How To *Really* Pick Up (And Keep!) Those 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:

• Habits don't just add up over time—they snowball

  • This will happen whether the habit is good or bad

  • So it's really important to make them good, so that each day sees n% improvement instead of n% deterioration

  • To give a habit a chance to get done for long enough for it to stick, it needs to be made as easy as possible at first

  • Tracking one's habits is also super-important

  • Check out today's main feature for tips on making this much easier and much more effective!

• When it comes to supplements, sometimes cost is no guarantee of quality.

  • Ora combats this in three ways (see today's sponsor section for details!)

• Almost all of us will face bereavement at some point, if we haven’t already. But what happens when someone is gone... Yet also at the same time not necessarily gone? Today's book of the day tackles the challenge of managing this "ambiguous loss".

Read on to learn about these things and more…

👀 WATCH AND LEARN

Dr. Jen Gunter: What's normal anxiety—and what's an anxiety disorder?

Almost everyone gets anxious at times, but how can you tell when it crosses the line and needs attention?

In this short (5:10) video, Dr. Jen Gunter shares the science behind your brain's threat-detection system, what makes it malfunction, and the most effective ways of treating it:

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

✅ MAIN FEATURE

The Healthiest Habit-Building

Why was that book “Atomic Habits” called that? It wasn’t just because it’s a catchy title…

Habits are—much like atoms—things that are almost imperceptibly small, yet when stacked, they make up the substance of many much larger and more obvious things, and also contain an immense amount of potential power.

About that power…

Habits are the “compound interest” of natural human life. Every action we take, every decision we make, makes our life (often imperceptibly) better or worse. But getting even just 1% better or 1% worse at something every day? That’s going to not just add up over time… It’ll actively compound over time.

Habits will snowball one way or the other, good or bad. So, we want to control that snowball so that it works for us rather than against us.

Thus, we need to choose habits that are helpful to us, rather than those that are harmful to us. Top examples include:

• Making healthy food choices rather than unhealthy ones

• Moving our body regularly rather than being sedentary

• Having a good bedtime/morning routine rather than a daily chaotic blur

• Learning constantly rather than digging into old beliefs out of habit

• Forging healthy relationships rather than isolating ourselves

We all know that to make a habit stick, we need to practice it regularly, with opinions varying on how long it takes for something to become habit. Some say 21 days; some say 66. The number isn’t the important part!

What is important

You will never get to day 66, much less will you get to day 366, if you don’t first get to day 6 (New Year’s Resolutions, anyone?).

So in the early days especially, when the habit is most likely to get dropped, it’s critical to make the habit as easy as possible to form.

That means:

• The habit should be made as pleasant as possible

  • (e.g. by making modifications to it if it’s not already intrinsically pleasant)

• The habit should take under 2 minutes to do at first

  • (no matter if it takes longer than 2 minutes to be useful; it’ll never be useful if you don’t first get it to stick, so make your initial commitment only 2 minutes, just to get in the habit)

• The habit should have cues to remind you

  • (as it’s not habit yet, you will need to either set a reminder on your phone, or leave a visual reminder, such as your workout clothes laid out ready for you in the morning, or a bowl of fruit in plain view where you spend a lot of time)

What gets measured, gets done

Streaks are a great way to do this. Habit-tracking apps help. Marks on a calendar or in a journal are also totally fine.

What can help especially, and that a lot of people don’t do, is to have a system of regular personal reviews—like a work “performance review”, but for oneself and one’s own life.

Set a reminder or write on the calendar / in your diary, to review monthly, or weekly if you prefer, such things as:

• How am I doing in the areas of life that are important to me?

  • Have a list of the areas of life that are important to you, by the way, and genuinely reflect on each of them, e.g:

    • Health

    • Finances

    • Relationships

    • Learning

    • Sleep

    • Etc

• What is working for me, and what isn’t working for me?

• What will I do better in this next month/week?

…and then do it!

Good luck, and may it all stack up in your favor!

❤️ OUR SPONSORS MAKE THIS PUBLICATION POSSIBLE

Ora: Transparency and Verifiability

It’s easy to have an expectation of “you get what you pay for”, but one of the biggest problems buying supplements is that sometimes, cost is no guarantee of quality.

In other words, you can pay too much and still get something that was made in someone’s shed and contains many impurities, or was manufactured in a way that completely defeats the purpose and robs the supplement of any effectiveness.

Ora combats this in three ways:

• Having high quality (and transparent, verifiable!) sources

• Having rigorous testing of their products

  • (by 3rd party labs; you can see those test results on their website)

• Having a 60-day no-quibble money-back guarantee—if you’re not satisfied with the results, they’ll refund you in full

As for what they sell, they have a range of 28 products so far, for comprehensive all-around health.

Click here to check out Ora and start enjoying better daily cumulative results from your supplementation!

🌍 AROUND THE WEB

What’s happening in the health world…

• Genetic variants may affect treatment response to commonly prescribed type 2 diabetes medication

• Almond milk yogurt vs dairy? Here's which one is better for you

• "We tell them they can still laugh"—the doctor treating the mental scars of Gaza’s children

• Can exercise ease anxiety? Study investigates the potentials and pitfalls of fitness as therapy

• Mediterranean diet: A recipe for reduced stress and improved sleep

More to come tomorrow!

📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

Loss, Trauma, and Resilience: Therapeutic Work With Ambiguous Loss - by Dr. Pauline Boss

Most books about bereavement are focused on grieving healthily and then moving on healthily. And, while it may be said "everyone's grief is on their own timescale"... society's expectation is often quite fixed:

"Time will heal", they say.

But what if it doesn't? What happens when that's not possible?

Ambiguous loss occurs when someone is on the one hand "gone", but on the other hand, not necessarily.

This can be:

• Someone was lost in a way that didn’t leave a body to 100% confirm it

  • (e.g. disaster, terrorism, war, murder, missing persons)

• Someone remains physically present but in some ways already "gone"

  • (e.g. Alzheimer's disease or other dementia, brain injury, coma)

These things stop us continuing as normal, and/but also stop us from moving on as normal.

When either kind of moving forward is made impossible, everything gets frozen in place. How does one deal with that?

Dr. Boss wrote this book for therapists, but its content is equally useful for anyone struggling with ambiguous loss—or who has a loved one who is, in turn, struggling with that.

The book looks at the impact of ambiguous loss on continuing life, and how to navigate that:

• How to be resilient, in the sense of when life tries to break you, to have ways to bend instead.

• How to live with the cognitive dissonance of a loved one who is a sort of "Schrödinger's person".

• How, and this is sometimes the biggest one, to manage ambiguous loss in a society that often pushes toward: "it's been x period of time, come on, get over it now, back to normal"

Will this book heal your heart and resolve your grief? No, it won't. But what it can do is give a roadmap for nonetheless thriving in life, while gently holding onto whatever we need to along the way.

Click here to check out "Ambiguous loss, Trauma, and Resilience" on Amazon—it can really help

May your way forward be ever clear and purposeful,

The 10almonds Team