Unfuck Your Brain – by Dr. Faith Harper
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This book takes a trauma-informed care approach, which is relatively novel in the mental health field and it’s quickly becoming the industry standard because of its effectiveness.
The basic premise of trauma-informed care is that you had a bad experience (possibly even more than one—what a thought!) and that things that remind you of that will tend to prompt reactivity from you in a way that probably isn’t healthy. By identifying each part of that process, we can then interrupt it, much like we might with CBT (the main difference being that CBT, for all its effectiveness, tends to assume that the things that are bothering you are not true, while TIC acknowledges that they might well be, and that especially historically, they probably were).
A word of warning: if something that triggers a trauma-based reactivity response in you is people swearing, then this book will either cure you by exposure therapy or leave you a nervous wreck, because it’s not just the title; Dr. Harper barely gets through a sentence without swearing. It’s a lot, even by this (European) reviewer’s standards (we’re a lot more relaxed about swearing over here, than people tend to be in America).
On the other hand, something that Dr. Harper excels at is actually explaining stuff very well. So while it sometimes seems like she’s “trying too hard” style-wise in terms of being “not like other therapists”, in her defence she’s nevertheless a very good writer; she knows her stuff, and knows how to communicate it clearly.
Bottom line: if you don’t mind a writer who swears more than 99% of soldiers, then this book is an excellent how-to guide for self-administered trauma-informed care.
Click here to check out Unfuck Your Brain, and indeed unfuck it!
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Teriyaki Chickpea Burgers
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Burgers are often not considered the healthiest food, but they can be! Ok, so the teriyaki sauce component itself isn’t the healthiest, but the rest of this recipe is, and with all the fiber this contains, it’s a net positive healthwise, even before considering the protein, vitamins, minerals, and assorted phytonutrients.
You will need
- 2 cans chickpeas, drained and rinsed (or 2 cups of chickpeas, cooked drained and rinsed)
- ¼ cup chickpea flour (also called gram flour or garbanzo bean flour)
- ¼ cup teriyaki sauce
- 2 tbsp almond butter (if allergic, substitute with a seed butter if available, or else just omit; do not substitute with actual butter—it will not work)
- ½ bulb garlic, minced
- 1 large chili, minced (your choice what kind, color, or even whether or multiply it)
- 1 large shallot, minced
- 1″ piece of ginger, grated
- 2 tsp teriyaki sauce (we’re listing this separately from the ¼ cup above as that’ll be used differently)
- 1 tsp yeast extract (even if you don’t like it; trust us, it’ll work—this writer doesn’t like it either but uses it regularly in recipes like these)
- 1 tbsp black pepper
- 1 tsp fennel powder
- ½ tsp sweet cinnamon
- ½ tsp MSG or 1 tsp low-sodium salt
- Extra virgin olive oil for frying
For serving:
- Burger buns (you can use our Delicious Quinoa Avocado Bread recipe)
- Whatever else you want in there; we recommend mung bean sprouts, red onion, and a nice coleslaw
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Preheat the oven to 400℉ / 200℃.
2) Roast the chickpeas spaced out on a baking tray (lined with baking paper) for about 15 minutes. Leave the oven on afterwards; we still need it.
3) While that’s happening, heat a little oil in a skillet to a medium heat and fry the shallot, chili, garlic, and ginger, for about 2–3 minutes. You want to release the flavors, but not destroy them.
4) Let them cool, and when the chickpeas are done, let them cool for a few minutes too, before putting them all into a food processor along with the rest of the ingredients from the main section, except the oil and the ¼ cup teriyaki sauce. Process them into a dough.
5) Form the dough into patties; you should have enough dough for 4–6 patties depending on how big you want them.
6) Brush them with the teriyaki sauce; turn them onto a baking tray (lined with baking paper) and brush the other side too. Be generous.
7) Bake them for about 15 minutes, turn them (taking the opportunity to add more teriyaki sauce if it seems to merit it) and bake for another 5–10 minutes.
8) Assemble; we recommend the order: bun, a little coleslaw, burger, red onion, more coleslaw, mung bean sprouts, bun, but follow your heart!
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- Three Daily Servings of Beans/Legumes?
- Hoisin Sauce vs Teriyaki Sauce – Which is Healthier?
- Sprout Your Seeds, Grains, Beans, Etc
- Our Top 5 Spices: How Much Is Enough For Benefits? ← we scored 4/5 today!
- Monosodium Glutamate: Sinless Flavor-Enhancer Or Terrible Health Risk?
Take care!
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The Cough Doctor
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The Cough Doctor
This is Dr. Peter Small, who worked in epidemiology since the beginning of HIV epidemic. He became a pioneer in the field of molecular epidemiology. As such, his work was a guiding beacon for the public health response to the resurgence of tuberculosis. He’s travelled the world spending years in various institutions studying all manner of respiratory illnesses…. These have ranged from tuberculosis to pneumonia to lung cancer and (back to epidemiology) Covid-19.
He’s now the Chief Medical Officer at…
Hyfe
Hyfe, a medical AI company, was founded in 2020. Its objective: to build acoustic tools for respiratory diagnostics and monitoring.
In other words: it records coughs and collects data about coughing.
❝It’s ironic how much people focus on counting steps while ignoring cough, which is far more consequential. Hyfe is a science-driven company with the technology to make cough count. Particularly now, with increased awareness of cough and the rapid growth of digital health driven by Covid-19, this technology can improve the lives of patients, the care provided by doctors, and the efficiency of health systems.❞
~ Dr. Peter Small, CMO, Hyfe
How does it do it?
Hyfe’s AI monitors the number of times a person coughs and the sound of the cough through any smartphone or other smart device.
This data collected over time provides increasingly more reliable information than a single visit to the doctor! By constantly listening and analyzing, it can detect patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed.
How big is this “big data” effort?
Hyfe maintains the largest cough dataset in the world. This means it can compare the sound of a patient’s cough with more than 400 million cough-like sounds from 83 countries across all continents.
The human brain doesn’t handle big numbers well. So, just to illustrate: if the average cough is 1 second long, that means it’d take more than 12 years to listen to them all.
Hyfe, meanwhile, can:
- listen to many things simultaneously
- index them all against user and location,
- use its ever-growing neural net to detect and illustrate patterns.
It’s so attentive, that it can learn to distinguish between different people’s coughs in the same household.
❝Companies like Google Health see even basic information such as getting an accurate count of the number of times a person coughs a day as a useful resource, and part of a larger need to collect and chronicle more health information to refine the way doctors diagnose disease and manage treatments in the future.❞
What are the public health implications?
The most obvious application is to note when there’s a spike in coughing, and see how such spikes grow and spread (if they do), to inform of contagion risks.
Another is to cross-reference it with data about local environmental allergens. Knowing how things like pollution and even pollen affect individuals differently could be helpful in identifying (and managing) chronic conditions like asthma.
What are the private health implications?
❝It’s going to transform the whole clinical approach for this common and chronic symptom. Patients will come in, have the data on how much they are coughing, and the physician can suggest a treatment based on that information to see if it makes the coughs better❞
~ Dr. Peter Small
Dr. Small’s colleague Dr. Cai, speaking for Google Health on this project, sees even more utility for diagnostics:
❝When I was in medical school, never ever did they teach us that we could listen to somebody cough and identify whether that person has TB (tuberculosis), COPD, or a tumor. But I keep seeing more and more studies of people coughing into a microphone, and an algorithm can detect whether somebody has TB with 95% specificity and sensitivity, or if someone has pneumonia or an exacerbation of COPD❞
~ Dr. Lawrence Cai
And the privacy implications?
Perhaps you don’t quite fancy the idea of not being able to cough without Google knowing about it. Hyfe’s software is currently opt-in, but…
If you cough near someone else’s Hyfe app, their app will recognize you’re not the app’s user, and start building a profile for you. Of course, that won’t be linked to your name, email address, or other IDs, as it would if you were the app’s user.
Hyfe will ask to connect to your social media, to collect more information about you and your friends.
Whether you’d like to try this or perhaps you’re just curious to learn more about this fascinating project, you can check out:
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Yoga Safety: Simple Guidelines
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.
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
❝I was wondering whether there were very simple, clear bullet points or instructions on things to be wary of in Yoga.❞
That’s quite a large topic, and not one that lends itself well to being conveyed in bullet points, but first we’ll share the article you sent us when sending this question:
Tips for Avoiding Yoga Injuries
…and next we’ll recommend the YouTube channel @livinleggings, whose videos we feature here from time to time. She (Liv) has a lot of good videos on problems/mistakes/injuries to avoid.
Here’s a great one to get you started:
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Cherries vs Elderberries – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing cherries to elderberries, we picked the elderberries.
Why?
Both are great! But putting them head-to-head…
In terms of macros, cherries have slightly more protein (but we are talking miniscule numbers here, 0.34mg/100g), while elderberries have moderately more carbs and more than 4x the fiber. This carbs:fiber ratio difference means that elderberries have the lower glycemic index by far, as well as simply more grams/100g fiber, making this an easy win for elderberries.
In the category of vitamins, cherries have more of vitamins A, B9, E, K, and choline, while elderberries have more of vitamins B1, B2, B3, B6, and C. The margins of difference mean that elderberries have the very slightly better overall vitamin coverage, but it’s so slight that we’ll call this a 5:5 tie.
When it comes to minerals, cherries have more copper, magnesium, and manganese, while elderberries have more calcium, iron, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc. A nice easy win to top it off for elderberries.
On the polyphenols (and other phytochemicals) front, both are great in different ways, nothing that’d we’d consider truly sets one ahead of the other.
All in all, adding up the sections, an overall win for elderberries, but by all means enjoy either or both!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
- Cherries’ Very Healthy Wealth Of Benefits!
- Herbs for Evidence-Based Health & Healing ← one of them is elderberry, which hastens recovery from upper respiratory viral infections 😎
Take care!
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You’ve Got Questions? We’ve Got Answers!
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From Cucumbers To Kindles
Q: Where do I get cucumber extract?
A: You can buy it from BulkSupplements.com (who, despite their name, start at 100g packs)
Alternatively: you want it as a topical ointment (for skin health) rather than as a dietary supplement (for bone and joint health), you can extract it yourself! No, it’s not “just juice cucumbers”, but it’s also not too tricky.
Click Here For A Quick How-To Guide!
Q: Tips for reading more and managing time for it?
A: We talked about this a little bit in yesterday’s edition, so you may have seen that, but aside from that:
- If you don’t already have one, consider getting a Kindle or similar e-reader. They’re very convenient, and also very light and ergonomic—no more wrist strain as can occur with physical books. No more eye-strain, either!
- Consider making reading a specific part of your daily routine. A chapter before bed can be a nice wind-down, for instance! What’s important is it’s a part of your day that’ll always, or at least almost always, allow you to do a little reading.
- If you drive, walk, run, or similar each day, a lot of people find that’s a great time to listen to an audiobook. Please be safe, though!
- If your lifestyle permits such, a “reading retreat” can be a wonderful vacation! Even if you only “retreat” to your bedroom, the point is that it’s a weekend (or more!) that you block off from all other commitments, and curl up with the book(s) of your choice.
Q: Any study tips as we approach exam season? A lot of the productivity stuff is based on working life, but I can’t be the only student!
A: We’ve got you covered:
- Be passionate about your subject! We know of no greater study tip than that.
- Find a willing person and lecture them on your subject. When one teaches, two learn!
- Your mileage may vary depending on your subject, but, find a way of studying that’s fun to you!
- If you can get past papers, get as many as you can, and use those as your “last minute” studying in the week before your exam(s). This will prime you for answering exam-style questions (and leverage state-dependent memory). As a bonus, it’ll also help ease any anxiety, because by the time of your exam it’ll be “same old, same old”!
Q: Energy drinks for biohacking, yea or nay?
A: This is definitely one of those “the dose makes the poison” things!
- Caffeine, in and of itself, can be healthy in moderation for most people.
- Taurine has assorted benefits at safe dosages:
- Other ingredients often have health benefits too.
But… The generally agreed safe dose of taurine is around 3g/day for most people; a standard Red Bull contains 1g.
That math would be simple, but… if you eat meat (including poultry or fish), that can also contain 10–950mg per 100g. For example, tuna is at the high end of that scale, with a standard 12oz (340g) tin already containing up to 3.23g of taurine!
And sweetened carbonated beverages in general have so many health issues that it’d take us a full article to cover them.
Short version? Enjoy in moderation if you must, but there are definitely better ways of getting the benefits they may offer.
Q: Best morning routine?
A: The best morning routine is whatever makes you feel most ready to take on your day!
This one’s going to vary a lot—one person’s morning run could be another person’s morning coffee and newspaper, for example.
In a nutshell, though, ask yourself these questions:
- How long does it take me to fully wake up in the morning, and what helps or hinders that?
- When I get out of bed, what do I really need before I can take on my day?
- If I could have the perfect morning, what would it look like?
- What can evening me do, to look after morning me’s best interests? (Semi-prepare breakfast ready? Lay out clothes ready? Running shoes? To-Do list?)
Q: I’m curious how much of these things you actually use yourselves, and are there any disagreements in the team? In a lot of places things can get pretty heated when it’s paleo vs vegan / health benefits of tea/coffee vs caffeine-abstainers / you need this much sleep vs rise and grinders, etc?
A: We are indeed genuinely enthusiastic about health and productivity, and that definitely includes our own! We may or may not all do everything, but between us, we probably have it all covered. As for disagreements, we’ve not done a survey, but if you take an evidence-based approach, any conflict will tend to be minimized. Plus, sometimes you can have the best of both!
- You could have a vegan paleo diet (you’d better love coconut if you do, though!
- There is decaffeinated coffee and tea (your taste may vary)
- You can get plenty of sleep and rise early (so long as an “early to bed, early to rise” schedule suits you!)
Interesting note: humans are social creatures on an evolutionary level. Evolution has resulted in half of us being “night owls” and the other half “morning larks”, the better to keep each other safe while sleeping. Alas, modern life doesn’t always allow us to have the sleep schedule that’d suit each of us best individually!
Have a question you’d like answered? Reply to this email, or use the feedback widget at the bottom! We always love to hear from you
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
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Wanna read more?
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.
You’ve Got Questions? We’ve Got Answers!
Q: Tips for reading more and managing time for it?
A: We talked about this a little bit in yesterday’s edition, so you may have seen that, but aside from that:
- If you don’t already have one, consider getting a Kindle or similar e-reader. They’re very convenient, and also very light and ergonomic—no more wrist strain as can occur with physical books. No more eye-strain, either!
- Consider making reading a specific part of your daily routine. A chapter before bed can be a nice wind-down, for instance! What’s important is it’s a part of your day that’ll always, or at least almost always, allow you to do a little reading.
- If you drive, walk, run, or similar each day, a lot of people find that’s a great time to listen to an audiobook. Please be safe, though!
- If your lifestyle permits such, a “reading retreat” can be a wonderful vacation! Even if you only “retreat” to your bedroom, the point is that it’s a weekend (or more!) that you block off from all other commitments, and curl up with the book(s) of your choice.
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
