How To Keep Warm (Without Sweat Patches!)

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:

• Layering clothes is good in cold weather, but make sure you do it right unless you want sweat patches under all those layers (see today’s video for how!)

• Pillow sprays and other ways of enjoying bedtime scents can improve sleep—but mostly just by association/placebo (see today’s main feature for the science)

• 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…

🌍 10ALMONDS APPROVED BLACK FRIDAY DEALS

👀 WATCH AND LEARN

The One Big Mistake That's Making You Colder (8:09)

Layering clothes is great! Sweat, however, is not:

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

Layered menu:

• 0:19 | Cold weather layering

• 1:48 | Sweat evacuation

• 3:32 | Insulating layers

• 4:14 | Middle layers

• 5:23 | Base layers

• 6:09 | Wool

• 6:35 | Tips

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

❓ MAIN FEATURE

It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!

Have a question or a request? You can always hit “reply” to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom!

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 saw an advert on the subway for a pillow spray that guarantees a perfect night's sleep. What does the science say about smells/sleep?❞

That is certainly a bold claim! Unless it’s contingent, e.g. “…or your money back”. Because otherwise, it absolutely cannot guarantee that.

There is some merit:

Source: Reciprocal relationships between sleep and smell

Translating that from sciencese:

Sometimes we find pleasant smells relaxing, and placebo effect also helps.

That “any potential direct physiochemical effect”, though, when it does occur, is things like this…

Read: Odor blocking of stress hormone responses

…but that’s a mouse study, and those odors may only work to block three specific mouse stress responses to three specific stressors: physical restraint, predator odor, and male–male confrontation.

In other words: if, perchance, those three things are not what’s stressing you in bed at night (we won’t make assumptions), and/or you are not a mouse, it may not help.

(and this, dear readers, is why we must read articles, and not just headlines!)

But! If you are going to go for a pillow fragrance, something well-associated with being relaxing and soporific, such as lavender, is the way to go:

• Effects of aromatherapy on sleep quality and anxiety of patients

• Effects of Aromatherapy on the Anxiety, Vital Signs, and Sleep Quality of Percutaneous Coronary Intervention Patients in Intensive Care Units

• Effect of lavender aromatherapy on vital signs and perceived quality of sleep in the intermediate care unit: a pilot study

tl;dr = patients found lavender fragrances relaxing, experienced less anxiety, got better sleep (significantly or insignificantly, depending on the study) and enjoyed lower blood pressure (significantly or insignificantly, depending on the study).

PS: this writer uses a pillow spray like this one 💤

Enjoy!

📊 POLL

We turn the tables and ask you a question…

We’ll then talk about this tomorrow:

❤️ 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…

• Alzheimer's and Parkinson's: scientists produce human norepinephrine neurons from stem cells

• 5 reasons why climate change may see more of us turn to alcohol and other drugs

• Low-salt diet confers similar blood pressure benefit to common first-line antihypertensive medication

• Kiwi cafés sizzle with success on meat-free Mondays, cooking up environmental change

• Managing holiday travel stress

• Machine learning uncovers potent immunomodulators for vaccines and immunotherapy

• Pass the potatoes, or take a pass? Here's expert advice

More to come tomorrow!

📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

The Kindness Method: Change Your Habits for Good Using Self-Compassion and Understanding – by Sahroo Izadi

You may be wondering: is this a diet book? Or perhaps a wishy-washy "love yourself" book? An Atomic Habits rehash? No, none of the above. It’s definitely its own thing!

This book is, however, about everything from alcohol addiction to procrastination to weight loss and more.

The author herself went from yo-yo dieting to a stable healthy lifestyle, and wants to share with us how she did it.

So she took what worked for her, organized and distilled it, and named it "the kindness method", which...

• promotes positivity not in a "head in the sand" sense but rather: you have strengths, let's find them and use them

• offers many exploratory exercises to help you figure out what's actually going to be best for you

• plans support in advance—you're going to be your own greatest ally here

It's about:

• being kind to yourself rather than setting yourself up to fail, and "judging a fish by how well it can climb a tree"

• being kind to yourself by being compassionate towards your past self and moving on with lessons learned

• being kind to yourself by getting things in order for your future self, because you need to treat your future self like a loved one

It's a catch-all handbook for changing your habits—in general, and/or in whatever area of your life you most feel you want or need to.

Bottom line: if you'd like a way to real, measurable self-improvement that doesn't involve self-hatred along the way, you could do well to get this book as a gift for your future self.

Click here to check out The Kindness Method, and be good to yourself!

Wishing you a relaxing and restful day,

The 10almonds Team