The Conquest of Happiness – by Bertrand Russell

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When we have all our physical needs taken care of, why are we often still not happy, and what can we do about that?

Mathematician, philosopher, and Nobel prizewinner Bertrand Russell has answers. And, unlike many of “the great philosophers”, his writing style is very clear and accessible.

His ideas are simple and practical, yet practised by few. Rather than taking a “be happy with whatever you have” approach, he does argue that we should strive to find more happiness in some areas and ways—and lays out guidelines for doing so.

Areas to expand, areas to pull back on, areas to walk a “virtuous mean”. Things to be optimistic about; things to not get our hopes up about.

Applying Russell’s model, there’s no more “should I…?” moments of wondering which way to jump.

Bottom line: if you’ve heard enough about “how to be happy” from wishy-washier sources, you might find the work of this famous logician refreshing.

Click here to check out The Conquest of Happiness, and see how much happier you might become!

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  • Why Telomeres Shorten, & What Can Be Done About It

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    Telomeres are protective caps at the ends of our DNA, similar to the plastic tips on shoelaces (there’s a repeated “junk DNA” string, TTAGGG in humans, kept safe in a sheathe, which made of shelterin, a protein complex).

    They prevent our genetic material from becoming damaged or tangled. However, each time a cell divides, telomeres get a little shorter because the copying process isn’t perfect (DNA polymerase can’t replicate everything inside the sheathe, because it is too well-protected).

    So, how do we deal with this?

    Lacing up for long life

    An enzyme called telomerase (discovered as recently as 2009 by Nobel Prize-winning scientists Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn et al.) can rebuild telomeres. It has two main parts: one part1 that makes new DNA and another part2 that acts as a guide. Most cells don’t produce enough telomerase, so telomeres still tend to shrink over time.

    1 TERT (Telomerase Reverse Transcriptase), which synthesizes telomeric DNA
    2 TERC (Telomerase RNA Component), which serves as a template

    When telomeres become too short, cells stop dividing. Some cells may enter a damaged state (e.g. senescent “zombie” cells) or die. In some cases, cells bypass this limit by reactivating telomerase, which can lead to cancer.

    Studies on mice show that when telomerase is missing, they age more quickly and struggle to repair tissues. When telomerase is restored, aging effects are reversed. Human research also links short telomeres to age-related diseases like immune system decline and organ damage.

    Researchers have already found some ways to slow aging by:

    • Activating telomerase (e.g. with small molecules like TA-65).
    • Gene therapy to transiently express telomerase.
    • Stabilizing TERC RNA component to prevent degradation.

    However, increasing telomerase too much could raise the risk of cancer. So, it’s a bit of a juggling act yet.

    For more on all of this, enjoy:

    Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

    Want to learn more?

    You might also like:

    Fisetin: The Anti-Aging Assassin ← kills senescent cells, meaning newer cells are copied rather than older ones, resulting in copied cells with less DNA damage

    Take care!

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  • Can You Gain Muscle & Lose Fat At The Same Time?

    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? We love to hear from you!

    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 😎

    ❝Is it possible to lose fat and gain muscle at the same time, or do we need to focus on one and then the other, and if so, which order is best?❞

    Contrary to popular belief, you can do both simultaneously! However, it’s not as easy as doing just one or the other, which is why most bodybuilders, for example, have a “building phase” and a “cutting phase”.

    The reason it’s difficult is because of the diet. Growing muscle doesn’t just take protein and micronutrients; it takes energy as well, which must come from carbohydrates and/or fats. Therefore, it is tricky to eat enough to build muscle and to fuel the workouts that are required to build the muscle (you can’t hit the gym in a state of rabbit starvation* and expect to perform well at your workout), while at the same time not eating enough carbs/fats to have any excess to store as fat.

    *So-called because rabbit-meat is very lean, such that when during times of famine, European peasants tried to subsist off mostly rabbits, their health quickly plummeted for lack of energy. It’s also been called “salmon starvation”, apparently, for the same reason:

    How ancestral subsistence strategies solve salmon starvation and the “protein problem” of Pacific Rim resources

    In French it’s called “Mal de caribou” (caribou sickness), by the way. But you get the idea: eat too much lean protein without enough carbs/fats, and woe shall befall.

    So, if you want to do both at once, you need to be incredibly on top of your macros, and the bad news is, only you (or a coach working directly with you) can work out what precise macros requirements your body has, because it depends on your body and your activities.

    The easier “half-way house”

    We will get to the “building phase” and “cutting phase” of bodybuilders, but first, here’s an option that’s very worthy of consideration, and it is: forget about your weight and just focus on health while incidentally doing regular resistance exercises and HIIT.

    What will happen if you do this (assuming a healthy balanced diet, nothing special and without counting anything, but we’re talking at least mostly whole-foods, and at least mostly plants; the Mediterranean diet is great for this, as it is for most things) is:

    • The dietary approach described will gradually improve your metabolic health if it wasn’t already good. If it was already good, it’ll likely just maintain it, rather than improve it.
    • The resistance exercises will, if engaged with seriously (it has to be difficult to do, or your muscles won’t have any reason to grow), gradually build muscle. This will be very gradual, because you’re not eating for bodybuilding, nor optimizing your general lifestyle for same. Historically many women have feared lifting weights because they don’t want to “look like a weightlifter”, but the kinds of bodies that word brings to mind are not the kind that happen by accident (especially for women, with our different hormones guiding our bodies to a different composition); it takes a lot of single-minded dedication to specifically optimize size gains, for a long time.
    • The high-intensity interval training (HIIT) will more rapidly improve your metabolic health, and unlike most forms of exercise, it will actually result in a gradual reduction of fat, if you have superfluous fat to lose. This is because whereas most forms of cardio exercise increase the heartrate for a while but then have a corresponding metabolic slump afterwards to make up for it, HIIT confuses the heart (in a good way) which results in it having to grow stronger, and not doing any compensatory metabolic slump:

    How To Do HIIT (Without Wrecking Your Body) ← as well as the “how to”, this also gives some of the science behind it, too

    This will, thus, result in gradual gain of muscle and loss of fat—or if you take it easier with the exercise, then you can easily settle into just maintaining your body composition as it is, but that wasn’t the question today.

    So, there you have it, that’s how to do both at once! Now, if you want more dramatic results, then more dramatic methods are called for:

    What bodybuilders (mostly) do

    Matters of genetic predisposition and commonplace use of steroids aside, here’s how bodybuilders get that “lots of muscle, no fat” figure:

    1. First, get into “moderate” shape if not already there.
    2. Bulk up: eat amounts of food that will seem unreasonable to a non-bodybuilder; eating 2x or even 3x the “recommended” daily calorie amount is common; focus is typically on getting adequate (for bodybuilding purposes) protein while also carb-loading for workouts and getting at least enough fats for fat-soluble vitamins to work. In the gym, focus on doing sets of very few reps with the heaviest weights one can safely lift, while doing minimal cardio, and also sleeping a lot (9–12hrs per day), which is essential because this is putting a huge strain on the body and it needs a chance to recover and rebuild.
    3. Cut down: maintain protein intake (to at least mostly maintain muscles) while keeping carbs and fats low, doing cardio work (HIIT is still ideal) and running a calorie deficit for a short while (there is no use in trying to maintain a long-term calorie deficit; your body will try to save you from starvation by storing any fat it can and slowing your metabolism).

    Phases 2 and 3 are then cycled, alternating every month, or every 6 weeks, or every 2 months or so, depending on personal preferences and scheduling considerations (bodybuilders will often have competitions they are working towards, so they need to time things to be at the end of a cutting phase to look their “best” by bodybuilder standards).

    Disclaimer: bodybuilding is complex, and can be ruinous to the health if practised inexpertly, because of its extreme nature. We don’t recommend serious bodybuilding per se in general, but if you are going to do it, please consult with a professional bodybuilding coach, and do not rely on a few paragraphs from us that are intended only to give the most basic overview of how bodybuilders can approach the “gain muscle, lose fat” problem.

    Want to know more?

    We’ve written on some related topics previously; here’s a three-part series:

    1. How To Lose Weight (Healthily!)
    2. How To Build Muscle (Healthily!)
    3. How To Gain Weight (Healthily!) ← this one’s specifically about gaining healthy levels of fat, for any who want/need that

    And also:

    Can We Do Fat Redistribution? ← yes we can, but there are caveats

    Take care!

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  • 3 Appetite Suppressants Better Than Ozempic

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    Dr. Annette Bosworth gives her recommendations, and explains why:

    What and how

    We’ll get straight to it; the recommendations are:

    • Coffee, black, unsweetened: not only suppresses the appetite but also boosts the metabolism, increasing fat burn.
    • Salt: especially for when fasting (as under such circumstances we may lose salts without replenishing them), a small taste of this can help satisfy taste buds while replenishing sodium and—depending on the salt—other minerals. For example, if you buy “low-sodium salt” in the supermarket, this is generally sodium chloride cut with potassium chloride and/or occasionally magnesium sulfate.
    • Ketones (MCT oil): ketones can suppress hunger, particularly when fasting causes blood sugar levels to drop. Supplementing with MCT oil promotes ketone production in the liver, training the body to produce more ketones naturally, thus curbing appetite.

    For more on these including the science of them, enjoy:

    Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

    Want to learn more?

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    Take care!

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Related Posts

  • In Praise Of Walking – by Dr. Shane O’Mara
  • The Borderline Personality Disorder Workbook – by Dr. Daniel Fox

    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.

    Personality disorders in general get a bad rep. In part, because their names and descriptions often focus on how the disorders affect other people, rather than how they affect the actual sufferer:

    • “This disorder gives you cripplingly low self-esteem; we call it Evil Not-Quite-Human Disorder”
    • “This disorder makes you feel unloveable; we call it Abusive Bitch Disorder”
    • …etc

    Putting aside the labels and stigma, it turns out that humans sometimes benefit from help. In the case of BPD, characterized by such things as difficult moods and self-sabotage, the advice in this book can help anyone struggling with those (and related) issues.

    The style of the book is both textbook, and course. It’s useful to proceed through it methodically, and doing the exercises is good too. We recommend getting the print edition, not the Kindle edition, so that you can check off boxes, write in it (pencil, if you like!), etc.

    Bottom line: if you or a loved one suffers from BPD symptoms (whether or not you/they would meet criteria for diagnosis), this book can help a lot.

    Click here to check out the BPD Workbook, and retake control of your life!

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  • Dancing vs Parkinson’s Depression

    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 fun study, and the results are/were very predictable, and/but not necessarily something that people might think of in advance. First, let’s look at how some things work:

    Parkinson’s disease & depression

    Parkinson’s disease is a degenerative neurological disease that, amongst other things, is characterized by low dopamine levels.

    For the general signs and symptoms, see: Recognize The Early Symptoms Of Parkinson’s Disease

    Dopamine is the neurotransmitter responsible for feelings of reward, is involved in our language faculties and the capacity to form plans (even simple plans such as “make a cup of coffee”) as well as being critical for motor functions.

    See also: Neurotransmitter Cheatsheet ← for demystifying some of “what does what” for commonly-conflated chemicals

    You can see, therefore, why Parkinson’s disease will often have depression as a comorbidity—there may be influencing social factors as well (many Parkinson’s disease sufferers are quite socially isolated, which certainly does not help), but a clear neurochemical factor that we can point to is “a person with low dopamine levels will feel joyless, bored, and unmotivated”.

    Let movement be thy medicine

    Parkinson’s disease medications, therefore, tend to involve increasing dopamine levels and/or the brain’s ability to use dopamine.

    Antidepressant medications, however, are more commonly focused on serotonin, as serotonin is another neurotransmitter associated with happiness—it’s the one we get when we look at open green spaces with occasional trees and a blue sky ← we get it in other ways too, but for evolutionary reasons, it seems our brains still yearn the most for landscapes that look like the Serengeti, even if we have never even been there personally.

    There are other kinds of antidepressants too, and (because depression can have different causes) what works for one person won’t necessarily work for another. See: Antidepressants: Personalization Is Key!

    In the case of Parkinson’s disease, because the associated depression is mostly dopamine-related, those green spaces and blue skies and SSRIs won’t help much. But you know what does?

    Dance!

    A recent (published last month, at time of writing) study by Dr. Karolina Bearss et al. did an interventional study that found that dance classes significantly improved both subjective experience of depression, and objective brain markers of depression, across people with (68%) and without (32%) Parkinson’s disease.

    The paper is quite short and it has diagrams, and discusses the longer-term effect as well as the per-session effect:

    Impact of Weekly Community-Based Dance Training Over 8 Months on Depression and Blood Oxygen Level–Dependent Signals in the Subcallosal Cingulate Gyrus for People With Parkinson Disease: Observational Study

    Dance is thought to have a double-effect, improving both cognitive factors and motor control factors, for obvious reasons, and all related to dopamine response (dancing is an activity we are hardwired to find rewarding*, plus it is exercise which also triggers various chemicals to be made, plus it is social, which also improves many mental health factors).

    *You may have heard the expression that “dancing is a vertical expression of a horizontal desire”, and while that may not be true for everyone on an individual level, on a species level it is a very reasonable hypothesis for why we do it and why it is the way it is.

    Want to learn more?

    We wrote previously about battling depression (of any kind) here:

    The Mental Health First-Aid That You’ll Hopefully Never Need

    Take care!

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  • Healing The Modern Brain – by Dr. Drew Ramsey

    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 previously reviewed Dr. Ramsey’s Eat To Beat Depression & Anxiety, and this time [it briefly covers that ground again, and then] it’s more about comprehensive brain health and mental fitness.

    He tackles this in a methodical fashion, first briefly covering the need for mental fitness, and the obstacles to same, before the main part of the book—which covers the “how”.

    The “how” in question is multifaceted, and the “nine tenets” mentioned in the subtitle cover very obvious things like diet, exercise, sleep, etc, as well as less obvious yet very important things like connection, engagement, purpose, and so forth, and some things that don’t get talked about much at all elsewhere, such as the processes of grounding and unburdening, as he describes them.

    The style is mostly narrative with many anecdotes to illustrate points, but with practical advice woven throughout also, all very readable. There’s a respectable bibliography at the back.

    Bottom line: if you’d like your brain health to get gradually better instead of gradually worse, this book can help set you on the right track.

    Click here to check out Healing The Modern Brain, and heal your modern brain!

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