The Nuance
‘Social sharing’ is a core human trait, but at times it can reinforce negative emotions and disordered thinking.
In the video, a middle-aged man named Bill — no last name given — wears a denim shirt and sits in an upholstered chair.
Slowly, fumbling a bit over his words, he recounts the last days of his father’s life. “He was not real happy,” Bill says, “but he insisted on staying in his home.”
His father was old and ailing. He had bouts of incontinence and delirium, and Bill was the only one around to care for him. Near the end, Bill’s fatigue and frustration got the best of him. He told his father, “I don’t know how much…
New research on standing points to a minimum daily goal
London’s bright-red double-decker buses are one of the city’s hallmarks. Seventy years ago, those buses and their operators were at the center of one of the first occupational studies to examine the role of sitting on health.
Back then, each bus had a driver and a conductor. For a 1954 study, researchers at London’s transportation department examined the heart-disease incidence among these and other transit workers.
The researchers found that conductors, who spent most of the day on their feet collecting fares, were about 25% less likely than the seated drivers to develop heart disease. …
The Nuance
Information overload from news consumption is linked to both psychological disturbances and groupthink
Two hundred years ago — yesterday, in evolutionary terms — most people went days or even weeks without encountering news that did not involve their local community.
Today, the average person is bombarded with novel information about the wider world and its diverse (and often distressing) goings-on.
“Possibly the most prominent characteristic of news consumption today is the sheer amount of information that consumers are exposed to,” wrote the authors of a 2014 study in the journal Computers in Human Behavior. …
The Nuance
Habits and other automatic behaviors — even healthy ones — fail to train some critical cognitive muscles.
It took a lot of work, but you did it. You optimized your daily routine.
You hop on the Peloton first thing every morning, and you drink a nutrient-packed power smoothie for breakfast. You’re the picture of diligence at work, and your evenings and weekends are similarly streamlined. Productivity experts could write books about you.
The best part is, staying with it is a breeze. You’ve turned your goals and intentions into habits, and so now they’re nearly effortless.
There’s only one problem: Whenever you’re forced to break from your routines, you struggle. Even small disruptions seen to knock you…
The Nuance
Researchers are finally uncovering the exact ways that sugar disrupts the GI tract
In 1776, at the start of the Revolutionary War, the average person consumed about four pounds of sugar each year. Today, per capita sugar intake in the U.S. exceeds 120 pounds.
Roughly 75% of all foods and beverages in this country contain added sugar. According to the American Heart Association, the average adult swallows the equivalent of six bowling balls of the stuff each year. Meanwhile, the average child downs enough added sugar to fill a bathtub.
Researchers have long suspected that sugar — in particular the added sugar that doesn’t occur naturally in whole fruits or vegetables — is…
The Nuance
The Delta variant has thrown some of our risk-benefit calculations out of whack
The term “breakthrough infection,” as we’ve all learned, refers to any SARS-CoV-2 infection that occurs in someone who is vaccinated.
From the start, public health officials made it clear that breakthrough infections would be a thing. While the vaccines we have are highly effective, they’re not perfect. And when you’re vaccinating hundreds of millions of people across the country — and billions around the globe — it’s a statistical certainty that some vaccinated individuals are going to get sick and die.
People seeking to downplay (or flat out deny) the utility of vaccines have seized on breakthrough infections as evidence…
The Nuance
A new study contradicts some long-standing medical advice
For years, doctors have warned people to avoid or limit their coffee intake if they’re at risk for heart trouble.
This advice is based in part on the belief that the caffeine in coffee (and other caffeinated drinks) can produce dangerous heartbeat abnormalities known as arrhythmias.
This belief has some research to back it up. A study published in 1980 found an association between the number of cups of coffee a person drank each day and that person’s risk for arrhythmia. …
The Nuance
HRV has emerged as a key indicator of stress — and maybe also impending illness
Chronic stress is a killer. It’s associated with dysfunctions of the heart, brain, and immune system, and it seems to cause or contribute to all manner of health problems — from heart disease and diabetes to depression and dementia.
While just about everyone recognizes the dangers of chronic stress, experts still haven’t figured out a great way to measure it. Typically, they rely on psychological assessments — basically, asking people about their life and state of mind — and biomarkers such as blood pressure.
Unfortunately, these diagnostic methods are imprecise and sometimes unreliable. They give doctors a good idea of…
The Nuance
A prominent U.K. psychologist believes we should change the way we talk about depression, anxiety, and other forms of psychological distress
In 2013, the British Psychological Society published a position statement that raised alarms about “the increasing medicalisation” of mental health care.
In particular, the BPS took issue with the language and criteria outlined in the American Psychiatric Association’s newly updated Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — the DSM-5 — which psychiatrists and many other mental-health experts around the world rely on to guide their work.
The BPS called the DSM-5’s classification models “flawed” and unreliable.
It argued that the DSM-5’s current approach to identifying and labeling mental health problems lacks consistency and scientific rigor, over-emphasizes biological factors and…
The Nuance
NDEs may be a byproduct of an important survival instinct
In 1843, the Scottish explorer and missionary David Livingstone was attacked by a lion.
“I heard a shout . . . and looking half round, I saw the lion just in the act of springing on me,” Livingstone later recalled. The lion clamped its jaws around his shoulder and shook him “as a terrier dog does a rat.”
But then a curious thing happened. The shock of the attack produced what Livingstone described as a sort of dreaminess. “There was no sense of pain nor feeling of terror, though [I was] quite conscious of all that was happening,” he said…
