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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:

• Cannabis is popularly used for many medicinal reasons, including to improve sleep

  • Today’s main feature explores how THC affects sleep, the benefits and risks, and how CBD measures up to the same task.

• Do you enjoy cooking in principle, but in practice find the shopping and preparatory work a bit much to maintain every day?

  • Today’s sponsor Purple Carrot is offering delicious and nutritious plant-based meals to your door, with a wide range of options to choose from (e.g. high protein, high fiber, lower calorie, gluten-free, etc).

• Today’s featured recipe is for our supergreen superfood salad slaw—which as well as being delicious, is also remarkably versatile, and can be enjoyed as a very worthy accompaniment to almost any main.

Read on to learn more about these things, or click here to visit our archive

A Word To The Wise

Watch and Learn

6 Signs Of Stroke (One Month In Advance)

Most people can recognise the signs of a stroke when it's just happened, but knowing the signs that appear a month beforehand would be very useful. That's what this video's about!

Prefer text? The above video will take you to a 10almonds page with a text-overview, as well as the video!

Thursday Q&A

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 😎

❝I'm one of those older folks that have a hard time getting 7 hrs. I know a lot of it my fault...like a few beers at nite...🥰am now trying THC gummies for anxiety, instead of alcohol......less calories 😁how does THC affect our sleep,? Safer than alcohol.....I know your next article 😊😊😊😊❣️😊alot of us older kids do take gummies 😲😲😲thank you❞

Great question! We wrote a little about CBD gummies (not THC) before:

Do CBD Gummies Work?

…and went on to explore THC’s health benefits and risks here:

Cannabis Myths vs Reality

For starters, let’s go ahead and say: you’re right that it’s safer (for most people) than alcohol—but that’s not a strong claim, because alcohol is very bad for pretty much everything, including sleep.

So how does THC measure up when it comes to sleep quality?

Good news: it affects the architecture of sleep in such a way that you will spend longer in deep sleep (delta wave activity), which means you get more restorative and restful sleep!

See also: Alpha, beta, theta: what are brain states and brain waves? And can we control them?

Bad news: it does so at the cost of reducing your REM sleep, which is also necessary for good brain health, and will cause cognitive impairment if you skip too much. Normally, if you are sleep-deprived, the brain will prioritize REM sleep at the cost of other kinds of sleep; it’s that important. However, if you are chemically impaired from getting healthy REM sleep, there’s not much your brain can do to save you from the effects of REM sleep loss.

See: Cannabis, Cannabinoids, and Sleep: a Review of the Literature 

This is, by the way, a reason that THC gets prescribed for some sleep disorders, in cases where the initial sleep disruption was because of nightmares, as it will reduce those (along with any other dreams, as collateral damage):

Clinical Management of Sleep and Sleep Disorders With Cannabis and Cannabinoids: Implications to Practicing Psychiatrists

One thing to be careful of if using THC as a sleep aid is that withdrawal may make your symptoms worse than they were to start with:

Updates in the use of cannabis for insomnia

With all that in mind, you might consider (if you haven’t already tried it) seeing whether CBD alone improves your sleep, as while it does also extend time in deep sleep, it doesn’t reduce REM nearly as much as THC does:

The effects of a brand-specific, hemp-derived cannabidiol product on physiological, biochemical, and psychometric outcomes in healthy adults: a double-blind, randomized clinical trial

👆 this study was paid for by the brand being tested, so do be aware of potential publication bias. That’s not to say the study is necessarily corrupt, and indeed it probably wasn’t, but rather, the publication of the results was dependent on the company paying for them (so hypothetically they could have pulled funding from any number of other research groups that didn’t get the results they wanted, leaving this one to be the only one published). That being said, the study is interesting, which is why we’ve linked it, and it’s a good jumping-off-point for finding a lot of related papers, which you can see listed beneath it.

CBD also has other benefits of its own, even without THC:

CBD Oil: What Does The Science Say?

Take care!

Our Sponsors Make This Publication Possible

Transform Your Meals With Purple Carrot’s Prepared Plant-Based Meals

Purple Carrot is on a mission to prove that plant-based eating doesn’t have to be difficult, boring, or time-consuming.

We’ve all been there. You search for recipes, shop for groceries, and spend hours preparing a nutritious meal for your family, only to be left with a lackluster dish that leaves you craving takeout.

With Purple Carrot’s chef-prepared meals and perfectly curated meal kits, you’ll never have to deal with these challenges again. Purple Carrot provides everything you need to put tasty dishes on the table that everyone will love - choose from high-protein, lower-calorie, high-fiber, and gluten-free options every week and skip or cancel whenever you want to take a break

Purple Carrot also knows the power of eating seasonally.

That’s why, this month, they’re offering an array of delicious, summer-themed meals filled with seasonal ingredients, including: Stuffed Sweet Potatoes with Cucumber Chickpea Salad, Sticky Mango Tofu with Quinoa, and Crispy Black Bean Tacos with Blistered Tomato Salad.

Get these seasonal meals while you can!

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

This Or That?

Vote on Which is Healthier

Yesterday we asked you to choose between shrimp and caviar—we picked the caviar (click here to read about why), as did only 28% of you!

Now for today’s choice:

Click on whichever you think is better for you!

Recipes Worth Sharing

Supergreen Superfood Salad Slaw

When it comes to "eating the rainbow", in principle green should be the easiest color to get in, unless we live in a serious food desert (or serious food poverty). In practice, however, a lot of meals could do with a dash more green. This "supergreen superfood salad slaw" is remarkably versatile, and can be enjoyed as a very worthy accompaniment to almost any main:

Click below for our full recipe, and learn its secrets:

One-Minute Book Review

The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully – by Frank Ostaseski

This book covers exactly what its subtitle promises, and encourages the reader to truly live life fully, something that Ostaseski believes cannot be done in ignorance of death.

Instead, he argues from his experience of decades working at a hospice, we must be mindful of death not only to appreciate life, but also to make the right decisions in life—which means responding well to what he calls, as per the title of this book, “the five invitations”.

We will not keep them a mystery; they are:

1. Don't wait; do the important things now

2. Welcome everything; push away nothing

3. Bring your whole self to the experience

4. Find a place in the middle of things

5. Cultivate a "don't know" mind

Note, for example, that “do the important things now” requires knowing what is important. For example, ensuring a loved one knows how you feel about them, might be more important than scratching some item off a bucket list. And “push away nothing” does mean bad things too; rather, of course try to make life better rather than worse, but accept the lessons and learnings of the bad too, and see the beauty that can be found in contrast to it. Enjoying the fullness of life without getting lost in it; carrying consciousness through the highs and lows. And yes, approaching the unknown (which means not only death, but also the large majority of life) with open-minded curiosity and wonder.

The style of the book is narrative and personal, without feeling like a collection of anecdotes, but rather, taking the reader on a journey, prompting reflection and introspection along the way.

Bottom line: if you’d like to minimize the regrets you have in life, this book is a fine choice.

Click here to check out The Five Invitations, and answer with a “yes” to the call of life!

Penny For Your Thoughts?

Wishing you a restfully restorative day,

The 10almonds Team