Extend Your Healthy Longevity – Twelve Things That May Be Accelerating Your Aging – A Three-part Series.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
“Life is a fatal disease. Once contracted, there is no known cure.”
This is a quote from Dr. Walter Bortz, one of my favorite authorities on maintaining good health in our third age. Dr. Bortz is an 89-year old former Stanford University geriatric physician and author of seven books, my favorites being “Dare to Be 100” and “The Roadmap to 100”.
While his quote has a bit of a fatalistic tone, his written and spoken advice takes a much more optimistic tone about delaying the “fatal disease” part of life.
Dr. Bortz convinced me, when I read “Dare to Be 100” the first of three times in 2013, that I needed to ratchet up my own longevity expectations. Prior to reading his reasoned and experienced position on successful aging, I hadn’t given it a lot of thought and was pretty fatalistic in my longevity expectations.
Kind of the “what will be, will be” – with a sprinkling of naivete about the non-role of genetics in my longevity.
So with a fresh understanding from Dr. Bortz that there is no biological reason that the human body shouldn’t last well past 100 years, I began confessing to the goal of living to 100. I’ve since revised that to 112 ½ years because, at 75, I decided I need another third of my life to catch up for what didn’t get done in the first two-thirds.
Yes, my friends and family still think I’m nuts but no longer roll their eyes – probably out of boredom, deference, and pity. Candidly, I am probably nuts to think it will happen. With mild hypertension, hypothyroidism, atrial flutter, and statin-controlled cholesterol, I’m probably not the best horse to bet on in this race.
But one thing is certain. Like anything else, if I don’t set the goal, I for sure won’t get there. So what if I miss it by 5 or 10 years? It beats buying into only living to the average U.S.male lifespan of 78.69 years. Especially when you are 77.5, which I am.
No, I’m not going to be a part of the statistic. Too much to do in my quest to instill sageism and fight ageism.
Yeah, we aren’t going to get out of this thing alive. But we don’t need to hasten the demise. Culturally, we’re really good at building age accelerators into our lifestyles, often innocently and due to lack of knowledge, more often just out of laziness, lack of discipline, capitulation to convenience and a refusal to acknowledge the insidious nature of habits.
How might you be accelerating your aging? Here are the first four of a dozen accelerators I’ll toss out over the next three weeks for you to consider and check yourself against :
- Attitude with no gratitude or altitude. Bortz turns the word DARE into an acronym for longer living: Diet – Attitude – Renewal – Exercise. Of the four, he considers attitude the most important, by far. He reminds us that “attitude facilitates the biological steps, the planning, the decision making that take us to true old age. It’s possible to get there by chance, but not likely.” The research studies of centenarians have revealed that they think health and don’t dwell on sickness and death. They expect to foil the doc and live.
William James wrote: “Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help make it so.” Tony Robbins reminds us that it’s impossible to be grateful and depressed at the same time. Think lofty thoughts and be grateful for each day.
- A past bigger than your future. I learned the other day that the highest increase in suicide in the U.S. is in males 50+ and that suicide rates for males are highest among those aged 75+. Certainly, illness is a big factor in this. But also contributing can be a lost sense of purpose, a loss of personal identity brought on by retirement, or a living in the past without a vision for what could be a bigger future in the third age.
Culturally, we’ve been taught to wind down as we age, to come in for a landing after several decades of flying high. A mindset that suggests another take-off and moving into a future that could be bigger than a high-achieving past is foreign to us when, in fact, we are in an ideal position to make our future bigger. Maybe not in title; maybe not in money; maybe not in culturally-perceived prestige. But we can bring and pay forward our talents and acquired skills and experiences to serve others in transformational ways that exceeded what we did in our past.
- Seeking comfort and security. Nothing significant develops in a comfort zone. When we seek comfort, we unconsciously seek complacency. Any progress made in our first half or two-thirds only happened when we stepped out of the comfort zone that was holding us back. Yet we strive for comfort within the illusion that there is a thing called security. The pursuit of comfort and security is not how we grow and is not the real world we live in. We’ve bought some bad intellectual goods.
Brianna West, author and blogger at Thought Catalog offers up some insight in both areas:
“There’s no such thing as real comfort, there’s only the idea of what’s safe. This one is a big one to swallow, but there’s really no such thing as “comfort,” which is why comfortable things don’t last, and why the best-adjusted people are most “comfortable” in “discomfort.” Comfortable is just an idea. You choose what you want to base yours on.”
“There’s no such thing as true security. We seek comfort believing that it makes us safe, but we live in a world in which there is no such thing as true security. Our bodies were made to evolve, our physical items are temporary and can be lost and broken, etc. To combat this, we seek comfort, rather than accepting the transitory nature of life.”
- Ignoring our biology. I certainly was naïve about my biology in my first half: smoking for 18 years, extended periods of limited physical exertion, poor nutrition – just a few of a plethora of bad habits. Had I been more informed of how my body is designed to function, perhaps I would have overcome the peer pressure and cultural influences that put me in those habit patterns. Will I pay a longevity price for that? Most likely. But I grew up and matured in an era when we knew relatively little about our biology. For instance, in my teen years, doctors, dentists, and actors encouraged smoking! Our knowledge today of how the body parts all work together and what it takes to keep them healthy is unparalleled. We know all we need to know to virtually eliminate the five major killers in our culture (heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer and dementia). Yet none of the five is receding!
Lori Bitter of The Business of Aging.com and author of “The Grandparent Economy” found, in extensive research she recently conducted, that “baby boomers know what they should be doing – they just don’t do it. It generally takes a crisis to provide the stimulus to make the changes they know they should be making.” We choose to ignore what we know that can slow age acceleration.
Let’s keep it simple. We are 35 trillion cells, give or take a few trillion. Give those cells the oxygen they crave (exercise), the right type of glucose (nutrition) and less cortisol, adrenaline, and norepinephrine (stress reduction), and they’ll do their job to slow the age acceleration.
In addition to either of the two books by Dr. Bortz mentioned at the top, I suggest a trip through a great transformational book on this topic entitled “Younger Next Year”, a must-read for anyone wanting to push that endpoint further out.
These four age accelerators get us started. Eight more to follow over the next two articles. Tune in next week. Please leave your comments below about this quartet of accelerators.
Great article. Looking forward to next two articles in this series.
Thank you George. Hope you enjoy the next two articles.
Hi Gary, thought provoking stuff as usual, thanks much. I wonder if it would be more powerful if you flipped the script?
Stop Accelerating Your Aging is a negative mindset. How about “Start Extending Your Healthy Longevity” Whatever choices/actions folks are making at present gets them the health and longevity of those choices. The choices we make determine the life we lead. Making more healthy proactive choices to stretch both health and longevity is the goal I believe.
Using the same solid material you cite, you could point out the pitfalls of wrong choices but leave readers with a clear idea or two of what to do and encourage them to do it.
Roger, great suggestion that I’m taking seriously. I’ve changed the headline for the series and am going to try to put a more positive spin on the content, although with some of these topics that’s a challenge. Thanks for reading and taking the time to pass along this helpful comment.
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