Tech Bliss – by Clo S., MSc.
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The popular idea of a “digital detox” is simple enough, “just unplug!”, they say.
But here in the real world, not only is that often not practical for many of us, it may not always even be entirely desirable. The Internet (and our devices with all their bells and whistles) can be a source of education, joy, and connection!
So, how to find out what’s good for us and what’s not, in our daily digital practices? Clo. S. has answers… Or rather, experiments for us to do and find out for ourselves.
These experiments range from the purely practical “try this to streamline your experience” to the more personal “how does this thing make you feel?”. A lot of the experiments will be performed via your digital devices—some, without! Others are about online interpersonal dynamics, be they one-on-one or navigating a world in which it seems everyone is out to get us, our outrage, and/or our money. Still yet others are about optimizing what you do get from the parts of your digital experience that are enriching for you.
As the title suggests, there are 30 experiments, and it’s not a stretch to do them one per day for a month. But, as the author notes, it’s by no means necessary to do them like that; it’s a workbook and reference guide, not a to-do list!
(On the topic of it being a reference guide…There’s also an extensive tools directory towards the end!)
In short: this is a great book for optimizing your online experience—whatever that might mean for you personally; you can decide for yourself along the way!
Click here to get a copy of Tech Bliss: 30 Experiments For Your Digital Wellness today!
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Screaming at Screens?
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I Screen, You Screen, We All Screen For…?
Dr. Kathryn Birkenbach is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Neuroscience at Columbia University, and Manager of Research at Early Medical in New York.
Kathryn has things to tell us about kids’ neurological development, and screen time spent with electronic devices including phones, tablets, computers, and TVs.
From the 1960s criticism of “the gogglebox” to the modern-day critiques of “iPad babies” as a watchword of parental neglect, there’s plenty people can say against screen time, but Dr. Birkenbach tells us the that the reality is more nuanced:
Context Is Key
On a positive note”: consistent exposure to age-appropriate educational material results in quicker language acquisition than media that’s purely for entertainment purposes, or not age-appropriate.
Contrary to popular belief, children do not in fact learn by osmosis!
Interaction Is Far More Valuable Than Inaction
Kathryn advises that while adults tend to quite easily grasp things from instructional videos, the same does not go for small children.
This means that a lot of educational programming can be beneficial to small children if and only if there is an adult with them to help translate the visual into the practical!
There’s a story that does the rounds on the Internet: a young boy wanted to train his puppy, but didn’t know how. He asked, and was told “search for puppy training on YouTube”. His parents came back later and found him with his iPad, earnestly showing the training videos to the puppy.
We can laugh at the child’s naïvety, knowing that’s not how it works and the puppy will not learn that way, so why make the same mistake in turn?
❝The phenomenon known as the “video deficit effect” can be overcome, when an on-screen guide interacts with the child or a parent is physically present and draws the child’s attention to relevant information.
In other words, interaction with others appears to enhance the perceived salience of on-screen information, unlocking a child’s ability to learn from a medium which would otherwise offer no real-world benefit.❞
Screens Can Supplement, But Can’t Replace, Live Learning & Play
Sci-fi may show us “education pods” in which children learn all they need to from their screen… but according to our most up-to-date science, Dr. Birkenbach says, that simply would not work at all.
Screen time without adult interactions will typically fail to provide small children any benefit.
There is one thing it’s good at, though… attracting and keeping attention.
Thus, even a mere background presence of a TV show in the room will tend to actively reduce the time a small child spends on other activities, including live learning and exploratory play.
The attention-grabbing abilities of TV shows don’t stop at children, though! Adult caregivers will also tend to engage in fewer interactions with their children… and the interactions will be shorter and of lower quality.
In Summary:
- Young children will tend not to learn from non-interactive screen time
- Interactive screen time, ideally with a caregiver, can be educational
- Interactive screen time, not with a carer, can be beneficial (but a weak substitute)
- Interactive screen time refers to shows such as Dora The Explorer, where Dora directly addresses the viewer and asks questions…But it’s reliant on the child caring to answer!
- It can also mean interactive educational apps, provided the child does consciously interact!
- Randomly pressing things is not conscious interaction! The key here is engaging with it intelligently and thoughtfully
- A screen will take a child’s time and attention away from non-screen things: that’s a genuine measurable loss to their development!
Absolute Bottom Line:
Screens can be of benefit to small children, if and only if the material is:
- Age-Appropriate
- Educational
- Interactive
If it’s missing one of those three, it’ll be of little to no benefit, and can even harm, as it reduces the time spent on more beneficial activities.
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Feel-Good Productivity – by Dr. Ali Abdaal
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“Rise and grind” is not a sustainable way to live. Yet for most of us, there are things we do have to do every day that we don’t necessarily do for fun. So, how to be productive with those things, and not feel like we are constantly compromising and sacrificing our time on this earth for some intrinsically trivial but extrinsically required activity that’ll be forgotten tomorrow?
And most of us do also have dreams and ambitions (and if you don’t, then what were they before life snatched them away from you?), things to work towards. So there is “carrot” for us as well as “stick”. But how to break the cycle and get more carrot and less stick, while being more productive than before?
Dr. Abdaal frames this principally in terms of neurology first, psychology next.
That when we are bored, we simply do not have the neurochemicals required to work well anyway, so addressing that first needs to be a priority. He lays out many ways of doing this, gives lots of practical tips, and brings attention to the ways it’s easy to go wrong (and how to fix those too).
The writing style isdeceptively relaxed and casual, leading the reader smoothly into understanding of each topic before moving on.
Bottom line: if you want to get more done while feeling better about it (not a tired wreck), then this is the book for you!
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Resistance Is Useful! (Especially As We Get Older)
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Resistance Is Useful!
At 10almonds we talk a lot about the importance of regular moderate exercise (e.g. walking, gardening, housework, etc), and with good reason: getting in those minutes (at least 150 minutes per week, so, a little over 20 minutes per day, or 25 minutes per day with one day off) is the exericise most consistently linked to better general health outcomes and reduced mortality risk.
We also often come back to mobility, because at the end of the day, being able to reach for something from a kitchen cabinet without doing oneself an injury is generally more important in life than being able to leg-press a car.
Today though, we’re going to talk about resistance training.
What is resistance training?
It can be weight-lifting, or it can be bodyweight exercises. In those cases, what you’re resisting is gravity. It can also be exercises with resistance bands or machines. In all cases, it’s about building and/or maintaining strength.
Why does it matter?
Let’s say you’re not an athlete, soldier, or laborer, and the heaviest thing you have to pick up is a bag of groceries. Strength still matters, for two main reasons:
- Muscle strength correlates to bone strength. You can’t build (or maintain) strong muscles on weak bones, so if you take care of your muscles, then your body will keep your bones strong too.
- That’s assuming you have a good diet as well—but today’s not about that. If you’d like to know more about eating for bone health though, do check out this previous article about that!
- Muscle strength correlates to balance and stability. You can’t keep yourself from falling over if you are physically frail.
Both of those things matter, because falls and fractures often have terrible health outcomes (e.g., slower recovery and more complications) the older we get. So, we want to:
- Ideally, not fall in the first place
- If we do fall, have robust bones
See also: Effects of Resistance Exercise on Bone Health
How much should we do?
Let’s go to the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research on this one:
❝There is strong evidence to support the benefits of resistance exercise for countering many age-related processes of sarcopenia, muscle weakness, mobility loss, chronic disease, disability, and even premature mortality.
In addition, this Position Statement provides specific evidence-based practice recommendations to aid in the implementation of resistance exercise programs for healthy older adults and those with special considerations.
While there are instances where low-intensity, low-volume programs are appropriate (i.e., beginning programs for individuals with frailty or CVDs), the greatest benefits are possible with progression to moderate to higher intensity programs.❞
~ Fragala et al
Read the statement in full:
There’s a lot of science there and it’s well worth reading if you have the time. It’s particularly good at delineating how much is not enough vs how much is too much, and the extent to which we should (or shouldn’t) train to exhaustion.
If you don’t fancy that, though, and/or just want to start with something accessible and work your way up, the below is a very good (and also evidence-based) start-up plan:
Healthline’s Exercise Plan For Seniors—For Strength, Balance, & Flexibility
(it has a weekly planner, step-by-step guides to the exercises, and very clear illustrative animations of each)
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- Muscle strength correlates to bone strength. You can’t build (or maintain) strong muscles on weak bones, so if you take care of your muscles, then your body will keep your bones strong too.
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When Did You Last Have a Cognitive Health Check-Up?
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When Did You Last Have a Cognitive Health Check-Up?
Regular health check-ups are an important part of a good health regime, especially as we get older. But after you’ve been prodded, probed, sampled and so forth… When did you last have a cognitive health check-up?
Keeping on top of things
In our recent Monday Research Review main feature about citicoline, we noted that it has beneficial effects for a lot of measures of cognitive health.
And that brought us to realize: just how on top of this are we?
Your writer here today could tell you what her sleep was like on any night in the past year, what her heart rate was like, her weight, and all that. Moods too! There’s an app for that. But cognitive health? My last IQ test was in 2001, and I forget when my last memory test was.
It’s important to know how we’re doing, or else how to we know if there has been some decline? We’ve talked previously about the benefits of brain-training of various kinds to improve cognition, so in some parts we’ll draw on the same resources today, but this time the focus is on getting quick measurements that we can retest regularly (mark the calendar!)
Some quick-fire tests
These tests are all free, quick, and accessible. Some of them will try to upsell you on other (i.e. paid) services; we leave that to your own discretion, but the things we’ll be using today are free.
Test your verbal memory
This one’s a random word list generator. It defaults to 12 words, but you can change that if you like. Memorize the words, and then test yourself by seeing how many you can write down from memory. If it gets too easy, crank up the numbers.
Test your visual memory
This one’s a series of images; the test is to click to say whether you’ve seen this exact image previously in the series or not.
Test your IQ
This one’s intended to be general purpose intelligence; in reality, IQ tests have their flaws too, but it’s not a bad metric to keep track of. Just don’t get too hung up on the outcome, and remember, your only competition is yourself!
Test your attention / focus
This writer opened this and this three other attention tests (to get you the best one) before getting distracted, noting the irony, and finally taking the test. Hopefully you can do better!
Test your creativity
This one’s a random object generator. Give yourself a set period of time (per your preference, but make a note of the time you allow yourself, so that you can use the same time period when you retest yourself at a later date) in which to list as many different possible uses for the item.
Test your musical sense
This one’s a pitch recognition test. So, with the caveat that it is partially testing your hearing as well as your cognition, it’s a good one to take and regularly retest in any case.
How often should you retest?
There’s not really any “should” here, but to offer some advice:
- If you take them too often, you might find you get bored of doing so and stop, essentially burning out.
- If you don’t take them regularly, you may forget, lose this list of tests, etc.
- Likely a good “sweet spot” is quarterly or six-monthly, but there’s nothing wrong with testing annually either.
It’s all about the big picture, after all.
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Tinnitus: Quieting The Unwanted Orchestra In Your Ears
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Tinnitus—When a “minor” symptom becomes disruptive
Tinnitus (typically: ringing in the ears) is often thought of less as a condition in and of itself, and more a symptom related to other hearing-related conditions. Paradoxically, it can be associated with hearing loss as well as with hyperacusis (hearing supersensitivity, which sounds like a superpower, but can be quite a problem too).
More than just ringing
Tinnitus can manifest not just as ringing, but also as whistling, hissing, pulsing, buzzing, hooting, and more.
For those who don’t suffer from this, it can seem very trivial; for those who do… Sometimes it can seem trivial too!
But sometimes it’s hard to carry on a conversation when at random moments it suddenly sounds like someone is playing a slide-whistle directly into your earhole, or like maybe a fly got stuck in there.
It’s distracting, to say the least.
What causes it?
First let’s note, tinnitus can be acute or chronic. So, some of these things may just cause tinnitus for a while, whereas some may give you tinnitus for life. In some cases, it depends on how long the thing in question persisted for.
A lot of things can cause it, but common causes include:
- Noise exposure (e.g. concerts, some kinds of industrial work, war)
- High blood pressure
- Head/neck injuries
- Ear infection
- Autoimmune diseases (e.g. Type 1 Diabetes, Lupus, Multiple Sclerosis)
So what can be done about it?
Different remedies will work (or not) for different people, depending on the cause and type of tinnitus.
Be warned also: some things that will work for one person’s tinnitus will make another person’s worse, so you might need to try a degree of experimentation and some of it might not be fun!
That in mind, here are some things you might want to try if you haven’t already:
- Earplugs or noise-canceling headphones—while tinnitus is an internal sound, not external, it often has to do with some part(s) of your ears being unduly sensitive, so giving them less stimulus may ease the tinnitus that occurs in reaction to external noise.
- A great option (that this writer uses personally and considers a life-changer) is silicon earplugs that live in a little case on a keyring when not in use—no more heart-racing fleeing from supermarket checkout boops or pedestrian crossing bips or traffic noises or babies crying or (etc)
- White noise—if you also have hyperacusis, a lower frequency range will probably not hurt the way a higher range might. If you don’t also have hyperacusis, you have more options here and this is a popular remedy. Either way, white noise outperforms “relaxing” soundscapes.
- Hearing aids—counterintuitively, for some people whose tinnitus has developed in response to hearing loss, hearing aids can help bring things “back to normal” and eliminate tinnitus in the process.
- Customized sound machines—if you have the resources to get fancy, science currently finds this to be best of all. They work like white noise, but are tailored to your specific tinnitus.
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Heart Health vs Systemic Stress
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At The Heart Of Good Health
This is Dr. Michelle Albert. She’s a cardiologist with a decades-long impressive career, recently including a term as the president of the American Heart Association. She’s the current Admissions Dean at UCSF Medical School. She’s accumulated enough awards and honors that if we list them, this email will not fit in your inbox without getting clipped.
What does she want us to know?
First, lifestyle
Although Dr. Albert is also known for her work with statins (which found that pravastatin may have anti-inflammatory effects in addition to lipid-lowering effects, which is especially good news for women, for whom the lipid-lowering effects may be less useful than for men), she is keen to emphasize that they should not be anyone’s first port-of-call unless “first” here means “didn’t see the risk until it was too late and now LDL levels are already ≥190 mg/dL”.
Instead, she recommends taking seriously the guidelines on:
- getting plenty of fruit, vegetables, whole grains, lean protein
- avoiding red meat, processed meats, refined carbohydrates, and sweetened beverages
- getting your 150 minutes per week of moderate exercise
- avoiding alcohol, and definitely abstaining from smoking
See also: These Top Five Things Make The Biggest Difference To Health
Next, get your house in order
No, not your home gym—though sure, that too!
But rather: after the “Top Five Things” we linked just above, the sixth on the list would be “reduce stress”. Indeed, as Dr. Albert says:
❝Heart health is not just about the physical heart but also about emotional well-being. Stress management is crucial for a healthy heart❞
~ Dr. Michelle Albert
This is where a lot of people would advise mindfulness meditation, CBT, somatic therapies, and the like. And these things are useful! See for example:
No-Frills, Evidence-Based Mindfulness
…and:
However, Dr. Albert also advocates for awareness of what some professionals have called “Shit Life Syndrome”.
This is more about socioeconomic factors. There are many of those that can’t be controlled by the individual, for example:
❝Adverse maternal experiences such as depression, economic issues and low social status can lead to poor cognitive outcomes as well as cardiovascular disease.
Many jarring statistics illuminate a marked wealth gap by race and ethnicity… You might be thinking education could help bridge that gap. But it is not that simple.
While education does increase wealth, the returns are not the same for everyone. Black persons need a post-graduate degree just to attain similar wealth as white individuals with a high school degree.❞
~ Dr. Michelle Albert
Read in full: AHA president: The connection between economic adversity and cardiovascular health
What this means in practical terms (besides advocating for structural change to tackle the things such as the racism that has been baked into a lot of systems for generations) is:
Be aware not just of your obvious health risk factors, but also your socioeconomic risk factors, if you want to have good general health outcomes.
So for example, let’s say that you, dear reader, are wealthy and white, in which case you have some very big things in your favor, but are you also a woman? Because if so…
Women and Minorities Bear the Brunt of Medical Misdiagnosis
See also, relevant for some: Obesity Discrimination In Healthcare Settings ← you’ll need to scroll to the penultimate section for this one.
In other words… If you are one of the majority of people who is a woman and/or some kind of minority, things are already stacked against you, and not only will this have its own direct harmful effect, but also, it’s going to make your life harder and that stress increases CVD risk more than salt.
In short…
This means: tackle not just your stress, but also the things that cause that. Look after your finances, gather social support, know your rights and be prepared to self-advocate / have someone advocate for you, and go into medical appointments with calm well-prepared confidence.
Take care!
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