The Worry Trick – by Dr. David Carbonell
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Worry is a time-sink that rarely does us any good, and often does us harm. Many books have been written on how to fight anxiety… That’s not what this book’s about.
Dr. David Carbonell, in contrast, encourages the reader to stop trying to avoid/resist anxiety, and instead, lean into it in a way that detoothes it.
He offers various ways of doing this, from scheduling time to worry, to substituting “what if…” with “let’s pretend…”, and guides the reader through exercises to bring about a sort of worry-desensitization.
The style throughout is very much pop-psychology and is very readable.
If the book has a weak point, it’s that it tends to focus on worrying less about unlikely outcomes, rather than tackling worry that occurs relating to outcomes that are likely, or even known in advance. However, some of the techniques will work for such also! That’s when Dr. Carbonell draws from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).
Bottom line: if you would like to lose less time and energy to worrying, then this is a fine book for you.
Click here to check out The Worry Trick, and repurpose your energy reserves!
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Are Brain Chips Safe?
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Ready For Cyborgization?
In yesterday’s newsletter, we asked you for your views on Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs), such as the Utah Array and Neuralink’s chips on/in brains that allow direct communication between brains and computers, so that (for example) a paralysed person can use a device to communicate, or manipulate a prosthetic limb or two.
We didn’t get as many votes as usual; it’s possible that yesterday’s newsletter ended up in a lot of spam filters due to repeated use of a word in “extra ______ olive oil” in its main feature!
However, of the answers we did get…
- About 54% said “It’s bad enough that our phones spy on us, without BCI monitoring our thoughts as well!”
- About 23% said “Sounds great in principle, but I don’t think we’re there yet safetywise”
- About 19% said “Sign me up for technological telepathy! I am ready for assimilation”
- One (1) person said “Electrode outside the skull are good; chips on the brain are bad”
But what does the science say?
We’re not there yet safetywise: True or False?
True, in our opinion, when it comes to the latest implants, anyway. While it’s very difficult to prove a negative (it could be that everything goes perfectly in human trials), “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”, and so far this seems to be lacking.
The stage before human trials is usually animal trials, starting with small creatures and working up to non-human primates if appropriate, before finally humans.
- Good news: the latest hot-topic BCI device (Neuralink) was tested on animals!
- Bad news: to say it did not go well would be an understatement
The Gruesome Story of How Neuralink’s Monkeys Actually Died
The above is a Wired article, and we tend to go for more objective sources, however we chose this one because it links to very many objective sources, including an open letter from the Physicians’ Committee for Responsible Medicine, which basically confirms everything in the Wired article. There are lots of links to primary (medical and legal) sources, too.
Electrodes outside the skull are good; chips on/in the brain are bad: True or False?
True or False depending on how they’re done. The Utah Array (an older BCI implant, now 20 years old, though it’s been updated many times since) has had a good safety record, after being used by a few dozen people with paralysis to control devices:
How the Utah Array is advancing BCI science
The Utah Array works on the same general principle as Neuralink, but the mechanics of its implementation are very different:
- The Utah Array involves a tiny bundle of microelectrodes (held together by a rigid structure that looks a bit like a nanoscale hairbrush) put in place by a brain surgeon, and that’s that.
- The Neuralink has a dynamic web of electrodes, implanted by a little robot that acts like a tiny sewing machine to implant many polymer threads, each containing its own a bunch of electrodes.
In theory, the latter is much more advanced. In practice, so far, the former has a much better safety record.
I am right to be a little worried about giving companies access to my brain: True or False?
True or False, depending on the nature of your concern.
For privacy: current BCI devices have quite simple switches operated consciously by the user. So while technically any such device that then runs its data through Bluetooth or WiFi could be hacked, this risk is no greater than using a wireless mouse and/or keyboard, because it has access to about the same amount of information.
For safety: yes, probably there is cause to be worried. Likely the first waves of commercial users of any given BCI device will be severely disabled people who are more likely to waive their rights in the hope of a life-changing assistance device, and likely some of those will suffer if things go wrong.
Which on the one hand, is their gamble to make. And on the other hand, makes rushing to human trials, for companies that do that, a little more predatory.
Take care!
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Non-Alcohol Mouthwash vs Alcohol Mouthwash – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing non-alcohol mouthwash to alcohol mouthwash, we picked the alcohol.
Why?
Note: this is a contingent choice and is applicable to most, but not all, people.
In short, there has been some concern about alcohol mouthwashes increasing cancer risk, but research has shown this is only the case if you already have an increased risk of oral cancer (for example if you smoke, and/or have had an oral cancer before).
For those for whom this is not the case (for example, if you don’t smoke, and/or have no such cancer history), then best science currently shows that alcohol mouthwash does not cause any increased risk.
What about non-alcohol mouthwashes? Well, they have a different problem; they usually use chlorine-based chemicals like chlorhexidine or cetylpyridinium chloride, which are (exactly as the label promises) exceptionally good at killing oral bacteria.
(They’d kill us too, at higher doses, hence: swill and spit)
Unfortunately, much like the rest of our body, our mouth is supposed to have bacteria there and bad things happen when it doesn’t. In the case of our oral microbiome, cleaning it with such powerful antibacterial agents can kill our “good” bacteria along with the bad, which lowers the pH of our saliva (that’s bad; it means it is more acidic), and thus indirectly erodes tooth enamel.
You can read more about the science of all of the above (with references), here:
Toothpastes & Mouthwashes: Which Help And Which Harm?
Summary:
For most people, alcohol mouthwashes are a good way to avoid the damage that can be done by chlorhexidine in non-alcohol mouthwashes.
Here are some examples, but there will be plenty in your local supermarket:
Non-Alcohol, by Colgate | Alcohol, by Listerine
If you have had oral cancer, or if you smoke, then you may want to seek a third alternative (and also, please, stop smoking if you can).
Or, really, most people could probably skip mouthwashes, if you’ve good oral care already by other means. See also:
Toothpastes & Mouthwashes: Which Help And Which Harm?
(yes, it’s the same link as before, but we’re now drawing your attention to the fact it has information about toothpastes too)
If you do want other options though, might want to check out:
Less Common Oral Hygiene Options ← miswak sticks are especially effective
Take care!
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Turns out the viral ‘Sleepy Girl Mocktail’ is backed by science. Should you try it?
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Many of us wish we could get a better night’s sleep. Wouldn’t it be great if it was as easy as a mocktail before bed?
That’s what the latest viral trend might have us believe. The “Sleepy Girl Mocktail” is a mix of tart cherry juice, powdered magnesium supplement and soda water. TikTok videos featuring the concoction have garnered hundreds of thousands of views. But, what does the science say? Do these ingredients actually help us sleep?
Tart cherry juice
There is research to show including tart cherry juice in your diet improves overall sleep. Clinical trials show tart cherry juice increases sleep quality and quantity, as well as a lessening insomnia symptoms (compared to a placebo). This could be due to the presence of melatonin, a sleep-promoting hormone, in cherries.
Tart cherry varieties such as Jerte Valley or Montmorency have the highest concentration of melatonin (approximately 0.135 micrograms of melatonin per 100g of cherry juice). Over the counter melatonin supplements can range from 0.5 milligram to over 100 milligrams, with research suggesting those beginning to take melatonin start with a dose of 0.5–2 milligrams to see an improvement in sleep.
Melatonin naturally occurs in our bodies. Our body clock promotes the release of melatonin in the evening to help us sleep, specifically in the two hours before our natural bedtime.
If we want to increase our melatonin intake with external sources, such as cherries, then we should be timing our intake with our natural increase in melatonin. Supplementing melatonin too close to bed will mean we may not get the sleep-promoting benefits in time to get off to sleep easily. Taking melatonin too late may even harm our long-term sleep health by sending the message to our body clock to delay the release of melatonin until later in the evening.
Magnesium – but how much?
Magnesium also works to promote melatonin, and magnesium supplements have been shown to improve sleep outcomes.
However, results vary depending on the amount of magnesium people take. And we don’t yet have the answers on the best dose of magnesium for sleep benefits.
We do know magnesium plays a vital role in energy production and bone development, making it an important daily nutrient for our diets. Foods rich in magnesium include wheat cereal or bread, almonds, cashews, pumpkin seeds, spinach, artichokes, green beans, soy milk and dark chocolate.
Bubbly water
Soda water serves as the base of the drink, rather than a pathway to better sleep. And bubbly water may make the mix more palatable. It is important to keep in mind that drinking fluids close to bedtime can be disruptive to our sleep as it might lead to waking during the night to urinate.
Healthy sleep recommendations include avoiding water intake in the two hours before bed. Having carbonated beverages too close to bed can also trigger digestive symptoms such as bloating, gassiness and reflux during the night.
Bottoms up?
Overall, there is evidence to support trying out the Sleepy Girl Mocktail to see if it improves sleep, however there are some key things to remember:
timing: to get the benefits of this drink, avoid having it too close to bed. Aim to have it two hours before your usual bedtime and avoid fluids after this time
consistency: no drink is going to be an immediate cure for poor sleep. However, this recipe could help promote sleep if used strategically (at the right time) and consistently as part of a balanced diet. It may also introduce a calming evening routine that helps your brain relax and signals it’s time for bed
- maximum magnesium: be mindful of the amount of magnesium you are consuming. While there are many health benefits to magnesium, the recommended daily maximum amounts are 420mg for adult males and 320mg for adult females. Exceeding the maximum can lead to low blood pressure, respiratory distress, stomach problems, muscle weakness and mood problems
sugar: in some of the TikTok recipes sugar (as flavoured sodas, syrups or lollies) is added to the drink. While this may help hide the taste of the tart cherry juice, the consumption of sugar too close to bed may make it more difficult to get to sleep. And sugar in the evening raises blood sugar levels at a time when our body is not primed to be processing sugar. Long term, this can increase our risk of diabetes
sleep environment: follow good sleep hygiene practices including keeping a consistent bedtime and wake time, a wind-down routine before bed, avoiding electronic device use like phones or laptops in bed, and avoiding bright light in the evening. Bright light works to suppress our melatonin levels in the evening and make us more alert.
What about other drinks?
Other common evening beverages include herbal tisanes or teas, hot chocolate, or warm milk.
Milk can be especially beneficial for sleep, as it contains the amino acid tryptophan, which can promote melatonin production. Again, it is important to also consider the timing of these drinks and to avoid any caffeine in tea and too much chocolate too close to bedtime, as this can make us more alert rather than sleepy.
Getting enough sleep is crucial to our health and wellbeing. If you have tried multiple strategies to improve your sleep and things are not getting better, it may be time to seek professional advice, such as from a GP.
Charlotte Gupta, Postdoctoral research fellow, CQUniversity Australia
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Dial Down Your Pain
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This is Dr. Christiane Wolf. Is than an MD or a PhD, you ask? The answer is: yes (it is both; the latter being in psychosomatic medicine).
She also teaches Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, which as you may recall is pretty much the most well-evidenced* form of meditation there is, in terms of benefits:
No-Frills, Evidence-Based Mindfulness
*which is not to claim it is necessarily the best (although it also could be); rather, this means that it is the form of meditation that’s accumulated the most scientific backing in total. If another equal or better form of meditation enjoyed less scientific scrutiny, then there could an alternative out there languishing with only two and a half scientific papers to its name. However, we at 10almonds are not research scientists, and thus can only comment on the body of evidence that has been published.
In any case, today is going to be about pain.
What does she want us to know?
Your mind does matter
It’s easy to think that anything you can do with your mind is going to be quite small comfort when your nerves feel like they’re on fire.
However, Dr. Wolf makes the case for pain consisting of three components:
- the physical sensation(s)
- the emotions we have about those
- the meaning we give to such (or “the story” that we use to describe it)
To clarify, let’s give an example:
- the physical sensations of burning, searing, and occasionally stabbing pains in the lower back
- the emotions of anguish, anger, despair, self-pity
- the story of “this pain has ruined my life, is making it unbearable, will almost certainly continue, and may get worse”
We are not going to tell you to throw any of those out of the window for now (and, would that you could throw the first line out, of course).
The first thing Dr. Wolf wants us to do to make this more manageable is to break it down.
Because presently, all three of those things are lumped together in a single box labelled “pain”.
If each of those items is at a “10” on the scale of pain, then this is 10×10×10=1000.
If our pain is at 1000/10, that’s a lot. We want to leave the pain in the box, not look at it, and try to distract ourselves. That is one possible strategy, by the way, and it’s not always bad when it comes to giving oneself a short-term reprieve. We balanced it against meditation, here:
Managing Chronic Pain (Realistically)
However, back to the box analogy, if we open that box and take out each of those items to examine them, then even without changing anything, even with them all still at 10, they can each be managed for what they are individually, so it’s now 10+10+10=30.
If our pain is at 30/10, that’s still a lot, but it’s a lot more manageable than 1000/10.
On rating pain, by the way, see:
Get The Right Help For Your Pain
Dealing with the separate parts
It would be nice, of course, for each of those separate parts to not be at 10.
With regard to the physical side of pain, this is not Dr. Wolf’s specialty, but we have some good resources here at 10almonds:
- The 7 Approaches To Pain Management
- 10 Tips To Reduce Morning Pain & Stiffness With Arthritis
- Science-Based Alternative Pain Relief: When Painkillers Aren’t Helping, These Things Might
When it comes to emotions associated with pain, Dr. Wolf (who incidentally is a Buddhist and also a teacher of same, and runs meditation retreats for such), recommends (of course) mindfulness, and what in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is called “radical acceptance” (in Buddhism, it may be referred to as being at one with things). We’ve written about this here:
“Hello, Emotions”: Radical Acceptance In CBT & DBT
Once again, the aim here is still not to throw the (often perfectly valid) emotions out of the window (unless you want to), but rather, to neutrally note and acknowledge the emotions as they arrive, á la “Hello, despair. Depression, my old foe, we meet again. Hello again, resentment.” …and so on.
The reason this helps is because emotions, much like the physical sensations of pain, are first and foremost messengers, and sometimes (as in the case of chronic pain) they get broken and keep delivering the message beyond necessity. Acknowledging the message helps your brain (and all that is attached to it) realize “ok, this message has been delivered now; we can chill about it a little”.
Having done that, if you can reasonably tweak any of the emotions (for example, perhaps that self-pity we mentioned could be turned into self-compassion, which is more useful), that’s great. If not, at least you know what’s on the battlefield now.
When we examine the story of our pain, lastly, Dr. Wolf invites us to look at how one of the biggest drivers of distress under pain is the uncertainty of how long the pain will last, whether it will get worse, whether what we are doing will make it worse, and so forth. See for example:
How long does back pain last? And how can learning about pain increase the chance of recovery?
And of course, many things we do specifically in response to pain can indeed make our pain worse, and spread:
Dr. Wolf’s perspective says:
- Life involves pain
- Pain invariably has a cause
- What has a cause, can have an end
- We just need to go through that process
This may seem like small comfort when we are in the middle of the pain, but if we’ve broken it down into parts with Dr. Wolf’s “box method”, and dealt with the first two parts (the sensations and the emotions) as well as reasonably possible, then we can tackle the third one (the story) a little more easily than we could if we were trying to come at it with no preparation.
What used to be:
“This pain has ruined my life, is making it unbearable, will almost certainly continue, and may get worse”
…can now become:
“This pain is a big challenge, but since I’m here for it whether I want to be or not, I will suffer as I must, while calmly looking for ways to reduce that suffering as I go.”
In short: you cannot “think healing thoughts” and expect your pain to go away. But you can do a lot more than you might (if you left it unexamined) expect.
Want to know more from Dr. Wolf?
We reviewed a book of hers recently, which you might enjoy:
Outsmart Your Pain – by Dr. Christiane Wolf
Take care!
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Avoiding Razor Burn, Ingrown Hairs & Other Shaving Irritation
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How Does The Video Help?
Dr. Simi Adedeji’s incredibly friendly persona makes this video (below) on avoiding skin irritation, ingrown hairs, and razor burn after shaving a pleasure to watch.
To keep things simple, she breaks down her guide into 10 simple tips.
What Are The 10 Simple Tips?
Tip 1: Prioritize Hydration. Shaving dry hair can lead to increased skin irritation, so Dr. Simi recommends moistening the hair by showering or using a warm, wet towel for 2-4 minutes before getting the razor out.
Tip 2: Avoid Dry Shaving. Dry shaving not only removes hair but can also remove the protective upper layer of skin, which contributes to razor burn. To prevent this, simply use some shaving gel or cream.
Tip 3: Keep Blades New and Sharp. This one’s simple: dull blades can cause skin irritation, whilst a sharp blade ensures a smoother and more comfortable shaving experience.
Tip 4: Avoid Shaving the Same Area Repeatedly. Multiple passes over the same area can remove skin layers, leading to cuts and irritation. Aim to shave each area only once for safer results.
Tip 5: Consider Hair Growth Direction. Shaving in the direction of hair growth results in less irritation, although it may not provide the closest shave.
Tip 6: Apply Gentle Pressure While Shaving. Excessive pressure can lead to cuts and nicks. Use a gentle touch to reduce these risks.
Tip 7: Incorporate Exfoliation into Your Routine. Exfoliating helps release trapped hairs and reduces the risk of ingrown hairs. For those with sensitive skin, it’s recommended to exfoliate either two days before or after shaving.
Tip 8: Avoid Excessive Skin Stretching. Over-stretching the skin during shaving can cause hairs to become ingrown.
Tip 9: Moisturize After Shaving. Shaving can compromise the skin barrier, leading to dryness. Using a moisturizer can be a simple fix.
Tip 10: Regularly Rinse Your Blade. Make sure that, during the shaving process, you are rinsing your blade frequently to remove hair and skin debris. This keeps it sharp during your shave.
If this summary doesn’t do it for you, then you can watch the full video here:
How did you find that video? If you’ve discovered any great videos yourself that you’d like to share with fellow 10almonds readers, then please do email them to us!
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Signs That Are Present When Someone Is Dying
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You’ve probably been there a few times, although given the emotional nature of the thing, it’s likely that you weren’t taking notes. Hospice workers, on the other hand, do take notes, so here are some things you might want to know, and if anything makes the next time even a little easier, that’ll be good:
Last stages
Here are the discussed signs of the “active dying” phase:
- Increasing unconsciousness:
- The person will be mostly unresponsive most of the time.
- Eyes may be open or partially open but not making eye contact.
- Mouth will likely remain open due to muscle relaxation.
- Cessation of food and water intake
- The person will likely not eat or drink for several days.
- This is a natural process and does not cause suffering per se (e.g. thirst, hunger).
- Dryness of mouth, however, can be treated with a little moistening, for comfort.
- Changes in breathing
- Breathing patterns will change and may be irregular.
- This is a natural metabolic response, and is not a sign of distress.
- Terminal secretions (“death rattle”) may occur:
- A gurgling sound caused by saliva buildup due to loss of swallowing reflex.
- Not painful or distressing for the person.
- Can be managed by repositioning or using medication to dry secretions.
- Skin color changes / mottling:
- First appears on fingers and toes (purple or gray discoloration).
- May spread to knees, nose, or other extremities.
- Temperature fluctuations:
- The body loses its ability to regulate temperature.
- Person may feel hot but be cold (or vice versa).
- Fevers are common—cooling measures and/or Tylenol can help.
A person in discomfort may appear restless, have a furrowed brow, or show physical agitation. If on the other hand they appear peaceful and unresponsive, they are almost certainly not in distress. At such times, it’s best to focus on just keeping them clean and comfortable.
For more on all of these, see:
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Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
Managing Mortality: When Planning Is a Matter of Life and Death
Take care!
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- Increasing unconsciousness:
