Unleashing My Superpowers – by Dr. Patience Mpofu

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The 10almonds Team

Dr. Patience Mpofu is on a mission to provide women and girls with the inside-information, knowledge, resources, and strategies to break through the glass ceiling. She writes from her experience in STEM, but her lessons are applicable in any field.

Her advices range from the internal (how to deal with imposter syndrome) to the external (how to overcome cultural biases); she also explains and illustrates the importance of both role models and mentors.

While a lot of the book is half instruction manual, half memoir of her incredible life and career (to illustrate her points), and is well-worth reading—and/or perhaps worth gifting to a girl you know with ambitions in STEM?

Grab a copy of Unleashing My Superpowers now!

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  • How To Keep Your Mind From Wandering

    The 10almonds Team

    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.

    Whether your mind keeps wandering more as you get older, or you’re a young student whose super-active brain is more suited to TikTok than your assigned reading, sustained singular focus can be a challenge for everyone—and yet (alas!) it remains a required skill for so much in life.

    Today’s edition of 10Almonds presents a nifty trick to get yourself through those tasks! We’ll also be taking some time to reply to your questions and comments, in our weekly interactive Q&A.

    First of all though, we’ve a promise to make good on, so…

    How To Stay On The Ball (Or The Tomato?) The Easy Way

    For most of us, we face three main problems when it comes to tackling our to-dos:

    1. Where to start?
    2. The task seems intimidating in its size
    3. We get distracted and/or run out of energy

    If you’re really not sure where to start, we recommended a powerful tool in last Friday’s newsletter!

    For the rest, we love the Pomodoro Technique:

    1. Set a timer for 25 minutes, and begin your task.
    2. Keep going until the timer is done! No other tasks, just focus.
    3. Take a 5-minute break.
    4. Repeat

    This approach has three clear benefits:

    1. No matter the size of the task, you are only committing to 25 minutes—everything is much less overwhelming when there’s an end in sight!
    2. Being only 25 minutes means we are much more likely to stay on track; it’s easier to defer other activities if we know that there will be a 5-minute break for that soon.
    3. Even without other tasks to distract us, it can be difficult to sustain attention for long periods; making it only 25 minutes at a time allows us to approach it with a (relatively!) fresh mind.

    Have you heard that a human brain can sustain attention for only about 40 minutes before focus starts to decline rapidly?

    While that’s been a popular rationale for school classroom lesson durations (and perhaps coincidentally ties in with Zoom’s 40-minute limit for free meetings), the truth is that focus starts dropping immediately, to the point that one-minute attention tests are considered sufficient to measure the ability to focus.

    So a 25-minute Pomodoro is a more than fair compromise!

    Why’s it called the “Pomodoro” technique?

    And why is the 25-minute timed work period called a Pomodoro?

    It’s because back in the 80s, university student Francesco Cirillo was struggling to focus and made a deal with himself to focus just for a short burst at a time—and he used a (now “retro” style) kitchen timer in the shape of a tomato, or “pomodoro”, in Italian.

    If you don’t have a penchant for kitsch kitchenware, you can use this free, simple Online Pomodoro Timer!

    (no registration/login/download necessary; it’s all right there on the web page)

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  • Age & Aging: What Can (And Can’t) We Do About It?

    The 10almonds Team

    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.

    How old do you want to be?

    We asked you how old you are, and got an interesting spread of answers. This wasn’t too surprising; of course we have a general idea of who our readership is and we write accordingly.

    What’s interesting is the gap for “40s”.

    And, this wasn’t the case of a broken poll button, it’s something that crops up a lot in health-related sociological research. People who are most interested in taking extra care of their body are often:

    • Younger people full of optimism about maintaining this perfectly healthy body forever
    • Older people realizing “if I don’t want to suffer avoidable parts of age-related decline, now is the time to address these things”

    In between, we often have a gap whereby people no longer have the optimism of youth, but do not yet feel the pressure of older age.

    Which is not to say there aren’t 40-somethings who do care! Indeed, we know for a fact we have some subscribers in their 40s (and some in their 90s, too), just, they evidently didn’t vote in this poll.

    Anyway, let’s bust some myths…

    Aging is inevitable: True or False?

    False, probably. That seems like a bold (and fortune-telling) claim, so let’s flip it to deconstruct it more logically:

    Aging is, and always will be, unstoppable: True or False?

    That has to be “False, probably”. To say “true” now sounds like an even bolder claim. Just like “the moon will always be out of reach”.

    • When CPR was first developed, first-aiders were arrested for “interfering with a corpse”.
    • Many diseases used to be death sentences that are now “take one of these in the morning”
      • If you think this is an appeal to distant history, HIV+ status was a death sentence in the 90s. Now it’s “take one of these in the morning”.

    But, this is an appeal to the past, and that’s not always a guarantee of the future. Where does the science stand currently? How is the research and development doing on slowing, halting, reversing aging?

    We can slow aging: True or False?

    True! There’s a difference between chronological age (i.e., how much time has passed while we’ve been alive) and biological age (i.e., what our diverse markers of aging look like).

    Biological age often gets talked about as a simplified number, but it’s more complex than that, as we can age in different ways at different rates, for example:

    • Visual markers of aging (e.g. wrinkles, graying hair)
    • Performative markers of aging (e.g. mobility tests)
    • Internal functional markers of aging (e.g. tests for cognitive decline, eyesight, hearing, etc)
    • Cellular markers or aging (e.g. telomere length)
    • …and more, but we only have so much room here

    There are things we can do to slow most of those, including:

    In the case of cognitive decline particularly, check out our previous article:

    How To Reduce Your Alzheimer’s Risk

    It’s too early to worry about… / It’s too late to do anything about… True or False?

    False and False!

    Many things that affect our health later in life are based on early-life choices and events. So it’s important for young people to take advantage of that. The earlier one adopts a healthy lifestyle, the better, because, and hold onto your hats for the shocker here: aging is cumulative.

    However, that doesn’t mean that taking up healthy practices (or dropping unhealthy ones) is pointless later in life, even in one’s 70s and beyond!

    Read about this and more from the National Institute of Aging:

    What Do We Know About Healthy Aging?

    We can halt aging: True or False?

    False, for now at least. Our bodies are not statues; they are living organisms, constantly rebuilding themselves, constantly changing, every second of every day, for better or for worse. Every healthy or unhealthy choice you make, every beneficial or adverse experience you encounter, affects your body on a cellular level.

    Your body never, ever, stops changing for as long as you live.

    But…

    We can reverse aging: True or False?

    True! Contingently and with limitations, for now at least.

    Remember what we said about your body constantly rebuilding itself? That goes for making itself better as well as making itself worse.

    But those aren’t really being younger, we’ll still die when our time is up: True or False?

    False and True, respectively.

    Those kinds of things are really being younger, biologically. What else do you think being biologically younger is?

    We may indeed die when our time is up, but (unless we suffer fatal accident or incident first) “when our time is up” is something that is decided mostly by the above factors.

    Genetics—the closest thing we have to biological “fate”—accounts for only about 25% of our longevity-related health*.

    Genes predispose, but they don’t predetermine.

    *Read more: Human longevity: Genetics or Lifestyle? It takes two to tango

    (from the Journal of Immunity and Ageing)

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  • Two Things You Can Do To Improve Stroke Survival Chances

    The 10almonds Team

    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.

    Dr. Andrew’s Stroke Survival Guide

    This is Dr. Nadine Andrew. She’s a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Medicine at Monash University. She’s the Research Data Lead for the National Center of Healthy Aging. She is lead investigator on the NHMRC-funded PRECISE project… The most comprehensive stroke data linkage study to date! In short, she knows her stuff.

    We’ve talked before about how sample size is important when it comes to scientific studies. It’s frustrating; sometimes we see what looks like a great study until we notice it has a sample size of 17 or something.

    Dr. Andrew didn’t mess around in this regard, and the 12,386 participants in her Australian study of stroke patients provided a huge amount of data!

    With a 95% confidence interval because of the huge dataset, she found that there was one factor that reduced mortality by 26%.

    And the difference was…

    Whether or not patients had a chronic disease management plan set up with their GP (General Practitioner, or “family doctor”, in US terms), after their initial stroke treatment.

    45% of patients had this; the other 55% did not, so again the sample size was big for both groups.

    Why this is important:

    After a stroke, often a patient is discharged as early as it seems safe to do so, and there’s a common view that “it just takes time” and “now we wait”. After all, no medical technology we currently have can outright repair that damage—the body must repair itself! Medications—while critical*—can only support that and help avoid recurrence.

    *How critical? VERY critical. Critical critical. Dr. Andrew found, some years previously, that greater levels of medication adherence (ie, taking the correct dose on time and not missing any) significantly improved survival outcomes. No surprise, right? But what may surprise is that this held true even for patients with near-perfect adherence. In other words: miss a dose at your peril. It’s that important.

    But, as Dr. Andrew’s critical research shows, that’s no reason to simply prescribe ongoing meds and otherwise cut a patient loose… or, if you or a loved one are the patient, to allow yourself/them to be left without a doctor’s ongoing active support in the form of a chronic disease management plan.

    What does a chronic disease management plan look like?

    First, what it’s not:

    • “Yes yes, I’m here if you need me, just make an appointment if something changes”
    • “Let’s pencil in a check-up in three months”
    • Etc

    What it actually looks like:

    It looks like a plan. A personal care plan, built around that person’s individual needs, risks, liabilities… and potential complications.

    Because who amongst us, especially at the age where strokes are more likely, has an uncomplicated medical record? There will always be comorbidities and confounding factors, so a one-size-fits-all plan will not do.

    Dr. Andrew’s work took place in Australia, so she had the Australian healthcare system in mind… We know many of our subscribers are from North America and other places. But read this, and you’ll see how this could go just as much for the US or Canada:

    ❝The evidence shows the importance of Medicare financially supporting primary care physicians to provide structured chronic disease management after a stroke.

    We also provide a strong case for the ongoing provision of these plans within a universal healthcare system. Strategies to improve uptake at the GP level could include greater financial incentives and mandates, education for patients and healthcare professionals.❞

    See her groundbreaking study for yourself here!

    The Bottom Line:

    If you or a loved one has a stroke, be prepared to make sure you get a chronic health management plan in place. Note that if it’s you who has the stroke, you might forget this or be unable to advocate for yourself. So, we recommend to discuss this with a partner or close friend sooner rather than later!

    “But I’m quite young and healthy and a stroke is very unlikely for me”

    Good for you! And the median age of Dr. Andrew’s gargantuan study was 70 years. But:

    • do you have older relatives? Be aware for them, too.
    • strokes can happen earlier in life too! You don’t want to be an interesting statistic.

    Some stroke-related quick facts:

    Stroke is the No. 5 cause of death and a leading cause of disability in the U.S.

    Stroke can happen to anyone—any age, any time—and everyone needs to know the warning signs.

    On average, 1.9 million brain cells die every minute that a stroke goes untreated.

    Stroke is an EMERGENCY. Call 911 immediately.

    Early treatment leads to higher survival rates and lower disability rates. Calling 911 lets first responders start treatment on someone experiencing stroke symptoms before arriving at the hospital.

    Source: https://www.stroke.org/en/about-stroke

    What are the warning signs for stroke?

    Use the letters F.A.S.T. to spot a stroke and act quickly:

    • F = Face Drooping—does one side of the face droop or is it numb? Ask the person to smile. Is the person’s smile uneven?
    • A = Arm Weakness—is one arm weak or numb? Ask the person to raise both arms. Does one arm drift downward?
    • S = Speech Difficulty—is speech slurred?
    • T = Time to call 911

    Source: https://www.stroke.org/en/about-stroke/stroke-symptoms

    Last but not least, while we’re sharing resources:

    Download the PDF Checklist: 8 Ways To Help Prevent a Second Stroke

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Related Posts

  • The Oxygen Advantage – by Patrick McKeown

    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.

    The 10almonds Team

    You probably know to breathe through your nose, and use your diaphragm. What else does this book have to offer?

    A lot of the book is aimed at fixing specific problems, and optimizing what can be optimized—including with tips and tricks you may not have encountered before. Yet, the offerings are not bizarre either; we don’t need to learn to breathe through our ears while drinking a glass of water upside down or anything.

    Rather, such simple things as improving one’s VO₂Max by occasionally holding one’s breath while walking briskly. But, he advises specifically, this should be done by pausing the breath halfway through the exhalation (a discussion of the ensuing physiological response is forthcoming).

    Little things like that are woven throughout the book, whose style is mostly anecdotal rather than hard science, yet is consistent with broad scientific consensus in any case.

    Bottom line: if you’ve any reason to think your breathing might be anything less than the best it could possibly be, this book is likely to help you to tweak it to be a little better.

    Click here to check out The Oxygen Advantage, and get yours!

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  • The Intelligence Trap – by David Robson

    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.

    The 10almonds Team

    We’re including this one under the umbrella of “general wellness”, because it happens that a lot of very intelligent people make stunningly unfortunate choices sometimes, for reasons that may baffle others.

    The author outlines for us the various reasons that this happens, and how. From the famous trope of “specialized intelligence in one area”, to the tendency of people who are better at acquiring knowledge and understanding to also be better at acquiring biases along the way, to the hubris of “I am intelligent and therefore right as a matter of principle” thinking, and many other reasons.

    Perhaps the greatest value of the book is the focus on how we can avoid these traps, narrow our bias blind spots, and play to our strengths while paying full attention to our weaknesses.

    The style is very readable, despite having a lot of complex ideas discussed along the way. This is entirely to be expected of this author, an award-winning science writer.

    Bottom line: if you’d like to better understand the array of traps that disproportionately catch out the most intelligent people (and how to spot such), then this is a great book for you.

    Click here to check out The Intelligence Trap, and be more wary!

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  • The Diabetes Code – by Dr. Jason Fung

    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.

    The 10almonds Team

    Cure this serious disease with diet!” is often a bold-claim that overreaches scientific rigor, but in this case, it’s well-established as scientifically valid.

    Caveat up-front: the only known circumstance in which this won’t work is if you have comorbidities that prevent you from following the advice.

    You may be wondering: is this just the Mediterranean diet again? The answer is that the Mediterreanean diet (or similar) is part of it. But there’s a lot more to this book than that.

    Dr. Fung explains to us a lot of the physiology of type 2 diabetes; how insulin resistance occurs, how it becomes a vicious cycle that we get locked into, and how to escape it.

    • We learn about the role of fructose, and why fruit is very healthful whereas high-fructose corn syrup and similars are very much not.
    • We learn about the role of the liver in glycogen metabolism, and how to un-fatty a fatty liver. Good news: the liver has famously strong self-regenerative abilities, if we give it a break to allow it to do so!
    • We learn why portion control doesn’t work, and why intermittent fasting does (here be science).

    Dr. Fung’s very readable explanations are free from needless jargon while not dumbing down. The writing style is clear and direct: “this happens this way”, “do this, not that”, etc.

    Bottom line: if you have type 2 diabetes and would like to not have that (or if you are pre-diabetic and would like to avoid diabetes) this is a book for you. If you are in great metabolic health and would like to stay that way as you get older, then this is a book for you too.

    Click here to check out The Diabetes Code, and get/keep your metabolic health in order!

    Don’t Forget…

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