Archive for category: Health and Wellness

Welcome to Part 3 of this series on avoiding extended late life frailty.

In Part 1, we looked at frailty with the intent of establishing that it isn’t synonymous with aging and that it is not a disease but rather a condition related to disuse. I also introduced a clinical term often associated with this condition – sarcopenia – which the dictionary defines as “loss of muscle tissue as a natural part of the aging process.”

In Part 2, I took the position that debilitating loss of muscle mass as we age is a major contributor to our loss of independence but is, for most, an insidiously debilitating lifestyle choice.  And that our medical community is doing little to raise our awareness of how we can reduce the effects of sarcopenia.

What I hope to accomplish with the series is to elevate awareness and motivate and persuade readers to take a new understanding of this self-inflicted malady and make changes that will enable them to dodge some bullets later in life.

In other words, avoid the “frail trail”.

Really our choices are to confront it or let it continue to take us slowly, gradually, to an extended and miserable, costly late life – “living too short and dying too long.”

There are few givens when it comes to what happens to us in this second half/third stage of life –loss of muscle mass is one of them.  We cannot predict with certainty what other maladies may befall us in these later stages – and it’s likely some will.

But this one we can predict and proactively make some allowances for.

And we must because it is the most prevalent condition that robs us of the vitality we deserve to live an active, fulfilling late life.

We don’t need more Nobel prizes

In the words of Dr. David Katz, a physician at the Yale School of Medicine, and founder of an organization called the Academy of Lifestyle Medicine:

“We already know all that we need to know to reduce, by 80%, the five major killers in our country.  We don’t need more fancy drugs or equipment or more Nobel Prizes.  We know all we need to know today.”

 The Center for Disease Control (CDC) reminds us that four risky behaviors – lack of physical activity, poor nutrition, smoking, and excess alcohol consumption – are responsible for much of the suffering and early death related to chronic diseases.  These chronic diseases are also among the most preventable and regular physical exercise is one of the most important remedies.

The CDC also informs us that, in 2012, only 7.9 percent of those 75 or older engaged in aerobic and strength-training that met the 2008 federal physical activity guidelines for that age group. Yikes!!

By allowing our musculoskeletal resources to decline, we practically guarantee the onset of any of a number of potential calamities.

 

 

 

Here are just a few from a long list of conditions that medical professionals have observed that result from sarcopenia:

1. Decreased strength
2. Mobility and balance problems
3. Falls
4. Weak bones and fractures
5. Weight gain/obesity
6. Diabetes
7. Decreased visual acuity
8. Declining sensory perception
9. Slowed reflexes
10. Inability to cope with stressful conditions

Stop the death spiral

All of these contribute to the mountain of demoralizing statistics about where this is taking us in terms of living conditions and health care costs.  There are some who predict that the care of the elderly, as the ranks swell, could bankrupt our economy.

We can each do our part to stop this death spiral and take advantage of the longevity bonus that most of us will experience.

So, let’s cut through it all and get to a solution.

I’ll stand by my claim in Part 2 that sarcopenia is reversible and that the solution is:

Simple

Lift weights.  If you haven’t lifted a weight since Apollo 13, consult with your physician, start small and build up.  Learn proper techniques early to avoid injury as you proceed.

Inexpensive

Join a local gym.  If you are over 65 and have a Medicare Advantage plan, you are probably eligible for the very popular Silver Sneakers program.  I frequent a 24-hour Fitness facility six days a week under this program and don’t spend a nickel.

Immediate

With a consistent, disciplined strength training routine, you will feel and see significant results as soon as two weeks.  You’ll feel better, have more energy, sleep better and may even look better almost immediately.  It’s not about weight loss but, depending on your starting point, that may be a serendipitous result.

Drug-free

Aside from an occasional Advil early on as your muscles respond and grow from the new stress, there are no drugs needed to reverse this condition.

It really is that simple.  So why do so few of us do it?  Why is it so difficult?

The answer to that is simple also.  Attitude and habits.

The biggest battle is mental, not physical. Attacking and reversing a condition like sarcopenia requires a commitment to hard physical work.  It requires a commitment to an activity that most in the middle-age group and beyond don’t care for, think about or relate to.

This simple plan requires an attitude that accepts and understands the downside of inaction and commits to doing something about it.  But it must go beyond willpower because willpower alone doesn’t work.  We have broken New Year’s resolutions as ongoing proof of that.  Without a total commitment to reversal, this effort too will fail.

Our lives are driven by habits.  Many of the habits we’ve adopted directly contribute to the decline of our musculoskeletal resources (need I mention TV, snow blowers, electric knives, elevators, etc.?) An effective battle against sarcopenia will mean replacing some deeply entrenched lifestyle habits with habits that are, for most, uncomfortable and unfamiliar in the short term.

Notice I said replace.  We really can’t effectively change habits.   We must replace them.

My own sarcopenia battle

I think I’ve mentioned in previous articles that I’ve been a gym rat for over 30 years.  When I cold-turkeyed off of cigarettes on June 6, 1979, I took up running.  Then, in 1987, I joined a new athletic club and began a 17-year run of pickup basketball five days a week. I also began taking advantage of the weight room at the same time and thus put in place an aerobic and strength-training habit that I haven’t broken since.

Although my knees don’t permit basketball, at age 77 I still do 45 minutes of aerobic (upright bike, elliptical or treadmill) six days a week with three of those days including 30-40 minutes of weight training.

Nothing gets in the way of my dedication of 3-4% of my week to this habit.  If I can’t stay with it because of calendar issues or illness, I’m difficult to be around.

A resource to get you started

Recently I stumbled across Fred Bartlit, 87-year old attorney, West Pointer/Army Ranger, strength trainer extraordinaire.  I’ve referred to Fred’s campaign against sarcopenia in Part 1 and 2 of this series.

Time, space and your attention span prevents me from laying out a detailed sarcopenia reversal plan in a single article.  So, I’m going to leave that to Fred and his co-writers and recommend an investment in his book: “Choosing the Strong Path: Reversing the Downward Spiral of Aging”.  (Note: I have no affiliate arrangement with Fred.  He doesn’t know I exist – yet.)

Fred’s book will do two things:

1. Provide a clear understanding of sarcopenia and its impact, physically, emotionally and financially.
2. Provide a safe, sensible roadmap for incorporating strength-training into your life at a pace and level appropriate for your situation.

You will also find excellent resources at his website www.strongpath.com including some really outstanding brief videos demonstrating proper techniques for starting exercises.

This book and website can get you started right with a new motivational understanding of why you should be doing it.  We don’t need to be a part of the depressing statistics of what is happening to our demographic.

When we take this seriously, we can, in fact, “die young, as late as possible.”

I hope this series has been helpful.  It’s a huge topic to which one can’t do justice in 3,000 words.  Fred’s resources can.

We’d love to hear your story about your journey in this area.  Leave a comment for us below.

Fred Bartlit really lit me up!!

Fred’s story showed up in a recent Sunday issue of our local newspaper.  My wife found it, brought it to me and said: “This guy is singing your song!”.

She was absolutely right.  Fred is an 86-year old West Point grad, former Army Ranger, founder and practicing attorney in a hugely successful law firm, back-bowl skier, a golfer who shoots his age in summer, and a strength-trainer extraordinaire.

All that is impressive and inspiring in its own right, but what lit me up most is Fred’s vigorous campaign against one of the most damaging myths of aging that we allow to penetrate our psyche.

That myth?  That we are all destined to get frail as we get old. To that, Fred says “horsefeathers” – or a more pejorative version of the word.  He’s chosen to walk his talk.

He’s taking his message to the masses, not only by example but by speaking out publicly and co-authoring a book “Choosing the StrongPath: Reversing the Downward Spiral of Aging”.  He’s not shy about holding our healthcare industry responsible for perpetuating the myth through their inaction and not educating patients on the ways to avoid early and long-term frailty.

Our two greatest fears

Research has shown that the two greatest fears we face as we age are:

1. Fear of outliving our money.
2. Fear of losing our independence

Frailty is how we lose our independence.

But what is frailty?

Six years ago, I stumbled into a book entitled “Dare to Be 100”, one of seven books written by Dr. Walter Bortz, 88-year-old retired Stanford geriatric physician and one of my heroes in this battle against the mythical stigmas of aging.  Dr. Bortz put frailty into perspective for me and helped me make some needed changes in my lifestyle.

Dr. Bortz points out that frailty has lacked a conceptual framework.  He poses interesting questions like:

• Is frailty a disease? Is so, where do we look for it in our medical classroom or textbooks?
• Is it a legitimate entry on a death certificate? Cause of death: he/she was frail. Not gonna happen.
• Can we admit someone to a hospital with the diagnosis of frailty and have a prayer of insurance covering anything?
• Is frailty aging? One would tend to think so since it shows up mostly with older people.  But, at the same time, we can identify younger people who are frail due to any number of causes.  If I put my leg in a cast for six months, it becomes frail.

So his position is that frailty is NOT synonymous with aging.  Rather, “it is the reciprocal of vitality, robustness, and healthiness.  It is a predisposition to failure.  It is a disconnectedness, a weakness, an infirmity.”  So an 86-year old Fred Bartlit can be totally unfrail while your 57-year old neighbor can be near totally frail.

More explicitly, and more profoundly, Dr. Bortz goes on to say:

“—frailty is a downward drift of matter from a more highly organized state of order, structure, and function to a state of increased disorder, instability, and susceptibility.  The cause of this total decay is the loss of contact of the system from its environment, with its ordering capacity.”

Did I lose you there?  Sorry.  He finally drops the formal classroom jargon and says bluntly: “Frailty is not aging. Frailty results from disuse – even more than it does from aging.  It is not a disease.  It is a condition.”

And it’s reversible – NO MATTER THE AGE!

Dr. Bortz helped me understand that a body, or an organ within it, reaches clinical frailty when it reaches 70% loss of functionality.  Falling below that 30% threshold is almost certain death of the organ or the body.

We have a “health space” with 70% to work with.  Graphically, it would look like the graph below.  Our mission should be to stay as high in the 70% space for as long as we can.  We have much we can do to make that happen, far much more than we are showing the drive to do in our culture.

I’ve borrowed another one of Dr. Bortz’s graphs to illustrate further how frailty works if intervention doesn’t take place.  If we just let life take its sedentary, convenience and comfort-seeking way without the intervention of proper diet and exercise, we are going to decline at a rate of about 2% /year after age 30, which is when our bodily decline begins to accelerate.  By 65 or 70, at that rate, we are in trouble.

On the other hand, if we were to “intervene” with appropriate health-inducing activities and reduced that decline rate to, say, 1% or 0.5%, perhaps that 100 year threshold I profess would easily be in reach – at least theoretically, notwithstanding the possibility of some form of disease or event that changes that decline rate.

And that’s where Fred Bartlit comes into the picture. I haven’t spoken with Fred but I think he would agree with all this.  I’ve asked for the opportunity to interview him so I can feature him in a future personal-interest article, but I suspect he is too busy to bother with that right now.  Regardless, Fred and I are very much on the same wavelength – and mission – in terms of crusading for the avoidance and/or reversal of frailty.

I have witnessed too many friends, relatives, neighbors – as I’m sure you have – who are stooped, immobile and old before their time. Some may be disease related, but most of it is due to inactivity.

There is a rampant, but undiscussed, condition with a big, scary-sounding name associated with that.  It’s called “sarcopenia”.  Fred is on a campaign against sarcopenia – as I am.  Because it doesn’t have to develop – and it is reversible.

I’m going to dedicate next week’s article to fleshing out and flushing out sarcopenia.   Because somebody needs to – our medical community isn’t.

Stayed tuned – hang with me next week.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Your telomeres are listening to you!!  And they may not like what they are hearing.

OK, buffo – what’s a telomere?

Think of that little plastic wrap at the end of a shoelace that keeps it from fraying.  You do wear laced shoes occasionally, don’t you?  Or have recently enough to remember that little essential component, right?

Now transfer that visual to a chromosome which is in your DNA which is in your cells which are in your body to the tune of  35 trillion, give or take a few trillion.

Got the visual?  OK – that little shoelacey-type thingy at the end of your chromosomes is a “noncoding DNA”.  What does that mean?

I have NO idea.

Let’s just go with telomeres and call it good.  The length of those telomeres at the end of each of your chromosomes is important.  When they get real short, that cell in which they reside checks out and stops dividing.  That’s called cell senescence – as in, DEAD!

So if we were able to keep those shoe-lacey-type thingies long, our cells would stay alive and, if I understand basic biology, that means our bodies would stay alive longer.

Some really smart people tell us that this works because telomeres keep the genetic material in the cell from unraveling.  Unraveling genetics does sound like something to avoid if we have the option.

Apparently, we do have some options to prevent it from happening, at least according to two of those aforementioned “smart people” – researchers Elizabeth Blackburn and Elissa Epel.

I did learn about telomeres because I read Mses. Blackburn’s and Epel’s book last year –  The Telomere Effect: A Revolutionary Approach to Living Younger, Healthier, Longer.

I believe their book was (maybe still is) considered a breakthrough publication on the topic.  If you need to go deep on the topic, slog through it.  And believe me, it’s a slog.  I read a lot of heavy stuff and this one nearly got sent to used-book heaven unfinished because of the academic- and researchese-writing style.  It’s a good substitute for a melatonin fix should you need one.

But I digress.

A good friend forwarded me this article, which is excerpted from that book: “Could your thoughts make you age faster?”  I think it pretty much says in 1686 words what it took the authors 383 pages to say in their book about what you need to know about telomeres and your role in their length.

This excerpted message cuts to the chase:  your thoughts and lifestyle decision shorten or lengthen your telomeres.

Mses. Blackburn and Epel put it this way (bolding is mine):

“The foods you eat, your response to challenges, the amount of exercise you get, and many other factors appear to influence your telomeres and can prevent premature aging at the cellular level. One of the keys to enjoying good health is simply doing your part to foster healthy cell renewal.  People who score high on measures of cynical hostility have shorter telomeres.  People who score high on measures of cynical hostility tend to get more cardiovascular disease, metabolic disease and often die at younger ages.”

OMG, yet another part of our body that doesn’t like bad food, laziness and “stinkin’ thinkin”.

We’ve known for like forever that stress-released hormones like cortisol and adrenaline are devastating over the long haul.  In fact, Mayo Clinic weighs in with this from one of their website articles:

The long-term activation of the stress-response system — and the subsequent overexposure to cortisol and other stress hormones — can disrupt almost all your body’s processes. This puts you at increased risk of numerous health problems, including:

• Anxiety
• Depression
• Digestive problems
• Headaches
• Heart disease
• Sleep problems
• Weight gain
• Memory and concentration impairment

The more we poke around and digitally-dissect this transport system we walk around in, the more we seem to end up coming back to the same conclusion.

We are what we think, eat and do – all elements we can control.

Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it?  Get these under control and live forever.

Well, for whatever the reasons (which are legion), we’re not very good at it even though the solution isn’t all that complicated (not to be confused with easy).

The late Dr. Harry Lodge, co-author of the life-transforming book, “Younger Next Year” put the solution simply with his “Harry’s Rules”

1. Exercise six days a week for the rest of your life
2. Do serious aerobic exercise four days a week for the rest of your life.
3. Do serious strength training, with weights, two days a week for the rest of your life.
4. Spend less than you make. (Stress relief)
5. Quit eating crap!!
6. Care (Stress relief)
7. Connect and commit (Stress relief)

Why can’t we do this – and “die young, as late as possible” – like maybe around 100 or more?

Need a reminder to do the right thing?

That thingy at the end of the shoelace is called an aglet.  Buy a bunch of shoelaces, paint the aglets red and hang them throughout the house/office/car, especially in the vicinity of the lazy boy and the fridge.  And maybe one in your pocket at all times to pull out when the resistance takes your thoughts into the toilet.

Your aglets won’t get shorter, but just maybe your telomeres won’t either – because, remember, they are watching and listening to you.

Maybe you saw the November 30, 2019 Associated Press article in your local paper entitled: “CDC: Life expectancy in U.S. declining.”

I found it buried on page 15A in the birdcage-bottom-quality newspaper we have here in Denver.  No space for this newsflash in the front portion of our paper.  More of the attention there was dedicated to the announcement of the city council’s pending approval of a “supervised drug-use site” where addicts can come to get clean needles and shoot-up under the watchful eye of a “public servant.”

Go figure.

For the third year in a row, our life expectancy has been trending the wrong direction.  After a century of near-meteoric growth (47 in 1910; 78 in 2015), we’ve found a number of ways to turn it in the other direction.

“We’ve never seen anything like this” says the overseer of the CDC death statistics.  Cancer was the only one of the top ten killers that receded in 2017, albeit only slightly.   Seven of the ten increased.  The biggie, heart disease, has stopped falling; the other biggies, suicide, stroke, diabetes, Alzheimer’s,  continue to climb.

I find it interesting that CDC officials wouldn’t speculate about what’s behind the declining life expectancy – and then, in the next breath, hint that a “sense of hopelessness” may have something to do with it, further suggesting that “financial struggles, widening income gap, and divisive politics” are contributing, concluding that therein lies the hopelessness, which therein leads to increased drug, which therein may explain much of this pull-back.

Drug deaths, while certainly a concern, still haven’t cracked the list of top ten killers in the U.S.

The food industry gets another pass

Burger King and Carl’s Junior never got a pixel of ink in the article!  Nor did Coke or Mountain Dew. The meat industry gets yet another pass from the CDC. 

Now it’s Trump-era politics and class identity instead of sugar, fat and salt that are bending the longevity curve? 

Color me skeptical.

Let’s not hang curve-bending clogged arteries and visceral fat on putrid Potomac politics.

This same CDC seems to have a short-term memory.  In 2017, the organization revealed research that suggests 1 of 3 adults in the U.S. has prediabetes and, of this group, 9 of 10 don’t know they have it.  

I’m no medical expert, but I’m confident saying that divisive politics or financial struggles are not likely to appear on the list of things that causes prediabetes, cancer or heart disease.

Oh, I hear your counter argument:  it’s the worrying related to those types of issues that is bumping up the cortisol and adrenaline thus contributing to these diseases. 

Maybe so.

Permit me to provide a very quick, effective tutorial on preventing worry.

DON’T!!  There you have it – probono.  You’re welcome.

It’s the most egregious use of imagination imaginable – and 95% of our worries never materialize.

Maybe someday we’ll get real.

With all the hysteria and new attention, it’s not likely drug deaths will crack the top-ten list of killers.  All current ten killers are considered preventable, some to greater degrees than others.  We’ve known for decades what we need to do to prevent these killers but we persist in killing ourselves slowly by ignoring the fundamentals of how our cells work.

The universe has established a lifespan benchmark of 122 ½years (reference Ms. Jeanne Calment) and we did a marvelous job of creeping toward that in the 20^th century.  But with the low-hanging fruit already picked i.e. infant mortality, elimination/reduction of infectious diseases, washing hands before surgery, etc. , we seem to have become Sisyphean and lost the enthusiasm about continuing to push the longevity boulder up the hill.

We still only achieve about 66% of that full-life potential, even though we know what it takes to realize more of it.  

We’ve become complacent in understanding our biology;  we’ve allowed a deceptive food-industry to take our taste buds captive;  we cling to the 20^th century model of labor-to-leisure retirement and become  sedentary and disconnected, thus contributing to a persistent “live short, die long” life curve of gradual and extended frailty.

The solution is a pretty simple plan, really.

• Stop eating crap – cook at home, leave the meat on the cow and pig.
• Get off your arse and your heart rate up at least three days a week, preferably five.
• Go lift a few weights a couple of days a week.
• Rebuild a “friends list” and do something with it – like connect.
• Burn/Goodwill the Lazyboy and take the batteries out of the remote.
• Don’t stop working – find a “third age” sense of purpose.
• Never stop learning.  Become part of the 5% of our population that reads 95% of the books.
• Spend a little time learning how your body works at the cellular level – it’ll help motivate you to follow through on the above.

Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach says that people die early for three reasons:

1. No money
2. No friends
3. No purpose

Hard to argue.  A sense of purpose is a principal driver that can help us turn the curve back up.  Plus it will render you immune to Trumpian-politics, CNN/Fox, stock market swings and Facebook narcissism.

What can be bad about that?

I’m an addict!

No, you won’t find needle marks on my arms or between my toes.  I haven’t joined the opioid crowd. I had my single, daily beer today – that was it.  My computers are free of porn sites.  And I haven’t spun a roulette wheel or said “hit me” at a blackjack table in 20 years.  And I’ve never bought a lottery ticket.

My addiction would be viewed by most as hardly an addiction, or as something harmful.  But I assure you, viewing it from this side, it is, without question, a harmful addiction with its own unique destructive power.

Like all addictions, it started slowly and has continued to layer on over the last 30 years.  Not unlike how other addictions get started.

As with other addictions, mine is also difficult to reverse or shed.  And like recovery from other addictions, the other side is bright and promising.

What is the addiction?

I’m addicted to learning!

I hear your eyebrows raising.  Whaaa?

Perhaps a better way to describe my addiction is “information accumulation.” And its start was innocent enough.  It came with exposure to the world of “positive thinking”, “self-help”, and “personal development” in the early 1980’s through books and audio programs by Robert Schuler, Dale Carnegie, Brian Tracy, Denis Waitley, Norman Vincent Peale, Earl Nightingale, Napoleon Hill, Tom Hopkins, to name but a few.

What started as reading maybe a book in a month has grown to a book a week or more to where I’ve averaged over 70 books a year for the last 6 years.  And not a novel in that mix.

Hey, I get it if you don’t relate to this.  I’m a rather unproud outlier in this area.

The addiction deepened and took on a new dimension with the advent of the internet and browsers (1990’s)  to the point today where my high-speed access, Evernote, Feedly, Medium.org,  blog subscriptions and alerts galore have enabled the learning and accumulation addiction to reach the point of total overwhelm.

Is there a 12-step program for this?  Perhaps an “Accumulation Anonymous” chapter somewhere?  If you know of one, write me.  I need one, fast!

So why the need for a detox?

Blame Tim Ferris, author of “Four-hour Work Week”.  OK, I confess – my addiction has caused me to read this book four times.   That’s nuts, relatively speaking.  I get it.

The reason I keep going back to Ferris’ book, and others, is I am caught in a destructive mindset that says the “answer” to my inaction and procrastination lies in the next book, or blog, or podcast, or whatever escape mechanism chooses to raise its head.  I subconsciously am hoping for the emergence of a magic bullet from the next element I dive into to move me to action.

Chapter 5 of Ferris’ book is unkind – in a positive way.  It’s confrontational – in a transformational way.  His transformational unkindness reminds me that I’m caught in a trap of inventing things to do to avoid the important. That’s what my accumulation has become.

I’ve come to realize that all the motivation, self-help material that I’ve consumed has been incredibly helpful and moved me out of my comfort zone and helped me grow.  But I’ve reached the point that I am now in the rut of consuming without changing, consuming without creating at an acceptable level and, most concerning, consuming without being conscious of, or remembering, what I’ve learned.

So, lacking an appropriate AA chapter for this, I’m putting myself into a self-designed rehab.

Here’s a glimpse of what I’m dealing with in this addiction and what I have to overcome.  Maybe some of you out there can relate, although I fear I’m part of a small crowd.

1. I have read approximately 650 books over the last 10 years – one a week or more. It’s going to be difficult to avoid putting my nose into a book for a couple of hours in the morning.  But it’s gotta happen!
2. There have been less than five novels in that mix. My reading and study have been very horizontal – self-development, positive psychology, health-and-wellness, nutrition, brain health, advances in bio-science, career planning, the changing retirement world – I’ll stop there although there are other topics. Boring stuff for the well-adjusted homo-sapien.
3. I have 938 podcasts on my 10-year old Apple Classic I-pod. Embarrassingly, I’ve listened to a very large percentage of these (mostly as I work out – it’s the only way I can avoid terminal boredom with my workout routine). Perhaps it’s divine providence and a hint that rehab is necessary that this Apple relic finally gave it up and took this portable audio library with it.   A good omen!
4. At any given point in time, I have 12-15 blogs/newsletters cluttering my email inbox, having succumbed to an offer for a free something-or-other and offering up my email address in exchange. I delete one and another one sneaks in to replace it.  The temptation to read something with each newsletter arrival has been doggedly persistent.  Equivalent, I suppose, to a quick fix. Rehab calls for finding more “unsubscribe” links.
5. I currently have three on-line courses I’ve invested in that are in various stages of completion – one on health and wellness coaching, one on writing and self-publishing, and one on successful blogging. I forget what I learned in each one when I return to it.  Yuck!

I’m not expecting cold-sweats nor do I think I need a weekly support-group meeting to pull this off.  But it won’t be easy.

Some would say I’m trying to replace good habits.  No.  I’m going to replace an excess of good habits.  Reading, study, learning, research, stretching your mind are good – and important.  Until they aren’t.  I’ve reached that point.  Because they have gotten in the way of – as Seth Godin puts it – shipping.  Shipping to Godin – a word class “shipper” – is action, producing something.

My excess of habits has aligned itself with lizard-brain “resistance” to effectively infuse my day with procrastination and comfort level.  Not a great formula for shipping or doing something with meaning and impact, which is what my written life-goals remind me daily that I’m supposed to be doing – only to be stuffed down by my lizard brain.

Well, the “universe” spoke loud and clear these last ten days by serving up – ironically – three blog posts back-to-back-to-back on this very topic, all from different writers and sources. I’ve learned to pay attention to the universe when things like that happen.

Combined, the three blogs have motivated me to begin development of my own “12-Step and AA (Accumulation Anonymous)” program.  Here are the first six steps.  I’d have more completed but I’ve got this book and course I need to finish (yes, the withdrawal will be difficult and take a while).

1. Step #1: Read fewer fluffy, front-loaded motivational self-help books.  After 30 years of these, I’m good with the basics.  The foundation is in place.
2. Step #2: Read less each day (see #3); write more.
3. Step #3: More nuanced reading; go deeper with my learning and more vertical, less horizontal with the topics.
4. Step #4: Stop plowing through books that aren’t reaching me.  If it ain’t resonating, quit and put or give it away -don’t get hung up on the “sunk cost” of having paid for the book.  Come back to it only if, later on, it fits the “nuanced, vertical” category.
5. Step #5: Take advantage of the positive impact of “spaced repetition” and “interleaving” on long-term memory and strong neural connections by having several books going at one time on different topics/problems and in different formats i.e. physical, Kindle and audio.
6. Step #6: Get skilled at avoiding long books built around simple ideas.  Example:  many self-help books.  Study table of contents on Amazon before any buy.

The remaining six steps require some more time and thinking.  More to follow.

Maybe my travails will be helpful although I totally understand if this seems trivial and totally unrelatable.  I classify my issues as a “high-class problem”.  I could be sitting here lamenting my decline into dementia regretting having never read a book since high school or college graduation, which is the case for 38% and 42% or our population respectively. But it feels good to know I’m in the 5% of our population that reads 95% of the books.

Notwithstanding the whining I’ve foisted on you above, it also feels good to know that this mushy 2 ½ lbs of fatty acid between my ears is not going to be a victim of “use it or lose it” syndrome.

Any thoughts?  Or comments?  Let me know below in the comment section.