This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism – by Ashton Applewhite
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It’s easy to think of ageism as being 80% “nobody will hire me because I am three years away from standard retirement age”, but it’s a lot more pervasive than that. And some of it, perhaps the most insidious, is the ageism that we can sometimes internalize without thinking it through.
10almonds readers love to avoid/reverse aging (and this reviewer is no different!), but it’s good once in a while to consider our priorities and motivations, for example:
- There is merit in being able to live without disability or discomfort
- There is harm in feeling a need to pass for younger than we are
And yet, even things such as disabilities are, Applewhite fairly argues, not to be feared. Absolutely avoided if reasonably possible of course, yes, but if they happen they happen and it’s good that we be able to make our peace with that, because most people have at least some kind of disability before the end, and can still strive to make the most of the precious gift that is life. The goal can and should be to play the hand we’re dealt and to live as well as we can—whatever that latter means for us personally.
Many people’s life satisfaction goes up in later years, and Applewhite hypothesizes that while some of that can be put down to circumstances (often no longer overwhelmed with work etc, often more financially stable), a lot is a matter of having come to terms with “losing” youth and no longer having that fear. Thus, a new, freer age of life begins.
The book does cover many other areas too, more than we can list here (but for example: ranging from pro/con brain differences to sex and intimacy), and the idea that long life is a team sport, and that we should not fall into the all-American trap of putting independence on a pedestal. Reports of how aging works with close-knit communities in the supercentenarian Blue Zones can be considered to quash this quite nicely, for instance.
The style is casual and entertaining, and yet peppered with scholarly citations, which stack up to 30 pages of references at the back.
Bottom line: getting older is a privilege that not everyone gets to have, so who are we to squander it? This book shares a vital sense of perspective, and is a call-to-arms for us all to do better, together.
Click here to check out This Chair Rocks, and indeed rock it!
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How To Know When You’re Healing Emotionally
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The healing process can be humbling but rewarding, leading to deep fulfillment and inner peace. Discomfort in healing can be part of growth and self-integration. Because of that, progress sometimes looks and/or feels like progress… And sometimes it doesn’t. Here’s how to recognize it, though:
Small but important parts of a bigger process
Nine signs indicating you are healing:
- Allowing emotions: you acknowledge and process both negative and positive emotions instead of suppressing them.
- Improved boundaries: you improve at expressing and maintaining boundaries, overcoming fear of rejection, guilt, and shame.
- Acceptance of past: you accept difficult past experiences and their impact, reducing their hold over you.
- Less reactivity: you become less reactive and more thoughtful in responses, practicing emotional self-regulation.
- Non-linear healing: you understand that healing involves ups and downs and isn’t a straightforward journey.
- Stepping out of your comfort zone: you start taking brave steps that previously induced fear or anxiety.
- Handling disappointments: you accept setbacks and respond to them healthily, without losing motivation.
- Inner peace: you develop a sense of wholeness, and forgiveness for yourself and others, reducing self-sabotage.
- Welcoming support: you become more open to seeking and accepting help, moving beyond pride and shame.
In short: healing (especially the very first part: accepting that something needs healing) can be uncomfortable but lead to much better places in life. It’s okay if healing is slow; everyone’s journey is different, and doing your best is enough.
For more on each of these, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like:
Why You Can’t Just “Get Over” Trauma
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Tastes from our past can spark memories, trigger pain or boost wellbeing. Here’s how to embrace food nostalgia
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Have you ever tried to bring back fond memories by eating or drinking something unique to that time and place?
It could be a Pina Colada that recalls an island holiday? Or a steaming bowl of pho just like the one you had in Vietnam? Perhaps eating a favourite dish reminds you of a lost loved one – like the sticky date pudding Nanna used to make?
If you have, you have tapped into food-evoked nostalgia.
As researchers, we are exploring how eating and drinking certain things from your past may be important for your mood and mental health.
Halfpoint/Shutterstock Bittersweet longing
First named in 1688 by Swiss medical student, Johannes Hoffer, nostalgia is that bittersweet, sentimental longing for the past. It is experienced universally across different cultures and lifespans from childhood into older age.
But nostalgia does not just involve positive or happy memories – we can also experience nostalgia for sad and unhappy moments in our lives.
In the short and long term, nostalgia can positively impact our health by improving mood and wellbeing, fostering social connection and increasing quality of life. It can also trigger feelings of loneliness or meaninglessness.
We can use nostalgia to turn around a negative mood or enhance our sense of self, meaning and positivity.
Research suggests nostalgia alters activity in the brain regions associated with reward processing – the same areas involved when we seek and receive things we like. This could explain the positive feelings it can bring.
Nostalgia can also increase feelings of loneliness and sadness, particularly if the memories highlight dissatisfaction, grieving, loss, or wistful feelings for the past. This is likely due to activation of brain areas such as the amygdala, responsible for processing emotions and the prefrontal cortex that helps us integrate feelings and memories and regulate emotion.
How to get back there
There are several ways we can trigger or tap into nostalgia.
Conversations with family and friends who have shared experiences, unique objects like photos, and smells can transport us back to old times or places. So can a favourite song or old TV show, reunions with former classmates, even social media posts and anniversaries.
What we eat and drink can trigger food-evoked nostalgia. For instance, when we think of something as “comfort food”, there are likely elements of nostalgia at play.
Foods you found comforting as a child can evoke memories of being cared for and nurtured by loved ones. The form of these foods and the stories we tell about them may have been handed down through generations.
Food-evoked nostalgia can be very powerful because it engages multiple senses: taste, smell, texture, sight and sound. The sense of smell is closely linked to the limbic system in the brain responsible for emotion and memory making food-related memories particularly vivid and emotionally charged.
But, food-evoked nostalgia can also give rise to negative memories, such as of being forced to eat a certain vegetable you disliked as a child, or a food eaten during a sad moment like a loved ones funeral. Understanding why these foods evoke negative memories could help us process and overcome some of our adult food aversions. Encountering these foods in a positive light may help us reframe the memory associated with them.
Just like mum used to make. Food might remind you of the special care you received as a child. Galina Kovalenko/Shutterstock What people told us about food and nostalgia
Recently we interviewed eight Australians and asked them about their experiences with food-evoked nostalgia and the influence on their mood. We wanted to find out whether they experienced food-evoked nostalgia and if so, what foods triggered pleasant and unpleasant memories and feelings for them.
They reported they could use foods that were linked to times in their past to manipulate and influence their mood. Common foods they described as particularly nostalgia triggering were homemade meals, foods from school camp, cultural and ethnic foods, childhood favourites, comfort foods, special treats and snacks they were allowed as children, and holiday or celebration foods. One participant commented:
I guess part of this nostalgia is maybe […] The healing qualities that food has in mental wellbeing. I think food heals for us.
Another explained
I feel really happy, and I guess fortunate to have these kinds of foods that I can turn to, and they have these memories, and I love the feeling of nostalgia and reminiscing and things that remind me of good times.
Yorkshire pudding? Don’t mind if I do. Rigsbyphoto/Shutterstock Understanding food-evoked nostalgia is valuable because it provides us with an insight into how our sensory experiences and emotions intertwine with our memories and identity. While we know a lot about how food triggers nostalgic memories, there is still much to learn about the specific brain areas involved and the differences in food-evoked nostalgia in different cultures.
In the future we may be able to use the science behind food-evoked nostalgia to help people experiencing dementia to tap into lost memories or in psychological therapy to help people reframe negative experiences.
So, if you are ever feeling a little down and want to improve your mood, consider turning to one of your favourite comfort foods that remind you of home, your loved ones or a holiday long ago. Transporting yourself back to those times could help turn things around.
Megan Lee, Senior Teaching Fellow, Psychology, Bond University; Doug Angus, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Bond University, and Kate Simpson, Sessional academic, Bond University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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The Surprising Link Between Type 2 Diabetes & Alzheimer’s
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The Surprising Link Between Type 2 Diabetes & Alzheimer’s
This is Dr. Rhonda Patrick. She’s a biomedical scientist with expertise in the areas of aging, cancer, and nutrition. In the past five years she has expanded her research of aging to focus more on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, as she has a genetic predisposition to both.
What does that genetic predisposition look like? People who (like her) have the APOE-ε4 allele have a twofold increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease—and if you have two copies (i.e., one from each of two parents), the risk can be up to tenfold. Globally, 13.7% of people have at least one copy of this allele.
So while getting Alzheimer’s or not is not, per se, hereditary… The predisposition to it can be passed on.
What’s on her mind?
Dr. Patrick has noted that, while we don’t know for sure the causes of Alzheimer’s disease, and can make educated guesses only from correlations, the majority of current science seems to be focusing on just one: amyloid plaques in the brain.
This is a worthy area of research, but ignores the fact that there are many potential Alzheimer’s disease mechanisms to explore, including (to count only mainstream scientific ideas):
- The amyloid hypothesis
- The tau hypothesis
- The inflammatory hypothesis
- The cholinergic hypothesis
- The cholesterol hypothesis
- The Reelin hypothesis
- The large gene instability hypothesis
…as well as other strongly correlated factors such as glucose hypometabolism, insulin signalling, and oxidative stress.
If you lost your keys and were looking for them, and knew at least half a dozen places they might be, how often would you check the same place without paying any attention to the others?
To this end, she notes about those latter-mentioned correlated factors:
❝50–80% of people with Alzheimer’s disease have type 2 diabetes; there is definitely something going on❞
There’s another “smoking gun” for this too, because dysfunction in the blood vessels and capillaries that line the blood-brain barrier seem to be a very early event that is common between all types of dementia (including Alzheimer’s) and between type 2 diabetes and APOE-ε4.
Research is ongoing, and Dr. Patrick is at the forefront of that. However, there’s a practical take-away here meanwhile…
What can we do about it?
Dr. Patrick hypothesizes that if we can reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes, we may reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s with it.
Obviously, avoiding diabetes if possible is a good thing to do anyway, but if we’re aware of an added risk factor for Alzheimer’s, it becomes yet more important.
Of course, all the usual advices apply here, including a Mediterranean diet and regular moderate exercise.
Three other things Dr. Patrick specifically recommends (to reduce both type 2 diabetes risk and to reduce Alzheimer’s risk) include:
(links are to her blog, with lots of relevant science for each)
You can also hear more from Dr. Patrick personally, as a guest on Dr. Peter Attia’s podcast recently. She discusses these topics in much greater detail than we have room for in our newsletter:
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The DASH Diet Mediterranean Solution – by Dr. Marla Heller
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Sometimes, an author releases a series of books that could have just been one book, with various padding and rehashes. In some cases, naming no names
Dr. Mark Hyman, it means we have to carefully pick out the honestly very good and highly recommendable ones from the “you just republished for the extra income, didn’t you?” ones.In this case, today’s book is part of a series of books with very similar titles, and this one seems the most useful as a standalone book
The Mediterranean Diet is still the scientific world’s current “gold standard” in terms of most evidence-based diet for general health, and as we’ve written about, it can be tweaked to focus on being best for [your particular concern here]. In this case, it’s the DASH variant of the Mediterranean Diet, considered best for heart health specifically.
The style is repetitive, and possibly indicative of the author getting into a habit of having to pad books. Nevertheless, saying things too often is better than forgetting to say them, so hey. On which note, it is more of an educational book than a cookbook—it does have recipes, but not many.
Bottom line: if you’d like an introduction to the DASH variant of the Mediterranean Diet, this book will get you well-acquainted.
Click here to check out The DASH Diet Mediterranean Solution, and learn all about it!
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The Recipe For Empowered Leadership – by Doug Meyer-Cuno
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This is not a “here’s how to become a leader, you young would-be Machiavelli”; it’s more a “so you’re in a leadership role; now what?” book. The book’s subtitle describes well its contents: “25 Ingredients For Creating Value & Empowering Others”
The book is written with the voice of experience, but without the ego-driven padding that accompanies many such books. Especially: any anecdotal illustrations are short and to-the-point, no chapter-long diversions here.
Which we love!
Equally helpful is where the author does spend a little more time and energy: on the “down to brass tacks” of how exactly to do various things.
In short: if instead of a lofty-minded book of vague idealized notions selling a pipedream, you’d rather have a manual of how to actually be a good leader when it comes down to it, this is the book for you.
Pick Up The Recipe For Empowered Leadership On Amazon Today!
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Kiwi vs Lime – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing kiwi to lime, we picked the kiwi.
Why?
Looking at the macros first, kiwi has more protein, more carbs, and more fiber. As with most fruits, the fiber is the number we’re most interested in for health purposes; in this case, kiwi is just slightly ahead of lime on all three of those.
In terms of vitamins, kiwi has more of vitamins A, B2, B3, B6, B9, C, E, K, and choline, while lime has a tiny bit more vitamin B5. As in, the vitamin that’s in pretty much anything and is practically impossible to be deficient in unless you are literally starving to death. You may be thinking: aren’t limes a famously good source of vitamin C? And yes, yes they are. But kiwis have >3x more. In other big differences, kiwis also have >6x more vitamin E and >67 times more vitamin K.
When it comes to minerals, kiwi has more calcium, copper, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, and zinc, while lime has more iron and selenium. Another easy win for kiwis.
In short: enjoy both; both are good. But kiwis are the more nutritionally dense option by almost every way of measuring it.
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
Top 8 Fruits That Prevent & Kill Cancer ← kiwi is top of the list; it promotes cancer cell death while sparing healthy cells
Take care!
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