Have You Put An Expiration Date on Learning?

“Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one’s self-esteem.  That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily, and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all.”

So says Thomas Szasz, Hungarian-American academic, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst.

Mr. Szasz’s statement sort of pissed me off.  Cannot learn at all?   C’mon, I’m learning something new every day at 77.

I’ll bet (I hope) you are too.

I’ll confess, it’s a tad harder.  Well, maybe more than a tad. My brain’s CPU seems to be stuck at Windows XP and the hard disk could use a partial download to the cloud to free up some space.

But not at all, Mr.Szasz?

My nine-year-old granddaughter and her six-year-old brother this week seemed to fuel Szasz’s argument.

They just finished a full-week of drama camp and both had significant roles in the play that wrapped up the week.

My wife and I weren’t able to attend the play.  During their visit this week, my wife asked them to do their parts for us.

Our culture hasn’t gotten to them with the “self-importance” thing yet.  With these two, you always get a bit more than you bargained for – in energy, enthusiasm, craziness.  With this request, they didn’t disappoint.

They did THE WHOLE PLAY for us!!

That’s right – their parts and everybody else’s part.  Dances included.  And with some of their own improvisation sprinkled in.  A full week after the performance.

 

That same day, I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember a quote I had read earlier that I wanted to capture.  Nor could I even remember the book I read it in (I have four books going right now).

So maybe Thomas has a point. But I’m not willing to concede on the “at all” part.  I’ll concede on the speed thing, both in learning and retrieving, but not on my ability to continue to learn, and learn deeply.

In fact, since I’ve lost my sense of self-importance (please, don’t cross-check that with my wife), I’m learning at a faster clip and in more volume than I was 20 years ago when I was in the middle of building self-importance in the corporate world.

With titles, position and the opinion of others now in the back seat, I’m highly motivated to continue to learn what I want to learn.

My reading is more focused on my life quest and has shifted to more non-comfort-zone reading.  Best selling author, Stephen J. Dubner , author of “Freakonomics” and “Superfreakonomics”, was right when he said: “most ‘important’ books aren’t much fun to read.  Most fun books aren’t very important.”

I’ve read several un-fun books this past year and have been stretched in the process.

I’m also trying to write something daily that pushes me outside my comfort zone – like this article.

My Toastmaster Club gives me an opportunity weekly to stretch, test, and refine my speaking skills, both prepared and impromptu.

I wish all this was coming up roses.  I will admit to continued frustration with the failure to retain the information I read and with the fits and starts of my progress in both writing and speaking.

After reading over 500 books over the last decade, I confess that I have retained very little of what each book said. I can look at the cover of a book on my “favorites” shelf and honestly not be able to tell you much of what I learned from it that was significant.

When a good friend recommended a book called “Peak. Secrets From the New Science of Expertise” by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool, I did my usual thing – I bought the cheapest used paperback copy on Amazon.

As is often the case, it was a timely injection into my reading stream.  I read it in five days of early morning reading time.  It is replete with highlights, margin notes, paper-clipped pages and colored tabs protruding from the side that mark the mega-important pages.

It’s the quirky way that I attack books.  It’s also why I NEVER lend them out or why I can’t recycle them to a used-book grave because they are such a marked-up mess.

But I’ve been doing that with books forever, and I still can’t remember much of their content.

Ericsson’s book may be the catalyst that will change all of that for me – and perhaps for you if you are experiencing similar frustration with retaining and applying what you’ve learned.  Ericsson’s research appears to have the key to unsticking me from a handful of stuck areas in my life – reading retention, writing and speaking with impact, frozen golf handicap, plateaued guitar playing – to name a few in my life.

Ericsson’s extensive research and human experiments on memory retention reinforce the point that, like a computer, our brains have short-term memory (RAM) and long-term memory (hard drive).   We’ve known for decades that there is a limit to what our short-term memory will retain.  It’s designed to hold small amounts of information for a short time.

That’s why you forget the new neighbor’s name fifteen minutes after you met them unless you do something to move it out of short-term to long-term memory – such as repeating the names over and over again until the transfer takes place.

Our brains have a strict limit on what they can hold in short-term memory.  The average limit is seven items, which explains why we have to write ten-digit phone numbers down rather than expect to remember them  (it doesn’t get easier as we get older, have you noticed?)

Ericsson’s experiments and research confirmed that, unlike short-term memory, long-term memory doesn’t have an upper limit, but takes much longer to deploy.

He provides examples throughout the book of truly amazing feats of memory to illustrate this quality of our brain.  His cornerstone experiment involved working with a bright, young Carnegie Mellon grad student testing his ability to present digits that were read to him at the rate of one per second – too fast to transfer them to his long-term memory.  Repeating them back to Ericsson, the student continually hit the wall at number sequences eight or nine digits long.

But, over two years and two hundred training sessions, the student successfully remembered eighty-two digits read to him one per second.

Eighty two!!

He did it by refining a mental process for moving the digits to his long term memory.

Using other examples of exceptional performance throughout the book – blindfolded chess players, record-holding cyclists, typist exceeding 200 words per minute, basketball free-throw shooters – Ericsson concludes that “no matter what field you study, music or sports or chess or something else, the most effective types of practice all follow the same set of general principles.”

It’s not about genetics or innate talent.

Wanna be a “grandmaster?”  I know, few of us do because we don’t think we have the “innate talent.”  But if we did want grandmaster status, we would have to accept that high achievement is not rooted in intelligence or inborn talent.

It’s rooted in practice, deep deliberate practice.

In Ericsson’s words: “The answer is that the most effective and most powerful types of practice in any field work by harnessing the adaptability of the human body and brain to create, step by step, the ability to do things that were previously not possible” and that “- all truly effective practice techniques work in essentially the same way.”

I had read other similarly-themed books about deliberate practice, the secondary role of talent versus effort, the significance of 10,000 hours to master something (Geoff Colvin’s “Talent Is Overrated”; Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers”, Daniel Coyle’s “The Talent Code”) and have had the “head knowledge” of what separates the great from the good from the mediocre.

Ericsson’s book caps that little library and is providing a eureka moment that, as I write this, is inspiring me to move what I’ve learned from my head into practical application, starting with forgiving myself for the years of wasted surface-level practice along my vocational path.

My braggadocious posture about reading 75 books a year is now not only embarrassing but also reveals my naivete about meaningful learning.  It represented “notches on the gun”.  It was get-that-one-on-the-shelf-and-get-on-to-the-next-one, searching for that magic quote, sentence or paragraph that will turn my success ship.

Previously, I would finish every book, even if it wasn’t reaching me.  I’m over that.  I’ve learned that many books are fluff and a waste – and that not every book has its time and space in my world.  If it isn’t reaching me but there is a hint of something valuable, I will now shelve it and maybe come back to it and see if its time has come.

Before, if I finished a book that really reached me, I’d finish and shelve it on my “A” shelf, only occasionally coming back months or years later to reread it.  No more of that either.  I now stay with the book and try to move as much of the really important content to my long-term memory by rereading the highlights/paper-clipped/colored-tab pages and then (I know this seems nutty!) writing the really, really good stuff on 3x 5 cards to keep in the book.

Those are my cliff notes for further review down the road.

Four levels of practice.

Reflecting on “Peak”, it is clear that we can choose the level of expertise or mastery that we want, independent of innate talent.  Colvin, Gladwell, and Coyle also said that in their books.

And we can do it at any age, even as a third-ager.

We have four practice choices as we move forward in life:

  • No practice
  • Practice
  • Purposeful practice
  • Deliberate practice

No practice

This is the default and where many of us end up.  Accepting our fate; maintaining the comfort of the status-quo; conceding to our inherent laziness; not understanding how our brain/body works at its best; being goalless, drifting and led, not leading.  Then we hit the death bed and express regrets for never having taken any risks – or worked hard at getting good at something worthwhile.

Practice

This is “naïve practice” which is essentially just doing something repeatedly and “expecting that the repetition alone will improve one’s performance”, according to Ericsson.  It’s practice without clear goals, no feedback mechanism, no stretch. This too is comfort-zone territory.

This is me for the last twenty years on the driving range with  $7 buckets of balls hitting them with no sense of what needs to be fixed, no one to give me feedback on why most are mishits, deepening the defects in my swing and making it harder for a coach to coach them out of me.

It’s “doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results” defined by Einstein as “insanity”.  That shows up often in my guitar playing where I sit and entertain myself by playing stuff I already know well and not pushing myself to add a new tune, technique, new rift, or extending my hand stretch.

It’s doing a sales call using the same script/pitch over and over and wondering why prospects aren’t converting and thinking that “they” will eventually get smart and change if you just stick with it long enough.

My instincts and the immutable Pareto Principle of life tell me that 80% of us fit in these two categories.

 

 

Purposeful practice

In contrast, purposeful practice is more purposeful and focused.   According to Ericsson and Poole, purposeful practice has the following characteristics:

  1. Purposeful practice has well-defined, specific goals. Without this, there is no way to judge whether the practice session has been a success.  Permit me to give you an example from my own life.

I love golf.  My 22 handicap has not moved in ten years.  The last few years, I’ve been tracking several components of my game: fairways hit, greens-in-regulation, chips/pitches, putts.   The glaring deficiency in my game is greens-in-regulation – my ball is invariably on the green one or more shots more than it should be to make par.  I average a paltry two G-I-R’s per eighteen-hole round.  No magic here.  My approach shots stink, meaning that’s where my problem lies.

I’m setting the goal for this season of an average of six G-I-Rs and a handicap of 18.  I’ve already taken lessons from a pro and know what to do – learn to make a freaking approach shot!

  1. Purposeful practice is focused. I know I have virtually no chance to change my handicap or G-I-R unless I focus my attention and effort on that missing component of poor approach shots. So my practice is focused on improving that shot selection.
  2. Purposeful practice involves feedback. You have to know what you are doing wrong.  That’s where the golf pro comes in.  He can watch a few swings and know what needs to change and instruct me accordingly.  I have also enlisted the help of my weekly playing partner on what to watch for in my swing and to let me know when I’m doing it wrong.
  3. Purposeful practice requires getting out of one’s comfort zone. This may be the most important part of purposeful practice, according to Ericsson.  It’s a fundamental truth about any kind of practice: if you don’t push yourself beyond your comfort zone, you will never improve.  “Try harder” should give way to “try different.”

Deliberate practice

Most of us would do well to get from “naïve” practice to purposeful practice.  That move alone can produce amazing results.

But there is yet another level of practice, according to Ericsson, that is the “Gold Standard”.  It’s called deliberate practice – it’s purposeful practice on steroids.

Here are a couple of examples:

  1. It’s Tiger Woods dropping 20 golf balls into a sand trap and stepping on each one before he hits it out.
  2. It’s the planet’s best acoustic guitar player, Tommy Emmanuel, committed to “being better tomorrow than I am today” and learning a new tune or rift every day, or working with another artist in a different music genre as often as he can. In his sixties, he performs 300 days a year around the world.
  3. It’s my first jazz guitar teacher in the mid-sixties who looked at my self-taught technique and said “we’re starting over.” He stuck me into a violin book for weeks to teach me the fretboard and to correct a dismal right-hand technique before we even started a dialog about playing jazz guitar.   It was miserable, boring practice that had the most profound impact on my playing for the next five decades.

Here’s what I learned from “Peak” about “deliberate practice” and how I will be applying it:

  1. Develop clear mental representations (visualization) of what I want to accomplish.
  2. Narrow, refine and make my five-year goals more specific
  3. Develop baby-steps toward each five-year goal
  4. Get more focused, eliminate the distractions that rob from full attention (can you spell “smartphone” and “Facebook”?)
  5. Expand my sources of feedback – find out from others if I’m doing things right. (Many thanks to those of you who have been sending me comments on my blog – I take them seriously)
  6. Get out of my comfort zone. “Trying harder” will now become “try different”.
  7. Involve coaches – both live and virtual
  8. Be consistent – write daily, publish weekly
  9. Be kind to me and patient with the speed of development

It’s revelatory to track the path followed by some of the world’s greatest achievers and learn that “prodigy”, “innate talent”, “genius” rarely applies.  Time and practice mark the path of high achievers.

And that they don’t stop learning as they age.

So Mr.Szasz, with all due respect, I’ll keep learning – because I can.  And I must.  My string, and that of my compatriots in this “older person” category hasn’t run out.  If we’ve stopped learning, we’ve made one of the most unfortunate mistakes we can make if we wish to live a longer, healthier life.

Your thoughts are welcome – please scroll down and leave a comment.

August Is An Important Month On Your Life Calendar

August in Colorado.  Hot, dry, rather boring except for Palisade peaches and Olathe sweet corn.  Asking ourselves: “How did another summer slip through our fingers?” Browning lawns, back to the dreaded school zone speed limits and regretting the time wasted watching pre-season NFL games.

I  signed up to speak at my Toastmaster club last week.   The theme for the meeting was “August”, so I pulled together this eleven-minute presentation.  It was good enough to win the best speech for the evening, a nod that my sympathetic Toastmaster friends have given me several dozen times over the past six years of membership.

As I scrambled to prepare (I never start soon enough) it came to me that just like our 12-month Gregorian calendar has a beginning in January and an ending in December, so do our lives have a January and a December.

And we all have had, or will have, an August.

All of us started on January 1 of the calendar of life and each of us is at a particular month based on how long we’ve been on this planet relative to how long we will live.

It becomes a bit subjective when we do that because (1) people’s life spans can vary a lot and (2) we have no idea how long each of us may live.

We can look at a thirty-something millennial and say perhaps that she is in April on her life span calendar.

We could take someone mid-forties and say he is somewhere around June or July.

Or we could look at me at seventy-seven.  Based on today’s average life span of seventy-eight for men – egad, I’m at New Year’s Eve!

And the ball should be about to drop, statistically!

Don’t fret – I intend to stick around for at least another 100 articles. (BTW, this is #97)

August is the two-third point of the annual calendar.  In terms of age against our average life span in this country, that would be equivalent to 51 years for men 55 for women.

In my career and retirement coaching business, I’m dealing mostly with folks who are in the August/September period of their lives based on the current average life span.  My focus is helping people at that point make a career transition or move into the post-career phase of their lives – the final three to four months of their life calendar.

I refer to it as the third age – that period between the end of parenting or end of career and true old age.

I use my personal journey in my coaching. I’m admittedly a bit strange in how I view my life calendar.  Some time ago, in my 50s, I began to feel the calendar squeezing in – that realization that there may be more days behind than ahead.  I was feeling like I was in August, maybe even September.

I didn’t like that feeling.  I had too much that I hadn’t done.  The thought of being in August/September compelled me to think differently.  Hey, there’s only one-third left – and I’m not happy with what I have to show for it.

So my choice was to really kick it up and start doing more of what I wanted to do for this final stage of my life calendar – or find a way to extend my calendar.

I decided to try to do both.

Doing more – that I have control over.

Extend my calendar – not as much control.

But I decided I have nothing to lose by at least resetting my calendar because if I didn’t set that as a goal and change some things, chances are that I would likely live out just an average life span.

So about 10 years ago, I began to confess to myself and others that I was going to ignore average life span and live to 100.  I backed up that proclamation with a lot of research that said there isn’t any reason, biologically, for that not to happen.

People thought I was nuts then – and still do.  Even more so now, because at age 75 I changed my target to 112 ½.  I wanted to have a third of my life left because I had so much I wanted to accomplish.

I learned that, regardless of age, all of us can play a proactive role in extending our life span through our attitude, habits, and lifestyle.  I undertook a significant change in lifestyle and adopted more life-extending habits.

Let’s take a look at what that does to my calendar – at least psychologically.   At 77, instead of being at New Year’s Eve,  I’m back into August with 32% of my life left.

Think about where you would fall on your calendar if you adopted the same approach.  Now I’m sure few of you here spend much time thinking about how long you will live – or have projected a date for your demise.

But if you were, say,  forty-six and in the July of your life, but decided to live to 100, psychologically you’ve now moved that back to late May or June.

More time to get things done; more time to reach your life goals; more time with those you love.

The list of possibilities is endless.

Here are three things to think about in all this:

  1. We are learning that we can, in all likelihood, extend our life calendar by understanding how our bodies and minds work and treating them properly. We have more control over our life span than we realize because of how much more we know about how this two-legged transport vehicle works. I encourage you to learn more about your biology, exercise more self-care and to work against the healthcare illiteracy that pervades our society.
  2. Each decision you make today has consequences in later months on your calendar, especially in the fall and winter months of your calendar. Think today about what you are doing to protect your mind and body for the long haul.  We still live too short and die too long in this country because of the habits we developed earlier in our lives.
  3. Getting old and aging are not the same thing. We all are going to get old.  All of us has a midnight December 31st in our future.  But how we get there is called aging.  Despite all the forces against it such as ageism, youth-oriented society, myths about aging, we are beginning to discover that this third age – or fall/winter months of our calendars – can truly be the happiest, most fulfilling and productive months on our life calendar.

August on our life calendar – however long our calendar may be – is an important transitional time.  Rather than hot, dry, and boring and sliding us into a time of despair, deterioration, and depression as our culture would lead us to believe it’s going to, it can be a launch point to a new takeoff rather than a landing.  A time in which we all can bring forward our accumulated experiences, talents and passions and pay them forward to help those that follow us.

Maybe you have some thoughts about all this.  If so, share them below with a comment.

Also, if you haven’t, subscribe to our weekly newsletter at  www.makeagingwork.com and receive a copy of my free ebook entitled “Achieve Your Full-Life Potential: Five Easy Steps to Living Longer, Healthier, and With More Purpose.”

One Woman’s Quest to Restore Good Nutrition

The Dalai Lama, when asked what surprised him most about humanity, said:

“Man.
Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money.
Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health.”

That quote was shared with me by Susan Buckley, Registered Dietitian and the Nutrition Manager at South Denver Cardiology, one of Denver’s premier cardiac medical practices.  I interviewed Susan for this article after attending several of her free nutrition presentations at SDC. I was impressed with the depth and breadth of her nutrition knowledge – and her commitment to revealing the truth about the sad state of nutrition in our society.

Susan has a pretty amazing personal story.  A southern California native, she grew up in a household where her mother didn’t cook much so there was lots of fast food.  She struggled for years with her weight, going from 118 pounds to 180 during her high school years.

Like many facing this condition, she tried lots of diets with the typical see-saw results.  The tipping point for her was when she reached 200 pounds following the birth of her second daughter.

She didn’t want her daughters to grow up with a “disordered relationship with food and their bodies” so she committed to the Weight Watcher program and decided to go back to school to become a dietitian, earning a degree in dietetics and doing an internship at the St. Louis VA Medical Center.

And she dropped 70 pounds – and kept it off!

Susan is a long-standing member of the National Weight Control Registry which is a  research study that includes people 18 years or older who have lost at least 30 lbs of weight and kept it off for at least one year. There are currently over 10,000 members enrolled in the study, making it perhaps the largest study of weight loss ever conducted.

She shared with me that the commonality they have discovered through the Registry is that it is a cohort of breakfast eaters and exercisers.   Those are two consistents in her life also.  And her exercise includes strength training multiple times a week.

As Nutrition Manager at South Denver Cardiology, she does a lot of one-on-one consulting as well as teaching classes on a variety of topics such as diabetes, cholesterol,  high blood pressure, and different diet plans.  She also teaches some cooking classes.  All this typically consumes one day of her week.

The rest of her week is spent in her private practice where she consults with people who have severe, life-altering food sensitivities such as migraines, irritable bowel syndrome, reflux, and autoimmune disorders.  She tells of clients who suffer from devastating migraines who can’t leave their homes for days and have exhausted their options with their doctors.  She works with these types of clients to do food sensitivity blood tests to determine what foods are causing severe inflammation in the body and then does a food elimination diet to reduce or eliminate the inflammation.

The results have been remarkable.

Susan exudes passion and confidence.  Tall, slender and fit, she portrays what she preaches.

I asked Susan if she is optimistic or pessimistic about the future when it comes to nutrition in our culture.  She admits to going back and forth on this.  My sense is that she tilts a bit to the pessimistic side as one who is immersed in understanding the tremendous forces working against us in trying to achieve widespread healthful nutrition.

She told me: “it’s almost impossible to sustain a healthy lifestyle in the environment we’ve created.  Our society is set up for convenience and high calories – and we combine it with all kinds of labor-saving devices.”

She bristles a bit as she explains how effective food companies are at designing foods to hit the “bliss point” where one bite, or one chip, or one sip builds a craving for another.  Bliss points aren’t aimed at what’s good for the body.   Remember the “betcha can’t eat just one” ads for potato chips.  That’s a core food design principle.  And it’s where a lot of our “pretend” food or “toxic food-like substances” come from.

In her world, she observes how entrenched bad eating habits are in our society and how incredibly difficult it is to change nutrition habits.  Our taste buds have been held captive since childhood.  Despite that, she has seen people make healthy long-term changes in their lives through her coaching.

She places her hope for the future with children, on reaching them while they are still malleable with a message of how important good nutrition is.  To tackle the childhood obesity epidemic, she feels we are going to have to work through the schools and the food companies.  She laments the horrific food offerings in our school systems and blames food companies for turning a blind eye to the health impact that their products are having on our children.

Susan mentioned the work that Dr. Mark Hyman is doing to work with food companies to try to convince them to produce “real food” rather than “chemical food” which we know can affect the brain.

Susan has co-authored two books:  “The Kardea Gourmet: Smart and Delicious Eating for a Healthy Heart” and “Cooking With Heart”.  Both were co-written with Dr. Richard Collins, a retired cardiologist from South Denver Cardiology and a former partner in presenting many cooking and food selection classes at SDC.

I love the quote she shared with me that she borrowed from Dr. Collins. It clearly speaks to where we are today:

“It takes 2 calories to roll down a car window to get a 700 calorie breakfast”

It makes you appreciate what she is up against.  And what she’s been through.  And the worthiness of where she is going.

You can find out more about Susan and her practice at www.susanbuckleynutritionsolutions.com

 

Ten habits That Will Improve Your Life the Most After 55

In case you haven’t noticed, if you are over 55 today, you are the center of a lot of attention.  As a “boomer”, you’re a hot topic because you are part of the hysteria about the aging of our society.

You see, in the eyes of the government, media, academia, most corporations, and many of the Gen Xers and millennials, you threaten the stability of our country because, well, you’re getting older. And that means you are less capable, less productive, less motivated, less energetic, less whatever.

In spite of what we’ve learned about our mind and body and its resilience and potential, culturally we persist in believing that there is a major downturn in capability when we approach the end of our sixth decade or move into our seventh.

Pardon my bluntness, but that prevailing attitude has a lot bull**** mixed into it!

I’m no conspiracy theorist, but I believe in following the money.  And when you F-T-M on a lot of the attitudes about aging, you get the sense that there just might be some ulterior motives in trying to keep us in the dark about our potential to age more successfully, gracefully, optimally or whatever “-lly” you prefer.

 

Let me take a shot at a couple of “suspects”:

  • Our healthcare (er, disease care) system: Consider what would happen to our $3.5 trillion healthcare system if that system decided to revert to proactive healthcare instead of reactive healthcare.  What if, instead of drug it or cut it out, our healthcare practitioners practiced the Greek concept of “Hygeia” which means “soundness” or “wholeness” of the body and keeping it fit.  Instead of “Panacea” or “remedy for all diseases” and chasing the horse with pills or scalpels after its left the barn, what if “Hygeia” took over and fewer people showed up for their $35 co-pay, “fix-me, Doc” experience – because they didn’t need to.  Just think of the horrific impact it would have on general cash flow within this out-of-control system.  Empty hospitals.  Docs with openings on their schedule and more than 15 minutes to meet with you. Rusty radiology machines. Empty waiting rooms. Fewer drug addictions. Kind of a refreshing thought, isn’t it?
  • The pharmaceutical industry. Can you imagine if we learned how to get well and stay well what the drug companies would do? Extend that to TV advertising.  I’m sure you’ve noticed that drug advertising dominates TV advertising these days.  Neither of those industries wants us to take charge of our own health and do the things that allow us to avoid taking their drugs or ignoring their commercials.  Our healthcare naivete/illiteracy keeps them in business and profitable.
  • The food industry. OMG, don’t even get me started. Consider that we exist in a profit-oriented society where our healthcare system doesn’t care about what we eat and a food industry that doesn’t care about our health.  Sixty-five percent of us are overweight, twenty percent of us are obese. Heart disease remains the biggest killer.  Diabetes has reached epidemic levels.  On average, as a population, we’ve gained fifteen pounds over the last couple of decades but haven’t gotten any taller.  We succumb to the convenience of processed and manufactured/pretend food for a lifetime and then wonder why we get sick for a long time before we cash out.  Does the food industry care?  If you’ve ever been in middle aisles of an American grocery store, I think you know the answer to that.

Is there an answer for healthy survival in the midst of all this.  Yep – and it really isn’t complicated.  I didn’t say easy – I said it’s not complicated.

It’s called self-efficacy.  It’s getting educated and taking full responsibility for your health.

It’s never too late to start; it’s always too early to quit.

Here are ten simple things to do to improve your health and enhance your chances of living longer and healthier. Most of these you know. But, are you doing them?  As the proverb says:  ‘Knowing and not doing is not knowing.”

  1. Don’t retire. How’s that for a controversial starting point? Retirement, as we’ve known it for several decades, is dying, none too soon.  And for good reason.  Joint research by the Social Security Administration and the National Institute on Aging indicates that full-time retirement is associated with a 23-29 percent increase in mobility and daily activity difficulties, an 8 percent increase in illness, and 11 percent decline in mental health.
  2. Upgrade your diet away from animal-based and processed foods. The verdict is in, and has been for a while: a largely plant-based diet is by far the healthiest.  The only argument the food industry can take against that – in particular the beef, pork, and poultry industries – is that a plant-based diet doesn’t provide enough protein.  Wrong!   Most nutrition experts claim we are over-proteined in our culture and feel a plant-based diet offers adequate protein.   F-T-M and don’t buy the meat and poultry industry argument.
  3. Up your exercise and include strength training. Less than a quarter of Americans 18 or older met physical activity guidelines for cardiovascular and muscle-strengthening activity in 2017 according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. On page 56 (adult) and page 68 (older adult) of the downloadable .pdf of the government Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans,  minimum recommended exercise calls for 2 ½ – 5 hours a week of moderate-intensity or 1 1/4 – 2 ½ hours of vigorous-intensity aerobic exercise per week.  Muscle-strengthening activities involving all major muscle groups should be added on two or more days a week. Get your heart rate into the optimal exercise range for your age (220 minus your age times .65 and .85) and sustain it.

The weight training is vital. You are experiencing sarcopenia and probably aren’t aware of it.  We all fall victim to it.  It’s loss of muscle mass and it started for us all in our 30s.  The only antidote is strength training.  Remember this simple mantra:  Aerobic exercise will give you life, strength training will make it worth living.

  1. Get more sleep. No magic here.  You need a minimum of seven hours a night at this age.  Naps count.  Research shows that a chronic lack of sleep, or getting poor quality sleep, increases the risk of disorders including high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, depression, and obesity.
  2. Challenge your brain. Don’t believe the myth that brain senescence is automatic.  It isn’t.  Oh, it can happen if you let it.  But we’ve known for years that our brain, regardless of age, can produce new synaptic connections.  It’s called neurogenesis.  Think of your brain as a muscle.  It, too, can atrophy.  Use it or lose it.
  3. Maintain a high level of social activity. AARP says that social isolation is as damaging as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.  Too often, reduced social engagement is a consequence of the retirement phase of life. We now know that being socially active plays a key role in longevity and good health.   TV and Lazyboy are deadly combinations.
  4. Assess your relationships and do some housecleaning. Do you have toxic relationships in your life? We benefit by getting rid of negative, draining relationships. Motivational speaker, Jim Rohn, famously said: “You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”  We are greatly influenced by those closest to us, in the way we think, our self-esteem, our decision making.  Severing a relationship can be tough, but vital to avoid the energy drain and excess cortisol production that a bad relationship can cause.  Do yourself and your toxic friend(s) a favor – cut the cord.
  5. Increase your interaction with younger people. We seem to be quick to throw rocks at Millenials when we should make an effort to interact more with them.  It will be a mutually-beneficial relationship.  You feed off their energy, enthusiasm, ideas, and tech-savviness.  They gain from your wisdom, steadiness, and common sense.   It’s encouraging to see more and more companies discovering this and striving toward multi-generational workforces.
  6. Learn something new every day. Henry Ford said: “Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty.”  We lament our muscle atrophy as we age but ignore our brain atrophy.  One of the greatest old dead white men, Leonardo de Vinci, nailed it:  “Learning is the only thing the mind never exhausts, never fears, and never regrets.”
  7. Get savvy on basic technology. Technology development will continue to accelerate. If you are still pondering the purchase of a smartphone, well, you may have some serious catching up to do.  Yes, there are downsides to all the tech that surrounds us.  But the upsides are much greater.

There may be an organization in your area that specializes in teaching technology to seniors.  One good resource is a site called Senior Planet  which “celebrates aging by sharing information and resources that support aging with attitude, and helps people who were born long before the digital revolution to stay engaged and active by bringing a digital-technology focus to a range of topics – among them news, health, sex and dating, art and design, senior style, travel, and entertainment.”  They have physical locations in New York City. Plattsburgh, NY, San Antonio, TX, Palo Alto, CA and just opened in Denver, CO.

  1. Find someone to help/mentor. There is often a serendipitous effect of mentoring someone that goes beyond helping.  Mentors typically improve their own skills by being inspired by new ideas, expanding their network and learning new strategies, technologies, and methods.

OK, I don’t count well.  The last one is a bonus.

The list could be much longer.  I hope there is a pearl in this list you hadn’t heard or thought about.  I don’t expect you to agree with all of them.   I’d love to hear your disagreement/counter-argument.  Scroll down and leave a comment.