Archive for category: Health and Wellness

Image by Couleur from Pixabay

I hope you don’t think I have a big-word fetish.  Last week I dumped a doozy on you with “oligodencrocytes.”  Judging from the positive response and zero unsubscribes from last week, I’m sensing you have a tolerance level for an occasional esoteric linguistic trip.

Assuming so, let’s go on another one. This time, I’m going to invoke a really old friend of all of us  – Aristotle,  he of Greek legend and fame and one with considerable currency on the personal development front.

Before I dive in too deep, let me confess that I’m drawing much of today’s content from a fabulous book that fell in my path recently entitled “Life Reimagined: The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife” by veteran NPR journalist and correspondent Barbara Bradley Hagerty.

If you invest in it, I think you will enjoy the trip, especially through chapter five entitled “It’s the Thought That Counts.”  It was in that chapter that Aristotle resurfaced.

Thinking about your thinking

Apparently the Greeks thought a lot about thinking.  They debated a lot about happiness.  One side of the debate was “hedonia” from which we get our word hedonism, described in the book as happiness coming from “satisfying appetites, having a good beer, a good meal, and good sex.”

What’s not to like, right?

Aristotle, on the other hand, enters the debate rather curmudgeon-like, asking questions like “What is a good life?” explicitly saying it’s not hedonia but rather something more than that.

He wrote that “- the highest of all human goods is the realization of our own true potential” and suggested that we all emerge on this mudball with unique human capacities and abilities.

Deepening his role as a party-pooper. he called it “the daimen” and suggested, according to Hagerty, “that our task in life is to figure out what those unique capacities are, and then to do our very best to bring them into reality.”

This brings us our big-word-of-the-week: eudaimonia (not to be confused with those healthful, green immature soybeans).

From it, we derive “eudaimonic happiness.”  It is about “striving, working hard, purposeful engagement, the kind of effort that may be stressful or even painful in the short run but over the long run brings meaning and a wildly profitable return on investment.”

 Going “blue collar”

I needed that big word and definition.  You see, I’ve committed to writing at least 500 words a day on something to somebody or some thing (this blog, Quora.com, Medium.com, guest blog, etc.) taking the advice of a large squadron of very successful writers, who have persuaded me that learning the craft of writing is unglamorous blue-collar work.

Since my start, and as of 12/31/19, I had missed only 38 out of 203 days and have missed 0 days over the last three months.  That has produced, since I started tracking in mid-June 2019, over 110,000 words.  For you non-writers, that’s roughly equivalent to 2-4 self-help books or 1 1/2 of Ms. Hagerty’s masterpiece.

How does my commitment stack up against Ari’s eudaimonic happiness checklist?

• Striving? Check.
• Working hard? Check – some days the words flow, most days not.  Some days, 30 minutes; most days, 1-2 hours.
• Purposeful engagement? Check. Feeling good about the mission/quest and the encouraging feedback. Positive comments, upvotes, claps, likes are increasing along with a steady climb in new subscribers to this weekly diatribe.
• Stressful? Check. Yeah, it pushes me out to the edge of my comfort zone which I consider the kind of positive stress I need.
• Painful in the short run? Check. Reference Working Hard above.
• Meaning?  A subjective check. Yeah – I think I’m touching a soul now and then. And I know I’m incrementally getting better at the craft I’ve chosen to finish out with.
• Wildly profitable ROI?  NOT! Missing in action! I took my 110,000-word tracking sheet to King Soopers to use to buy some Zyrtek.   I was ushered out, gently, sniffling all the way.

So, where’s the eudaimonia?

No, I wasn’t dropped on my head as a child?  Yes, I’m feeling “eudaimonic happiness” despite the absence of anything resembling ROI presently, or a clear vision of where it may come from.

Hagerty helped me understand why, illogically, I feel that way.  She suggests that there are two types of happiness: short-term happiness and long-term meaning.

As a septuagenarian feeling eudaimonic happiness, I’m not in a very exclusive club.  Most folks, by this age or earlier, have “matured” past short-term happiness into seeking something with long-term meaning.   If we haven’t begun to make that transition in mid-life we can end up stuck permanently in an unhappiness rut – or on a “hedonia” track.  You know what I’m referring to – the trophy wife, red convertible, radical career change sort of track.

That track can make you a permanent resident at the bottom of life’s “U-curve of Happiness.”

A happiness curve?

There has been a lot of research on the stages of happiness across the age spectrum and it’s produced a thing called the “U-curve of Happiness.”

It looks something like this:

Surprising to most, happiness generally hits bottom in mid- to late-forties and then curves back up steadily through old age.

That’s pretty counter-intuitive, counter-cultural isn’t it? In our younger years, we looked askance at older people and assumed that they are unhappy and miserable with what we perceived as deteriorating minds and bodies. Conversely, wouldn’t the pinnacle of earnings years, material accumulation, title prestige, etc. be the really happy times?

Now we’re there and, if we are fortunate, have discovered it to be false.

Research has reinforced our mid-life discovery that continued pursuit of extrinsic, image-related goals won’t serve us well and can bring on negative emotions such as shame, guilt, anger as well as recurring sicknesses and loss of energy – not to mention the occasional red ‘beemer convertible.

Conversely, we’ve learned that intrinsic goals that value personal growth, deeper relationships, and something bigger than self reward us with a better self-image and better health.  Maybe even a much longer life with good health.

Hagerty points out:

“Our bodies prefer selfless happiness to self-centeredness and will reward eudaimonia with longer life. Scientists have discovered that people who pursue eudaimonic well-being also have lower particular biomarkers for inflammation that have been linked to a number of health problems, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, and Alzheimer’s disease.  These purposeful people even have lower cholesterol.”

The MIDUS touch

I encourage you to invest in Hagerty’s book. In chapter five, she shares the results of an enormous research project  conducted at the University of Wisconsin called MIDUS (Midlife in the United States) that “tracked thousands of people through their mid-life and later years, measuring their well-being in every possible way: physically, emotionally, psychologically, biologically, and neurologically.”

The conclusion of the study:  pursuing happiness can backfire, but pursuing eudaimonia rarely fails.  In chapter five, she shares the study’s six attitudes or mindsets that can predict health and well-being: 

1. Positive relations with others
2. Environmental mastery, or the ability to create or choose environments where you thrive and handle events as they come along.
3. Self-acceptance, or knowing your strengths and weaknesses.
4. Autonomy, that is independence, controlling your own behavior, and not looking for approval from others.
5. Personal growth, meaning that you keep evolving and learning throughout your life.
6. Purpose in life, or the search for meaning in everyday life, even when things go (horribly) wrong; a sense of direction and zest for life.

It’s the thought that counts!

Take the big words, all the research, the eloquent language, the checklists and it all returns back to one thing which Hagerty uses as the chapter title – “It’s The Thought That Counts.” 

We are nothing more than what we allow our thinking to think about what we think.

It can be both disturbing and reassuring to know that we have thought our way into our current circumstances, good or bad.

I don’t think it’s inappropriate to wrap with the time-worn cliché:  the only control we have over circumstances in life is how we respond to (think about) those circumstances.

We will experience the upturn of the happiness curve only if we have our arms around that principle.

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How about you? Any “eudaimonia” happening in your life?  I’d love to hear your story.  Scroll down and leave a comment or email me at gary@makeagingwork.com with your thoughts or suggestions.

If you haven’t, join the steadily growing tribe by subscribing at www.makeagingwork.com and get a free copy of my e-book “Achieve Your Full-life Potential: Five Easy Steps to Living Longer, Healthier, and With More Purpose.”

It’s been a challenge selecting four more topics to wrap up this three-part series on age accelerators to avoid.  Not because there is a scarcity of accelerators but rather having so many possible topics to bring forth.

So here’s my final selection of age accelerators to avoid – I hope you find these last four helpful.

1. Holding on to disempowering cultural beliefs.  Dr. Mario Martinez, in his books “The Mindbody Code” and “The Mindbody Self”, introduces us to the new language of biocognition – how our culture affects our biology.  This language provides a basis for many insights into health or the lack of it.  Our cultural beliefs are extremely potent when it comes to our health.  They can promote wellness and lead us to joy and happiness or they can cause us to cling to patterns of behavior that are known to be harmful and life-shortening.

Dr. Martinez points out:

“Based on the latest scientific studies of healthy brains, healthy longevity, and a strong sense of self worth, biocognition debunks some very persistent myths: that we are victims of our genetics; that aging is an inevitable process of deterioration; and that the life sciences can simply choose to ignore the influence of culture on human health and well-being”.

Through his extensive global study of centenarians, Dr. Martinez uncovers the empowering and disempowering effect of cultural beliefs and argues that ” – healthy longevity is learned rather than inherited and that the causes of health are inherited rather than learned.”  For instance, he uses the term cultural portal to argue that growing older is the passage of time, whereas aging is what we do with time based on our cultural beliefs.

Dr. Martinez uses this example (bolding is mine):

“Middle age is one of the cultural portals.  When it begins, your culture will tell you how to behave and dress and what to expect – all without any biological evidence to support that stage of your life.  But if you’re not aware that you are in a cultural fishbowl, you will age according to what your culture tells you rather than your biology.  Fortunately, there are ways to come out of the portals, as healthy centenarians and other outliers are able to do.”

Does this paragraph make you stop and think?  What cultural beliefs might we be carrying forward into the third age that are sub-consciously disempowering us and keeping us from realizing the tremendous potential that remains for us in this period?  A few come to my mind:

• • The expectation and necessity of retirement.  We are often tagged as a “fool” or “unfortunate” if we don’t capitulate to retirement.  The cultural editors that have instilled this cultural belief have been tremendously effective in taking a flawed, unnatural concept and turning it into an entitled withdrawal by appealing to the more hedonistic side of our personalities and away from our instinctive need for meaning and purpose.
  • The belief that our DNA is our destiny.  We’re learning, according to Dr. Martinez,  to challenge genetic sentencing in family illness and that “we are not the mechanical products of our genes, we are the coauthors of their expression.  With few exceptions, illnesses are only genetic propensities, not inevitable disruptions waiting for their time to unfold.”  We are born with a gift of health but allow cultural beliefs to roadblock our opportunity to express and benefit from the gift.   We thus view health as the absence of illness rather than understand and pursue the concept of wellness, the optimal expression of health.
  • Old age is to be dreaded. When I mention to someone my intention to live to 112 1/2, the reaction is immediate repulsion.  Not toward me personally, but to their mind’s eye – wheelchairs, dementia, Depends, bent-over immobility.  Yet we hear more and more stories of centenarians who replace dread with resilience in the face of age-related setbacks and combine it with two robust causes of health:  passion and meaning.  Above all, they continue to work, refusing to retire from what they love.

2.  Act your age.  Here an interesting infographic from SeniorLiving.org from a survey of more than 1,100 Americans about the upper limit age for many behaviors.  It pulls together quite a list of cultural activites and how we view adherence to them as we age.

I’m all in on not acting your age.

Spend 3 minutes to view this video by Dr. Roger Landry, former Air Force flight surgeon and respected author of “Live Long, Die Short”.  He introduces a new concept called the “dignity of risk.”  It says all that needs to be said about not acting our age.

3.  Stop being courageous.  The dying have a message.  Australian hospice nurse, Bronnie Ware, for many years spent time with patients who were in the last few weeks of their lives and who had gone home to die.  In her article “Regrets of the Dying, she shares the five most common regrets that they expressed in their final days:

• • I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
  • I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
  • I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
  • I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
  • I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Regret #1 was by far the most common.

For many, being courageous and heeding the call to break out and be true to oneself while progressing into the second half/third stage of life intensifies and, at the same time, becomes increasingly difficult.

4.  Losing a sense of purpose and meaning.  Dr. Robert Butler was a world-renowned gerontologist, psychiatrist, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning activist and aging pioneer who coined the terms “ageism” and “longevity revolution.  The Blue Zones website reports that Dr. Butler and his collaborators led an NIH-funded study that looked at the correlation between having a sense of purpose and longevity. His 11-year study followed healthy people between the ages of 65 and 92 and showed that those who expressed having clear goals or purpose lived longer and lived better than those who did not. This is because individuals who understand what brings them joy and happiness tend to have what we like to call the Right Outlook. They are engulfed in activities and communities that allow them to immerse themselves in a rewarding and gratifying environment.

In Okinawa, where we find one of the highest percentages of people living to 100 or beyond, they have a term for sense of purpose – ikigai.  It stands for “why I wake up in the morning”.

Hold on – I’m not going all political on you.  I’m in the same place you are – dumbfounded by how far off the tracks we’ve gone in government leadership and common sense.

That’s stuff for another article – somebody else’s article because I’m not writing it.

But a New York Times piece entitled “Our Food Is Killing Too Many of Us” recently hit my newsfeed.  It reminds us that we “Americans are sick – much sicker than many realize.”  It refers to the CDC report that more than 100 million U.S. adults are now living with diabetes or prediabetes.  Breaking down the CDC report, it appears that about 10% have diabetes, 90% have prediabetes which, if not treated, can lead to Type 2 diabetes within five years.

If you’ve been enduring my articles for a while, you know that I unabashedly boarded this “food is killing us” bandwagon long ago and continue as a lonely voice in a wilderness of fellow sapiens whose taste buds and habits have been taken and held captive as we slowly eat ourselves to death.

Along with the planet!

OK – I’m not going all environmentalist on you either.  But, at some point, we’ve got to get real about all this.

Think about it – have you heard one garlic-laced utterance from any of the several thousand presidential candidates that included the word “food”?

Have any of them expressed concern or interest in the current destruction and burning of the lungs of our planet to graze more four-legged saturated-fat-factories?

How many of them know or care that it takes 600 liters of fresh water to produce one liter of any sugar-sweetened soda delivered in a plastic bottle.  Or that, according to Soil and Water Specialists at the University of California Agricultural Extension, the water required to produce one pound of beef is 5,214 gallons.

Please assure me you won’t be holding your breath waiting for any of the above to cross the lips of any candidate, right or left.

What we can count on is the continuing political dance that steps over the problem to focus on how to ensure that the financial injury for bad health habits isn’t egregious.  Nary a poke at the source of the problem – poor eating habits, lack of exercise, a food industry that thrives on government inaction and a populace ignorant to what they are doing to themselves.

Oh, and we had best throw in a healthcare system that struggles to spell “food” and would go apoplectic if asked  to define “nutrition.”

The Times article acknowledges that government plays a crucial role:

“The significant impacts of the food system on well-being, health care spending, the economy, and the environment — together with mounting public and industry awareness of these issues — have created an opportunity for government leaders to champion real solutions.

Yet with rare exceptions, the current presidential candidates are not being asked about these critical national issues. Every candidate should have a food platform, and every debate should explore these positions. A new emphasis on the problems and promise of nutrition to improve health and lower health care costs is long overdue for the presidential primary debates and should be prominent in the 2020 general election and the next administration.”

 I suppose we could hope it will happen –the political “food platform” thing.  Nothing wrong with being hopeful but I’m inclined to put hope and wish in the inaction category.  Does it make sense to wait for a political “food platform” to emerge from the tangle of trade wars, border conflicts, space defense, buying frozen countries, and free everything for everybody?

It starts with us. And our nutritional and environmental awareness.  We don’t do well with the first and ignore the impact of the latter.

Meat equals money and our appetite for meat is the most direct cause of the Amazon’s peril along with other parts of the world with the U.S. near the top of the list.

Carefully engineered combinations of sugar, salt and fat are a direct cause of our sickness.  We are victims of our own naivete, reprogrammed taste buds, and craving for convenience. Given all that, we individually are still the only solution.

Consider this suggestion from nutrition activist and physician Dr. David Katz ( the bolding is mine):

“Eat less meat this week. If you eat it daily, skip a day. If you only eat it weekly, skip the week.  If you, personally, had to set some majestic, 200-year-old tree on fire as a prelude to your next bacon-cheeseburger, would you do it? Those of you who say yes are beyond redemption. To everyone else: eat less meat, please. This is the price it is exacting- unattenuated simply because someone else strikes the match.

Less ultra-processed food, less meat, and more whole plant foods are the very formula most indelibly linked to less chronic disease, less premature death, less obesity, more years in life, more life in years. But in this context, that is simply fortuitous.

There are no healthy people on a ravaged planet. There are no healthy people on a planet that can no longer sustain them. We are at risk of eating ourselves into extinction.”

Thanks for allowing me back up on my soapbox.  Feel free to knock me off with a comment below if you feel differently.  My-fruit-and-vegetable-and-wholegrain-fed skin is getting thicker.

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P.S. How fortuitous.  Just as I finished this article, a newspaper headline in our daily rag called the Denver Post said the following: “Trump administration limits scientific input” with a tag “USDA Dietary Guidelines”.  We now know that one presidential candidate, and his administration, have a “food platform”.  It indirectly supports the consumption of meat, highly processed and high sodium foods by eliminating questions about those issues from the 80 questions that the committee overseeing nutritional guidelines have been asked to explore.  If you read the article, I hope you come away a bit incensed.