The Off-Button For Your Brain

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The Off-Button For Your Brain

We evolved our emotions for our own benefit as a species. Even the “negative” ones:

  • Stress keeps us safe by making sure we take important situations seriously
  • Anger keeps us safe by protecting us from threats
  • Disgust keeps us safe by helping us to avoid things that might cause disease
  • Anxiety keeps us safe by ensuring we don’t get complacent
  • Guilt keeps us safe by ensuring we can function as a community
  • Sadness keeps us safe by ensuring we value things that are important to us, and learn to become averse to losing them
  • …and so on

But that’s not always useful. What was once a very good response to a common source of fear (for example, a sabre-toothed tiger) is no longer a helpful response to a modern source of fear (for example, an important interview).

Sometimes it’s good to take the time and energy to process our feelings and the event(s) that prompted those feelings. Sometimes, we don’t have that luxury.

For example, if you are stressed about your workload? Then staying awake half the night thinking about it is only going to make your problems worse the next day.

So, how to switch that off, or at least put a pause on it?

The human mind tends to have a “negative bias”, evolved for our own protection. If something is “good enough”, we don’t need to worry about it, so we move on to the next thing, until we find something that is a problem, then we dwell on that. That’s not always helpful, and the good news is, there’s a way to flip the switch on this process:

Identifying the positive, and releasing the rest

This exercise can be done when you’re trying to sleep, or at any time you need a calmer, quieter mind.

Take a moment to notice whatever you’re experiencing.

If it’s something that feels good, or neutral, identify it with a single word. For example:

  • Warmth
  • Soft
  • Security
  • Smile
  • Peace

If it’s something that feels bad, then instead of identifying it, simply say (or think) to yourself “release”.

You can’t fight bad feelings with force, and you can’t “just not think about them”, but you can dismiss them as soon as they arrive and move onto the next thing. So where your train of thought may previously have been:

It’s good to be in bed ➔ I have eight hours to sleep before my meeting ➔ Have I done everything I was supposed to? ➔ I hope that what I’ve done is good enough ➔ [Mentally rehearsing how the meeting might go] ➔ [various disaster preparations] ➔ What am I even going to wear? ➔ Ugh I forgot to do the laundry ➔ That reminds the electricity bill is due ➔ Etc

Now your train of thought may be more like:

Relief ➔ Rest ➔ But my meeti—release ➔ If I—release ➔ soft ➔ comfort ➔ release ➔ pillow ➔ smile ➔ release ➔ [and before you know it you’re asleep]

And if you do this in a situation where you’re not going to sleep? Same process, just a more wakeful result, for example, let’s move the scene to an office where your meeting will shortly take place:

Five minutes to go ➔ What a day ➔ Ok, I’d better clear my head a bit ➔ release ➔ release ➔ breath ➔ light ➔ chair ➔ what if—release ➔ prepared ➔ ready ➔ calm ➔ [and before you know it you’re impressing your work associate with your calm preparedness]

In summary:

If you need to stop a train of thought, this method may help. Especially if you’re in a situation where you can’t use some external distraction to keep you from thinking about the bad thing!

You’re probably still going to have to deal with the Bad Thing™ at some point—you’ve just recognized that now isn’t the time for that. Mentally postpone that so that you will be well-rested when you choose to deal with the Bad Thing™ later at your convenience.

So remember: identify the positive (with a single word), and anything else, just release.

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  • Calisthenics for Beginners – by Matt Schifferle

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    For those who are curious to take up calisthenics, for its famed benefit to many kinds of health, this is a great starter-book.

    First, what kind of benefits can we expect? Lots, but most critically:

    • Greater mobility (as a wide range of movements is practiced, some of them stretchy)
    • Cardiovascular fitness (calisthenics can be performed as a form of High Intensity Impact Training, HIIT)
    • Improved muscle-tone (because these are bodyweight strength-training exercises—have you seen a gymnast’s body?)
    • Denser bones (strong muscles can’t be built on weak bones, so the body compensates by strengthening them)

    A lot of the other benefits stem from those, ranging from reduced risk of stroke, diabetes, heart disease, osteoporosis, etc, to improved mood, more energy, better sleep, and generally all things that come with a decent, rounded, exercise regime.

    Schifferle explains not just the exercises, but also the principles, so that we understand what we’re doing and why. Understanding improves motivation, adherence, and—often—form. Exercise diagrams are clear, and have active muscle-groups highlighted and color-coded for extra clarity.

    As well as explaining exercises individually, he includes three programs, increasing in intensity. He also offers adjustments to make exercises easier or more challenging, depending on the current condition of your body.

    The book’s not without its limitations—it may be a little male-centric for some readers, for instance—but all in all, it’s a very strong introduction to calisthenics… Enough to get anyone up and running, so to speak!

    Get started with “Calisthenics for Beginners” from Amazon today!

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  • Delay Ageing – by Dr. Colin Rose

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    Note: the title is spelled that way because it is British English. We generally write in US English here at 10almonds, but we’ll first quote directly from Dr. Rose as written:

    ❝I have written Delay Ageing because there is some very important recent University research on ageing and age related illness that deserves to be made accessible to a general audience.❞

    What is this research? Well, there’s quite a lot over its 300-odd pages (exact number depends on the edition and whether we count end matter), and most of it is tweaks and refinements on things with which you’ll probably be at least brushingly familiar if you’re a regular 10almonds reader.

    Dr. Rose addresses the nine hallmarks of aging, of which there are ten, ranging from such things as “telomeres get shorter” and “DNA accumulates damage”, to “stem cells become exhausted” and “cells fail to communicate properly”, and asks the question “what if we were to target all these things simultaneously?”.

    Rather than going for drugs on drugs on drugs (half of them to deal with undesired side effects of the previous ones), Dr. Cole leaves no stone unturned to find lifestyle interventions that will improve each of these, even if just a little. Because, all those “little” improvements add up and even compound, and on the flipside, mean that factors of aging aren’t adding up and compounding so much or so quickly anymore.

    The rather broad umbrella of “lifestyle interventions” obviously includes food under its auspices, and with it, nutraceuticals. So to give one example, if you’re taking a fisetin supplement (a natural senolytic agent), you’ll find science vindicating that here. And much more.

    The style is… Less pop-science and more “textbook written for laypersons”, and you may be thinking “isn’t that the same?” and the difference is that the textbook has a lot less polish and finesse, but often more precise information.

    Bottom line: if you’d like to combat aging on 10 different fronts with easily implementable lifestyle interventions, and know exactly what is doing what and how, then this is the book for you.

    Click here to check out Delay Ageing, and delay aging!

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  • Healthy Tiramisu

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    Tiramisu (literally “pick-me-up”, “tira-mi-su”) is a delightful dish that, in its traditional form, is also a trainwreck for the health, being loaded with inflammatory cream and sugar, not to mention the cholesterol content. Here we recreate the dish in healthy fashion, being loaded with protein, fiber, and healthy fats, not to mention that the optional sweetener is an essential amino acid. The coffee and cocoa, of course, are full of antioxidants too. All in all, what’s not celebrate?

    You will need

    • 2 cups silken tofu (no need to press it) (do not substitute with any firmer tofu or it will not work)
    • 1 cup oat cream (you can buy this ready-made, or make it yourself by blending oats in water until you get the desired consistency) (you can also just use dairy cream, but that will be less healthy)
    • 1 cup almond flour (also simply called “ground almonds”)
    • 1 cup espresso ristretto, or otherwise the strongest black coffee you have facility to make
    • ¼ cup unsweetened cocoa powder, plus more for dusting
    • 1 pack savoiardi biscuits, also called “ladyfinger” biscuits (this was the only part we couldn’t make healthy—if you figure out a way to make it healthy, let us know!) (if vegan, obviously use a vegan substitute biscuit; this writer uses Lotus/Biscoff biscuits, which work well)
    • 1 tsp vanilla essence
    • ½ tsp almond essence
    • Optional: glycine, per taste
    • Garnish: roasted coffee beans

    Method

    (we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)

    1) Add glycine to the coffee first if you want the overall dish to be sweeter. Glycine has approximately the same sweetness as sugar, and can be used as a 1:1 substitution. Use that information as you see fit.

    2) Blend the tofu and the oat cream together in a high-speed blender until smooth. It should have a consistency like cake-batter; if it is too liquidy, add small amounts of almond flour until it is thicker. If it’s too thick, add oat cream until it isn’t. If you want it to be sweeter than it is, add glycine to taste. When happy with its taste and consistency, divide it evenly into two bowls.

    3) Add the vanilla essence and almond essence to one bowl, and the cocoa powder to the other, mixing well (in a food processor, or just by using a whisk)

    4) Coat the base of a glass dish (such as a Pyrex oven dish, but any dish is fine, and any glass dish will allow for viewing the pretty layers we’ll be making) with a very thin layer of almond flour (if you want sweetness there, you can mix some glycine in with the almond flour first).

    4) One by one, soak the biscuits briefly in the coffee, and use them to line to base of the dish.

    5) Add a thin layer of chocolate cream, ensuring the surface is as flat as possible. Dust it with cocoa powder, to increase the surface tension.

    6) Add a thin layer of vanilla-and-almond cream, ensuring the surface is as flat as possible. Dust it with cocoa powder, to increase the surface tension.

    7) Stop and assess: do you have enough ingredients left to repeat these layers? It will depend on the size and shape dish you used. If you do, repeat them, finishing with a vanilla-and-almond cream layer.

    8) Dust the final layer with cocoa powder if you haven’t already, and add the coffee bean garnish, if using.

    9) Refrigerate for at least 8 hours, and if you have time to prepare it the day before you will eat it, that is best of all.

    Enjoy!

    Want to learn more?

    For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:

    Take care!

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  • When Science Brings Hope

    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’s a lot of bad news out there at present, including in the field of healthcare. So as some measure of respite from that, here’s some good news from the world of health science, including some actionable things to do:

    Run for your life! Or casually meander for your life; that’s fine too.

    Those who enjoy the equivalent of an average of 160mins slow (3mph) walking per day also enjoy the greatest healthspan. Now, there may be an element of two-way causality here (moving more means we live longer, but also, sometimes people move less because of having crippling disabilities, which are themselves not great for healthspan, as well as having the knock-on effect of reducing movement, and so such conditions yield and anti-longevity double-whammy), but for any who are able to, increasing the amount of time per day spend moving, ultimately results (on average) in a lot of extra days in life that we’ll then get to spend moving.

    Depending on how active or not you are already, every extra 1 hour walked could add two hours and 49 minutes to life expectancy:

    Read in full: Americans over 40 could live extra 5 years if they were all as active as top 25% of population, modeling study suggests

    Related: The Doctor Who Wants Us To Exercise Less & Move More

    Re-teaching your brain to heal itself

    Cancer is often difficult to treat, and brain tumors can be amongst the most difficult with which to contend. Not only is everything in there very delicate, but also it’s the hardest place in the body to get at—not just surgically, but even chemically, because of the blood-brain barrier. To make matters worse, brain tumors such as glioblastoma weaken the function of T-cells (whose job it is to eliminate the cancer) by prolonged exposure.

    Research has found a way to restore the responsiveness of these T-cells to immune checkpoint inhibitors, allowing them to go about their cancer-killing activities unimpeded:

    Read in full: New possibilities for treating intractable brain tumors unveiled

    Related: 5 Ways To Beat Cancer (And Other Diseases)

    Here’s to your good health!

    GLP-1 receptor agonists, originally developed to fight diabetes and now enjoying popularity as weight loss adjuvants, work in large part by cutting down food cravings by interfering with the chemical messaging about such.

    As a bonus, it seems that they also can reduce alcohol cravings, especially by targetting the brain’s reward center; this was based on a large review of studies looking at how GLP-1RA use affects alcohol use, alcohol-related health problems, hospital visits, and brain reactions to alcohol cues:

    Read in full: Diabetes medication may be effective in helping people drink less alcohol, research finds

    Related: How To Reduce Or Quit Alcohol

    Take care!

    Don’t Forget…

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  • 3 Secrets Behind The Healing Power Of Plants

    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 well-established that whole food plant-based diets including fruits, vegetables, beans, whole grains, nuts, and seeds can reverse chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol, obesity, and more.

    Dr. Laurie Marbas explains how it works:

    Three ways plant-based diets heal

    There’s a lot to be said for plants, from their fiber to their beneficial phytochemicals. For example:

    Reversing insulin resistance: plant-based diets help reverse insulin resistance, a major factor in type 2 diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and many other maladies. Particularly high-fiber foods like beans and oats stabilize blood sugar by slowing sugar absorption and reducing insulin spikes. These diets are also naturally low in saturated fats, which are linked to insulin resistance, and include phytonutrients from colorful fruits and vegetables that improve insulin sensitivity. Studies demonstrate that plant-based diets lower HbA1C levels (glycated hemoglobin, a measure of how sugary your blood has been on average in the past 2−3 months) and can even reverse type 2 diabetes for most* people.

    *Scientists are very reluctant to claim absolutes such as “all”, “every”, etc, since it cannot be proven that it will work for all people (there are over 8 billion of us after all, and any one of us could get in theory get type 2 diabetes and then try reversing it, so it’s hard to speak for all 8 billion-odd of us) but it is well-established that it usually does indeed reverse it, and for what it’s worth, the confidence interval in such studies is always at least 95% sure, usually higher, which multiplied by countless studies can indeed give us quite some confidence.

    Reducing chronic inflammation: chronic inflammation, linked to diseases like arthritis, heart disease, and cancer, can also be reduced through a plant-based diet. Foods rich in antioxidants, such as berries, leafy greens, and nuts, neutralize inflammation-causing free radicals. Omega-3-rich plant foods like chia seeds, flax seeds, and walnuts further balance inflammation. Additionally, fiber fosters healthy gut bacteria, which produce vital compounds that reduce systemic inflammation (and do a lot more good things besides, but we’re limiting ourselves to talking about inflammation here). Research shows that plant-based diets can significantly lower inflammation markers within weeks (almost certainly you’ll notice the difference yourself, too).

    Synergy of whole foods: perhaps the biggest power of a plant-based diet lies in the synergy of its components. Nutrients like the fiber and phytonutrients we mentioned work together to combat inflammation and remove waste products that could fuel disease. For example, magnesium, found abundantly in leafy greens (which is why most Americans are deficient in magnesium), supports over 300 enzymatic processes, including blood sugar and inflammation regulation. This holistic approach ensures the whole body receives all the tools it needs to repair, regenerate, and thrive, thus once you’re on the right track, it’s “the gift that keeps on giving” when it comes to health, as each part helps the other parts to work better, which help the other parts to work better, which… (etc)

    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:

    What’s Your Plant Diversity Score?

    Take care!

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  • The Best Form Of Sugar During Exercise

    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 😎

    ❝What is the best form of sugar for an energy kick during exercise? Both type of sugar eg glicoae fructose dextrose etc and medium, ie drink, gel, solids etc❞

    Great question! Let’s be clear first that we’re going to answer this specifically for the context of during exercise.

    Because, if you’re not actively exercising strenuously right at the time when you’re taking the various things we’re going to be talking about, the results will not be the same.

    For scenarios that are anything less than “I am exercising right now and my muscles (not joints, or anything else) are feeling the burn”, then instead please see this:

    Snacks & Hacks: Eating For Energy (In Ways That Actually Work)

    Because, to answer your question, we’re going to be going 100% against the first piece of advice in that article, which was “Skip the quasi-injectables”, i.e., anything marketed as very quick release. Those things are useful for diabetics to have handy just in case of needing to urgently correct a hypo, but for most people most of the time, they’re not. See also:

    Which Sugars Are Healthier, And Which Are Just The Same?

    However…

    When strenuously exercising in a way that is taxing our muscles, we do not have to worry about the usual problem of messing up our glucose metabolism by overloading our body with sugars faster than it can use it (thus: it has to hurriedly convert glucose and shove it anywhere it’ll fit to put it away, which is very bad for us), because right now, in the exercise scenario we’re describing, the body is already running its fastest metabolism and is grabbing glucose anywhere it can find it.

    Which brings us to our first key: the best type of sugar for this purpose is glucose. Because:

    • glucose: the body can use immediately and easily convert whatever’s spare to glycogen (a polysaccharide of glucose) for storage
    • fructose: the body cannot use immediately and any conversion of fructose to glycogen has to happen in the liver, so if you take too much fructose (without anything to slow it down, such as the fiber in whole fruit), you’re not only not going to get usable energy (the sugar is just going to be there in your bloodstream, circulating, not getting used, because it doesn’t trigger insulin release and insulin is the gatekeeper that allows sugar to be used), but also, it’s going to tax the liver, which if done to excess, is how we get non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
    • sucrose: is just a disaccharide of glucose and fructose, so it first gets broken down into those, and then its constituent parts get processed as above. Other disaccharides you’ll see mentioned sometimes are maltose and lactose, but again, they’re just an extra step removed from useful metabolism, so to save space, we’ll leave it at that for those today.
    • dextrose: is just glucose, but when the labeller is feeling fancy. It’s technically informational because it specifies what isomer of glucose it is, but basically all glucose found in food is d-glucose, i.e. dextrose. Other isomers of glucose can be synthesized (very expensively) in laboratories or potentially found in obscure places (the universe is vast and weird), but in short: unless someone’s going to extreme lengths to get something else, all glucose we encounter is dextrose, and all (absolutely all) dextrose is glucose.

    We’d like to show scientific papers contesting these head-to-head for empirical proof, but since the above is basic chemistry and physiology, all we could find is papers taking this for granted and stating in their initial premise that sports drinks, gels, bars usually contain glucose as their main sugar, potentially with some fructose and sucrose. Like this one:

    A Comprehensive Study on Sports and Energy Drinks

    As for how to take it, again this is the complete opposite of our usual health advice of “don’t drink your calories”, because in this case, for once…

    (and again, we must emphasize: only while actively doing strenuous exercise that is making specifically your muscles burn, not your joints or anything else; if your joints are burning you need to rest and definitely don’t spike your blood sugars because that will worsen inflammation)

    …just this once, we do want those sugars to be zipping straight into the blood. Which means: liquid is best for this purpose.

    And when we say liquid: gel is the same as a drink, so far as the body is concerned, provided the body in question is adequately hydrated (i.e., you are also drinking water).

    Here are a pair of studies (by the same team, with the same general methodology), testing things head-to-head, with endurance cyclists on 6-hour stationary cycle rides:

    CHO Oxidation from a CHO Gel Compared with a Drink during Exercise

    Meanwhile, liquid beat solid, but only significantly so from the 90-minute mark onwards, and even that significant difference was modest (i.e. it’s clinically significant, it’s a statistically reliable result and improbable as random happenstance, but the actual size of the difference was not huge):

    Oxidation of Solid versus Liquid CHO Sources during Exercise

    We would hypothesize that the reason that liquids only barely outperformed solids for this task is precisely because the solids in question were also designed for the task. When a company makes a fast-release energy bar, they don’t load it with fiber to slow it down. Which differentiates this greatly from, say, getting one’s sugars from whole fruit.

    If the study had compared apples to apple juice, we hypothesize the results would have been very different. But alas, if that study has been done, we couldn’t find it.

    Today has been all about what’s best during exercise, so let’s quickly finish with a note on what’s best before and after:

    Before: What To Eat, Take, And Do Before A Workout

    After: Overdone It? How To Speed Up Recovery After Exercise

    Take care!

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