This Naked Mind – by Annie Grace
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We’ve all read about the many, many, dangers of drinking. We’ve also probably all read about how to make the change to not drinking. Put things out of sight, tell your friends, have this rule, have this excuse (for not drinking) ready to give to people who challenge you, consider a support group, and so on.
What Annie Grace offers in this #1 bestseller is different:
A blend of mostly psychology and sociology, to examine the “liminal thinking” stages that funnel us to drink in the first place… and where that leads, and how to clamber back out of the pitcher plant we weren’t necessarily aware we were sliding into.
While she kicks off citing Jung, from a psychological perspective more of this book is CBTish, as it pertains a lot to examining the process of:
- belief—held and defended, based on the…
- conclusion—drawn, often irrationally, from the…
- experience—that we had upon acting on an…
- observation—often mistaking an illusion for the underlying…
- reality
…and how we can and often do go wrong at each step, and how little of the previous steps we can perceive at any given time.
What does this mean for managing/treating alcoholism or a tendency towards alchoholism?
It means interrupting those processes in a careful, surgically precise fashion, so that suddenly… The thing has no more power over us.
Whether you or a loved one struggle with a tendency to addiction (any addiction, actually, the advice goes the same), or are just curious about the wider factors at hand in the epidemiology of addiction, this book is for you.
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Science of Pilates – by Tracy Ward
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We’ve reviewed other books in this series, “Science of Yoga” and “Science of HIIT” (they’re great too; check them out!). What does this one add to the mix?
Pilates is a top-tier “combination exercise” insofar as it checks a lot of boxes, e.g:
- Strength—especially core strength, but also limbs
- Mobility—range of motion and resultant reduction in injury risk
- Stability—impossible without the above two things, but Pilates trains this too
- Fitness—many dynamic Pilates exercises can be performed as cardio and/or HIIT.
The author, a physiotherapist, explains (as the title promises!) the science of Pilates, with:
- the beautifully clear diagrams we’ve come to expect of this series,
- equally clear explanations, with a great balance of simplicity of terms and depth where necessary, and
- plenty of citations for the claims made, linking to lots of the best up-to-date science.
Bottom line: if you are in a position to make a little time for Pilates (if you don’t already), then there is nobody who would not benefit from reading this book.
Click here to check out Science of Pilates, and keep your body well!
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Mental illness, psychiatric disorder or psychological problem. What should we call mental distress?
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We talk about mental health more than ever, but the language we should use remains a vexed issue.
Should we call people who seek help patients, clients or consumers? Should we use “person-first” expressions such as person with autism or “identity-first” expressions like autistic person? Should we apply or avoid diagnostic labels?
These questions often stir up strong feelings. Some people feel that patient implies being passive and subordinate. Others think consumer is too transactional, as if seeking help is like buying a new refrigerator.
Advocates of person-first language argue people shouldn’t be defined by their conditions. Proponents of identity-first language counter that these conditions can be sources of meaning and belonging.
Avid users of diagnostic terms see them as useful descriptors. Critics worry that diagnostic labels can box people in and misrepresent their problems as pathologies.
Underlying many of these disagreements are concerns about stigma and the medicalisation of suffering. Ideally the language we use should not cast people who experience distress as defective or shameful, or frame everyday problems of living in psychiatric terms.
Our new research, published in the journal PLOS Mental Health, examines how the language of distress has evolved over nearly 80 years. Here’s what we found.
Engin Akyurt/Pexels Generic terms for the class of conditions
Generic terms – such as mental illness, psychiatric disorder or psychological problem – have largely escaped attention in debates about the language of mental ill health. These terms refer to mental health conditions as a class.
Many terms are currently in circulation, each an adjective followed by a noun. Popular adjectives include mental, mental health, psychiatric and psychological, and common nouns include condition, disease, disorder, disturbance, illness, and problem. Readers can encounter every combination.
These terms and their components differ in their connotations. Disease and illness sound the most medical, whereas condition, disturbance and problem need not relate to health. Mental implies a direct contrast with physical, whereas psychiatric implicates a medical specialty.
Mental health problem, a recently emerging term, is arguably the least pathologising. It implies that something is to be solved rather than treated, makes no direct reference to medicine, and carries the positive connotations of health rather than the negative connotation of illness or disease.
Is ‘mental health problem’ actually less pathologising? Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock Arguably, this development points to what cognitive scientist Steven Pinker calls the “euphemism treadmill”, the tendency for language to evolve new terms to escape (at least temporarily) the offensive connotations of those they replace.
English linguist Hazel Price argues that mental health has increasingly come to replace mental illness to avoid the stigma associated with that term.
How has usage changed over time?
In the PLOS Mental Health paper, we examine historical changes in the popularity of 24 generic terms: every combination of the nouns and adjectives listed above.
We explore the frequency with which each term appears from 1940 to 2019 in two massive text data sets representing books in English and diverse American English sources, respectively. The findings are very similar in both data sets.
The figure presents the relative popularity of the top ten terms in the larger data set (Google Books). The 14 least popular terms are combined into the remainder.
Relative popularity of alternative generic terms in the Google Books corpus. Haslam et al., 2024, PLOS Mental Health. Several trends appear. Mental has consistently been the most popular adjective component of the generic terms. Mental health has become more popular in recent years but is still rarely used.
Among nouns, disease has become less widely used while illness has become dominant. Although disorder is the official term in psychiatric classifications, it has not been broadly adopted in public discourse.
Since 1940, mental illness has clearly become the preferred generic term. Although an assortment of alternatives have emerged, it has steadily risen in popularity.
Does it matter?
Our study documents striking shifts in the popularity of generic terms, but do these changes matter? The answer may be: not much.
One study found people think mental disorder, mental illness and mental health problem refer to essentially identical phenomena.
Other studies indicate that labelling a person as having a mental disease, mental disorder, mental health problem, mental illness or psychological disorder makes no difference to people’s attitudes toward them.
We don’t yet know if there are other implications of using different generic terms, but the evidence to date suggests they are minimal.
The labels we use may not have a big impact on levels of stigma. Pixabay/Pexels Is ‘distress’ any better?
Recently, some writers have promoted distress as an alternative to traditional generic terms. It lacks medical connotations and emphasises the person’s subjective experience rather than whether they fit an official diagnosis.
Distress appears 65 times in the 2022 Victorian Mental Health and Wellbeing Act, usually in the expression “mental illness or psychological distress”. By implication, distress is a broad concept akin to but not synonymous with mental ill health.
But is distress destigmatising, as it was intended to be? Apparently not. According to one study, it was more stigmatising than its alternatives. The term may turn us away from other people’s suffering by amplifying it.
So what should we call it?
Mental illness is easily the most popular generic term and its popularity has been rising. Research indicates different terms have little or no effect on stigma and some terms intended to destigmatise may backfire.
We suggest that mental illness should be embraced and the proliferation of alternative terms such as mental health problem, which breed confusion, should end.
Critics might argue mental illness imposes a medical frame. Philosopher Zsuzsanna Chappell disagrees. Illness, she argues, refers to subjective first-person experience, not to an objective, third-person pathology, like disease.
Properly understood, the concept of illness centres the individual and their connections. “When I identify my suffering as illness-like,” Chappell writes, “I wish to lay claim to a caring interpersonal relationship.”
As generic terms go, mental illness is a healthy option.
Nick Haslam, Professor of Psychology, The University of Melbourne and Naomi Baes, Researcher – Social Psychology/ Natural Language Processing, The University of Melbourne
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Cardiac Failure Explained – by Dr. Warrick Bishop
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The cover of this book makes it look like it’ll be a flashy semi-celebrity doctor keen to sell his personalized protocol, along with eleventy-three other books, but actually, what’s inside this one is very different:
We (hopefully) all know the basics of heart health, but this book takes it a lot further. Starting with the basics, then the things that it’s easy to feel like you should know but actually most people don’t, then into much more depth.
The format is much more like a university textbook than most pop-science books, and everything about the way it’s written is geared for maximum learning. The one thing it does keep in common with pop-science books as a genre is heavy use of anecdotes to illustrate points—but he’s just as likely to use tables, diagrams, callout boxes, emboldening of key points, recap sections, and so forth. And for the most part, this book is very information-dense.
Dr. Bishop also doesn’t just stick to what’s average, and talks a lot about aberrations from the norm, what they mean and what they do and yes, what to do about them.
On the one hand, it’s more information dense than the average reader can reasonably expect to need… On the other hand, isn’t it great to finish reading a book feeling like you just did a semester at medical school? No longer will you be baffled by what is going on in your (or perhaps a loved one’s) cardiac health.
Bottom line: if you’d like to know cardiac health inside out, this book is an excellent place to start.
Click here to check out Cardiac Failure Explained, and get to the heart of things!
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Related Posts
Farmed Fish vs Wild, The Blood Pressure Sweet Spot, And More
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It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? You can always hit “reply” to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom!
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
❝Maybe I missed it but the study on blood pressure did it say what the 2 numbers should read ideally?❞
We linked it at the top of the article rather than including it inline, as we were short on space (and there was a chart rather than a “these two numbers” quick answer), but we have a little more space today, so:
Category Systolic (mm Hg) Diastolic (mm Hg) Normal < 120 AND < 80 Elevated 120 – 129 AND < 80 Stage 1 – High Blood Pressure 130 – 139 OR 80 – 89 Stage 2 – High Blood Pressure 140 or higher OR 90 or higher Hypertensive Crisis Above 180 AND/OR Above 120 To oversimplify for a “these two numbers” answer, under 120/80 is generally considered good, unless it is under 90/60, in which case that becomes hypotension.
Hypotension, the blood pressure being too low, means your organs may not get enough oxygen and if they don’t, they will start shutting down.
To give you an idea how serious this, this is the closed-circuit equivalent of the hypovolemic shock that occurs when someone is bleeding out onto the floor. Technically, bleeding to death also results in low blood pressure, of course, hence the similarity.
So: just a little under 120/80 is great.
❝What could be easily digestible plant sources of protein for a vegetarian. My son is a gym holic and always looking for ways to get his protein from lentils other than eggs. He says to reach his protein requirement for the day, the amount of lentils he has to eat is sometimes heavy on the gut. Would really appreciate if you throw some light on this❞
Unless one has IBS or similar (or is otherwise unaccustomed to consuming healthy amounts of fiber), lentils shouldn’t be at all problematic for the digestion.
However, the digestive process can still be eased by (speaking specifically for lentils here) blending them (in the water they were cooked in). This thick tasty liquid can then be used as the base of a soup, for example.
Soy is an excellent source of complete protein too. Your son probably knows this because it’s in a lot of body-building supplements as soy protein isolate, but can also be enjoyed as textured soy protein (as in many plant-based meats), or even just soy beans (edamame). Tofu (also made from soy) is very versatile, and again can be blended to form the basis of a creamy sauce.
Mycoproteins (as found in “Quorn” brand products and other meat substitutes) also perform comparably to meat from animals:
Meatless Muscle Growth: Building Muscle Size and Strength on a Mycoprotein-Rich Vegan Diet
See also, for interest:
❝Is it good to eat farm raised fish?❞
We’ll answer this as a purely health-related question (and thus not considering economy, ecology, ethics, or taste).
It’s certainly not as good as wild-caught fish, for several reasons, some more serious than others:
Farmed fish can have quite a different nutritional profile to wild-caught fish, and also contain more contaminants, including heavy metals.
For example, farmed fish tend to have much higher fat content for the same amount of protein, but lower levels of minerals and other nutrients. Here are two side-by-side:
Wild-caught salmon | Farmed salmon
See also:
Quantitative analysis of the benefits and risks of consuming farmed and wild salmon
Additionally, because fish in fish farms tend to be very susceptible to diseases (because of the artificially cramped and overcrowded environment), fish farms tend to make heavy use of antibiotics, which can cause all sorts of problems down the line:
So definitely, “let the buyer beware”!
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Vital Aspects of Holistic Wellness
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It’s Q&A Day!
Have a question or a request? You can always hit “reply” to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom!
This newsletter has been growing a lot lately, and so have the questions/requests, and we love that! 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
Q: I am interested in the following: Aging, Exercise, Diet, Relationships, Purpose, Lowering Stress
You’re going to love our Psychology Sunday editions of 10almonds! You might like some of these…
- Relationships: Seriously Useful Communication Skills!
- Purpose: Are You Flourishing? (There’s a Scale)
- Managing stress: Lower Your Cortisol! (Here’s Why & How)
- Also about managing stress: Sunday Stress-Buster
- Also applicable to stress: How To Set Your Anxiety Aside
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Sometimes, Perfect Isn’t Practical!
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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
❝10 AM breakfast is not realistic for most. What’s wrong with 8 AM and Evening me at 6. Don’t quite understand the differentiation.❞
(for reference, this is about our “Breakfasting For Health?” main feature)
It’s not terrible to do it the way you suggest It’s just not optimal, either, that’s all!
Breakfasting at 08:00 and then dining at 18:00 is ten hours apart, so no fasting benefits between those. Let’s say you take half an hour to eat dinner, then eat nothing again until breakfast, that’s 18:30 to 08:00, so that’s 13½ hours fasting. You’ll recall that fasting benefits start at 12 hours into the fast, so that means you’d only get 1½ hours of fasting benefits.
As for breakfasting at 08:00 regardless of intermittent fasting considerations, the reason for the conclusion of around 10:00 being optimal, is based on when our body is geared up to eat breakfast and get the most out of that, which the body can’t do immediately upon waking. So if you wake and get sunlight at 08:30, get a little moderate exercise, then by 10:00 your digestive system will be perfectly primed to get the most out of breakfast.
However! This is entirely based on you waking and getting sunlight at 08:30.
So, iff you wake and get sunlight at 06:30, then in that case, breakfasting at 08:00 would give the same benefits as described above. What’s important is the 1½ hour priming-time.
Writer’s note: our hope here is always to be informational, not prescriptive. Take what works for you; ignore what doesn’t fit your lifestyle.
I personally practice intermittent fasting for about 21hrs/day. I breakfast (often on nuts and perhaps a little salad) around 16:00, and dine at around 18:00ish, giving myself a little wiggleroom. I’m not religious about it and will slide it if necessary.
As you can see: that makes what is nominally my breakfast practically a pre-dinner snack, and I clearly ignore the “best to eat in the morning” rule because that’s not consistent with my desire to have a family dinner together in the evening while still practicing the level of fasting that I prefer.
Science is science, and that’s what we report here. How we apply it, however, is up to us all as individuals!
Enjoy!
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