⏰ 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:

• Often we know what we need to do, but knowing isn’t the problem.

  • Motivational (Self-)Interviewing is an evidence-based technique to pre-identify what is or isn’t going to work, setting plans accordingly, and actually following through to success. Today’s main feature will get you started!

• As we age, our collagen levels tend to get depleted more easily

  • Collagen is important not just for youthful good looks, but also for the health of bones and joints

    • Today’s sponsor NativePath are offering high-quality collagen without additives or harmful impurities

Read on to learn about these things and more…

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👀 WATCH AND LEARN

How To Squat For Your Anatomy (6:52)

Should you squat with toes 100% straight forward or turned out to the side? Today, Dr. Aaron Horschig shows you how to screen your body and determine your best squat stance based on your hip anatomy:

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

Anatomy-type menu:

• 0:21 | Anatomy

• 1:23 | Internal vs external rotation

• 2:39 | Anteversion

• 4:13 | Retroversion

Prefer text? You might like his book on this topic:

The Squat Bible: The Ultimate Guide to Mastering the Squat and Finding Your True Strength

Want to watch it, but not right now? Bookmark it for later 🔖

💡 MAIN FEATURE

When knowing what to do isn’t the problem

Often, we know what we need to do. Sometimes, knowing isn’t the problem!

The topic today is going to be a technique used by therapeutic service providers to help people to enact positive changes in their lives.

While this is a necessarily dialectic practice (i.e., it involves a back-and-forth dialogue), it’s still perfectly possible to do it alone, and that’s what we’ll be focussing on in this main feature.

What is Motivational Interviewing?

Read in full: Motivational Interviewing: An Evidence-Based Approach for Use in Medical Practice

It’s mostly used for such things as helping people reduce or eliminate substance abuse, or manage their weight, or exercise more, things like that.

However, it can be employed for any endeavour that requires motivation and sustained willpower to carry it through.

Three Phases

Motivational Interviewing traditionally has three phases:

1. Exploring and understanding the issue at hand

2. Guiding and deciding importance and goals

3. Choosing and setting an action plan

In self-practice, maybe you can already know and understand what it is that you want/need to change.

If not, consider asking yourself such questions as:

• What does a good day look like? What does a bad day look like?

• If things are not good now, when were they good? What changed?

• If everything were perfect now, what would that look like? How would you know?

Once you have a clear idea of where you want to be, the next thing to know is: how much do you want it? And how confident are you in attaining it?

This is a critical process:

• Give your answers numerically on a scale from 0 to 10

• Whatever your score, ask yourself why it’s not lower. For example, if you scored your motivation 4 and your confidence 2, what factors made your motivation not a lower number? What factors made your confidence not a lower number?

• In the unlikely event that you gave yourself a 0, ask whether you can really afford to scrap the goal. If you can’t, find something, anything, to bring it to at least a 1.

• After you’ve done that, then you can ask yourself the more obvious question of why your numbers aren’t higher. This will help you identify barriers to overcome.

Now you’re ready to choose what to focus on and how to do it. Don’t bite off more than you can chew; it’s fine to start low and work up. You should revisit this regularly, just like you would if you had a counsellor helping you.

Some things to ask yourself at this stage of the motivational self-interviewing:

• What’s a good SMART goal to get you started?

• What could stop you from achieving your goal?

  • How could you overcome that challenge?

  • What is your backup plan, if you have to scale back your goal for some reason?

A conceptual example: if your goal is to stick to a whole foods Mediterranean diet, but you are attending a wedding next week, then now is the time to decide in advance 1) what personal lines-in-the-sand you will or will not draw 2) what secondary, backup plan you will make to not go too far off track.

The same example in practice: wedding menus often offer meat/fish/vegetarian options, so you might choose the fish or vegetarian, and as for sugar and alcohol, you might limit yourself to “a small slice of wedding cake only; coffee/cheese option instead of dessert”, and “alcohol only for toasts”.

Giving yourself the permission well in advance for small (clearly defined and boundaried!) diversions from the plan, will stop you from falling into the trap of “well, since today’s a cheat-day now…”

Secret fourth stage

The secret here is to keep going back and reassessing at regular intervals. Set your own calendar; you might want to start out weekly and then move to monthly when you’re more strongly on-track.

For this reason, it’s good to keep a journal with your notes from your self-interview sessions, the scores you gave yourself, the goals and plans you set, etc.

When conducting your regular review, be sure to examine what worked for you, and what didn’t (and why). That way, you can practice trial-and-improvement as you go.

Want to learn more?

We only have so much room here, but there are lots of resources out there.

Here’s a high-quality page that:

• explains motivational interviewing in more depth than we have room for here

• offers a lot of free downloadable resource packs and the like

Check it out: Motivational Interviewing Theory & Resources

Enjoy!

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🌎 AROUND THE WEB

What’s happening in the health world…

• Study shows lasting effects of COVID-19 on nursing home residents

• Increased dementia risk associated with hearing impairment may come from compensatory brain changes

• Study reveals bias in AI tools when diagnosing women's health issue

• Thinking of trying a detox? Here’s what you need to know first

• MSU researchers discover why inflammation in the gut causes visceral pain

• Pulses found to significantly improve the nutritional profile of American diet

• Combined application of therapeutic viruses and nanomaterials to revolutionize cancer therapy

More to come tomorrow!

📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

Scarcity Brain: Fix Your Craving Mindset and Rewire Your Habits to Thrive with Enough – by Michael Easter

After a brief overview of the evolutionary psychology underpinnings of the scarcity brain, the author grounds the rest of this book firmly in the present. He explains how the scarcity loop hooks us and why we crave more, and what factors can increase or lessen its hold over us.

As for what things we are wired to consider "potentially scarce any time now" no matter how saturated we are in them, he looks at an array of categories, each with their nuances. From the obvious such as "food" and "stuff", to understandable "information" and "happiness", to abstractions like "influence", he goes to many sources—experts of various kinds from around the world—to explore how we can know "how much is enough", and—which can be harder—act accordingly.

The key, he argues, is not in simply wanting less, but in understanding why we crave more in the first place, get rid of our worst habits, and use what we already have, better.

Bottom line: if you feel a gnawing sense of needing more "to be on the safe side", this book can help you to be a little more strategic (and at the same time, less stressed!) about that.

Click here to check out Scarcity Brain, and manage yours more mindfully!

Wishing you a peaceful and restorative Sunday,

The 10almonds Team