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What's the key to a happy and healthy old age?
20 Plays1 month ago
There's a multitude of factors that determine one's physical and mental health as they progress through life and reach their older years.
Genetics, physical activity, nutrition, mental health history and environment are just a few examples.
Of course these play a big role, but there's one thing that always, always comes first in importance: human relationships.
A robust social life and an abundance of human connection is the #1 factor that determines happiness and mental (as well as physical!) wellbeing into old age.
Take care of yourselves, don't neglect your family, your friends, your communities, and never hesitate to reach out to someone, even for no reason.
We hold the most powerful medicine and we can give it freely to each other. Love truly is the answer.
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Transcript
The Link Between Social Interactions and Healthy Aging
00:00:06
Speaker
meaningful social interactions and connections strongly associates with healthy aging and with increased longevity. And the risk of a cardiovascular event or a decline due to diabetes or even to cancer is much improved if those meaningful social connections are in place. Either friends or family or something regular and that has emotional content it strongly associates with better outcomes for almost any condition, almost at any age.
00:00:33
Speaker
When my mother was at the end of her life, at the age of in 1998, living in a nursing home. She was stoic and quiet, very typical of that generation of wartime adults. She'd been a nurse in England during the Blitz in 1940. So she understood the priorities of life.
00:00:53
Speaker
And after the war, I think she rarely got agitated. Certainly as my mother, I never never saw her upset about anything, even a broken bone, because um just didn't rise to the level of importance of what she had already seen when she was younger during the war. In her final months, mom had gradually less and less to say, not because ah she had run out of ideas, but because she was content and all the important things had already been
A Personal Reflection on Life's End
00:01:21
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said.
00:01:21
Speaker
At our last visit, which was Christmas, before the April, the next year when her mitral valve gave out, um we sat in front of a television set in the nursing home and watched Judy Garland saying, have yourself a merry little Christmas, which was really sweet.
00:01:40
Speaker
That afternoon we held hands actively for five hours and not a word was spoken. I have to say it was the most eloquent conversation I ever had with my mom.
00:01:53
Speaker
I think words would have cheapened what was a profound expression of affection from her. It was Lovely.
Balancing Solitude and Companionship as We Age
00:02:05
Speaker
For adults, I think the balance between being alone and aging or being alone and in company ah or at any age is in fact one of the major challenges of adult life. How do you choose to be happily alone? How do you choose to be happily with somebody near to you like your partner?
00:02:23
Speaker
and This is in fact an ongoing challenge for all adults. However, ah in in aging, solitude is often forced unwillingly on senior citizens.
00:02:36
Speaker
It can be a cruel and unnecessary isolation that can double or triple the pain of chronic disease and decline. Many residents in my mom's nursing home had no visitors and although I knew that many people who were related to them um and were otherwise healthy adults lived in the area and they just never visited. I don't mean to judge, but I just saw the emotional pain that the neglect created.
00:03:04
Speaker
The stigma of aging and decline and of dementia and diabetes and heart failure and hip fractures and personality changes and loss of bladder and bowel control and everything else, they collide with ah romantic and sentimental ideas about healthy and graceful aging.
00:03:23
Speaker
The noble and wise patriarch who holds court with tea and biscuits in the afternoons on Sunday, while polite children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren traipse through the house to wish their respects, I think is a fantasy that um is not in the future that awaits most Americans.
The Importance of Social Connections for Longevity
00:03:42
Speaker
On the other hand, many studies have shown that um increasing meaningful social interactions and connections strongly associates with healthy aging and with increased longevity.
00:03:53
Speaker
And the risk of a cardiovascular event or a decline due to diabetes or even to cancer is much improved if those meaningful social connections are in place, either friends or family or something regular and that has emotional content. strongly associates with um better outcomes for almost any condition, almost at any age.
00:04:14
Speaker
Adults who reach the age of 100 years, the centenarians, or 110, super centenarians, have been intensively studied because everybody wants to know what's the secret.
00:04:26
Speaker
but What are you doing? What can I do that you do that will help me live longer? And there are certainly family histories that are involved. So there are there's longevity that runs in families. And so genes play a role for sure. And environment, low stress, low inflammation, also important.
00:04:42
Speaker
Diet. um Many of the older adults who reach these ages are lean. They are physically active. They typically don't smoke or drink. But the other factor that they almost always have in common worldwide is meaningful social connection.
00:04:57
Speaker
So some kind of group or family or emotionally laden connection helps preserve their longevity and their health. You can imagine the weekly bridge group of elderly ladies in the retirement home who meet without fail twice a week.
00:05:16
Speaker
um And they they show up even though they know that one of them is going to cheat. And they may not even like each other, but they show up anyway just out of bloody mindedness. That counts. The older group of Italian gentlemen playing bocce in the town piazza ah in the afternoons The physical activity, the regularity of it all, it matters. The group of retired French gentlemen sitting around in a cafe arguing over the newspaper, that counts.
00:05:42
Speaker
They might hate each other, but they show up just to make the point. The group of retired senior citizens in the Florida community ah playing pickleball twice a week without fail, that counts. These things are really good for you.
The Economic and Healthcare Challenges of Aging
00:05:57
Speaker
It matters because the number of aging Americans is increasing rapidly. and the social security calculations of the economics of all of this are changing worldwide because the number of ah people living into their retirement years and healthily or possibly drawing on social services is greatly outstripping the ability of the economy and working adults who have not yet retired to support them through taxes.
00:06:25
Speaker
um This is causing major stresses in lots of Western countries, especially in France, where it almost led to a fall of the government recently. So ah governments haven't figured out what to do about this. But the fact remains that people are living older and ah healthy healthy lives more of the time than they ever used to.
00:06:41
Speaker
have to consider what's going on here. The other fact about this is that um as people age, the burden of dementia and chronic disease is also going to go up. And I don't think we have sufficient infrastructure and health support in place to take care of these numbers of adults that are going to really overwhelm our systems in short order.
00:07:02
Speaker
The number of retirement homes, the number of nursing homes, the number of staff are simply inadequate in most Western countries to cope with the coming bubble of ah older adults who will need care. And I think the problem is going to be worst ah in the United States, which as a country has proven itself to be uniquely incapable of dealing properly with the health of anybody at any age. In America, health is not a desired outcome. It's profit. Insurance companies make money from monetizing diseases like dementia. They are not in the business of helping people live better no matter what they say. Their job to make money and diseases get monetized. So if a family has financial resources to support their aging senior with dementia, that's fine. But often they do not and that's going to lead to increasing isolation, social stigma, neglect and emotional pain as that person ages without
00:07:54
Speaker
the proper medical and social support that they really
Addressing Rising Senior Suicide Rates
00:07:57
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deserve. The other piece of it, of course, suicide is rising among senior citizens, and it's driven in part by loneliness and by hopelessness and neglect.
00:08:09
Speaker
And as the number of older adults without proper social and emotional support goes up, we should expect the super-rate to go up among older Americans as well. This is on all of us to address and do something about. It's going to be a chronic problem that requires a societal level and government solution.
00:08:28
Speaker
It's not an individual level problem. It's really about all of us thinking, how are we going to handle our aging population? And if we are lucky, aging, hopefully healthy aging,
00:08:42
Speaker
is in all of our futures and it's something that's going to require careful thinking.
00:08:55
Speaker
You've been listening to The Fifth Column, a series of podcasts documenting the intersecting stresses of our time. I'm Gerry Dennis. Please tune in again soon.