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1. Testosterone and Ball Icing results
About a month ago, my buddy Nick and I were talking about ball icing for testosterone and he had been worried about not having nocturnal/morning wood. He tried the ball icing and said he noticed some improvement in that area.
Just a few days back he got his testosterone results: 1131.6ng/dL. He said last November his testosterone was closer to 750. This test was done 2 weeks after he got into a consistent routine of icing the nads twice a day for 15 minutes at a time. Today he said that last night his nocturnal wood was even annoyingly persistent.
Note that he’s also taking Shilajit, Turkesterone and Tongkat Ali. He also eats 3 eggs a day, works out a lot & does Jiujitsu and boxing and sleeps 8+ hours a day. Though, he suspects the icing had the biggest impact.
Would’ve been nice to see his testosterone right before the icing and then right after 2 weeks of icing, but still a fun anecdote.
2. Oatly: Sweet as coke, Oily as french fries
Great post by Jeff Nobbs: Is Oatly Healthy?
He points out that:
A 12-ounce glass of oat milk (the amount in a medium latte) has about the same blood sugar impact as a 12-ounce can of Coke. …Based on its nutrition information, we can calculate that each 8 oz cup of oat milk (the amount in a small latte) contains about the same amount of oil as a medium serving of french fries.
3. Catharsis doesn’t always work. Expressing emotions enhances them.
While researching for my recent post Are we creating Trauma for Ourselves?, I came across this paper Is Psychoanalysis harmful? by Dr. Albert Ellis. He explains that:
The expressive, cathartic-abreactive method that is such a common part of analysis doesn’t encourage this client to stop and think about his philosophic premises; instead, it enables him to “feel good” — at least momentarily — in spite of the fact that he strongly retains these same premises, and in spite of the fact that he will almost certainly depress himself, because of his holding them, again and again.
He goes on to explain that allowing a patient to express their emotions as they feel them only encourages them to inhabit that same emotional state more often in the future.
In the expression of hostility that psychoanalysis encourages, the situation is even worse. … psychoanalysts usually [have the] false assumption: that the expression of hostile feelings will release and cure basic hostility. Nothing of the sort is probably true; in fact, just the opposite frequently happens. The individual who, in analytic sessions, is encouraged to express her hatred for her mother, husband, or boss may well end up by becoming still more hostile, acting in an overtly nasty fashion to this other person, engendering return hostility, and then becoming still more irate.
…One of the main functions of an effective therapist, moreover, is to help the client minimize or eliminate her hostility (while keeping her dislike of unfortunate events and nasty people, so that she can do something to solve her problems connected with them). Psychoanalysis, because it falsely believes that present hostility stems from past occurrences (rather than largely from the individual’s philosophic attitude toward and consequent interpretations about those occurrences), has almost no method of getting at the main sources of hatred and eradicating them. By failing to show the client how to change her anger-creating views and by encouraging her to become more hostile in many instances, it tends to harm probably the majority of analytic clients (or should we say victims?).
This sentiment that emotions that are allowed to be expressed as is is echoed in this conversation between Tim Ferriss an Gabor Mate. Ferriss explained how he had been to a couple therapists who suggest he punch a pillow or something to let out his rage, but Ferriss found that only magnified it. Gabor Mate says that allowing rage to “explode” will just magnify it “because it recruits more brain circuits to its service.” His approach is rather to allow the patient to fully experience the rage as it appears in the body; to investigate what’s going on in the body when it occurs. So this way, the person is neither suppressing their unproductive emotions nor acting them out.
4. Was Feminism totally Good for Women?
New podcast with Rachel Wilson, author of Occult Feminism: The Secret History of Women’s Liberation
5. Quote from Victor Frankl on why idealists are realists
”If we take man as he really is, we make him worse. But … if we seem to be idealists and we are overestimating, overrating man …. you know what happens? We promote him to what he really can be. So we have to be idealists in a way because then we wind up as the true, the real realists. And you know who as said this, if we take man as he is we make him worse, but if we take man as he should be, we make him capable of becoming what he can be. … Now you understand why in one of my writings I once said this is the most apt maxim and motto for any psychotherapeutic activity. So, if you don’t recognize a young man’s will to meaning, man’s search for meaning, you make him worse. You make him dull, you make him frustrated, you still add and contribute to his frustration while if you presuppose in this man … there must be a spark of search for meaning, let’s recognize this. Let’s presuppose it and then you will elicit it from and you will make him become what he in principle is capable of becoming.”
Frankl’s comments on idealism and aiming higher than you can go so you land as close to that as possible, is a truly motivating thought. It’s exactly the kind of philosophical idea that sparks a light of hope and encourages the best in people. It’s true in a spiritual sense