneous) and say “this is now glucose”.

    Pick a dessert over a sweet snack

    Remember that about the right order for foods? A dessert, when your body is already digesting dinner, is going to make much less of a glucose spike than, say, a blueberry muffin when all you’ve had this morning is coffee and juice.

    Reach for the vinegar before you eat

    We recently did a whole main feature about this, so we’ll not double up today!

    After you eat, move

    The glucose you eat will be used to replace lost muscle glycogen, before any left over is stored as fat… and, while it’s waiting to be stored as fat, just sitting in your bloodstream being high blood sugars. So, this whole thing will go a lot better if you are actively using muscle glycogen (by moving your body).

    Inchauspé gives a metaphor: imagine a steam train worker, shoveling coal into the furnace. Meanwhile, other workers are bringing more coal. If the train is moving quickly, the coal can be shoveled into the furnace and burned and won’t build up so quickly. But if the train is moving slowly or not at all, that coal is just going to build up and build up, until the worker can shovel no more because of being neck-deep in coal.

    Same with your blood sugars!

    If you want to snack, go low-sugar

    In the category of advice that will shock nobody: sugary snacks aren’t good for avoiding blood sugar spikes! This one probably didn’t need a chapter devoted to it, but anyway: low sugar is indeed the way to go for snacks.

    Put some clothes on your carbs

    This is about olive oil on pasta, butter on potatoes, and so forth. Basically, anything starchy is going to be broken down quickly to sugar and sent straight into the bloodstream, if there’s nothing to slow it down. If you’re wondering what to do with rice: adding a tablespoon of chia seeds to the rice while cooking (so they’re cooked together) will add very healthy fats to your rice, and (because they’ve been cooked) will not seem like eating seeds, by the way. In terms of texture and appearance, it’ll be as though you threw some black pepper in*

    *which you should also do for many reasons, but that’s beyond the scope of this “about blood sugars” feature!

    Wanting to know more about the science of this?

    We’ve done all we have room for here today, but Inchauspé is, as ever, happy to explain it herself:



    Prefer text? Check out:

    The Science Behind Glucose Goddess

    Share This Post

  • Codependent No More – by Melody Beattie

    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 is a book review, not a book summary, but first let’s quickly cover a common misconception, because the word “codependent” gets misused a lot in popular parlance:

    • What codependence isn’t: “we depend on each other and must do everything together”
    • What codependence is:“person 1 has a dependency on a substance (or perhaps a behavior, such as gambling); person 2 is trying to look after person 1, and so has developed a secondary relationship with the substance/behavior. Person 2 is now said to be codependent, because it becomes all-consuming for them too, even if they’re not using the substance/behavior directly”

    Funny how often it happens that the reality is more complex than the perception, isn’t it?

    Melody Beattie unravels all this for us. We get a compassionate and insightful look at how we can look after ourselves, while looking after another. Perhaps most importantly: how and where to draw a line of what we can and cannot do/change for them.

    Because when we love someone, of course we want to fight their battles with them, if not for them. But if we want to be their rock of strength, we can’t get lost in it too, and of course that hurts.

    Beatty takes us through these ideas and more, for example:

    • How to examine our own feelings even when it’s scary
    • How to practice self-love and regain self-worth, while still caring for them
    • How to stop being reactionary, step back, and act with purpose

    If the book has any weak point, it’s that it repeatedly recommends 12-step programs, when in reality that’s just one option. But for those who wish to take another approach, this book does not require involvement in a 12-step program, so it’s not a barrier to usefulness.

    Click here to check out Codependent No More and take care of yourself, too

    Share This Post

Related Posts

  • Food and exercise can treat depression as well as a psychologist, our study found. And it’s cheaper
  • The Dopamine Myth

    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.

    The Dopamine Myth

    There’s a popular misconception that, since dopamine is heavily involved in addictions, it’s the cause.

    We see this most often in the context of non-chemical addictions, such as:

    • gambling
    • videogames
    • social media

    And yes, those things will promote dopamine production, and yes, that will feel good. But dopamine isn’t the problem.

    Myth: The Dopamine Detox

    There’s a trend we’ve mentioned before (it got a video segment a few Fridays back) about the idea of a “dopamine detox“, and how unscientific the idea is.

    For a start…

    • You cannot detox from dopamine, because dopamine is not a toxin
    • You cannot abstain from dopamine, because your brain regulates your dopamine levels to keep them correct*
    • If you could abstain from dopamine (and did), you would die, horribly.

    *unless you have a serious mental illness, for example:

    • forms of schizophrenia and/or psychosis that involve too much dopamine, or
    • forms of depression and/or neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s (and several kinds of dementia) in which you have too little dopamine
    • bipolar disorder in which dopamine levels can swing too far each way

    See also: Dopamine fasting: misunderstanding science spawns a maladaptive fad

    Myth: Dopamine is all about pleasure

    Dopamine is a pleasure-giving neurotransmitter, but it serves more purposes than that! It also plays a central role in many neurological processes, including:

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

    Note for example how someone taking dopaminergic drugs (prescription or otherwise; could be anything from modafinil to cocaine) is not blissed out… They’re probably in a good mood, sure, but they’re focused, organized, quick-thinking, and so forth! This is not an ad for cocaine; cocaine is very bad for the health. But you see the features? So, what if we could have a little more dopamine… healthily?

    Dopamine—à la carte

    Let’s look at the examples we gave earlier of non-chemical addictions that are dopaminergic in nature:

    • gambling
    • videogames
    • social media

    They’re not actually that rewarding, are they?

    • Gamblers lose more than they win
    • Gamers cease to care about a game once they have won
    • Social media more often results in “doomscrolling”

    This is because what prompts the most dopamine is actually the anticipation of reward… not the thing itself, whose reward-pleasure is very fleeting. Nobody looks back at an hour of doomscrolling and thinks “well, that was fun; I’m glad I did that”.

    See the science: Liking, Wanting and the Incentive-Sensitization Theory of Addiction

    But what if we anticipated a reward from things that are not deleterious to health and productivity? Things that are neutral, or even good for us?

    Examples of this include:

    • Sex! (remember though, it’s not a race to the finish-line)
    • Good, nourishing food (bonus: some foods boost dopamine production nutritionally)
    • Exercise/sport (also prompts release of endorphins, win/win!)
    • Gamified learning apps (e.g. Duolingo)
    • Gamified health/productivity apps (anything with bells and whistles and things that go “ding” and measure streaks etc)

    Want to know more?

    That’s all we have time for today, but you might want to check out:

    10 Best Ways to Increase Dopamine Levels Naturally ← Science-based and well-sourced 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:

  • Synergistic Brain-Training

    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.

    Let The Games Begin (But It Matters What Kind)

    Exercise is good for brain health; we’ve written about this before, for example:

    How To Reduce Your Alzheimer’s Risk ← there are many advices here, but exercise, especially cardiovascular exercise in this case, is an important item on the list!

    Today it’s Psychology Sunday though, and we’re going to talk about looking after brain health by means of brain-training, via games.

    “Brain-training” gets a lot of hype and flak:

    • Hype: do sudoku every day and soon you will have an IQ of 200 and still have a sharp wit at the age of 120
    • Flak: brain-training is usually training only one kind of cognitive function, with limited transferability to the rest of life

    The reality is somewhere between the two. Brain training really does improve not just outwardly measurable cognitive function, but also internally measurable improvements visible on brain scans, for example:

    But what about the transferability?

    Let us play

    This is where game-based brain-training comes in. And, the more complex the game, the better the benefits, because there is more chance of applicability to life, e.g:

    • Sudoku: very limited applicability
    • Crosswords: language faculties
    • Chess: spatial reasoning, critical path analysis, planning, memory, focus (also unlike the previous two, chess tends to be social for most people, and also involve a lot of reading, if one is keen)
    • Computer games: wildly varied depending on the game. While an arcade-style “shoot-em-up” may do little for the brain, there is a lot of potential for a lot of much more relevant brain-training in other kinds of games: it could be planning, problem-solving, social dynamics, economics, things that mirror the day-to-day challenges of running a household, even, or a business.
      • It’s not that the skills are useful, by the way. Playing “Stardew Valley” will not qualify you to run a real farm, nor will playing “Civilization” qualify you to run a country. But the brain functions used and trained? Those are important.

    It becomes easily explicable, then, why these two research reviews with very similar titles got very different results:

    The first review found that game-based brain-training had negligible actual use. The “games” they looked at? BrainGymmer, BrainHQ, CogMed, CogniFit, Dakim, Lumosity, and MyBrainTrainer. In other words, made-for-purpose brain-trainers, not actual computer games per se.

    The second reviewfound that game-based training was very beneficial. The games they looked at? They didn’t name them, but based on the descriptions, they were actual multiplayer online turn-based computer games, not made-for-purpose brain-trainers.

    To summarize the above in few words: multiplayer online turn-based computer games outperform made-for-purpose brain-trainers for cognitive improvement.

    Bringing synergy

    However, before you order that expensive gaming-chair for marathon gaming sessions (research suggests a tail-off in usefulness after about an hour of continuous gaming per session, by the way), be aware that cognitive training and (physical) exercise training combined, performed close in time to each other or simultaneously, perform better than the sum of either alone:

    Comparing the effect of cognitive vs. exercise training on brain MRI outcomes in healthy older adults: A systematic review

    See also:

    Simultaneous training was the most efficacious approach for cognition, followed by sequential combinations and cognitive training alone, and significantly better than physical exercise.

    Our findings suggest that simultaneously and sequentially combined interventions are efficacious for promoting cognitive alongside physical health in older adults, and therefore should be preferred over implementation of single-domain training

    ~ Dr. Hanna Malmberg Gavelin et al.

    Source: Combined physical and cognitive training for older adults with and without cognitive impairment: A systematic review and network meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials

    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:

  • Ikigai – by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles

    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.

    Ikigai is the Japanese term for what in English we often call “raison d’être”… in French, because English is like that.

    But in other words: ikigai is one’s purpose in life, one’s reason for living.

    The authors of this work spend some chapters extolling the virtues of finding one’s ikigai, and the health benefits that doing so can convey. It is, quite clearly, an important and relevant factor.

    The rest of the book goes beyond that, though, and takes a holistic look at why (and how) healthy longevity is enjoyed by:

    • Japanese people in general,
    • Okinawans in particular,
    • Residents of Okinawa’s “blue zone” village with the highest percentage of supercentenarians, most of all.

    Covering considerations from ikigai to diet to small daily habits to attitudes to life, we’re essentially looking at a blueprint for healthy longevity.

    For a book whose title and cover suggests a philosophy-heavy content, there’s a lot of science in here too, by the way! From microbiology to psychiatry to nutrition science to cancer research, this book covers all bases.

    In short: this book gives a lot of good science-based suggestions for adjustments we can make to our lives, without moving to an Okinawan village!

    Click Here To Check Out Ikigai on Amazon Today!

    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: