Dr. Belaveshkin

Another victim of Russia's missile strike on a residential street: Fatima Huseynova, a graduate of Kharkiv Medical University, was killed. She had come to attend her graduation ceremony and receive her medical diploma.

Give Five: 5 health ideas for a better life (24) ✅1. Just add lemon. Lemon is one of the cheapest and most versatile staples of Mediterranean cooking — and it goes with almost everything. Marinate meat, poultry, and fish in it, squeeze it into soups, porridge, and legumes, add it to tea or water. Beyond flavor, lemon genuinely earns its place: it improves protein digestion, slows carbohydrate absorption, and delivers a solid range of beneficial phytonutrients. ✅2. Don't believe your weak thoughts. It's worth learning to tell the difference between your "weak" thoughts — the ones triggered by stress, fatigue, or emotion — and your "strong" ones, which actually reflect your values and how things really are. Mindfulness helps here: it lets you recognize that the dark, anxious voice inside is often just internal propaganda, a reaction to a distorted picture of reality rather than reality itself. It also helps you notice when what's speaking isn't really you — it's poor sleep, exhaustion, or fear. The practice is simple: restore your state first, reflect second. ✅3. Give names to objects. Emotional attachment isn't reserved for people. You can deliberately build a positive relationship with the objects tied to your good habits — and use that bond to reinforce them. Name your running shoes. Name your dumbbells. Once you do, they can "miss you" when you haven't shown up in a while, or you can enjoy "taking them out" on a new route. It sounds small, but the psychology is real. ✅4. Context-dependent habits. Context acts as a trigger — it quietly sustains old habits and can work against new ones. This is why moving to a new place or redecorating a room genuinely makes behavior change easier: the old cues are gone. To weaken a habit, strip away the context that supports it. To build a new one, pair it with a distinct new environment. And if you're going to break a rule — do it somewhere unfamiliar, not in your usual setting. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. ✅5. Menthol for heat. Menthol activates cold receptors and can temporarily raise your tolerance for both physical and mental stress in hot conditions. The delivery method matters — it works best in the mouth, so chewing gum and mint tea are more effective than a patch on the skin. Peppermint oil and mint tea also sharpen concentration and lift productivity — which puts them in a different category from chamomile, which relaxes rather than activates.

“Everything has two handles: one by which it can be carried, and another by which it cannot. If your brother acts unjustly, do not view the matter from the side of the injustice he has committed, for that is the handle by which it cannot be carried. Instead, view it from the side that he is your brother, that he was brought up with you. In this way, you will take hold of the handle by which it can be carried.” — Epictetus, Enchiridion (XLIII)

The most powerful intervention for extending human lifespan — potentially adding five to eight years — is simply radically cutting down screen time. It might actually outperform many mainstream lifestyle interventions.

The claim that reality will eventually force people to abandon illusions and propaganda (“the fridge beats propaganda”) is false, as shown by mouse self-stimulation experiments where animals kept pressing a reward lever and ignored food and water until exhaustion.

What do Musk’s IPOs and religion have in common from the perspective of dopamine neurobiology? Our brains contain several systems for processing spatial orientation. Dopamine is associated with neural circuits involved in analyzing distant objects in space (extrapersonal space), located away from us and perceived through central vision and saccadic eye movements. The process of visual search involves the ventrolateral temporal lobe, the lateral prefrontal cortex, and is linked to the lateral dopamine system. During evolution, this system also came to process everything that is “distant” and “abstract” — things that cannot be directly seen or touched, everything located in the future, everything high above us, and everything highly abstract. Thus, dopaminergic activity is associated with a focus on what is farther away from us, higher above us, more abstract, and further into the future. Constant references to and contemplation of such phenomena can produce a sustained sense of excitement and elevated dopamine activity: ☝️Thinking about God. A completely abstract superpowerful entity that cannot be seen, has no appearance or body, and exists simultaneously nowhere and everywhere. Today, this is AI. ☝️Thinking about the future. The further into the future, the greater the fascination it can evoke. The ultimate future is the end of the world, the apocalypse. Today, this becomes the collapse of civilization that must be accelerated and the migration of the chosen to the “stars. ☝️ Heaven and the stars. Height, aspiration upward toward the heavens, where great gods reside as stars and where our souls are destined to go — to paradise, to the stars, upward. Rockets and orbital data centers, the migration of the “chosen” to the stars (colonization of Mars) is a classic religious narrative appearing in many forms throughout history: from the soul of the pharaoh returning to the stars, to the “Heavenly Jerusalem,” a city among the stars representing a place of bliss and harmony with God. ☝️ Contempt for reality. Reality, numbers, and everyday life are considered unimportant — merely dirty routine with no significance. The only thing that matters is the divine plan of the future, ideas of “purifying” a race through the destruction of “unbelievers” or “undesirable people” — migrants, the poor, the sick, and those in need of care. DOGE: mass closure of food assistance programs, rollback of vaccination programs, reduction of medical care, and destruction of state institutions. Many eschatological movements view the destruction of the existing order as a way to bring about the arrival of a new world. As a result, crises, wars, and the collapse of social order and state institutions may be regarded as desirable developments. 🤔It is important to remember that such ideas can produce elevated dopamine activity and feelings of euphoria, but this is merely a biological quirk, not evidence of actual importance. Look around you — within your sphere of control there are plenty of things that are genuinely important, and only you can do them. 📗The Dopaminergic Mind in Human Evolution and History. Fred Previc. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009

Shouting “I’m outside politics” is itself a deeply destructive political stance. Refusing to make a choice is a choice. Refusing to act is an action. The ancient Greeks used the term “idiōtēs” (ἰδιώτης) to describe a private individual who stayed disengaged from public affairs.

Give Five: 5 health ideas for a better life (23) ✅1 Relaxing the eyes. Gaze direction and eye muscle tension affect your whole body's posture. Staring at a screen for hours builds tension throughout. What helps: look into the distance regularly — fix your gaze on something at least 4 meters away (a photo or painting with depth works great), close your eyes for 10–30 seconds as a micro-break, and try this: imagine your eyeballs as two heavy, warm spheres slowly rotating in their sockets. Even 10–20 seconds of closed eyes during screen work resets tension — and helps with memory too. ✅2 Dance. Among all movement-based interventions for depression, dancing comes out on top. Add even a minute to your warm-up or cooldown. Try a victory dance after a win, or dance out stress when it builds. Dancing is also the strongest driver of brain neuroplasticity across all movement types — and builds motor memory with lasting benefits. ✅3 Using the body to access intuition. In areas where you have real competence, your intuition is worth trusting. Try this: place the imaginary problem on a plate, pick up utensils, and eat it bite by bite — paying attention to sensations in your chest, throat, and stomach. How does your body receive it? That somatic response is your intuitive answer. ✅4 The most beneficial physical activity. For longevity, research consistently points to one category above others: games — from tennis to basketball. Games get you moving without it feeling like effort, involve varied movements, and include social connection. Finding a partner outdoors or at the gym is one of the simplest upgrades you can make. ✅5 Three fundamental paleo movements: push, pull, kick. These three cover the core of what human bodies were built for. Pushing — strikes, throws, push-ups, presses. Pulling — lifting, rowing, climbing, pull-ups. Kicking — jumps, squats, lunges. Together they engage most muscle groups with no special equipment. In the gym: bench press, deadlift, squat. At home: push-ups, pull-ups, squats.

Medicine or poison. It all depends on the right dose. The same principle applies everywhere: communication, food, exercise, information consumption—indeed, almost anything.

Patients who are most satisfied with their doctor are associated in some studies with a 12% higher rate of hospitalization and a 26% higher risk of death. Complete satisfaction is not always a sign of the best care. A good doctor should be able to tell you things that may be uncomfortable to hear, because sometimes difficult advice can be the most effective.