How To Rest More Efficiently (Yes, Really)

Today’s almonds have been activated by:

🧠 BRAIN-TEASER

Keep Your Brain Young With Today’s Brain-Teaser

(we’ll reveal the answer tomorrow)

⏰ IN A RUSH?

Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

• Four tips for healthier (pain-free) hips:

  • Don’t wear the same shoes all the time; have some variety

  • Walk on soft ground rather than hard, if you can

  • If you’re sitting, roll a tennis ball beneath each foot

  • Try to spend less time sitting!

• Rest is important for our health, and is often neglected

  • You’re almost certainly busier than you think—especially on a cellular level

  • The kind of break we take can matter as much as, or more than, how much time we spend nominally resting

    • Try to switch up physical/mental activities, so you’re not switching to something that’s using the same bodily resources as you’ve just been using

      • Please note: your brain is also part of your body, and its work/rest counts too.

• Consider intermittent fasting to give your body some metabolic downtime

• The practice of meditation can also help the rest of your body relax, not just your brain

• Being unable to easily participate in spoken conversations is not just an inconvenience; it’s also a [causal, fixable] risk factor for age-related cognitive decline.

  • Today’s sponsor, Hear.com, are offering the most cutting-edge dual-processing technology in hearing aids that isolate and separate speech from background noise.

Read on to learn about these things and more…

👀 WATCH AND LEARN

How Danni lost 10kg (22lb) in 12 weeks and kept it off | Five simple tips

There’s a lot of practical guidance packed into this one:

Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

• 1:47 | The Emotional Eating Trap

• 3:47 | Why Insulin Matters

• 4:49 | Intermittent Fasting

• 6:15 | Nutrition vs Calories

• 8:11 | Show Up For Yourself

💬 SUBSCRIBER VOICES

Hip Pain? Three Four Ways To Fix It!

A subscriber writes:

Sounds like not one, but three great tips 😎

A fourth one for the same issue would be simply: try to limit how long you spend sitting!

You may also like a book we reviewed back in April, “11 Minutes to Pain-Free Hips” (you’ll need to scroll down for the book review in its usual segment at the bottom).

We’d love to hear tips (for any health-related topics) from other readers, too, so if you have something you’d like to share, please hit reply to any of our emails, or use the handy feedback widget at the bottom. We look forward to hearing from you!

😌 MAIN FEATURE

How To Rest More Efficiently (Yes, Really)

We’ve talked before about how to recover more quickly after a workout, especially if you overdid it. There are a lot of tips in that article, so by all means check it out if you didn’t catch it at the time!

That was very specific to recovering from exercise, though. Today we’re looking at something a little different, a little more holistic.

You’re busier than you think

Maybe your life is an obvious blur of busy-ness. Maybe it’s not. But either way, you’re almost certainly busier than you think. Especially on a cellular level.

Your resting metabolic rate (RMR), or how many calories you burn while at rest (i.e., calories used just to keep you alive) will depend on various factors including age, sex, weight, body composition, and other things.

That said, it’ll probably be between 1000 and 2000 calories per day. You can get a rough idea of what it might be for you, using this calculator:

How Many Calories Do You Burn a Day at Rest (Doing Nothing)?

So if ever you wonder why you feel so exhausted, despite having done nothing, it could be that your body was busy:

• Metabolizing, generally (did you have a big meal?)

• Fighting an illness (bacterial or viral infection, for example)

• Fighting an imaginary illness and creating a real one in the process (stress, inflammation, etc)

• Recovering/rebuilding from something you did yesterday or even before that

• Thinking (your brain is your largest organ by mass, and consumes the most calories by far)

Your brain does not get a free pass on being part of your body! Just like if a certain muscle group were working out constantly for 16 hours you’d be feeling pretty tired, the same goes for the organ that is your brain, if it’s been working out constantly.

Your body is a composite organism—take advantage of that

Dolphins can shut down half of their brain at once, to let each hemisphere of the brain sleep independently in shifts. We (except in the case of split brain patients, where the corpus callosum has been severed) can’t do that, but we can let different parts of the organism that is our body work in shifts.

This is the real meaning of “a change is as a good as a rest”:

If you’ve been doing cognitive work (at your desk perhaps, maybe managing a spreadsheet, say), then taking a break to do crosswords will not, actually, give you break. Because you’re still sitting manipulating letters and numbers. As far as your brain (still having to do work!) is concerned, it’s basically the same. Nor will checking out social media; you’re still sitting examining a screen.

Instead, time to get physically active. Literally just doing the washing up would be a better break! Some yoga or Pilates would be perfect.

In contrast, if you’ve been doing a vigorous bit of gardening, then for example taking a break to lift weights isn’t going to be a break, because again you just switched to a similar task.

Better to pick up that book you’ve been meaning to read, or the crosswords we mentioned earlier. Or just lounge in your nicely-gardened garden.

The important thing is: to not require the same resources from the body (including the brain, it’s still part of the body) that you have been.

For more specific tips than we have room for here today, check out:

How to Take Better Breaks at Work, According to Research

Give your metabolism a break too

Not completely—you don’t need to be put into cryostasis or anything.

But, give your metabolism a rest, in relative terms. Intermittent fasting is great for precisely this; it lets your body rest and reset.

See: Intermittent Fasting: we sort the science from the hype!

So does the practice of meditation, by the way. You don’t have to get fancy with it, either:

Check out: No Frills, Evidence-Based Mindfulness

Enjoy, and rest well!

❤️ OUR SPONSORS MAKE THIS PUBLICATION POSSIBLE

Hearing So Clear It Has No Peers

Have you heard the good news?

A team of top German engineers has just unveiled the world’s very first hearing aids with dual processing, and the results are clear... Literally!

Why is this so special? Thanks to this cutting-edge German technology, these tiny devices capture speech and noise separately, resulting in groundbreaking levels of noise reduction and speech clarity.

Hear.com is so confident you’ll love their product, all devices come with a 45-day no-risk trial. They’ve already got 385,000 happy customers and counting, and their award-winning customer service will help with anything you need.

Please do visit our sponsors—they help keep 10almonds free

🌎 AROUND THE WEB

What’s happening in the health world…

• Study finds adding almonds to diet can help people lose weight and improve cardiometabolic health

• Chronic pelvic pain affects up to 26% of women: new research brings us closer to better treating it

• High blood pressure affects 1 in 3 adults worldwide, and most are not properly treated

• Study offers new insight into increased risk of blood clots in women

• New study finds personalized rehabilitation may be needed to effectively address chronic knee pain

• Polycystic ovary syndrome and gut health: what you need to know

• A plant-based diet could lower your risk of Parkinson's disease

More to come tomorrow!

📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

Eat More, Live Well: Enjoy Your Favourite Food and Boost Your Gut Health with The Diversity Diet. The Sunday Times Bestseller – by Dr. Megan Rossi

Often, eating healthily can feel restrictive. Don't eat this, skip that, eliminate the other. Where is the joy?

Dr. Megan Rossi brings a scientific angle on positive dieting, that is to say, looking at what to add, rather than what to subtract. Now, the idea isn't to have sugar-laden chocolate cake with berries on top and call it a net positive because of the berries, though. Rather, Dr. Rossi lays out how to include as many diverse vegetables and fruits as possible, with tasty recipes so that we're too busy with those to crave junk food.

Speaking of recipes, there are 80, and they are easy to follow. She describes them as "plant-based", and by this what she really means is "plant-centric" or such; she does include the use of some animal products.

This is important to note, because general convention is to use "plant-based" to mean functionally vegan, but being about the food rather than the ideology; a relevant distinction in both society and science. In the case of this book, it’s neither, but it is very healthy.

Bottom line: if you'd like to introduce more healthy diversity to your diet, rather than eating the same three fruits and five vegetables, but you're not sure how, this book will get you where you need to be.

Click here to check out Eat More, Live Well, and diversify your diet!

Wishing you a wonderfully restorative weekend (and a happy autumnal equinox—or vernal equinox if you’re in the Southern Hemisphere!),

The 10almonds Team