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DIGGING
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground.
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
~ Seamus Heaney
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SEAMUS HEANEY, POET OF THE EARTH
I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing
“Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.” This is the opening couplet of “Digging,” the first poem in Seamus Heaney’s first book. Published in 1966, when Heaney was twenty-seven, “Digging” became one of his best-known poems, included in countless anthologies and syllabi. It’s a feat of metaphor and muscular narrative, controlled yet bold. Heaney later called it “the first poem I wrote where I thought my feelings had got into words, or to put it more accurately, where I thought my feel had got into words.” The feel is a consonantal swagger, announcing a poet assured in his own rhythms and vernacular—and in his handling of both.
But I’ll be honest: “Digging” bored me when I first read it. Between me and Heaney’s clean cuts, there was a temperamental misalignment; I tend to prefer poems with a little muss and bedhead. And so while I was content to stumble on more of Heaney’s poems, I never sought them out. This is no minor omission: Robert Lowell declared Heaney “the best Irish poet since W. B. Yeats,” and readers of his poems and translations, from academics to presidents, have agreed. He won a Nobel Prize nearly twenty years before he died—a literary saint in middle age. Since his death in 2013, at seventy-four, his renown seems only to have grown.
A few years ago, I started to feel embarrassed to call myself a poet without truly knowing Heaney’s poetry. I resolved to read him, and to read him comprehensively. The Poems of Seamus Heaney, out this autumn, makes clear the size of the job: in over a thousand pages, it collects and annotates Heaney’s twelve full-length volumes, a chapbook, and dozens more poems that he published in magazines or pamphlets. Alongside this tome, there are also the poet’s letters and translations (already collected in similar canonical bricks), his many essays and lectures, a zillion or so interviews, and the rest of the material that has accreted around the man, from goings-at to stintless lauds, which I’m tempted to shorthand, like Heaney did in one letter, as “SHit.”
Poring over all this in Heaney’s giant shadow, I felt anxious to admire, then annoyed by my anxiety. A writer’s canonization is a slow slaughter of the real, the wax of the replica hardening until all that shows is mask or mascot. Yeats, the obvious Irish antecedent to Heaney’s global fame, supplied one of Heaney’s favorite descriptions of this predicament: in others’ eyes, the poet sees reflected the “smiling public man” who has nothing to do with the scribbler at his desk. Maybe, I thought, hearing Heaney’s actual voice would reveal the man behind the mask. On YouTube, scrolling and clicking resurrected him on my screen: there he was in 2010, still reciting “Digging,” his South Derry accent scooping and flensing.
The poem’s speaker, a Heaney type, sits pen in hand and observes through a window his father digging outside, like his father did before him. “But I’ve no spade to follow men like them,” Heaney says. To close the personal and generational divide, Heaney replays that first couplet, this time transforming the pen into a tool: “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.” Utility rather than threat. A peaceful resolution emerges, as both poetry and potatoes, after all, require “stooping in rhythm.”
As I listened to Heaney, some of my old resistance to the lines’ forceful march came back, but it occurred to me that “Digging” offered a model for tackling his daunting trove. Poetry, Heaney said in a lecture in 1974, is no surface matter. It arises “as revelation of the self to the self”; it uncovers “the buried shard.” To follow him, I, too, would have to dig. Attention to Heaney and his lifelong habit of unearthing, shaped by an Ireland layered with histories and enmities, hasn’t led me to a “true” version of the poet (what would that even mean?), but it has revealed a poet at once less assured and more curious—above all, more interesting—than the one I had shunned.
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Heaney was born in 1939 on a farm in Northern Ireland, where work and life proceeded according to season, task, sun, and kerosene—an almost premodern relation to time. Many of Heaney’s poems limn the landscapes and rituals of his childhood in County Derry, but he fends off uncritical nostalgia by making apparent the labor and endurance it required: one feels the weight of things lifted, pulled, hewn, tilled.
But these poems are not just antipastorals; they dirty up some idea of “simpler place, simpler time” while reveling in the muck. “Churning Day” delights in “the plash and gurgle of the sour-breathed milk, / the pat and slap of small spades on wet lumps”—onomatopoeic lines that convey his pleasure in “the music of what happens” in ordinary life, whether that’s birdsong or the soft slip of potato peelings into a bowl.
“All children want to crouch in their secret nests,” Heaney wrote in an autobiographical essay. His hiding spots were “the fork of a beech tree at the head of our lane, the close thicket of a boxwood hedge,” “the soft, collapsing pile of hay in a back corner of the byre,” and “a hollow tree, with gnarled, spreading roots.” When he was very young, he got lost in a patch of peas for long enough that his parents launched a search, his name soaring over the “green web, a caul of veined light.”
The child hidden under vines or in a tree recurs throughout Heaney’s poetry. In his essay, as in his poems, the story ends with the boy on the brink of being found, an interrupted, ambiguous metamorphosis: Is this rescue or removal? These are the stakes when the poet digs beyond the safe and easy. Bringing to light “the buried shard” means embracing some amount of alienation from the social world. Writing great poems, as Heaney put it in his Nobel lecture, requires being “true to the impact of external reality” while remaining “sensitive to the inner laws of the poet’s being.”
For Heaney, this delicate (and dialectic) work begins in that child-sense of being caught on the edge of something ancient and inexplicable, “the vowel of earth / dreaming its root.” His lines often seem to be trying to get beyond, or get past, or get through. Whether he takes up a thatched roof, a settle bed, or an alder, he digs hard in that “earth,” straining for the truth of the thing.
Perhaps, above all, this means reaching into the past. The temporal frame in Heaney’s poetry is vast and cyclical: potato digging happens in the wake of “centuries / Of fear and homage to the famine god.” Closer at hand, Heaney’s poetic life tracks, with uncanny synchronicity, the development of modern Ireland, and his books respond to the ugly convulsions that birthed it. He writes, always, as an Irish poet and—whether willingly or not—as a political one.
Heaney, who came from a Catholic family, grew to adulthood in a period of relative political quiescence. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) waged a border campaign but had little success, and by the time it finished, the political movement was near defunct. Heaney earned a university degree, got married, became a father, and began writing and teaching while his home territory lay in “frozen violence,” to borrow a phrase from the historian and politician Conor Cruise O’Brien.
He studied a very English English literature curriculum at Queen’s University Belfast, but he read widely, including Irish poets like Patrick Kavanagh and John Montague, whose examples authorized inscribing rural Catholic life in verse. His experience in the Group, a workshop organized by Philip Hobsbaum, with members who went on to become the core of a Northern poetic renaissance, seemed to affirm for Heaney that he was, in fact, a poet, without imposing any single aesthetic or ideology. As Heaney once told two other members of the Group, “I’d like to write like you boys, but I have to do my own thing.”
That thing took initial shape in Death of a Naturalist (1966) and Door into the Dark (1969), two collections that sketch the world before the thaw. These poems reflect a climate of diffuse discrimination: under the Unionist majority, Catholics struggled to secure jobs and housing and were widely disenfranchised. They also faced prejudice and brutality from a largely Protestant police force that could, using the Special Powers Act of 1922, imprison people without charge.
“Even though there was no sectarian talk or prejudice at home,” Heaney said decades later, “there was still an indignation at the political status quo.” His early work peers into the frozen North’s shadows: cast-off children, hypocritical pieties, sectarian unease, intimacy with death. In “Dream,” from 1969, Heaney’s pen again becomes an excavating tool, exposing a sinister subtext in the farm’s mundane repetitions:
I was hacking a stalk
Thick as a telegraph pole.
My sleeves were rolled
And the air fanned cool past my arms
As I swung and buried the blade,
Then laboured to work it unstuck.
The next stroke
Found a man’s head under the hook.
Still, the “dark” Heaney explores in these volumes is, most of all, the country dark of deep water and lightless nights, not the dark reaches of human-on-human violence. The pen holstered in “Digging” is held lightly, almost flippantly.
The upheaval that ensued brought terror to the surface. Heaney described the period, which became known as the Troubles, as “a quarter century of life-waste and spirit-waste.” In the late 1960s, a nonviolent civil rights campaign was met with official, violent suppression, which ignited further protests, empowered loyalist paramilitary groups, and renewed the IRA. In the wake of Bloody Sunday in 1972, when the British Army shot at unarmed protesters in Derry and killed thirteen people, spasmodic violence became the norm.
As the Troubles worsened, Heaney seemed to seek literal distance from the oppressive atmosphere of conflict in the North; his poetry, meanwhile, had to contend with “surviving” or “cohabitating” with it, as he later told an interviewer. For him, this meant getting inside or underneath reportorial summaries or partisan talking points.
In 1970, Heaney left Ireland for a teaching stint at the University of California, Berkeley. There he received a reeducation in Irish literature from an American colleague with Irish heritage. This, and distance, seemed to provide fresh perspective; Heaney left with a “charged-up sense” of his “situation as a ‘Northern poet’ more in relation to the wound and the work of Ireland as a whole.” He returned first to Belfast, but in 1972 moved to the republic, taking up residence at Glanmore Cottage, in County Wicklow.
The relocation was not, he always took care to specify, flight from the North, but it did answer an inner need: he later characterized himself as “a wood-kerne // Escaped from the massacre.” In Wintering Out, published that same year, Heaney dwells on Northern sounds, like the place-name Broagh, with “that last / gh the strangers found / difficult to manage,” as if trying to reach below the known contours of the landscape through the words used to talk about it.
Similar etymological poems recur in later books, plumbing names and pronunciations for revelations about culture and history until the words nearly become places themselves. Although Heaney was culturally rather than devoutly Catholic, these explorations suggest, to me, the possibility of a linguistic Eden, a truth that lingers somewhere deep in the past.
In 1975, Heaney published a book titled, simply and chillingly, North—his most concentrated effort to make “work adequate to the terrors and wrongs” of the region. Some of the poems in the collection, such as the famous “Whatever You Say Say Nothing,” confront the events of Northern Ireland head-on, but others are more oblique, tunneling into a prehistory of violence, peopled by “neighborly, scoretaking / killers, haggers / and hagglers, gombeen-men.” (Those short, chopped, consonant-heavy lines are pure Heaney.)
The entire first section of the book ruminates on Iron Age “bog bodies,” corpses naturally preserved by the peat and exhumed approximately two thousand years later, in Denmark. In Heaney’s hands, this process of excavation becomes a means of reckoning with current events—and, at times, with the poet’s role in them. In “Punishment,” a young female bog body becomes an analogy for women tarred and feathered by the IRA for disloyalty. The speaker, another Heaney type, enters as an “artful voyeur” who, by the poem’s end, stands complicit with the executioners: he “understand[s] the exact / and tribal, intimate revenge.”
North, which became Heaney’s best-known collection, was rapturously received by many, but this sort of poetry elicited fierce criticism from Northern writers such as Edna Longley, who eviscerated Heaney’s identification with the “‘slightly aggravated young Catholic male,’” and accused him of “fence-sitting”—an artistic as well as political failure.
The poet Ciaran Carson saw danger in Heaney’s project of digging into the past to see the present: “It is as if he is saying, suffering like this is natural; these things have always happened; they happened then, they happen now, and that is sufficient ground for understanding and absolution.”
In 1970s Northern Ireland, unearthing the ancestral Viking North seemed to suggest that intercommunal violence was inescapable, even fated. If “each hooded victim, / slashed and dumped” was one more link in an old chain, historically and culturally encoded, then peace was not dream but delusion.
Reading North now, alongside the praise it garnered and lumps it took, I am inclined to a more sympathetic reading. These poems may express aggravation, but they also testify to exhaustion, as the revolutionary hopes of the late 1960s were sucked into a morass of despair. The volumes that followed North continue to probe this unsteady terrain, and the poet’s especially uneasy footing. There are many poems that do not take up public or social concerns: poems about oysters, butter, lupines, old suits, a stroke; the sinuous, sensitive Glanmore sonnets; love poems and poems infused by eros; elegies for father, mother, dead friends. But as Heaney writes in North’s closing poem, he was always “weighing and weighing / My responsible tristia.”
From within Heaney’s later work, you can hear the same accusations he heard from without. In “An Afterwards,” from Field Work (1979), a poet trapped in a Dantean hellscape is accosted by his wife, who seems to speak for Ireland as a whole: “You aspired to a kind, / Indifferent, faults-on-both-sides tact.” In “The Flight Path,” which appears in The Spirit Level (1996), Heaney dramatizes a real encounter with an IRA activist on a train. The other man comes out swinging: “‘When, for fuck’s sake, are you going to write / Something for us?’” The poet answers: “‘If I do write something, / Whatever it is, I’ll be writing for myself.’”
Heaney seemingly rejected propagandizing on behalf of a cause. More nationalist than republican, he was, above all, a humanist, sympathetic to individual suffering and “the eternal reciprocity of tears,” to use a line by Wilfred Owen that Heaney often cited. After an early poem, “Requiem for the Croppies,” was taken up as an IRA anthem, he stopped reading it aloud in public. Still, defiance did not come naturally. He had been “a prefect from St. Columb’s,” as he writes in a verse-epistle, and he expressed respect for institutions and authorities.
In his letters, he comes across as a man plagued by a wish to satisfy everyone. In 1983, Heaney published a poem, “An Open Letter,” objecting to his own inclusion in an anthology of British poets—a public stance that, his papers show, entailed much hand-wringing. Once it appeared, and quickly spread, he wrote to the editor to restore good relations. In “Weighing In,” also from The Spirit Level, he returns to the language of measuring to reprimand himself for his “principle of bearing, bearing up / And bearing out” rather than doing what the title says: “every now and then, just weighing in.”
But this internal tension, less fence-sitting than genuine precarity, like standing on a tightrope with no net beneath, is precisely where I locate Heaney’s real achievement as a political poet, or as a poet at all. It’s clear, throughout the work, that he isn’t fully, or consistently, sure what poetry can do in the face of violence. But by writing for himself—by both recording and resisting all the warring allegiances and sympathies he felt—he remained responsive to the unsteadiness of his context, and his political poems are more interesting, and more illuminating, because they refuse a static position.
In North, flickers of doubt about the power of language emerge. “The Ministry of Fear,” which pores over his childhood and adolescence in light of sectarian violence, retells two incidents in which a young Heaney is asked his name and gives, in different ways, the wrong one; when words come into contact with a difficult world, they go awry. In subsequent books, Heaney continues a practice of turning to other stories and other sources, as if digging through the archives for ground that will hold. But the myths and allusions he draws into his work often deepen that hovering “uncertainty” about poetic power.
In Station Island (1984), Heaney uses Dante’s Purgatorio as a kind of scaffolding for the collection; he had read the poet for the first time in the 1970s, and wrote that he responded deeply to “the way in which Dante could place himself in an historical world yet submit that world to scrutiny from a perspective beyond history.”
In the title poem, a poet encounters shades who, like Dante’s interlocutors, give their stories along with questions, reproofs, and counsel. When I first read “Station Island,” I marveled at how far from the assurance of “Digging” it seemed; it makes a drama of doubt. And yet it also displays a greater confidence by bringing so many voices, from the familial to the august, to grapple with vast communal problems. Among these voices, a relative murdered during the Troubles appears to castigate the poet for having “confused evasion and artistic tact” and “saccharined my death with morning dew”—a sugarcoating. The poem delves into the core of literary insecurity: the fear that language makes reality more tolerable but fails to accomplish anything more than beautifying what should, to be true, remain ugly.
James Joyce (sounding a lot more like Seamus Heaney than James Joyce) issues the last admonishment in “Station Island”:
Keep at a tangent.
When they make the circle wide, it’s time to swim
out on your own and fill the element
with signatures on your own frequency,
echo soundings, searches, probes, allurements,
elver-gleams in the dark of the whole sea.
I’ve returned to these specific lines many times to try to understand how, exactly, they should be understood. They have the ring of proper conclusion, yet the poem’s nested dialectics wind between one voice and another, question and answer, public speech and private inquiry, safe silence and risked expression. The lines echo Heaney’s oft-repeated skepticism of poems that reify common feelings, or that can be converted into propaganda. “To swim out on your own” does not mean leaving history or politics behind but, rather, engaging with the contest within, where real poems emerge. Here, I am reminded of the child enchanted by watery places, now an adult treading the watery reaches of knowledge, attuned to the shift and flow of conclusions that others may see as stone-hard and unvarying.
“Markings,” a poem from Seeing Things (1991), demonstrates how language itself can disturb the boundary between water and earth, vision and reality:
A mower parted the bronze sea of corn.
A windlass hauled the centre out of water.
Two men with a cross-cut kept it swimming
Into a felled beech backwards and forwards
So that they seemed to row the steady earth.
“Sea of corn” sweeps us into the metaphor smoothly enough, but then the details of fieldwork intrude, ensuring that the metaphor remains present. By keeping both imagined and actual in sight, the poem lifts clear of cliché. We end on a picture simultaneously ordinary and arresting: two men who you can believe, for an instant, are wielding oars, though you know they stand on solid earth. For Heaney, that instability, captured in the image that wavers even as it holds, is where poetic discovery begins.
Heaney once praised Miłosz for capturing “the stability of truth,” but I am more intrigued by the instabilities: not just the doubts and changes in perspective but also the troublesome relationship between the “smiling public man” and the child still hiding deep inside, seeking to return to the “lobe and larynx / of the mossy places.” The real Heaney, if the term can be ventured, seemed immured by his own poetry, able to reach its source only with difficulty. The penultimate poem in the new anthology, “The Latecomers,” appeared in Poetry Ireland Review in 2014, months after Heaney’s death, and captures both the toll and purpose of this hard work.
It draws an analogy between the poet and Jesus, which might seem like more of the swagger I’d initially disliked in Heaney if the tone weren’t so tired and beleaguered. While in the thick of performing miracles at crowded gatherings, Jesus is “hedged on every side, // Harried and responsive to their need.” He is also plagued by “the pain of loss / In the eyes of those his reach had failed to bless.”
Here is another story, told slant, about the artist in relation to society. “Exhaustion and the imperatives of love / Vied in him.” The poem, collected here for the first time, reminds us that there is a cost to the highest achievements of art, one the artist himself pays. What the truest poet digs up is what we might dare to call his soul.
https://yalereview.org/article/elisa-gonzalez-searching-for-seamus-heaney
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DID CLIMATE CHANGE CAUSE THE CURRENT (OCTOBER 2026) HEATWAVE?
More than 80 million people are under an Extreme Heat Warning or Heat Advisory through this week, according to the National Weather Service. Forecasters at the service's Weather Prediction Center called this latest heat dome a "steamy air-mass even by mid-to-late August standards."
Dangerous record-breaking heat will continue across the South-Central U.S. and expand into the Southwest by mid-week, bringing daytime temperatures into the triple digits. Much of the desert Southwest, including parts of Arizona and New Mexico, could also break heat records, according to the National Weather Service.
What's happening
This latest heat wave is expected to remain over much of the Southern Plains and Lower Mississippi Valley through the middle of this week, bringing temperatures well above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The Southwest will continue to warm through the end of the week where daytime highs could be upwards of 110 degrees or more.
It's not just the daytime temperatures that are high. The nights won't cool down, according to the National Weather Service. These prolonged high temperatures coupled with little relief overnight increase the risk of heat-related illnesses.
Scientists are increasingly able to make the connection between the extreme weather you're experiencing — in this case, heat — and climate change. They can also show by just how much. NPR's Rebecca Hersher has reported that the climate signal is especially strong with heat. She interviewed Michael Wehner, a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory where he studies extreme weather and the impact climate change has on that weather.
"For garden variety heat waves — like the hottest day of the year, or the hottest day every 10 years — in the U.S., climate change has increased that heat wave's temperature by 3 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit," Wehner explained.
Understanding the role of climate change
The impact of climate change on heat waves is well established by scientists, but it can be hard to figure out what's real and what's not when there's so much information.
Human-caused climate change is fueling longer and more intense heat waves in the U.S. and around the world, and it makes dangerously high temperatures more likely. In most weather coverage, journalists will make that connection clear.
Climate change, driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels, is making heat waves more frequent and more intense than in the past. The average number of heat waves the U.S. experiences today has doubled since the 1980s.
Heat records are being surpassed more frequently because the planet is warming. The most intense heat waves would be impossible without human-caused global warming.
For example, the extreme heat in Europe in June would be virtually impossible without human-caused climate change, according to scientists at the World Weather Attribution group.
On health and heat
Yes, temperatures will be hot, but pay attention to the heat index. That's what the temperature feels like to the human body when relative humidity is combined with the air temperature.
The country's current heat wave will put that index between 105-115 degrees for parts of southern Arizona as well as much of Texas, Louisiana and into northern Florida this week.
Heat-related deaths are undercounted, and heat is more deadly than hurricanes, wildfires and floods combined.
Humid heat is particularly dangerous because sweat doesn't evaporate when it's hot and humid, which means the body can't cool down.
Extreme weather isn't new, but what's different is how climate change intensifies and, in some cases, makes it more frequent.
https://www.npr.org/2026/08/25/nx-s1-5940053/heat-wave-extreme-forecast-climate
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WHY YOU KNOW YOU MATTER BUT YOU STILL DON’T BELIEVE IT
Growing up emotionally neglected installs a belief about your worth that no one said out loud.
Between psychology, medical science, and neuroscience, we have never known so much about the human mind. Recently, I've been amazed at the number and quality of studies that are showing us the amount of pure power our brains have—powers that are truly amazing. Powers that change the meaning of the old phrase, "Put your mind to it.”
In my psychology practice, I spent years with one particular group of people, and I always read these studies with them in mind. If you grew up with childhood emotional neglect, you may know in your head that you matter and still not believe it deep down, and I want to tell you that here is a reason for that.
1. Your body responds to what you expect. In a study by Ranganathan and colleagues (2004), a group of people who listened to guided imagery of themselves going through a strength training workout gained real strength without ever lifting a weight. Their muscles stayed nearly inactive while they trained. The gain came from the brain, which learned to send a stronger signal to the muscle.
It’s not only imagination that does this, but expectation does it too. Reviewing 20 experiments with athletes and exercisers, Chhabra and Szabo (2024) found that people who were told they had been given something to boost their performance, and were given nothing at all, still did better. In a smaller set of those studies, the reverse ran even stronger. People who expected to do worse did.
The Takeaway: Your brain is far more powerful than scientists ever knew. It is capable of building real strength and changing what you are able to do, by the sheer force of your belief and imagination.
2. Turn a weakness into a strength. A fascinating study by Wesnousky and colleagues (2015) found that when people believe there is an upside to their personality flaw, they begin to show it. For example, when subjects were told that they were impulsive, but that impulsiveness has the upside of being more creative, they then performed much more creatively on subsequent tests.
The Takeaway: Be careful what you believe about yourself because your brain will make it so.
3. Drastically improve performance, just by imagining it. Multiple studies have shown that from athletes to surgeons to musicians, repeatedly imagining oneself performing a complex task, vividly and with realistic detail, leads to greatly improved performance (Toth et al., 2020). Many who are called upon to conduct high-pressure performances use the power of their imaginations to excel and perfect their skills.
The Takeaway: Your imagination has the power to significantly improve your ability to perform a complex task.
As a psychologist whose business is helping people change, I am not surprised by these findings. Every day I see people harness their brain powers to make profound changes in their personalities, their relationships, and their lives.
Why This Matters if You Grew Up Emotionally Neglected
Look at that second takeaway again, because it describes childhood emotional neglect exactly.
When your parents don't notice or respond enough to your feelings, they are usually saying nothing at all. But you receive a message anyway, and it’s a subtle but powerful one: “Your feelings don't matter, and neither, perhaps, do you.” No one ever says it directly to you. You absorb it, and you grow up quietly knowing it about yourself.
Then your brain does what these studies say it does; it makes it so. And since the expectation you were handed was not a hopeful one, you go quiet in a room where you have something to say. You apologize for needing anything. Or you call yourself selfish for having a feeling.
Does any of that sound familiar?
If so, do not worry; there is a positive side to all this. The good news is that the power of your brain can work in both directions. For years it has worked against you, using those negative messages your parents gave you to make you feel that your needs don’t matter. But now, you can start giving your powerful brain something new and different.
How to Use the Power of Your Own Brain
Own your power to change. Many people use their own power against themselves. If you believe that you cannot change, your brain will make it so. It is vital to flip that false notion on its head. Claim your power. Own it, and start using it.
Decide how you want to be different, and then vividly imagine yourself that way. For example, if you want to become more confident, repeatedly picture yourself confidently presenting at a work meeting, or self-assuredly walking through a crowd. Combine this mental practice with actual practice in real situations. Your progress will likely be faster.
Believe in yourself. Many fine people walk around this world feeling unworthy, invalid, or invisible. Others may feel unlovable, anxious, angry, or hopeless. If any of these words describe you, you can begin to use the power of your brain. Picture yourself in vivid color, exuding confidence and strength. Imagine yourself being and owning who you truly are. See that you are worthy and that you bring value to those around you.
If that third one feels like the hardest, that is worth knowing rather than worrying about.
Start small if you need to.
None Are as Important as You
Of all of the things in this world that you can believe in, none are as important as you.
So make a conscious decision. Wish it, believe it, imagine it. Your brain can make it so.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/childhood-emotional-neglect/202609/why-you-know-you-matter-but-still-dont-believe-it
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NEW RESEARCH ON SUICIDE PREVENTION
The 988 Suicide and Crisis Helpline has proven highly effective.
Suicide is a universally acknowledged global problem, and one that affects people across all age groups, social backgrounds, and economic circumstances. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), over 700 thousand people die by suicide each year, and suicide is the third leading cause of death in 15-29-year-olds and, overall, the 10th leading cause of death in the US.
Since 2008, when September was declared Suicide Prevention Awareness Month, organizations such as the International Organization for Suicide Prevention and The National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention (Action Alliance) have devoted efforts and resources to ending the culture of silence, raising awareness around prevention and support, and guiding individuals who are struggling toward effective interventions and treatments, as well as those who are living with the long-term impacts of the suicide of a loved one.
A promising statistic amid persistent concerns
According to research published in The Lancet in 2025, while suicide remains an urgent and serious global health issue, there has been a decline (of 39.5%) in suicides globally since 1990. Despite this decline, suicide persists as “a leading cause of death of young people in many areas of the world.”
Hotlines prove a valuable resource for adolescents and young adults
New research reveals the positive impact of suicide prevention among adolescents and young people since the inception of the 988 Suicide and Crisis Helpline in 2022, with rates dropping “11 percent below projections,” and decreasing most strongly in states with “higher volumes of answered calls,” according to an April 2026 New York Times article.
Small joys and suicide prevention
Research led by Philip Resnik, a computational linguist in the Department of Linguistics and Institute for Advanced Computer Studies at the University of Maryland, was published in July of 2026 and examined over 16,648 self-reports of individuals who had struggled with suicidal thoughts and shared their reasons to live. Research cited several categories as suicide deterrents, including concern for loved ones and pets, appreciation of small pleasures like food, music, and leisure activities, and anticipation of, and awareness of, the possibility of conditions improving in the future.
Effective restrictions to means
A systematic review of suicide means restrictions, including jumping restrictions, restrictions on package sizing of medications, restrictions of access to pesticides and pesticide bans, and the detoxification of fuels, showed promising results.
Small sample sizes limited results on restricting access to firearms. However, research from Weill Cornell Medicine and UC Berkeley School of Public Health that examined data from Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, and Rhode Island cited positive outcomes of temporary firearms restrictions for individuals at high risk of self-harm.
Promising new predictive research on the horizon
Highly anticipated research, led by suicide-prevention researcher Matthew K. Nock, Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, slated for publication in October of 2026, will introduce a new and highly effective model that accurately predicts both suicidal crises and actual suicide attempts a week in advance.
If you or someone you know is in crisis It is important to know that you are not alone … and it is important to seek help.
If you or someone you know is struggling with dark thoughts of having to escape or self-harm, there are emergency resources and mental health professionals standing by to help you.
Mental Health & Crisis Resources
If you or someone you know is in immediate danger or experiencing a medical emergency, call 911 or go to the nearest emergency department.
USA 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline Call or text: 988. Free, confidential crisis support is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Crisis Text Line Text HOME to 741741. Free, 24/7 emotional support from a trained crisis counselor.
SAMHSA National Helpline
1-800-662-4357 (HELP). Free, confidential, 24/7 information, support, and treatment referrals for mental health and substance-use concerns.
Disaster Distress Helpline
Call or text: 1-800-985-5990
24/7 crisis counseling for emotional distress related to natural or human-caused disasters.
*
WHY WE ARE NO WISER THAN OUR ANCESTORS
Caspar Friedrich: Wanderer above a Sea of Fog
Wisdom is not knowledge but perspective: seeing causes, connections, consequences, and limits.
Modern life gives us more information but less opportunity to understand what it means.
Wisdom requires the courage to see difficult truths, especially about ourselves.
Wisdom begins with the willingness to hear difficult truths, especially about ourselves. Our problem is not merely that we are no wiser than our ancestors; in many ways, we are less wise.
One reason for this is that we have abandoned wisdom as an ideal. The word "wisdom" appears 222 times in the Old Testament, and "philosophy" in the original Greek literally means "the love of wisdom." But today, anyone who speaks seriously about wisdom risks sounding pompous or ridiculous—like me right now.
We admire intelligence, productivity, and innovation because they can be measured and monetized. Wisdom, however, is quieter, and often goes against the grain.
What Wisdom Is
Because we've replaced wisdom with expertise, we confuse the one with the other. But if wisdom simply amounted to knowledge, learning the name of every river and mountain in the world would make us wise, and every modern school-leaver would be wiser than a Socrates or a Seneca. Socrates was declared the wisest of men not because he knew everything, but because he knew the extent of what he did not know.
Aristotle had a different take from us. He said that wisdom is the understanding of causes: The wise person knows not merely that something is, but why it is. Wisdom consists in seeing the relations between things, for example, the immediate action and its distant consequences, or the present moment and the shape of an entire life. It’s not so much a kind of knowledge but a way of seeing, or ways of seeing.
Why We Lack Wisdom
If, as Aristotle suggests, wisdom is perspective, our lack of wisdom becomes easier to explain. Today, knowledge is increasingly specialized and compartmentalized. Nobody is responsible for assembling the fragments or asking what they are for. There is no job description for someone like me, who falls between the cracks.
In addition, we suffer from an overload of information. We’re always checking our phones, flitting from fragment to fragment, and living in abstract bubbles. Our ancestors may have known far less, but they were exposed to the rain and the wind: to nature, mortality, connection… to the things that can give us perspective.
Although, to be fair, our ancestors too struggled with wisdom. Wisdom derives from the Indo-European root, weid-, "to see." In Norse mythology, Odin sacrifices one eye at Mimir’s well in exchange for a higher kind of vision. Later, he hangs for nine nights from the world tree, pierced by his own spear, to win the runes. That’s the kind of courage that wisdom demands: the courage to want and see what no one else wants and sees.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ataraxia/202609/why-we-are-no-wiser-than-our-ancestors
*
WHAT IS LOVE? ROMANTIC LOVE INHERITED MANY OF THE EXPECTATIONS ONCE PLACED UPON RELIGION.
Asking one person to provide everything makes disappointment inevitable.
Love enlarges one's world; dependency asks another person to fill it.
Still life with Lobster by Jan de Heem
To grow, the lobster must first shed its shell.
When worldly ambition fails to validate us, we often turn to romantic love. We rely on another person to lend our life weight and meaning. First, we ask the crowd; then, we ask one person.
The Greeks had several words for love: eros, philia, storge, and agape. Eros is passionate love, philia is friendship, storge is familial love, and agape is universal love. But we reduce all these types of love into just one word, which we associate with romantic love.
The Rise of Romantic Love
What we don’t realize is that romantic love, unlike passionate love, is a fairly modern concept. If you think about it, romantic love barely features in the 73 books of the Bible. The Bible’s greatest love stories are David and Jonathan, Ruth and Naomi, and, above all, the love of man for God. In the ancient world, passionate love was not seen as ennobling but as a dangerous affliction: think only of Helen and Paris, Dido and Aeneas, Antony and Cleopatra.
How, then, did this dangerous affliction become our highest ideal? As religion retreated, our need for the religious remained. We still longed for meaning and transcendence. Gradually, the sacred seeped out of God and into romantic love. We stopped loving God and started loving love.
That’s why love speaks the language of religion: adoration, devotion, eternal union… We expect one person to provide us with everything that God and everyone provided us with—until death do us part.
What Love Really Is
But once a person is given the role of God, disappointment becomes inevitable. When things go wrong, we conclude that we chose the wrong person, or that love has died—not that we are asking far too much.
This brings us back to the original question: what is love? Beneath all its forms—eros, philia, storge, agape—love is a reaching out beyond ourselves towards someone or something that lends weight and meaning to our life. It is the force that enables us to cross the boundary between ourselves and the world—like the lobster, to shed our shell and grow beyond it. That’s why people of little love are so small.
This definition gives us a litmus test by which to distinguish love from mere dependency. We can ask: Is this person enlarging my world, or am I merely asking them to save me from myself? Are we merely leaning against one another, or growing together?
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ataraxia/202609/what-is-love
*
WHY WABI-SABI IS THE BEST PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE
The Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi is about noticing and appreciating imperfection, impermanence, and the understated beauty in everyday life. Embracing the principles of wabi-sabi might be the radical act of rebellion you need to break free from the clutches of our hyperproductive, individualistic, and perfection-obsessed world.
Incorporating a practice of wabi-sabi into one’s life entails, through repeated reinforcement, treating cracks, wear-and-tear, and the passage of time not as flaws, but as the core of what makes life beautiful and meaningful.
For example, replacing a broken drawer knob with a personally crafted crochet pull isn’t just fixing a problem; it’s an act of giving your furniture a beautifully asymmetric touch, adding character and a special one-of-a-kind feeling to it. Similarly, the freckles on your face aren’t blemishes that need to be concealed with makeup; they are their own kind of embellishment for you to wear proudly.
1. Wabi-Sabi Reduces Perfectionism and Anxiety
A classic 2004 study found that maladaptive perfectionism — unrealistic self-standards and harsh self-criticism — is strongly associated with a fear of intimacy. This finding was echoed in multiple research efforts. The link, reinforced many times, also seems to reflect the same core reason: perfectionists often believe that if their “flaws” are exposed, they’ll be rejected.
Wabi-sabi directly challenges that fear. By embracing imperfection and seeing beauty in brokenness or asymmetry, wabi-sabi encourages a more compassionate, accepting view of the world within and without. From a relational perspective, this can loosen the grip of perfectionism and lower the walls that one might use unconsciously to prevent deep connection.
Perfectionism, as we know, can fuel chronic stress, procrastination, and self-doubt. Wabi-sabi, as the antidote to perfection, encourages embracing flaws in ourselves, others, and the world around us. For instance, rather than obsessing over a spotless home or flawless work presentation, noticing the charm in a chipped mug or a handwritten note can shift our perspective from judgment to appreciation.
2. Wabi-Sabi Encourages Emotional Resilience
To a first-timer or a hard-boiled productivity junkie, wabi-sabi can almost feel like a philosophy of “giving up.” Why else would someone embrace imperfection if not to shirk off their “responsibility” to not settle for anything less than perfection?
This, of course, couldn’t be further from the truth about wabi-sabi. The essence of this philosophy lies in acceptance — holding ambiguity, change, and aging with openness rather than resistance. And modern psychology tends to agree. According to the most recent research, accepting difficult emotions and experiences is one of the clearest signs of a healthy emotion regulation system; the cultivation of wabi-sabi in one’s life can aid this.
Recent neuropsychological research also supports this theory. A 2023 study of the brain structures of “high accepters” (people who habitually use acceptance) found that their brain networks linked to emotional regulation differed significantly from “low accepters.” This suggests that consistent acceptance is not just a feel-good strategy; it also has measurable neural correlates and is tied to better well-being and increased openness to new experiences.
Wabi-sabi’s ethos aligns closely with this correlation. In the simplest terms, the philosophy gently nudges us to lean into change, instead of constantly trying to fight it. In addition to this, it also asks us to honor the scars we may have endured in the process, rather than trying to erase or reduce them. When these two learnings fuse over time, we are left with mental and emotional resilience, which signals both beauty and strength.
3. Wabi-Sabi Doesn’t Equate Beauty with Perfection
Wabi-sabi teaches that beauty often resides in the “patina” of age — in scars, weathering, and the marks left by time. And this tenet of the philosophy resonates with positive psychology’s perspectives on meaning and growth. According to both, things that endure, change, or age well often carry deeper significance than those that stay flawless.
In design and wellness contexts, embracing this principle can encourage sustainability, while also delaying the impulse to discard what’s “worn out.” A 2024 design-aesthetic paper explored how wabi-sabi is being adopted in sustainable ceramic design, arguing that its acceptance of imperfection supports more environmentally conscious product-making.
Psychologically, when we see ourselves and our lives as works in progress, we make room for patience, humility, and long-term growth. Imperfection, in this way, becomes not a flaw, but an important inflection point or milestone of our story.
On a personal aesthetic level, wrinkles, sun spots, and the fading colors of our irises are all signs of our beauty evolving, not devolving. Eventually, with the help of this philosophy, we can curb our urge to pick at and criticize our faces and bodies for showing signs of merely existing and living in this world.
How to Practice Wabi-Sabi Daily
Wabi-sabi, as abstract as it may sound, can be incorporated into daily life in several practical ways. Here are a few suggestions to inspire you and get you started on your journey toward hard-earned imperfection:
Celebrate small imperfections. Make a conscious effort to notice the charm in a cracked mug, frayed sweater, or weathered book. Imperfections tell stories and create unique characters.
Slow down and observe. Take a moment to engage your senses and absorb the omnipresent beauty around you. Feel textures, watch natural light, listen to ambient sounds, and pay attention to details you would otherwise overlook.
Simplify your environment. Keep what feels meaningful or beautiful preserved in its imperfection, instead of trying to replace it or conceal it. Minimalism paired with wabi-sabi can promote calm and clarity.
Focus on the process, not on perfection. In cooking, art, or work, prioritize enjoyment and learning over flawless results. The act itself, not just the result, can be meditative and fulfilling.
Embrace life’s impermanence. Accept change, aging, and transitions as natural and unique experiences life has to offer. Recognize that time adds (and doesn’t subtract) beauty to objects, relationships, and experiences.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/social-instincts/202512/why-wabi-sabi-is-the-best-philosophy-of-life
*
HEART OF THE BEAST: A MOVING SURVIVAL TALE OR CONTRIVED DRAMA?
Here is a surprisingly negative review:
Heart of the Beast is guilty of being overly sappy, tugging at our heartstrings in ways that are contrived. The film may give us a genuine friendship between two clearly traumatized beings, but it weaponizes our emotions to tell a very bare-bones story that doesn’t have much going for it. It all leads to a tearjerker ending that is equal parts tender, unearned, and forced.
Directed by David Ayer and written by Cameron Alexander, the story follows retired Special Forces veteran James Belmont (Brad Pitt) and his German Shepherd, Odin, through the wilderness after Belmont crashes their plane while experiencing a heart attack. Despite a small appearance from J.K. Simmons as Watkins at the start of the film, Belmont and Odin are entirely alone for the remainder of its runtime. Occasional flashbacks, though wholly unnecessary, underscore not only Belmont but Odin’s combat trauma. They only have each other as they face rough terrain, wolves, and a precarious walk over dangerous waters.
It’s not that the film doesn’t have its moments; some of the story’s emotional ploys certainly worked on me. There are even harrowing scenes that will catch your breath, making us wonder whether either dog or man will survive to the end. But tearing up as Belmont waxes poetic about Odin — in what is simultaneously one of the best parts of the film and complete overkill — does not make a strong film. Heart of the Beast makes sure to put Belmont and Odin through everything one can think of while walking through an unknown wilderness, including Odin facing off with a bear, but waiting for something to happen amid the perils of their surroundings isn’t enough to sustain the film.
It’s clearly a love letter to dogs and the loyalty and companionship they provide humans, and that, on its own, can be very powerful. As a film, however, Heart of the Beast falters because its attempts at being heartfelt don’t come across as authentic. Anyone with a soft spot for dogs will surely love Odin, yet nearly every beat of the film seems primed to milk the pair’s relationship in exchange for our own loyalty and emotional investment without putting in much effort. It’s a journey that simply doesn’t resonate in the way it’s meant to, and I often felt forced into feeling something the film was only halfhearted about conveying.
The overreliance on the flashbacks to do the story’s work while also pulling its emotional weight highlights how little depth this film has. Not only are the flashbacks ugly to look at, but they actually take us out of the film. Heart of the Beast also asks us to lean into what can only be described as marginal military propaganda, while using a yellow filter for its combat flashbacks (in 2026 no less), without question, simply because a man loves his dog so much as to brave the unknown with him. That’s a bit lazy. A survival story following a man and his dog without the extra baggage would have been enough on its own.
The film is focused, but it also dawdles a bit, with a score that only soars in its most pivotal moment and is otherwise unnoticeable. There are instances of intensity, but Ayer can’t hold onto it long enough for it to be entirely effective. On the surface, it looks like a harrowing, impactful journey through the wilderness, but it needed a lot more effort to fill in the thin outline of its story. What we’re left with is an occasionally engaging film that desperately needed an influx of sincerity to work, but settles for overly engineered emotional drama.
**
Let’s look at a more positive review:
There are many ways to test a man's survival instincts. Drop him in the middle of nowhere, take away his food, strand him miles from civilization, throw a bear into the equation and, for good measure, add a pack of wolves.
Heart of the Beast has all the ingredients of that kind of survival thriller. But its most dangerous move is introducing Odin, a German Shepherd with soulful eyes and impeccable timing.
Warning: if you are emotionally susceptible to dogs, carry tissues. Preferably the industrial-sized pack.
Directed by David Ayer and written by Cameron Alexander, Heart of the Beast follows James Belmont (Brad Pitt), a retired Special Forces veteran who has chosen a life of solitude in the Alaskan wilderness. His closest companion is Odin (Uber), a former combat dog who served alongside him.
Their shared history is important, but the film wisely doesn't rush to explain every detail of it. Instead, it lets their familiarity speak for itself: the way Odin responds to James, the way James instinctively looks after him, and the quiet understanding between them suggest years of experiences that neither needs to put into words.
James and Odin have fashioned a strangely peaceful existence out of what they have left behind. There is no bustling social circle, no grand retirement plan and very little human contact. There is simply James, his dog and the vast wilderness around them. It is almost comically solitary, but there is comfort in it too.
That calm is eventually shattered, forcing the pair into an arduous journey through the Alaskan wilderness. Injured and far from civilization, James has to draw on his military experience while Odin becomes much more than a companion. Their journey puts their physical endurance — and their extraordinary bond — to the test.
The basic structure is familiar, and the film doesn't disguise that. The wilderness keeps throwing obstacles at the pair, from dangerous terrain to encounters with wild animals. At times, the sheer number of threats can feel almost amusingly relentless.
Yet the film's appeal isn't really in asking whether James and Odin will survive the next ten minutes. It is in making us care about what survival means to them.
James is not introduced as a conventional action hero. Pitt plays him as someone who has already lived through his most violent years and has no particular desire to return to them. He is physically capable, certainly, but the character carries an exhaustion that makes his strength feel believable.
Pitt's performance is strongest when he stops trying to be impressive. James doesn't need to deliver stirring speeches about courage or sacrifice. His relationship with Odin does most of the talking. A touch, a glance, a quiet moment beside the dog these are the scenes in which Pitt communicates the most.
And Odin is an extraordinary screen presence.
The film could easily have turned the dog into a sentimental device, but Odin is given enough personality to feel like a genuine character. His physical scars tell us that his past was violent, while his behavior around James reveals a remarkable degree of trust. He isn't simply following his owner through the wilderness. He watches him, responds to him and, at crucial moments, appears to understand exactly what James needs.
This is where the film's more interesting ideas emerge. Both James and Odin have been shaped by combat, and both carry the effects of those experiences into their isolated life together. The screenplay hints at a deeper story about trauma, grief and companionship, but doesn't always explore those ideas as fully as it could. Just when the film seems ready to sit with its emotional material, another survival challenge arrives.
As a result, Heart of the Beast occasionally feels like two films competing for attention: a straightforward wilderness thriller and a quieter story about two traumatized veterans trying to build a life after war.
The latter is considerably more interesting.
The action, however, is handled with enough urgency to keep the survival story entertaining. The physical set pieces have genuine force, and the encounters with wild animals provide several tense moments. The wilderness consistently feels like a formidable opponent.
There are many ways to test a man's survival instincts. Drop him in the middle of nowhere, take away his food, strand him miles from civilization, throw a bear into the equation and, for good measure, add a pack of wolves.
Heart of the Beast has all the ingredients of that kind of survival thriller. But its most dangerous move is introducing Odin, a German Shepherd with soulful eyes and impeccable timing.
Warning: if you are emotionally susceptible to dogs, carry tissues. Preferably the industrial-sized pack.
Directed by David Ayer and written by Cameron Alexander, Heart of the Beast follows James Belmont (Brad Pitt), a retired Special Forces veteran who has chosen a life of solitude in the Alaskan wilderness. His closest companion is Odin (Uber), a former combat dog who served alongside him.
Their shared history is important, but the film wisely doesn't rush to explain every detail of it. Instead, it lets their familiarity speak for itself: the way Odin responds to James, the way James instinctively looks after him, and the quiet understanding between them suggest years of experiences that neither needs to put into words.
James and Odin have fashioned a strangely peaceful existence out of what they have left behind. There is no bustling social circle, no grand retirement plan and very little human contact. There is simply James, his dog and the vast wilderness around them. It is almost comically solitary, but there is comfort in it too.
That calm is eventually shattered, forcing the pair into an arduous journey through the Alaskan wilderness. Injured and far from civilization, James has to draw on his military experience while Odin becomes much more than a companion. Their journey puts their physical endurance — and their extraordinary bond — to the test.
The basic structure is familiar, and the film doesn't disguise that. The wilderness keeps throwing obstacles at the pair, from dangerous terrain to encounters with wild animals. At times, the sheer number of threats can feel almost amusingly relentless.
Yet the film's appeal isn't really in asking whether James and Odin will survive the next ten minutes. It is in making us care about what survival means to them.
James is not introduced as a conventional action hero. Pitt plays him as someone who has already lived through his most violent years and has no particular desire to return to them. He is physically capable, certainly, but the character carries an exhaustion that makes his strength feel believable.
Pitt's performance is strongest when he stops trying to be impressive. James doesn't need to deliver stirring speeches about courage or sacrifice. His relationship with Odin does most of the talking. A touch, a glance, a quiet moment beside the dog — these are the scenes in which Pitt communicates the most.
And Odin is an extraordinary screen presence.
The film could easily have turned the dog into a sentimental device, but Odin is given enough personality to feel like a genuine character. His physical scars tell us that his past was violent, while his behavior around James reveals a remarkable degree of trust. He isn't simply following his owner through the wilderness. He watches him, responds to him and, at crucial moments, appears to understand exactly what James needs.
This is where the film's more interesting ideas emerge. Both James and Odin have been shaped by combat, and both carry the effects of those experiences into their isolated life together. The screenplay hints at a deeper story about trauma, grief and companionship, but doesn't always explore those ideas as fully as it could. Just when the film seems ready to sit with its emotional material, another survival challenge arrives.
As a result, Heart of the Beast occasionally feels like two films competing for attention: a straightforward wilderness thriller and a quieter story about two traumatized veterans trying to build a life after war.
The latter is considerably more interesting.
The action, however, is handled with enough urgency to keep the survival story entertaining. The physical set pieces have genuine force, and the encounters with wild animals provide several tense moments. The wilderness consistently feels like a formidable opponent.
The visual effects are less consistent. Some of the animal work blends smoothly into the film, while other sequences look noticeably digital. The artificiality is especially distracting when the movie wants us to believe that James and Odin are in mortal danger. The more convincing threat is often Pitt's battered body and the landscape itself.
And what a landscape it is. The wilderness gives the film its scale, but Ayer doesn't constantly photograph it as a postcard. The mountains and rivers can look beautiful one moment and deeply threatening the next. The silence is just as important as the danger. There are stretches where James and Odin simply move through the landscape, and those moments give the film some of its most welcome breathing room.
Ayer's direction is at its best in those pauses. He allows the relationship between the two to develop without drowning it in dialogue or music.
There is also something refreshing about Pitt allowing the film to make him look his age. After seeing him in larger-than-life roles, watching him play someone who is genuinely battered and vulnerable gives the performance an intimacy that a conventional action turn might not have had.
And what a landscape it is. The wilderness gives the film its scale, but Ayer doesn't constantly photograph it as a postcard. The mountains and rivers can look beautiful one moment and deeply threatening the next. The silence is just as important as the danger. There are stretches where James and Odin simply move through the landscape, and those moments give the film some of its most welcome breathing room.
James isn't a superhero. He gets tired. He gets hurt. He struggles. And sometimes, his only reason to keep moving is standing on four legs beside him.
That is ultimately where Heart of the Beast finds its emotional footing.
It isn't particularly interested in reinventing survival cinema. Its story occasionally follows well-worn paths, and its screenplay leaves some of its more intriguing psychological ideas underdeveloped. But the bond at its center gives the film a warmth that its bleak setting desperately needs.
Heart of the Beast may arrive dressed as a survival thriller, but beneath the bruises, blood, snow and CGI wolves is a remarkably simple story about loyalty. It doesn't always explore its ideas with the depth they deserve, but when it gets James and Odin right, the film lands with surprising force.
And if you make it through without reaching for those tissues, congratulations. Odin has clearly met his match.
https://www.ndtv.com/entertainment/heart-of-the-beast-review-brad-pitt-and-his-four-legged-co-star-make-this-survival-drama-worth-the-journey-3-stars-12100494
And, why not, let’s go to some all-out praise:
***
It’s an adventure movie.
It’s a dramatic film.
It’s a man-against-the-wilderness story.
But, most of all, “Heart of the Beast” is a tale of love – not the romantic kind of love, but the kind of love only a person and a loyal dog can share. If you ever have known the love of a dog, you will understand every frame of this movie. It’s one of the most moving films of 2026.
Director David Ayer, who directed Brad Pitt in “Fury,” knows how to draw emotion from the actor.
Pitt stars here as James, a former Special Forces soldier who is retired after seeing action in Iraq and Afghanistan. He goes camping in the woods with his beloved former combat dog, Odin, who is the only other living creature who shares James’ life.
Both of them carry scars from their experiences. Odin’s are visible on his face. The canine also has titanium teeth and an artificial leg. Both suffer from nightmares, in which they relive the horrors of combat.
James camps out with Odin, who goes with him when he fly-fishes. Both are contented to share the other’s company. So when a stranger (JK Simmons) arrives and wants to chat, both the man and the dog are wary.
A storm is on its way, so James and Odin take off, only to have the plane crash. And there they are, miles from anywhere, both injured and with no help in sight.
Cameron Alexander’s screenplay has some surprises in store, for the characters as well as the audience.
All the way through, the love between James and Odin is obvious, reflected in James’ dialogue and tender care-taking of Odin. As for the dog – and as a tribute to director Ayer – you can see the dog’s love for James in the canine’s eyes. Talk about chemistry – these two have it.
Hike out to see this wonderful adventure, and pack some tissues in you pocket.
4 stars
Rated PG-13 for scenes of severe injuries, and foul language.
Running time: One hour and 41 minutes.
In theaters.
https://www.ourquadcities.com/news/local-news/cook-review-love-between-man-and-dog-is-core-of-heart-of-the-beast-adventure/
Oriana: WARNING: SPOILER ALERT
Two things are glaringly wrong with this otherwise deeply engaging movie: the title and the ending. The word “beast” in the title will make people assume that this is yet another horror flick littering movie screens, particularly in the month of Halloween. And of course it’s no way to refer to a beautiful, loving and intelligent German shepherd. Maybe it’s a trivial point, but “beast” starts the movie on the wrong note.
A more important matter is the ending. A man-and-dog story is usually a family movie, and there is no need to frighten and sadden children who might watch it. A movie of this sort is basically required to have a happy ending. A survival drama needs to demonstrate survival. There is no need for the battered human protagonist to die. A quick suggested plot change: Have James collapse close to the highway. The dog, Odin, hearing the sound of traffic, races to reach the road (and indeed the movie has the dog run at full speed — precisely because the dog understands that the sound of traffic means humans, and humans mean rescue.) Once on the highway, the smart and brave animal obstructs a vehicle until the driver stops and gets out of the truck. Odin then leads the driver to his wounded human — in time to call for a helicopter evacuation to the nearest hospital. James survives, saved by his dog.
Someone might object that this kind of happy ending is unrealistic — but who says that movies have to be realistic? The movie is not based on a real story. Besides, both James and his dog have already survived so many dangers, including both combat and a wild mountain stream, that one more miracle wouldn’t surprise the viewers. It would make everyone happy — and what’s wrong with that?
*
THE WORLD’S FIRST EMPIRE
Roughly 4,300 years ago, a humble royal cupbearer overthrew his king and conquered the independent city-states of Mesopotamia, forging humanity's very first empire: the Akkadian Empire.
While ancient Egypt had unified the Nile Valley earlier, it was largely a single cultural and geographic entity. An empire is defined by a central authority subjugating and ruling over distinct, previously independent nations. The Sumerians in southern Mesopotamia had built sophisticated cities like Uruk and Ur, but they operated as autonomous rivals that frequently warred over land and water rights.
That cupbearer was Sargon of Akkad. Starting around 2334 BCE, he consolidated control over the south before pushing his armies outward into the Levant, Elam (modern-day Iran), and parts of Anatolia.
To maintain control over such a massive territory, the Akkadians invented administrative systems that became the blueprint for future empires. They standardized weights and measures to monopolize trade, replaced local rulers with loyal Akkadian-speaking governors, and established the first known postal system using clay tablets carried by relay riders.
Though the Akkadian Empire collapsed after about 150 years due to severe drought and foreign invasions, its legacy was permanent. Sargon established the template for imperial rule, and the Akkadian language he spread remained the diplomatic lingua franca of the ancient Near East for more than a thousand years.
At its height around 2280 BCE, the Akkadian Empire stretched from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea. ~ SepiaGlyphs, Quora
Akkadia continued through Babylon and Assyria, both being Akkadian speaking successor states. ~ Norman NoMates
*
AUTISM IS A POLYGENIC CONDITION
Autism is up to 80% heritable, yet only 15-20% of autistic people have children. By the ruthless math of natural selection, the condition should have vanished millennia ago.
The resolution to this paradox lies in the fact that there is no single "autism gene." Autism is highly polygenic, meaning it is influenced by thousands of distinct genetic variants. In small doses, these genes are not just harmless—they are highly advantageous.
This concept is known as the Broad Autism Phenotype (BAP). Many neurotypical people carry a subset of these genetic variants, which often manifest as an intense ability to focus, strong pattern recognition, and a highly analytical or "systematizing" mind. The humans who could sit still for hours figuring out how to chip the perfect flint hand-axe, track animal migration patterns, or build complex tools provided an immense survival advantage to their tribes. Natural selection actively selects for these genes in the broader population.
It is only when two people with high numbers of these variants have children together—a phenomenon called assortative mating, which is notably common in modern technical and academic hubs—that the combined genetic load may push their offspring past the clinical threshold for an autism diagnosis. The genes persist because they are overwhelmingly carried and passed down by neurotypical people who reproduce at standard rates.
Furthermore, a significant portion of autism cases are not inherited at all. Genomic sequencing has revealed that many cases, particularly those involving intellectual disability or severe developmental delays, are caused by de novo mutations. These are spontaneous, random genetic alterations that occur in the sperm or egg just before conception. Because these mutations arise anew in each generation, they continuously introduce autism-linked variants into the population entirely independent of anyone's reproductive success.
DNA methylation adds methyl groups to the DNA molecule, altering gene activity without changing the underlying sequence. Thousands of subtle genetic and epigenetic variations contribute to the broad autism phenotype. ~ VitalSign, Quora
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HOW EXERCISE BOOSTS THE BRAIN AND IMPROVES MENTAL HEALTH
Runners in Hawaii exercise at sunset. Exercise has profound effects on brain structure and provides more subtle mental health benefits as well.
Mental health disorders such as depression and anxiety aren’t easy to treat. Medications help many but have a high failure rate and may bring nasty side effects. Talk therapy is time-consuming and expensive. And neither approach is suited to preventing the disorders from developing in the first place. But many people overlook another option that, when it works, can be one of the most effective, least disruptive and cheapest ways of managing mental health disorders: exercise.
It’s hardly news that exercise is good for your physical health, and has long been extolled for mental health as well. But researchers are now making progress in understanding how, exactly, exercise may work its mental magic.
Exercise, they are learning, has profound effects on brain structure itself, and especially in regions most affected by depression and schizophrenia. It also provides other, more subtle benefits such as focus, a sense of accomplishment and sometimes social stimulation, all of which are therapeutic in their own right. And while more is generally better, even modest levels of physical activity, such as a daily walk, can pay big dividends for mental health.
“It’s a very potent intervention to be physically active,” says Anders Hovland, a clinical psychologist at the University of Bergen in Norway.
But that knowledge has barely begun to percolate into practice, says Joseph Firth, a mental health researcher at the University of Manchester in the UK. Just ask a hundred people receiving mental health care how many are getting exercise prescriptions as part of that care. “You wouldn’t find many,” Firth says.
Exercise — a tool against depression
Some of the strongest evidence for the mental benefits of exercise centers on depression. In 2016, Hovland and his colleagues searched the published literature and identified 23 clinical trials that tested the effectiveness of exercise in treating depression. Exercise was clearly effective and, in few studies, on par with antidepressant drugs, the researchers concluded.
And exercise offers several advantages. For one thing, antidepressant medications generally take several weeks or months to show their full effect. Exercise can improve mood almost immediately, making it a valuable supplement to frontline treatments such as drugs or therapy, notes Brett Gordon, an exercise psychology researcher at the Penn State College of Medicine. Plus, he says, exercise can counteract some of the unpleasant side effects of antidepressants, such as weight gain.
In addition, exercise has few of the negative side effects that are so common in drug therapies for depression and other disorders. “Many people who have mental health concerns are not enthusiastic about starting a medication for the rest of their lives, and are interested in pursuing other options. Exercise might be one of those options,” says Jacob Meyer, an exercise psychologist at Iowa State University.
There’s now emerging evidence that exercise also seems to help in treating or avoiding anxiety disorders, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and possibly other serious psychotic conditions as well. “The more we do these studies, the more we see that exercise can be valuable,” says Firth.
There’s a flip side to this coin that’s especially relevant during the Covid-19 pandemic: If exercise stabilizes mental health, then anything that prevents people from working out is likely to destabilize it. To test this, Meyer and his colleagues surveyed more than 3,000 Americans about their activity before and during the pandemic. Those who became less active because of Covid reported more depression and poorer mental health, they found. (Ironically, those who had not exercised regularly pre-Covid didn’t report much change. “When you’re already at zero, where do you go?” says Meyer.)
But researchers are still figuring out exactly how muscular exertion acts on the brain to improve mental health. For most biomedical questions like this, the first stop is animal experiments, but they aren’t as useful in studies of mental health issues. “Psychological health is so uniquely human that it can be hard to make a good jump from animal models,” says Meyer.
Exercise and a healthy brain
Scientists have come up with a few ideas about how exercise enhances mental health, says Patrick J. Smith, a psychologist and biostatistician at Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina, who wrote about the subject in the 2021 Annual Review of Medicine with his Duke colleague Rhonda M. Merwin. It doesn’t seem to have much to do with cardiovascular fitness or muscular strength — the most obvious benefits of exercise — since how hard a person can work out is only weakly associated with their psychological health. Something else must be going on that’s more important than mere fitness, says Smith.
One likely possibility is that exercise buffs up the brain as well as the body. Physical exercise triggers the release of a protein known as brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). BDNF is one of the key molecules that encourage the growth of new brain cells — including, possibly, in the hippocampus, a brain region important in memory and learning. Since the hippocampus tends to be smaller or distorted in people with depression, anxiety and schizophrenia, boosting BDNF through exercise may be one way physical activity might help manage these conditions.
Sure enough, studies show that people with depression have lower levels of BDNF — and, notably, one effect of antidepressant drugs is to increase production of that molecule.
Researchers have not yet shown directly that the exercise-associated increase in BDNF is what reduces depressive symptoms, but it remains one of the most promising possibilities, says Hovland.
Exercise and the brain
Exercise causes changes to the brain and also encourages helpful behaviors in participants. Together, these can help exercisers better cope with mental health challenges.
Exercise may also help anxiety disorders. The brain changes prompted by BDNF appears to enhance learning, which is an important part of some anti-anxiety therapies. This suggests that exercise may be a useful way of improving the effectiveness of such therapies. One of the standard therapies for PTSD, for example, involves exposing patients to the fear-causing stimulus in a safe environment, so that the patients learn to recalibrate their reactions to trauma-linked cues — and the better they learn, the more durable this response might be.
Kevin Crombie, an exercise neuroscientist now at the University of Texas at Austin, and his colleagues tested this idea in the lab with 35 women with PTSD. Researchers first taught the volunteers to associate a particular geometric shape with a mild electric shock. The next day, the volunteers repeatedly saw the same shape without the shock, so that they would learn that the stimulus was now safe. A few minutes later, half the volunteers did 30 minutes of moderate exercise — jogging or uphill walking on a treadmill — while the other half did only light movement, not enough to breathe heavily.
The following day, those who had exercised were less likely to anticipate a shock when they saw the “trigger” shape, Crombie found — a sign that they had learned to no longer associate the trigger with danger. Moreover, those volunteers who showed the greatest exercise-induced increases in BDNF also did best at this relearning.
Although the evidence is not yet definitive, a few studies have suggested that regular exercise may lead to better outcomes in patients with schizophrenia too. Vijay Mittal, a psychologist at Northwestern University, wondered whether working out also might prevent people from developing the disorder in the first place.
Mittal works with teenagers who are at high risk of psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia, but who have not yet progressed to the full-on disorder. In the past two decades, researchers have gotten much better at recognizing such individuals just as they begin to display the earliest signs of illness, such as seeing shadows out of the corner of their eye or hearing indistinct voices.
For about 10 percent to 33 percent of these teens, these early signs turn into something more serious. “A shadow might turn into a person,” says Mittal. “A whisper might turn into words. A suspicion that someone is following them might turn into the belief that the government is after them.”
Previously, Mittal had found that the hippocampus is different in at-risk teens who later slid down this slippery slope than in those who didn’t. He wondered whether exercise might help bolster the hippocampus and avert the slide. So his team tested this notion in a sample of 30 high-risk teens, half of whom followed a regimen of aerobic exercise twice a week for three months. (The other half, the control group, were told they were on the wait list for the exercise program.) The researchers used brain scans to look at participants’ hippocampus before and after the program.
The experiment has just concluded, and Mittal is still analyzing the results, which he calls promising. He cautions, however, that exercise is not a panacea. Schizophrenia is a diverse disease, and even if physical activity proves to be protective for some at-risk people, not all are likely to respond to it in the same way. “It’s really important to remember that these disorders are complicated. I’ve worked with people who exercise a lot and still have schizophrenia,” he says.
If Mittal’s work pans out, exercise may allow mental health workers to help a group that isn’t easily treated with drugs. “Someone who’s just at risk of a psychotic disorder, you can’t just give them medication, because that has risks too,” says Firth. “It would be fantastic to have something else in our arsenal.”
Exercise almost certainly has other effects on the brain, too, experts agree. For example, exercise stimulates the release of endocannabinoids, molecules that are important in modifying the connections between brain cells, the mechanism that underlies learning. This may provide another way of enhancing the learning that underlies successful treatment for depression, PTSD and other mental disorders. Indeed, Crombie’s study of exercise in a simplified model of PTSD therapy measured endocannabinoids as well as BDNF, and increases in both were associated with stronger learning responses.
And physical activity also moderates the body’s response to stress and reduces inflammation, both of which could plausibly help improve brain health in people with mental illness. “We have just scratched the surface,” says Hovland.
Moving the body, engaging the mind
But changing the structure of the brain isn’t the only way physical activity can be beneficial for those suffering from mental health conditions. The habit of exercise can itself be beneficial, by altering people’s thought patterns, says Smith.
For people with mental health issues, simply doing something — anything — can be helpful in its own right because it occupies their attention and keeps them from ruminating on their condition. Indeed, one survey of the published literature found that placebo exercise — that is, gentle stretching, too mild to cause any physiological effect — had almost half the beneficial effect on mental health as strenuous exercise did.
Besides just occupying the mind, regular workouts also give exercisers a clear sense of progress as their strength and fitness improves. This sense of accomplishment — which may be especially notable for weight training, where people make quick, easily measurable gains — can help offset some of the burden of anxiety and depression, says Gordon.
If so, playing a musical instrument, studying a language and many other activities could also help people cope with mental health conditions in a similar way. But exercise does more than that, making it one of the best choices for managing mental health. “You can see benefits from doing anything, but the exercise may confer greater benefits,” says Firth.
For one thing, relatively strenuous exercise teaches people to put up with short-term discomfort for long-term gain. People who suffer from anxiety disorders such as PTSD or panic attacks often show a reduced ability to tolerate mental discomfort, so that experiences most people would cope with result in uncontrolled anxiety instead. There’s now emerging evidence that regular exercise builds tolerance for internal discomfort, and this may explain part of its benefit in managing these conditions, Smith says.
Using exercise as a mental health treatment brings some challenges, however. “People with mental illness are also at higher risk of struggling with low motivation,” Firth says. This can make it difficult to organize and stick with an exercise program, and many patients need additional support.
This is often difficult, because psychologists, psychiatrists and other mental health workers are often already overburdened. Plus, prescribing and supervising exercise hasn’t traditionally been within these practitioners’ purview. “We’re telling people, ‘Hey, exercise is helpful,’ but we’re telling it to people who can’t really incorporate it because they often don’t get any training,” Firth says.
Exercise referral schemes, which link patients with fitness specialists and structured programs at community leisure centers, have been used in the UK and other places to encourage exercise in people with physical conditions such as obesity and diabetes. A similar approach could be valuable for mental health conditions, Firth says.
Therapists can also help patients persist for the long term by tailoring their exercise prescriptions to each individual’s capabilities. “I always tell patients that doing anything is better than doing nothing, and the best exercise for you is the one you’ll actually do,” Smith says.
The secret, he suggests, is to make sure people stop exercising before they’ve done so much it makes them feel exhausted afterward. “When you feel like crap after exercise, you’re not going to want to do it,” he says, because the brain tags the activity as something unpleasant. It’s far better to have the patient quit while they still have a positive feeling from the workout.
“Without even realizing it, their brain tends to tag that activity as something more pleasurable. They don’t dread it.”
Even light activity — basically just moving around now and then during the day instead of sitting for hours at a time — may help. In one study of more than 4,000 adolescents in the UK, Aaron Kandola, a psychiatric epidemiologist at University College London, and his colleagues found that youths who undertook more light activity during the day had a lower risk of depressive symptoms than those who spent more time sitting.
“What we really need are big exercise trials where we compare different amounts against each other,” says Kandola. “Instead, what we have are different studies that used different amounts of activity.” That makes precise recommendations difficult, because each study varies in terms of its patient populations and methods, and follows results for a different length of time. As researchers learn more about the mechanisms linking exercise to mental health, they should be able to refine their exercise prescriptions so that patients are best able to manage their illnesses.
And exercise has powerful benefits for people with mental illness that go beyond its effects on the illnesses themselves. Many struggle with related issues such as social withdrawal and a reduced capacity for pleasure, says Firth. Standard medications reduce some symptoms but do nothing to address these other problems. Exercise — especially as part of a group — can help boost their mood and enrich their lives.
Even more important, people with serious mental illnesses such as severe depression and schizophrenia also are more likely to have significant physical health issues such as obesity, heart disease and other chronic diseases, and as a result their life expectancy is 10 to 25 years lower than that of unaffected people.
“Reducing those health risks is really paramount at the moment,” says Kandola. “That’s the big appeal of exercise: We already know it can improve physical health. If it does have mental health benefits as well, it can be quite an important addition to treatment.”
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-exercise-boosts-the-brain-and-improves-mental-health-180979511/?itm_source=related-content&itm_medium=parsely-api
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BENEFITS OF SUFFICIENT BODY FAT
From releasing hormones to regulating our temperature, fat has myriad roles in the body. Here's why chasing extreme fat-loss goals is so unhealthy.
Fat has been somewhat demonized for years. Diet culture tells us to burn it, some food companies market low-fat products at us, and weightlifting forums share tips on how to reach as little body fat as possible. You only need to spend a moment scrolling through social media and you'll soon find advice on how to "get shredded". This sinewy physique is defined by extremely well-defined muscles.
This year, experts are concerned that the trend to be super skinny is once again resurfacing, in some cases fueled by the popularity of weight-loss drugs. Yet while too much fat poses health concerns and can lead to obesity, too little is not good for us either. The goal of ridding ourselves of fat can be damaging biologically as well as socially, numerous experts have told me.
"We have to love our fat," Elif Oral, an endocrinologist and professor of medicine at the University of Michigan, tells me. "It plays such an important biological function."
So how much do we really need? And why is too little body fat bad for us?
Why body fat matters
Broadly speaking, there are two different types of fat: dietary fat and body fat. Dietary fat is the fat you eat in your food, while body fat is nature's way of storing energy you don't need.
When you eat a meal, the dietary fats, carbohydrates and proteins in the food are broken down into simple building blocks your body can use for fuel. Carbohydrates become glucose, proteins become amino acids and fats become fatty acids. If you consistently eat more calories than you consume, fat cells – known as adipocytes – store these excess nutrients as lipids. This causes the fat cells to expand in size.
However rather than just sitting there passively, we now know that body fat is an active organ which regulates the body's functions. Just like in the story of Goldilocks and the three bears, our body works best when things are "just right". Too little, just like too much, is dangerous for our health.
We can think of our body fat as a specialized storage vault, taking up nutrients when energy is abundant and releasing them only when needed, says Mikael Ryden, professor of clinical and experimental fat tissue research at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. It's a system that helped our ancestors survive periods of food scarcity.
Another important role is communication. Fat cells produce hormones that tell the rest of the body how much energy we have and how full we are. The best studied of these is leptin, explains Oral. "Leptin tells the brain there is sufficient energy storage, and then the brain can almost relax," she says, which leaves the body able to focus on important biological processes such as reproduction and fighting infection. Without leptin, the brain starts to worry about the amount of energy available, meaning essential functions start to be deprioritized.
Body fat is also important for staying warm. White fat stores excess energy but also acts as a layer of insulation. Meanwhile, brown and beige fat contain specialized cells that burn energy to produce heat. This helps the body maintain its temperature.
What happens when we have too little?
The health consequences of having too much fat are well known. They include an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, certain cancers and osteoarthritis. However, having too little is not good either.
When body fat drops too low due to severe calorie restriction, it can have profound effects on our health and physiology, explains Jessica Maung a graduate student researcher of metabolic diseases at the University of Michigan. "Having too little adipose tissue leads to disrupted organ and bodily function," she says.
When the body has too little fat it responds by trying to save energy, essentially putting itself into starvation mode. Systems start to shut down, including our immune function. With no reserves left, the body starts to break down muscle instead. Bones are no longer built and repaired.
This results in frailty and increased risk of fractures, says Fredrik Karpe, professor of metabolic medicine at the University of Oxford. "That's not a healthy situation," says Karpe, especially because it leaves the body with no reserves to cope with a serious infection or other medical emergency.
Too little body fat can affect our hormones and reproductive health too. In men who become extremely lean because they are chronically under-fueling themselves, testosterone can fall, as can energy levels and physical performance. Some female athletes with very little body fat experience irregular periods or find that they stop altogether.
Several studies have found that carrying extra weight in middle and older age is associated with better survival odds during a critical illness. For instance, while people living with obesity are more likely to suffer from cardiovascular disease, they are less likely to die from it than leaner individuals also suffering from the condition – a phenomenon known as the obesity paradox. A cushion of fat reserves appears to help the body withstand serious cardiac events, strokes and other acute illnesses, according to Oral.
In extreme cases, having too little fat can lead to dire health consequences or be fatal. For example, the mental health condition anorexia nervosa can lead to long-term organ damage or death.
How much do we really need?
It’s surprisingly tricky to measure how much body fat you have yourself – but more on that later. There is also no universal percentage to aim for. Individual needs vary.
Nevertheless, as a broad guide, healthy adult men tend to have around 10–20% body fat.
Healthy adult women tend to have around 20–29%. Those living with obesity tend to have body fat above 30%.
In terms of how much is optimal, "it's very difficult to say exactly a range," says Ryden. "This might differ between people, sex and ethnicities."
Among athletes the typical amount of body fat tends to be lower.
In her research, Tamara Hew-Butler, a sports performance researcher at Wayne State University in Detroit, and colleagues scanned over 700 athletes using a Dexa scanner. This measures the body's composition including internal fat. "The lowest body fat that we ever found in an athlete was 10% for [a] male and 16% for [a] female." Some of the participants were surprised at this result, she says, as the athletes in the study trained regularly. They believed their body fat was as low as 1-2%.
It also matters where you store fat. Visceral fat, also known as belly fat, is especially harmful if you have too much of it. Unlike fat that lies under the skin, visceral fat wraps around vital internal organs and releases inflammatory chemicals that raise your blood pressure, and interfere with insulin, making it harder for the body to control blood sugar and raising the risk of type 2 diabetes.
How to measure our fat
There are a few ways to measure the amount of fat in your body.
The most detailed assessments come from Dexa full body scans, which can differentiate between body fat, lean muscle mass and bone mass. However, these require specialist equipment and can be expensive.
One popular home test is the skinfold test. This involves measuring the thickness of the fat layer just below the skin by pinching it using a specially designed pair of calipers. However, this instrument can only measure the thickness of fat folds at specific body parts. Visceral fat can’t be measured directly this way.
But skinfold tests are not particularly accurate, and may give misleadingly low figures.
Another at-home option is to use a set of smart scales. These work by sending a low electric current through the body to estimate fat mass. However, readings are influenced by how much fluid we have in our bodies and therefore they are not considered accurate for measuring fat levels. They also can’t tell you where your fat is stored, or distinguish between visceral fat and other types.
In fact, attempting to measure your fat levels in any detail is not generally necessary for maintaining a healthy body. But there are two measures that can help you to stick to a healthy weight and keep track of where fat is being stored.
A tape measure can help give a quick insight. The waist-to-height ratio measures how much central abdominal fat a person has relative to their height. Once you have measured your waist circumference, you can use an online calculator to find your ratio. A healthy range is around 0.4 to 0.49.
A person’s waist-to-hip ratio can also give a good indication. To get this figure, measure around your belly button and divide this figure by the measurement of the widest part of your hips (or use an online calculator). A measurement above 0.90 (men) and 0.85 (women) is considered high, as excess fat around the waist is an indicator of poor metabolic health. Body mass index (BMI) is not an accurate predictor of body fat as it can’t distinguish between the body’s fat and muscle content. People with a lot of muscle and very little fat may have a high BMI.
You may want to keep a closer eye on your body composition as you age. Our fat mass tends to increase while our muscle and bone levels decline. As this can cause adverse health effects, it's important to eat well, exercise and take part in strength-training.
However, we should learn to value the many important things fat does for us and not obsess over extreme fat-related goals. It’s important to have the right amount, rather than striving to have as little as possible. Or, as Oral puts it, "we believe fat is both powerful and beautiful.”
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260925-its-bad-for-our-health-to-have-too-little-fat
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CAN WE SLOW DOWN BRAIN AGING?
One sunny morning, 76-year-old Dutch-born Marijke and her husband Tom welcomed me in for breakfast at their home in Loma Linda, an hour east of Los Angeles.
Oatmeal, chai seeds, berries, but no processed sugary cereal or coffee were served — a breakfast as pure as Loma Linda’s mission.
Loma Linda has been identified as one of the world’s so-called Blue Zones, places where people have lengthier-than-average lifespans. In this case, it is the city’s Seventh-Day Adventist Church community who are living longer.
They generally don’t drink alcohol or caffeine, stick to a vegetarian or even vegan diet and consider it a duty of their religion to look after their bodies as best they can.
This is their “health message”, as they call it, and it has put them on the map — the city has been the subject of decades of research into why its residents live better for longer.
Dr Gary Fraser from the University of Loma Linda told me members of the Seventh-Day Adventist community there can expect not only a longer lifespan, but an increased “healthspan” — that is, time spent in good health — of four to five years extra for women and seven years extra for men.
Marijke and Tom had moved to the city later in life, but both were now firmly embedded in the community.
There’s no great secret to Loma Linda. Its citizens are simply living a really healthy life, keeping mentally stimulated and valuing the community a religion can often provide.
There are regular lectures on healthy living, musical get-togethers and exercise classes.
I chatted to Judy, who lives with 112 others at an assisted living facility where there was always the “ability to have heart-opening, brain-opening conversations”, she told me.
“What I didn't realize was how important socialization is to your brain... without it, it seems to shrink and go away,” Judy said.
Science has long recognized the benefits of social interactions and avoiding loneliness.
But now it's also possible to identify whose brains are aging faster than they should, so they can be tracked and in future potentially be treated better preventatively.
As we move towards more personalized, predictive, preventative healthcare models, early diagnosis will be crucial in all areas of health — powered by the incredible possibilities of AI and big data.
Computer models that assess how our brains age and predict their decline were shown to me by Andrei Irimia, associate professor of gerontology and computational biology at the University of Southern California.
He had created them using MRI scans, data from 15,000 brains and the power of artificial intelligence to understand the trajectory of both brains that are aging healthily and those in which there is a disease process, such as dementia.
“It's a very sophisticated way to look at patterns that we don't necessarily know about as humans, but the AI algorithm is able to pick up on them,” he said.
Prof Irimia did, of course, take a look inside my head.
I'd had a functional MRI scan ahead of my visit and, after analyzing its results, Prof Irimia told me I had a brain age eight months older than my chronological age (although apparently the bit that controls talking wasn’t aging so much. I could have told him that). However, Prof Irimia suggested that the results fall within a two-year error margin.
Private companies are starting to commercialize this technology, too. One firm, Brainkey, is offering the service in a variety of clinics around the world. Its founder Owen Philips told me that in future, getting an MRI should become easier.
"It’s becoming much more accessible for people to get an MRI scan, and the images coming off them are getting even better and better,” he said.
“I don't mean to nerd out there. But the technology is just getting to a point where we are able to see things much earlier than we could in the past. And that means we can understand exactly what's happening in an individual patient's brain. With AI, we can support that.”
In contrast to what Prof Irimia’s analysis of my MRI scan had told me, Brainkey’s estimate knocked a year off my brain’s biological age. I was also presented with a 3D-printed model of it, which appeared substantial and, I was assured, was life-sized.
article author with the life-sized 3D-printed model of her own brain
The aim here is not just a more precise approach to treatment, but also to be able to quantify how well any interventions are working.
Dramatic increases in life expectancy over the past 200 years have given rise to a host of age-related diseases. I did wonder whether, if we all lived long enough, dementia might come knocking at all our doors.
Prof Irimia said this was a theory many have investigated albeit not proven, adding that the aim was to find a way to keep on pushing dementia back, hopefully beyond our life expectancies.
And all of this takes us back to the same point. Every scientist and doctor, as well as those Blue Zoners, say lifestyle is key. Good diet, keeping active, mentally stimulated and happy are crucial to how our brains age.
There’s another important factor too, according to Matthew Walker, professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of the best-selling book Why We Sleep.
“Sleep is the single most effective thing you can do every day to reset your brain and body health,” he evangelized. “There is no operation of your mind that is not wonderfully enhanced when you get sleep, or demonstrably impaired when you don’t get enough.”
He spoke of our brains’ cleansing system, which functions during our slumber by washing away the beta-amyloid and tau proteins — these are “two of the main culprits underlying Alzheimer’s”.
Changes in sleep patterns are also associated with dementia. Prof Walker described how we don’t just see this in our 60s or 70s — it can begin during our 30s. So, identifying those changes through sleep tracking could potentially become a “model of midlife prevention”.
Fauna Bio, a biotech company on the outskirts of San Francisco, is collecting data on ground squirrels during and after hibernation. In this state of torpor, as it is known, the squirrels’ body temperature drops and their metabolic rate is reduced to just 1% of normal.
During this time, they appear to be able to regrow neurons and remake the connections their brains had lost. The company’s aim is to try and create drugs to replicate this process in humans, without them needing to spend half the year underground. Even if some may long for that.
Untreated depression has also been shown to raise our risk of dementia. Professor Leanne Williams of Stanford University has identified a method of “visualizing” some forms of depression on the brain using an MRI scan, and thus seeing if treatment has worked.
This may be able to help scientists understand more about the root causes of mental health conditions such as depression, as well as providing a way to quantify how treatment is going for a patient.
Few have put more faith in science to achieve longevity than Bryan Johnson — the tech entrepreneur spending millions in an effort to reverse his biological age.
Dozens of supplements, 19 hours a day of fasting, workouts that make him look as though he’s going to burst and an array of (sometimes controversial) treatments are what he hopes will turn back the clock.
But as 103-year-old Mildred, who I visited in Loma Linda said forcefully, “You absolutely need to be very careful with your diet, it’s true, but I’m not down for, ‘You've got to do this, and this, and this, and absolutely not touch this! '”. She thinks it’s more important we live a little, and let’s face it, she should know.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0www3qvx2zo
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Ending on beauty:
FIRE
After school we saw a strange glow.
A three-story building was on fire,
the only building on Grójecka Street
that had survived the war.
We rushed toward it and stood
as close as the firemen would allow.
It was December, the dark sky
like a black dress for a jewel.
The flame now crouched low,
licking the charred walls,
now shot up and danced high,
soaring, merging and dividing —
gold beyond a lion’s leap,
then a roaring red.
And the huge droning hum,
like a crowd chanting a prayer.
I imagine no one was hurt
in this passage to the light.
We didn’t ask, enchanted
by the wind of skyward sparks.
And that too was childhood,
more than anything that was
childhood: our faces happy
at last, haloed by the blaze.
~ Oriana
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