How To Avoid Slipping Into (Bad) Old Habits

Today’s almonds have been activated by:

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:

• Even after making progress in our healthy lives, it’s easy to slip back into old, less healthy ways

  • Today’s main feature borrows from the psychology of addiction recovery, to greatly reduce the likelihood of slip-ups

• How would you like your oral hygiene to be 250% better with no extra effort?

  • Today’s sponsor, LIVFRESH, have developed a gel that safely dissolves plaque without harming the teeth or gums. There’s science for it too, so do check out their website for that!

• Today’s featured recipe is a Marrakesh Sprouted Sorghum Salad, and it’s perhaps the most nutrient dense dish we’ve shared so far (and also exceptionally tasty)!

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

A Word To The Wise

Watch and Learn

80-Year-Olds Share Their Biggest Regrets

How many of these resonate with your life, and what can you do now, to live your life at its best?

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

Psychology Sunday

Treating Bad Habits Like Addictions

How often have you started a healthy new habit (including if it’s a “quit this previous thing” new habit), only to find that you slip back into your old ways?

We’ve written plenty on habit-forming before, so here’s a quick recap before we continue:

How To Really Pick Up (And Keep!) Those Habits

…and even how to give them a boost:

How To Keep On Keeping On… Long Term!

But how to avoid the relapses that are most likely to snowball?

Borrowing from the psychology of addiction recovery

It’s well known that someone recovering from substance addiction should not have even a small amount of the thing they were addicted to. Not one sip of champagne at a wedding, not one drag of a cigarette, and so forth.

This can go for other bad habits too; make one exception, and suddenly you have a whole string of “exceptions”, and before you know it, it’s not the exception anymore; it’s the new rule—again.

Three things that can help guard against this are:

1. Absolutely refuse to romanticize the bad habit. Do not fall for its marketing! And yes, everything has marketing even if not advertising; for example, consider the Platonic ideal of a junk-food-eating couch-potato who is humble, unassuming, agreeable, the almost-holy idea of homely comfort, and why shouldn’t we be comfortable after all, haven’t we earned our chosen hedonism, and so on. It’s seductive, and we need to make the choice to not be seduced by it. In this case for example, yes pleasure is great, but being sick tired and destroying our bodies is not, in fact, pleasurable in the long run. Which brings us to…

2. Absolutely refuse to forget why you dropped that behavior in the first place. Remember what it did to you, remember you at your worst. Remember what you feared might become of you if you continued like that. This is something where journaling helps, by the way; remembering our low points helps us to avoid finding ourselves in the same situation again.

3. Absolutely refuse to let your guard down due to an overabundance of self-confidence in your future self. We all can easily feel that tomorrow is a mystical land in which all productivity is stored, and also where we are strong, energized, iron-willed, and totally able to avoid making the very mistakes that we are right now in the progress of making. Instead, be that strong person now, for the benefit of tomorrow’s you. Because after all, if it’s going to be easy tomorrow, it’s easy now, right?

The above is a very simple, hopefully practical, set of rules to follow. If you like hard science more though, Yale’s Dr. Steven Melemis offers five rules (aimed more directly at addiction recovery, so this may be a big “heavy guns” for some milder habits):

1. change your life

2. be completely honest

3. ask for help

4. practice self-care

5. don’t bend the rules

You can read his full paper and the studies it’s based on, here:

Relapse Prevention and the Five Rules of Recovery

“What if I already screwed up?”

Draw a line under it, now, and move forwards in the direction you actually want to go.

Here’s a good article, that saves us taking up more space here; it’s very well-written so we do recommend it:

The Abstinence Violation Effect and Overcoming It

👆 this article gives specific, practical advices, including CBT tools to use

Take care!

Our Sponsors Make This Publication Possible

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So, treat yourself to the best:

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

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This Or That?

Vote on Which is Healthier

Yesterday we asked you to choose between black coffee and orange juice—we picked the coffee (click here to read about why), as did 89% of you!

Now for today’s choice:

Click on whichever you think is better for you!

Recipes Worth Sharing

Marrakesh Sprouted Sorghum Salad

Today we have a popular Maghreb dish using sorghum, a naturally gluten-free whole grain with a stack of vitamins and minerals. This salad also comes with fruit and nuts (apricots and almonds; a heavenly combination for both taste and nutrients) as well as greens, herbs, and spices—especially the flavor-packing ras el-hanout blend that we’ll also teach you to make!

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

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One-Minute Book Review

The Longevity Diet: Discover The New Science To Slow Aging, Fight Disease, And Manage Your Weight – by Dr. Valter Longo

Another book with “The New Science” in its subtitle, so, is this one a new science?

Yes and no; some findings are new, many are not, what really sets this book apart from many of its genre though is that rather than focusing on fighting aging, it focuses on retaining youth. While this may seem like one and the same thing, there is a substantive difference beyond the ideological, which is: while anti-aging research focuses on what causes people to suffer age-related decline and fights each of those things, Dr. Longo’s research focuses on what is predominant in youthful bodies, cells, DNA, and looks to have more of that. Looking in a slightly different place means finding slightly different things, and knowledge is power indeed.

Dr. Longo bases his research and focus on his “5 pillars of longevity”. We'll not keep them a mystery; they are:

1. Juventology research

2. Epidemiology

3. Clinical studies

4. Centenarian studies

5. Study of complex systems

The first there (juventology research) may sound like needless jargon, but it is the counterpoint of the field of gerontology, and is otherwise something that didn't have an established name.

You may wonder why "clinical studies" gets a separate item when the others already include studies; this is because many studies when it comes to aging and related topics are population-based studies, cohort studies, observational studies, or (as is often the case) multiple of the above at once.

Of course, all this discussion of academia is not itself practical information for the reader (unless we happen to work in the field), but it is interesting and does give confidence in the conclusions upon which the practical parts of the book are based.

And what are they? As the title suggests, it’s about diet, and specifically, it’s about Dr. Longo’s “fast-mimicking diet”, which boasts the benefits of intermittent fasting without intermittent fasting. This hinges, of course, on avoiding metabolic overload, which can be achieved with a fairly simple diet governed by the principles outlined in this book, based on the research referenced.

In the category of subjective criticism, there is quite a bit of fluff, much of it self-indulgently autobiographical and very complimentary, but its presence does not take anything away from the excellent content contained in the book.

Bottom line: if you’d like a fresh perspective on regaining/retaining youthfulness, then this is a great book to read.

Click here to check out The Longevity Diet, and stay younger!

Penny For Your Thoughts?

Wishing you a peaceful Sunday,

The 10almonds Team