The Science of Self-Learning – by Peter Hollins

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Teaching oneself new things is often the most difficult kind of bootstrapping, especially when one is unsure of such critical things as:

  • Where to begin? How, for that matter, do we find where to begin?
  • What can/should a learning journey look like?
  • What challenges should we expect, and how will we overcome them?

Hollins answers all of these questions and more. The greatest value of this book is perhaps in its clear presentation of concrete step-by-step instructions. Hollins gives illustrated examples too, but most importantly, he gives models that can be applied to any given type of learning.

The book also covers the most difficult problems most people face when trying to learn something by themselves, including:

  • Keeping oneself on-task (maintaining discipline)
  • Measuring progress (self-testing beyond memorization)
  • Keeping a fair pace of progress (avoiding plateaus)
  • How to know when one’s knowledge is sufficient or not (avoiding Dunning-Kruger Club)

All in all, if you’re looking to learn a new subject or skill, this could be a first step that saves you a lot of time later!

Get your copy of the Science of Self-Learning on Amazon today!

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  • Love Sense – by Dr. Sue Johnson
  • Stretching Scientifically – by Thomas Kurz
    Stop wasting time with ineffective stretching methods. Get specific, effective techniques for flexibility, strength, and mobility goals. No age limit. Stretch scientifically with this book.

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  • White Bread vs White Pasta – Which Is Healthier?

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    Our Verdict

    When comparing a white bread to a white pasta, we picked the pasta.

    Why?

    Neither are great for the health! But like for like, the glycemic index of the bread is usually around 150% of the glycemic index for pasta.

    All that said, we heartily recommend going for wholegrain in either case!

    Bonus tip: cooking pasta “al dente”, so it is still at least a little firm to the bite, results in a lower GI compared to being boiled to death.

    Bonus bonus tip: letting pasta cool increases resistant starches. You can then reheat the pasta without losing this benefit.

    Please don’t put it in the microwave though; you will make an Italian cry. Instead, simply put it in a colander and pour boiling water over it, and then serve in your usual manner (a good approach if serving it separately is: put it in the serving bowl/dish/pan, drizzle a little extra virgin olive oil and a little cracked black pepper, stir to mix those in, and serve)

    Enjoy!

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  • Healthy Homemade Flatbreads

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    Our recipes sometimes call for the use of flatbreads, or suggest serving with flatbreads. But we want you to be able to have healthy homemade ones! So here’s a very quick and easy recipe. You’ll probably need to order some of the ingredients in, but it’s worth it, and then if you keep a stock of the ingredients, you can whip these up in minutes anytime you want them.

    You will need

    • 1 cup garbanzo bean flour, plus more for dusting
    • 1 cup quinoa flour
    • 2 tbsp ground/milled flaxseed
    • 1 tbsp baking powder
    • 1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil, plus more for the pan
    • ½ tsp MSG, or 1 tsp low-sodium salt, with MSG being the healthier and preferable option
    • ½ tsp onion powder
    • ½ tsp garlic powder
    • ½ tsp dried cumin
    • ½ tsp dried thyme

    Method

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

    1) Mix the flaxseed with ⅓ cup of water and set aside for at least 5 minutes.

    2) Combine the rest of the ingredients in a big bowl, plus the flax mixtures we just made, and an extra ½ cup of water. Knead this into a dough, adding a touch more water if it becomes necessary, but be sparing with it.

    3) Divide the dough into 6 equal portions, shaping each into a ball. Dust a clean surface with the extra garbanzo bean flour, and roll each dough ball into in a thin 6″ circle.

    4) Heat a skillet and add some olive oil for frying; when hot enough, place a dough disk in the pan and cook for a few minutes on each side until golden brown. Repeat with the other 5.

    5) Serve! If you’re looking for a perfect accompaniment to these, try our Hero Homemade Hummus

    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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  • The S.T.E.P.S. To A Healthier Heart

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    Stepping Into Better Heart Health

    This is Dr. Jennifer H. Mieres, FACC, FAHA, MASNC. she’s an award-winning (we counted 9 major awards) professor of cardiology, and a leading advocate for women’s heart health. This latter she’s done via >70 scientific publications, >100 research presentations at national and international conferences, 3 books so far, and 4 documentaries, including the Emmy-nominated “A Woman’s Heart”.

    What does she want us to know?

    A lot of her work is a top-down approach, working to revolutionize the field of cardiology in its application, to result in far fewer deaths annually. Which is fascinating, but unless you’re well-placed in that industry, not something too actionable as an individual (if you are well-placed in that industry, do look her up, of course).

    For the rest of us…

    Dr. Mieres’ S.T.E.P.S. to good heart health

    She wants us to do the following things:

    1) Stock your kitchen with heart health in mind

    This is tied to the third item in the list of course, but it’s a critical step not to be overlooked. It’s all very well to know “eat more fiber; eat less red meat” and so forth, but if you go to your kitchen and what’s there is not conducive to heart health, you’re just going to do the best with what’s available.

    Instead, actually buy foods that are high in fiber, and preferably, foods that you like. Not a fan of beans? Don’t buy them. Love pasta? Go wholegrain. Like leafy greens in principle, but they don’t go with what you cook? Look up some recipes, and then buy them.

    Love a beef steak? Well we won’t lie to you, that is not good for your heart, but make it a rare option—so to speak—and enjoy it mindfully (see also: mindful eating) once in a blue moon for a special occasion, rather than “I don’t know what to cook tonight, so sizzle sizzle I guess”.

    Meal planning goes a long way for this one! And if meal-planning sounds like an overwhelming project to take on, then consider trying one of the many healthy-eating meal kit services that will deliver ingredients (and their recipes) to your door—opting for a plants-forward plan, and the rest should fall into place.

    2) Take control of your activity

    Choose to move! Rather than focusing on what you can’t do (let’s say, those 5am runs, or your regularly-scheduled, irregularly attended, gym sessions), focus on what you can do, and do it.

    See also: No-Exercise Exercise!

    3) Eat for a healthier heart

    This means following through on what you did on the first step, and keeping it that way. Buying fresh fruit and veg is great, but you also have to actually eat it. Do not let the perishables perish!

    For you too, dear reader, are perishable (and would presumably like to avoid perishing).

    This item in the list may seem flippant, but actually this is about habit-forming, and without it, the whole plan will grind to a halt a few days after your first heart-health-focused shopping trip.

    See also: Where Nutrition Meets Habits!

    4) Partner with your doctor, family, and friends

    Good relationships, both professional and personal, count for a lot. Draw up a plan with your doctor; don’t just guess at when to get this or that checked—or what to do about it if the numbers aren’t to your liking.

    Partnership with your doctor goes both ways, incidentally. Read up, have opinions, discuss them! Doing so will ultimately result in better care than just going in blind and coming out with a recommendation you don’t understand and just trust (but soon forget, because you didn’t understand).

    And as for family and friends, this is partly about social factors—we tend to influence, and be influenced by, those around us. It can be tricky to be on a health kick if your partner wants take-out every night, so some manner of getting everyone on the same page is important, be it by compromise or, in an ideal world, gradually trending towards better health. But any such changes must come from a place of genuine understanding and volition, otherwise at best they won’t stick, and at worst they’ll actively create a pushback.

    Same goes for exercise as for diet—exercising together is a good way to boost commitment, especially if it’s something fun (dance classes are a fine example that many couples enjoy, for example).

    5) Sleep more, stress less, savor life

    These things matter a lot! Many people focus on cutting down salt or saturated fat, and that can be good if otherwise consumed to excess, but for most people they’re not the most decisive factors:

    Hypertension: Factors Far More Relevant Than Salt ← sleep features here!

    Stress is also a huge one, and let’s put it this way: people more often have heart attacks during a moment of excessive emotional stress—not during a moment when they had a bit too much butter on their toast.

    It’s not even just that acute stress is the trigger, it’s that chronic stress is a contributory factor that erodes the body’s ability to handle the acute stress.

    Changing this may seem “easier said than done” because often the stressors are external (e.g. work pressure, financial worries, caring for a sick relative, relationship troubles, major life change, etc), but it is possible to find peace even in the chaos of life:

    How To Manage Chronic Stress

    Want to know more from Dr. Mieres?

    You might like this book of hers, which goes into each of the above items in much more depth than we have room to here:

    Heart Smarter for Women: Six Weeks to a Healthier Heart – by Dr. Jennifer Mieres

    Enjoy!

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  • Love Sense – by Dr. Sue Johnson
  • Healthy Hormones And How To Hack Them

    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.

    Healthy Hormones And How To Hack Them!

    Hormones are vital for far more than they tend to get credit for. Even the hormones that people think of first—testosterone and estrogen—do a lot more than just build/maintain sexual characteristics and sexual function. Without them, we’d lack energy, we’d be depressed, and we’d soon miss the general smooth-running of our bodies that we take for granted.

    And that’s without getting to the many less-talked-about hormones that play a secondary sexual role or are in the same general system…

    How are your prolactin levels, for example?

    Unless you’re ill, taking certain medications, recently gave birth, or picked a really interesting time to read this newsletter, they’re probably normal, by the way.

    But, prolactin can explain “la petite mort”, the downturn in energy and the somewhat depressed mood that many men experience after orgasm.

    Otherwise, if you have too much prolactin in general, you will be sleepy and depressed.

    Prolactin’s primary role? In women, it stimulates milk production when needed. In men, it plays a role in regulating mood and metabolism.

    Read: What Causes High Prolactin Levels in Men?

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  • Traveling To Die: The Latest Form of Medical Tourism

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    In the 18 months after Francine Milano was diagnosed with a recurrence of the ovarian cancer she thought she’d beaten 20 years ago, she traveled twice from her home in Pennsylvania to Vermont. She went not to ski, hike, or leaf-peep, but to arrange to die.

    “I really wanted to take control over how I left this world,” said the 61-year-old who lives in Lancaster. “I decided that this was an option for me.”

    Dying with medical assistance wasn’t an option when Milano learned in early 2023 that her disease was incurable. At that point, she would have had to travel to Switzerland — or live in the District of Columbia or one of the 10 states where medical aid in dying was legal.

    But Vermont lifted its residency requirement in May 2023, followed by Oregon two months later. (Montana effectively allows aid in dying through a 2009 court decision, but that ruling doesn’t spell out rules around residency. And though New York and California recently considered legislation that would allow out-of-staters to secure aid in dying, neither provision passed.)

    Despite the limited options and the challenges — such as finding doctors in a new state, figuring out where to die, and traveling when too sick to walk to the next room, let alone climb into a car — dozens have made the trek to the two states that have opened their doors to terminally ill nonresidents seeking aid in dying.

    At least 26 people have traveled to Vermont to die, representing nearly 25% of the reported assisted deaths in the state from May 2023 through this June, according to the Vermont Department of Health. In Oregon, 23 out-of-state residents died using medical assistance in 2023, just over 6% of the state total, according to the Oregon Health Authority.

    Oncologist Charles Blanke, whose clinic in Portland is devoted to end-of-life care, said he thinks that Oregon’s total is likely an undercount and he expects the numbers to grow. Over the past year, he said, he’s seen two to four out-of-state patients a week — about one-quarter of his practice — and fielded calls from across the U.S., including New York, the Carolinas, Florida, and “tons from Texas.” But just because patients are willing to travel doesn’t mean it’s easy or that they get their desired outcome.

    “The law is pretty strict about what has to be done,” Blanke said.

    As in other states that allow what some call physician-assisted death or assisted suicide, Oregon and Vermont require patients to be assessed by two doctors. Patients must have less than six months to live, be mentally and cognitively sound, and be physically able to ingest the drugs to end their lives. Charts and records must be reviewed in the state; neglecting to do so constitutes practicing medicine out of state, which violates medical licensing requirements. For the same reason, the patients must be in the state for the initial exam, when they request the drugs, and when they ingest them.

    State legislatures impose those restrictions as safeguards — to balance the rights of patients seeking aid in dying with a legislative imperative not to pass laws that are harmful to anyone, said Peg Sandeen, CEO of the group Death With Dignity. Like many aid-in-dying advocates, however, she said such rules create undue burdens for people who are already suffering.

    Diana Barnard, a Vermont palliative care physician, said some patients cannot even come for their appointments. “They end up being sick or not feeling like traveling, so there’s rescheduling involved,” she said. “It’s asking people to use a significant part of their energy to come here when they really deserve to have the option closer to home.”

    Those opposed to aid in dying include religious groups that say taking a life is immoral, and medical practitioners who argue their job is to make people more comfortable at the end of life, not to end the life itself.

    Anthropologist Anita Hannig, who interviewed dozens of terminally ill patients while researching her 2022 book, “The Day I Die: The Untold Story of Assisted Dying in America,” said she doesn’t expect federal legislation to settle the issue anytime soon. As the Supreme Court did with abortion in 2022, it ruled assisted dying to be a states’ rights issue in 1997.

    During the 2023-24 legislative sessions, 19 states (including Milano’s home state of Pennsylvania) considered aid-in-dying legislation, according to the advocacy group Compassion & Choices. Delaware was the sole state to pass it, but the governor has yet to act on it.

    Sandeen said that many states initially pass restrictive laws — requiring 21-day wait times and psychiatric evaluations, for instance — only to eventually repeal provisions that prove unduly onerous. That makes her optimistic that more states will eventually follow Vermont and Oregon, she said.

    Milano would have preferred to travel to neighboring New Jersey, where aid in dying has been legal since 2019, but its residency requirement made that a nonstarter. And though Oregon has more providers than the largely rural state of Vermont, Milano opted for the nine-hour car ride to Burlington because it was less physically and financially draining than a cross-country trip.

    The logistics were key because Milano knew she’d have to return. When she traveled to Vermont in May 2023 with her husband and her brother, she wasn’t near death. She figured that the next time she was in Vermont, it would be to request the medication. Then she’d have to wait 15 days to receive it.

    The waiting period is standard to ensure that a person has what Barnard calls “thoughtful time to contemplate the decision,” although she said most have done that long before. Some states have shortened the period or, like Oregon, have a waiver option.

    That waiting period can be hard on patients, on top of being away from their health care team, home, and family. Blanke said he has seen as many as 25 relatives attend the death of an Oregon resident, but out-of-staters usually bring only one person. And while finding a place to die can be a problem for Oregonians who are in care homes or hospitals that prohibit aid in dying, it’s especially challenging for nonresidents.

    When Oregon lifted its residency requirement, Blanke advertised on Craigslist and used the results to compile a list of short-term accommodations, including Airbnbs, willing to allow patients to die there. Nonprofits in states with aid-in-dying laws also maintain such lists, Sandeen said.

    Milano hasn’t gotten to the point where she needs to find a place to take the meds and end her life. In fact, because she had a relatively healthy year after her first trip to Vermont, she let her six-month approval period lapse.

    In June, though, she headed back to open another six-month window. This time, she went with a girlfriend who has a camper van. They drove six hours to cross the state border, stopping at a playground and gift shop before sitting in a parking lot where Milano had a Zoom appointment with her doctors rather than driving three more hours to Burlington to meet in person.

    “I don’t know if they do GPS tracking or IP address kind of stuff, but I would have been afraid not to be honest,” she said.

    That’s not all that scares her. She worries she’ll be too sick to return to Vermont when she is ready to die. And, even if she can get there, she wonders whether she’ll have the courage to take the medication. About one-third of people approved for assisted death don’t follow through, Blanke said. For them, it’s often enough to know they have the meds — the control — to end their lives when they want.

    Milano said she is grateful she has that power now while she’s still healthy enough to travel and enjoy life. “I just wish more people had the option,” she said.

    KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

    Subscribe to KFF Health News’ free Morning Briefing.

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  • Stress Resets – by Dr. Jennifer Taitz

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    You may be thinking: “that’s a bold claim in the subtitle; does the book deliver?”

    And yes, yes it does.

    The “resets” themselves are divided into categories:

    1. Mind resets, which are mostly CBT,
    2. Body resets, which include assorted somatic therapies such as vagus nerve resets, the judicious use of ice-water, what 1-minute sprints of exercise can do for your mental state, and why not to use the wrong somatic therapy for the wrong situation!
    3. Behavior resets, which are more about the big picture, and not falling into common traps.

    What common traps, you ask? This is about how we often have maladaptive responses to stress, e.g. we’re short of money so we overspend, we have an important deadline so we over-research and procrastinate, we’re anxious so we hyperfixate on the problem, we’re grieving so we look to substances to try to cope, we’re exhausted so we stay up late to try to claw back some lost time. Things where our attempt to cope actually makes things worse for us.

    Instead, Dr. Taitz advises us of how to get ourselves from “knowing we shouldn’t do that” to actually not doing that, and how to respond more healthily to stress, how to turn general stress into eustress, or as she puts it, how to “turn your knots into bows”.

    The style is… “Academic light”, perhaps we could say. It’s a step above pop-science, but a step below pure academic literature, which does make it a very pleasant read as well as informative. There are often footnotes at the bottom of each page to bridge any knowledge-gap, and for those who want to know the evidence of these evidence-based approaches, she does provide 35 pages of hard science sources to back up her claims.

    Bottom line: if you’d like to learn how better to manage stress from an evidence-based perspective that’s not just “do minfdulness meditation”, then this book gives a lot of ways.

    Click here to check out Stress Resets, and indeed soothe your body and mind in minutes!

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