High leverage ways to live longer, part 2....

Today's Post: Thursday, 12-8-2011

There are many ways to live longer but some give you a larger return than others.

I thought an interesting post would be to list the ones that give you the most leverage.

Some are easy, some are easy for some people but hard for others, and some take a lot of work for anyone who does them.

The overall strategy is to watch for these strategies and begin to use them yourself when you find them.

Or, if it’s something you used to do, when you see it again, resume doing it!

On Tuesday, 12-6-2011, we posted 8 of these strategies.

This part 2 post has 3 more. (In the set of 12, they are 9, 10, & 11.) 12 will be tomorrow.

9, 10, & 11 have to do with stress.

(#12 is different but can be very health protective as well. And one kind of it has been tested to somewhat reverse aging.)

Everyone is stressed by something.

Even people who are doing well have some stress. In fact, people who do worthwhile things or achieve personal goals often do things that add some stress.

Then too, many people are hammered by sudden and harsh stresses on occasion. Earthquakes, fires, floods, tornados, car accidents, and the like don’t always happen to other people.

Yet some people are less harmed by all this. They keep their health better and age more slowly. They recover from things others don’t. And they bounce back faster.

This is a very challenging area. So much so, that it is one that can take a lot of work to improve.

But if you know the key strategies and learn to use them well, you can live longer, have better health, age more slowly, and become much more stress resilient.

9. The first one is a set of related habits or skills that directly reduce the stress in your life. It seems simple. If fewer bad and stressful things happen to you, you are less stressed and you live longer, age more slowly, and stay healthier.

It’s proven to increase longevity too. It is more than just plausible from reasoning. In fact, it was found in one study to even help prevent Alzheimer’s disease.

There are several factors in this one area.

Be prudent, purposeful, and systematic about what you do and how you manage your life. Be analytical, accurate, and very careful in thinking about bad things that happen.

Be prudent:

Avoid unnecessary risks. Take reasonable precautions. Use safeguards. Learn to manage the risks in an area by preparing ahead of time to master the necessary skills. Check out warnings if you can or simply believe them. People who ignore some warnings often die rather suddenly afterwards. But even the more slow acting dangers can cause you damage and stress if you ignore warnings about them and those warnings are accurate. Test things in safe and revealing ways BEFORE taking risky actions.

This one already appeared last time in several specific areas.

Totally avoid tobacco smoke and products. Avoid the major car accident causes and always wear your seatbelt. Always brush and floss your teeth the way that protects your gums and do it every day.

Doing all these 3 directly reduces the stresses you will be under your whole life. But it also begins to give you this skill that you can apply in other areas too.

The Boy Scout motto Be Prepared fits here.

One of my professors put it this way. If you want to dive into water you can’t see into, never do so directly. People who do that often break their necks or their heads. Jump in feet first and explore around a bit BEFORE you dive in!

Businesses that ask the kinds of people who might buy what they have thought up to sell to find out what they might buy and what the for sure won’t buy, sometimes succeed. The businesses who do that and then do a very small and cheap test or several to see if those kind of people actually will buy, often get NO as an answer. They then don’t ruin careers or lose their own or investors money. So they have less stress.

But if someone tests many such things and finds one they CAN sell, they can make enough money to help pay to avoid risks in many ways.

The key that works in all areas not just starting businesses is the practice of doing well thought out and relatively safe tests and explorations BEFORE assuming a risky action is safe.

Another real world example is the explorer Roald Amundsen who was the first man to lead a successful expedition to the South Pole. He studied what the Eskimos did that actually worked in practice to survive in arctic cold. He gathered those materials and he and his men learned to use them. He carefully analyzed what key supplies it would be a disaster to be without suddenly and brought spares along! Despite real discomforts and hardships he and his men reached the South Pole and survived to return.

The competing explorer, Robert Scott, just set out with what he thought might work and without spares for critical supplies. He didn’t quite get to the South Pole and he and his men all died.

In every area of your life where there is enough risk to harm you if things go wrong, do your very best to emulate Roald Amundsen. He was systematic and thorough in his study of how to overcome the known risks and his preparation.

You’ll live longer and escape a lot of stress and harms others will not by using these skills.

Be systematic and well organized. Develop use and improve systems and procedures for important things you do often. Use outlines and to do lists. Set worthwhile but reachable short term goals you work regularly to achieve.

A study of people who did this and were prudent too found that they had so much less stress in their lives that they aged more slowly, lived longer, and were less likely to get Alzheimer’s disease.

Important point. Are people who do these things boring and inflexible?

Surprisingly they are actually more likely to do dynamic things and are MORE flexible than those who do not. The study I just noted found that the people in it who had these skills had just as many creative and interesting experiences as the people who were low or more. They just had easier to take and less stressful lives.

Another study of the jet aces from the Korean war found they were better organized and careful than non-aces. But they were also MORE flexible and able to improve.

Don’t shoot yourself in the foot!

Martin Seligman in his study of resilient and optimistic people found they were analytical and precise and almost scientific in how they explained bad events to themselves.

Most bad things have specific and temporary causes that come from outside your control.

The causes of bad events often do not keep happening. For many bad things, if you can find the cause you can often avoid it next time. Even those that damage you leave some good things intact. In even very damaging events, there are ways to recover. In some cases, you can recover to better a place than where you were to begin with. Even if you made a mistake to help produce the bad result, chances are it had other causes. And both your part in it and those other caused can often be avoided next time.

People without this skill tend to assume the opposite. They think that the part they played in it can never be fixed and that they are stuck with not being able to do it differently. They label themselves as stupid or incompetent or not being good at whatever skill would have helped. The horrible thing is that they then will make similar mistakes because this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. They won’t bother to upgrade their skills or get expert help because they assume permanent defeat ahead of time. Seligman calls this learned helplessness. But it comes from an unrealistically pessimistic and inaccurate thinking style.

Always find what things caused a bad situation that were outside your control. Always find what causes were temporary or can be avoided next time. Always assume you can learn skills or find ways to get expert help in similar situations next time. These are actually more accurate than the pessimistic view. And they enable you to be dramatically more resilient and less stressed when things go wrong.

This skill is incredibly important in dealing with other people and sustaining positive relationships as well.

People with this skill think of people as grouchy today rather than as nasty people. They remember the good things or friendly things they did and do even when they are acting nasty.

Here again this saves them from shooting themselves in the foot. This enables them to be dramatically easier to live with and tends to avoid permanently antagonizing the people in their lives. It often saves them from avoidable and unnecessary divorces as just one example. And, divorces are so stressful that even people in legitimately bad marriages are less stressed than people who get divorced.

And, this skill tends to make marriages enough better to not get to the really bad marriage category in the first place.

10. The related skill is to tend to believe that you can take actions to prevent bad situations and that you will be successful in your efforts.

Strangely, Seligman found that despite being MORE realistic and accurate in assessing bad things, optimistic people tend to believe they can be effective more than the objective facts suggest is possible. They can strike pessimists as being unrealistic and even dense.

The great news is that as long as you are prudent in how you avoid risks, this is a very powerful asset!

The reason for that is the effect it has on what you do.

People who have hope and this kind of optimism, look energetically for things that might solve the problem and try some, see the results, and then do more of what worked or try something else if they got bad results.

People who are more conventionally realistic and lack this skill assume failure in advance and do nothing.

The result is that people with this skill are proactive and work to improve things.

And, they often get good results when it looked initially as if good results were impossible.

People with this skill avoid or escape stress and are dramatically more resilient when stressed or even harmed.

One set of researchers even found they looked at potentially stressful problems as challenges they will overcome.

Just thinking that enables you to be less physically stressed even before you succeed at solving the problem in fact.

11. Whether you have chronic stress or right now have acute and severe stress or you tried to do too much and it’s caught up with you, even people with all these skills will have enough stress to damage them and speed aging some weeks. It can even be every week!

Your body tends to get stuck in flight or fight syndrome and drain your reserves until they are gone and the stress damages you.

But there are several practices that act almost as an off switch to turn off this over-reaction in your body. Using them enables you to stop the damage and physical stress.

People who use the more effective practices regularly do this so well, they simply are far less damaged by stress. They think better, they stay in better health, and they age more slowly.

In fact one researcher found that doing one of these practices both helps prevent all kinds of mental decline and Alzheimer’s disease. He even found that it can help reverse many cases of mental decline.

In particular the more effective of these practices can turn off high blood pressure. They even have turned off high blood pressure that the drugs could not in some people.

The 3 kinds that have been effective for people are meditation, yoga, and tai chi.

For most people meditation is the weakest of these practices. The people for whom it works tend to have a near religious belief in it and have the time for half an hour to an hour a day to do it. (People who do less meditation than that still get some lowering of high blood pressure but not very much. ) So unless you are really into it and have the time or happen upon a dynamic teacher, meditation may be a poor choice for you.

Yoga can work for some people. You do get some exercise from it and tend to become more flexible. Dr Dean Ornish has found a form of yoga that has given his patients great results for example. So, it can be a good choice.

But some forms of yoga are much less effective at reducing stress. And people have been injured enough to lose time from work by overdoing yoga stretches.

If you happen on a good teacher and like it, yoga can be a good choice. But for a universal recommendation I find yoga, like meditation, a bit on the too variable in results side.

My recommendation and the one I’ve begun to learn myself is Tai Chi. If you learn it and practice it for even 10 minutes a day on most days, you get superb and reliable stress relief.

Tai chi is enough of an exercise that you burn as many calories an hour doing it as you would if you went on a walk that many minutes.

(Meditators by contrast burn as many calories while meditating as sleepers or TV watchers!)

Tai Chi is also a slow and controlled, defensive martial art. So you also gain some self defense skill by learning it and practicing it every week.

One woman found it enhanced her ability to play the sport she did for recreation for example when part of this self defense skill enabled her to move more effectively in competition.

But the strongest recommendation of all is that the studies done on Tai Chi find it delivers the best stress relief by far.

People who have high blood pressure who learn and begin to practice Tai Chi were tested and lowered their blood pressure by 17 over 11. Only the strongest drugs to lower high blood pressure lower it that much.

Another study found that doing Tai Chi caused your telomeres to stay 43% longer.

As you may know, that much effect on your telomeres sharply slows aging and helps prevent virtually every disease.

(Telomeres are the protective caps on the end of your DNA. When they stay long, your cells make perfect copies. When they become too short, your cells make defective copies of your DNA which is the underlying cause of aging. Studies show people with short telomeres are much more likely to get heart disease, strokes, type 2 diabetes, cancer, and infectious diseases!)

That makes doing Tai Chi an incredible asset.

That’s why despite my very tight schedule I’m beginning to learn it myself.

I’m out of time again today, so factor 12 will be in tomorrow’s post, part 3 in this series.