How To Not Have A Stress-Free 2024!

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:

• Stressors are always going to stress us. But we can adapt to that, and we can do so in advance, so that it doesn’t completely pull the rug out from under us.

  • Evidence-based techniques from CBT, DBT, and MBSR can allow us to build psychological resilience such that we can weather what life throws at us

  • Happily, we can do that without suffering unduly along the way. See today’s main feature for details!

• Foods like peanuts, soy, vinegar, chocolate, citrus fruits, and caffeine (amongst others) have been linked to migraine. Too bad if you are prone to migraines and want a snack!

  • Today’s sponsor Amia are offering delicious cookies that are not only free from all common migraine triggers, but also all common allergens, and as a bonus, they have a bunch of brain-healthy ingredients too—See today’s sponsor section for details!

Read on to learn about these things and more…

👀 WATCH AND LEARN

Don’t Set Your New Year’s Goals Before You Do This (12:14)

This channel is by and for people with ADHD, but its advice can benefit all of us. And no, it’s not about SMART goal-setting, by the way.

Rather, it’s about making sure our goals are actually aligned with what’s most important to us, in a way that will allow us to continually make progress towards them, without it being a chore:

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

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

🧘 MAIN FEATURE

What’s The Worst That Could Happen?

When we talk about the five lifestyle factors that make the biggest difference to health, stress management would be a worthy addition as number six. We haven’t focused explicitly on that for a while, so let’s get ready to start the New Year on a good footing…

You’re not going to have a stress-free 2024

What a tender world that would be! Hopefully your stressors will be small and manageable, but rest assured, things will stress you.

And that’s key: “rest assured”. Know it now, prepare for it, and build resilience.

Sounds grim, doesn’t it? It doesn’t have to be, though.

When the forecast weather is cold and wet, you’re not afraid of it when you have a warm dry house. When the heating bill comes for that warm dry house, you’re not afraid of it when you have money to pay it. If you didn’t have the money and the warm dry house, the cold wet weather could be devastating to you.

The lesson here is: we can generally handle what we’re prepared for.

Negative visualization and the PNS

This is the opposite of what a lot of “think and grow rich”-style gurus would advise. And indeed, it’s not helpful to slide into anxious worrying.

If you do find yourself spiralling, here’s a tool for getting out of that spiral:

RAIN: an intervention for dealing with difficult emotions

For now, however, we’re going to practice Radical Acceptance.

First, some biology: you may be aware that your Central Nervous System (CNS) branches into the Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) and the Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS).

The PNS is the part that cues our body to relax, and suppresses our fight/flight response. We’re going to activate it.

Activating the PNS is easy for most people in comfortable circumstances (e.g., you are not currently exposed to stressful stimuli). It may well be activated already, and if it’s not, a few deep breaths is usually all it takes.

If you’d like a quick and easy Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) technique, here you go:

No-Frills, Evidence-Based Mindfulness

Activating the PNS is hard for most people in difficult circumstances (e.g., you either are currently exposed to stressful stimuli, or you are in one of the emotional spirals we discussed earlier).

However, we can trick our bodies and brains by—when we are safe and unstressed—practicing imagining those stressful stimuli. Taking a moment to not just imagine it experientially, but immersively. This, in CBT and DBT, is the modern equivalent to the old samurai who simply accepted, before battle, that they were already dead—and thus went into battle with zero fear of death.

A less drastic example is the zen master who had a favorite teacup, and feared it would get broken. So he would tell himself “the cup is already broken”. One day, it actually broke, and he simply smiled ruefully and said “Of course”.

How this ties together: practice the mindfulness-based stress reduction we linked above, while imagining the things that do/would stress you the most.

Since it’s just imagination, this is a little easier than when the thing is actually happening. Practicing this way means that when and if the thing actually happens (an unfortunate diagnosis, a financial reversal, whatever it may be), our CNS is already well-trained to respond to stress with a dose of PNS-induced calm.

You can also leverage hormesis, a beneficial aspect of (in this case, optional and chosen by you) acute stress:

Dr. Elissa Epel | The Stress Prescription

Psychological resilience training

This (learned!) ability to respond to stress in an adaptive fashion (without maladaptive coping strategies such as unhelpful behavioral reactivity and/or substance use) is a key part of what in psychology is called resilience:

Psychological resilience: an update on definitions, a critical appraisal, and research recommendations

And yes, the CBT/DBT/MBSR methods we’ve been giving you are the evidence-based gold standard.

Only the best for 10almonds subscribers! 😉 

Road to resilience: a systematic review and meta-analysis of resilience training programmes and interventions

❝That was helpful, but not cheery; can we finish the year on a cheerier note?❞

We can indeed:

How To Get Your Brain On A More Positive Track (Without Toxic Positivity)

Take care!

❤️ OUR SPONSORS MAKE THIS PUBLICATION POSSIBLE

Finally, Migraine-Friendly Food

Foods like peanuts, soy, vinegar, chocolate, citrus fruits, and caffeine (amongst others) have been linked to migraine. Too bad if you are prone to migraines and want a snack!

Amia's products fill that gap. They're made free from all common migraine triggers, and yes, they're also free from other nuts, dairy, and gluten.

Bonus: They're not just "the nothing cookie", though. Instead, they're packed with a nutritious blend of trigger-free oats and seeds, including hemp, flax, chia, and pumpkin... All known to have brain-healthy properties!

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

🌎 AROUND THE WEB

What’s happening in the health world…

• Hate salad or vegetables? Just keep eating them. Here’s how our tastebuds adapt to what we eat

• A new test could save arthritis patients time, money and pain. But will it be used?

• Quality of low-carb diets affects weight change in US adults, finds study

• Fascia: the most neglected part of our body is finally starting to receive attention

• Frequency of adding salt to foods linked to higher risk for CKD

• Loneliness is about more than the need to belong

• Adverse childhood experiences and future mortality risk

More to come tomorrow!

📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle – by Mark Wolynn

There is a trend in psychology to "blame the parents" for "childhood trauma" that can result in problems later in life. Sometimes fairly, sometimes not. This book's mostly not about that.

It does touch on our own childhood trauma, if applicable. But mostly, it's about epigenetic trauma inheritance. In other words, not just trauma that's passed on in terms of "the cycle of abuse", but trauma that's passed on in terms of "this generation experienced trauma x, developed trauma response y, encoded it epigenetically, and passed it on to their offspring".

So, how does one heal from a trauma one never directly experienced, and just inherited the response to it? That's what most of this book is about, after establishing how epigenetic trauma inheritance works.

The author, a therapist, provides practical advice for how to do the things that can be done to rewrite the epigenetic code we inherited. Better late than never!

Bottom line: it is well-established that trauma is inheritable. But unlike one's eye color or the ability to smell asparagus metabolites in urine, we can rewrite epigenetic things, to a degree. This book explains how.

Click here to check out It Didn't Start With You, and put things to rest!

Wishing you the very best for the coming year,

The 10almonds Team