The Power of When – by Dr. Michael Breus
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There’s a lot more to one’s circadian rhythm than just when one wakes and sleeps. This book goes into that quite deeply!
For example, those items in the subtitle? You could do them all at the same time, but it probably wouldn’t be optimal (although honestly, that does sound like quite a good life!). Rather, there are distinct times of day that we’re going to be better at certain things, and there are distinct times of day when certain things are going to be better for us.
Of course, some items are not so simple as a one-size fits all, so Dr. Breus outlines for us how to figure out our own chronotype (within four main schemas), and how to make that work for us as well as possible.
They style is easy-reading pop-science, with frequent summaries, bullet-points, quizzes, and so forth, making it easy to understand, learn, and apply.
Bottom line: if you feel like your sleep could use a do-over, then this book can help you get it into order—and the rest of your daily activities too!
Click here to check out The Power of When, and optimize your health!
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Loving Life at 50+ – by Maria Sabando
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What a pleasant mix of a book! Sabando writes about aging with a great blend of light-heartedness and seriousness, and gives extra attention to the important balancing act of:
- Indulging sufficiently to enjoy life
- Staying well enough to enjoy life
…because one without the other will not generally result in an enjoyable life! An American proud of her Italian heritage, she blends (as many immigrant families do) cultures and perspectives, aiming where she can for “the best of both” in that regard, too.
Nor is this just a philosophical book—there’s yoga to be learned here, chapter by chapter, and recipes peppered throughout. The recipes, by the way, are simple and… Honestly, not as healthy as the recipes we share here at 10almonds, but they are good and when it comes to those indulgences we mentioned, her philosophy is that strategic mindful indulgence keeps mindless binge-eating at bay. Which is generally speaking not a bad approach, and is one we’ve written about before as well.
When it comes to health advice, the author is no doctor or scientist, but her husband (a doctor) had input throughout, keeping things on track and medically sound.
The style is very casual, like talking to a friend, which makes for a very easy and enjoyable read. Absolutely a book that one could read casually in the garden, put down when interrupted, pick up again, and continue happily where one left off.
Bottom line: whatever your age (no matter whether your 50th birthday is in your shrinkingly near future or your increasingly distant past), there’s wisdom to be gained here—it’s not a manual (unless you want to treat it as one), it’s more… Thought-provoking, from cover to cover. Highly recommendable.
Click here to check out Loving Life at 50+, and love life at 50+!
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Beat Osteoporosis with Exercise – by Dr. Karl Knopf
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There are a lot of books about beating osteoporosis, and yet when it comes to osteoporosis exercises, it took us some work to find a good one. But, this one’s it!
A lot of books give general principles and a few sample exercises. This one, in contrast, gives:
- An overview of osteopenia and osteoporosis, first
- A brief overview of non-exercise osteoporosis considerations
- Principles for exercising a) to reduce one’s risk of osteoporosis b) if one has osteoporosis
- Clear explanations of about 150 exercises that fit both categories
This last item’s important, because a lot of popular advice is exercises that are only good for one or the other (given that a lot of things that strengthen a healthy person’s bones can break the bones of someone with osteoporosis), so having 150 exercises that are safe and effective in both cases, is a real boon.
That doesn’t mean you have to do all 150! If you want to, great. But even just picking and choosing and putting together a little program is good.
Bottom line: if you’d like a comprehensive guide to exercise to keep you strong in the face of osteoporosis, this is a great one.
Click here to check out Beat Osteoporosis With Exercise, and stay strong!
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Procrastination, and how to pay off the to-do list debt
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Procrastination, and how pay off the to-do list debt
Sometimes we procrastinate because we feel overwhelmed by the mountain of things we are supposed to be doing. If you look at your to-do list and it shows 60 overdue items, it’s little wonder if you want to bury your head in the sand!
“What difference does it make if I do one of these things now; I will still have 59 which feels as bad as having 60”
So, treat it like you might a financial debt, and make a repayment plan. Now, instead of 60 overdue items today, you have 1/day for the next 60 days, or 2/day for the next 30 days, or 3/day for the next 20 days, etc. Obviously, you may need to work out whether some are greater temporal priorities and if so, bump those to the top of the list. But don’t sweat the minutiae; your list doesn’t have to be perfectly ordered, just broadly have more urgent things to the top and less urgent things to the bottom.
Note: this repayment plan means having set repayment dates.
Up front, sit down and assign each item a specific calendar date on which you will do that thing.
This is not a deadline! It is your schedule. You’ll not try to do it sooner, and you won’t postpone it for later. You will just do that item on that date.
A productivity app like ToDoist can help with this, but paper is fine too.
What’s important here, psychologically, is that each day you’re looking not at 60 things and doing the top item; you’re just looking at today’s item (only!) and doing it.
Debt Reduction/Cancellation
Much like you might manage a financial debt, you can also look to see if any of your debts could be reduced or cancelled.
We wrote previously about the “Getting Things Done” system. It’s a very good system if you want to do that; if not, no worries, but you might at least want to borrow this one idea….
Sort your items into:
Do / Defer / Delegate / Ditch
- Do: if it can be done in under 2 minutes, do it now.
- Defer: defer the item to a specific calendar date (per the repayment plan idea we just talked about)
- Delegate: could this item be done by someone else? Get it off your plate if you reasonably can.
- Ditch: sometimes, it’s ok to realize “you know what, this isn’t that important to me anymore” and scratch it from the list.
As a last resort, consider declaring bankruptcy
Towards the end of the dot-com boom, there was a fellow who unintentionally got his 5 minutes of viral fame for “declaring email bankruptcy”.
Basically, he publicly declared that his email backlog had got so far out of hand that he would now not reply to emails from before the declaration.
He pledged to keep on top of new emails only from that point onwards; a fresh start.
We can’t comment on whether he then did, but if you need a fresh start, that can be one way to get it!
In closing…
Procrastination is not usually a matter of laziness, it’s usually a matter of overwhelm. Hopefully the above approach will help reframe things, and make things more manageable.
Sometimes procrastination is a matter of perfectionism, and not starting on tasks because we worry we won’t do them well enough, and so we get stuck in a pseudo-preparation rut. If that’s the case, our previous main feature on perfectionism may help:
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The Food For Life Cookbook – by Dr. Tim Spector
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We’ve previously reviewed Dr. Spector’s “Food For Life”, and while that was more of an “explanatory science” book, this one takes that science (reiterating it more briefly this time, by way of introduction) and makes a cookbook of it.
The nutritional emphasis in these recipes is on two things: maximizing fiber, and maximizing plant diversity. The recipes are not all vegan or even vegetarian, but they are plant-centric, and if the reader is vegetarian/vegan, then substitutions are easy to make.
The recipes themselves are simple without being boring, and are easy to follow, with full-page photos to accompany them. The science parts are very clear, accessible, and pop-science in style.
Bottom line: if you’d like to incorporate more fiber and more plants into your diet without it being a burden, this book is great for that.
Click here to check out the Food For Life Cookbook, and get cooking for life!
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PTSD, But, Well…. Complex.
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PTSD is typically associated with military veterans, for example, or sexual assault survivors. There was a clear, indisputable, Bad Thing™ that was experienced, and it left a psychological scar. When something happens to remind us of that—say, there are fireworks, or somebody touches us a certain way—it’ll trigger an immediate strong response of some kind.
These days the word “triggered” has been popularly misappropriated to mean any adverse emotional reaction, often to something trivial.
But, not all trauma is so clear. If PTSD refers to the result of that one time you were smashed with a sledgehammer, C-PTSD (Complex PTSD) refers to the result of having been hit with a rolled-up newspaper every few days for fifteen years, say.
This might have been…
- childhood emotional neglect
- a parent with a hair-trigger temper
- bullying at school
- extended financial hardship as a young adult
- “just” being told or shown all too often that your best was never good enough
- the persistent threat (real or imagined) of doom of some kind
- the often-reinforced idea that you might lose everything at any moment
If you’re reading this list and thinking “that’s just life though”, you might be in the estimated 1 in 5 people with (often undiagnosed) C-PTSD.
How About You? Take The (5mins) Test Here
Now, we at 10almonds are not doctors or therapists and even if we were, we certainly wouldn’t try to diagnose from afar. But, even if there’s only a partial match, sometimes the same advice can help.
So what are the symptoms of C-PTSD?
- A feeling that nothing is safe; we might suddenly lose what we have gained
- The body keeps the score… And it shows. We may have trouble relaxing, an aversion to exercise for reasons that don’t really add up, or an aversion to being touched.
- Trouble sleeping, born of nagging sense that to sleep is to be vulnerable to attack, and/or lazy, and/or negligent of our duties
- Poor self-image, about our body and/or about ourself as a person.
- We’re often drawn to highly unavailable people—or we are the highly unavailable person to which our complementary C-PTSD sufferers are attracted.
- We are prone to feelings of rage. Whether we keep a calm lid on it or lose our temper, we know it’s there. We’re angry at the world and at ourselves.
- We are not quick to trust—we may go through the motions of showing trust, but we’re already half-expecting that trust to have been misplaced.
- “Hell is other people” has become such a rule of life that we may tend to cloister ourselves away from company.
- We may try to order our environment around us as a matter of safety, and be easily perturbed by sudden changes being imposed on us, even if ostensibly quite minor or harmless.
- In a bid to try to find safety, we may throw ourselves into work—whatever that is for us. It could be literally our job, or passion projects, or our family, or community, and in and of itself that’s great! But the motivation is more of an attempt to distract ourselves from The Horrors™.
“Alright, I scored more of those than I care to admit. What now?”
A lot of the answer lies in first acknowledging to yourself what happened, to make you feel the way you do now. If you, for example, have an abject hatred of Christmas, what were your childhood Christmases like? If you fear losing money that you’ve accumulated, what underpins that fear? It could be something that directly happened to you, but it also could just be repeated messages you received from your parents, for example.
It could even be that you had superficially an idyllic perfect childhood. Health, wealth, security, a loving family… and simply a chemical imbalance in your brain made it a special kind of Hell for you that nobody understood, and perhaps you didn’t either.
Unfortunately, a difficult task now lies ahead: giving love, understanding, compassion, and reassurance to the person for whom you may have the most contempt in the world: yourself.
If you’d like some help with that, here are some resources:
ComplexTrauma.org (a lot of very good free resources, with no need for interaction)
CPTSD Foundation (mostly paid courses and the like)
Some final words about healing…
- You are in fact amazing,
- You can do it, and
- You deserve it.
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Healthy Living in a Contaminated World – by Dr. Donald Hoernschemeyer
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There’s a lot going on here, as this book tackles very many kinds of common contaminants, from waste products and industrial chemicals (such as from fracking), pesticides that are banned in most places but not the US, smog and soot from coal and oil power, mercury and other heavy metals, dioxins, Teflon and its close relatives, phthalates, BPA, and other things again regulated out of use in many countries but not entirely in the US (which bans them only in some things, like baby bottles), drinking water issues of various kinds, and much more.
Indeed, there’s a whole chapter on the US and international regulation of toxic substances; the problem is often that on a political level, the same people who are against nebulous “chemicals” are also against environmentalist regulations that would ban them. This is mostly not a political book though, and rather is chiefly a book of chemistry (the author’s field).
It does also cover the medical maladies associated with various contaminants, while the bulk of the data is on the chemistry side of such things as “elimination times for toxic chemicals”, “amounts of pesticides in fruit and vegetables”, “antibiotics and hormones used in animal agriculture”, and so forth.
The style is dense, and/but it is clear the author has made an effort to not be too dry. Still, this is not a fun read; it’s depressing in content and the style is more suited to academia. There are appendices containing glossaries and acronym tables, but reading front-to-back, there’s a lot that’s not explained so unless you also are a PhD chemist, chances are you’ll be needing to leaf forwards and backwards a lot.
Bottom line: this book is not thrilling, but what you don’t know, can kill you.
Click here to check out Healthy Living In A Contaminated World, and improve your odds!
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