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Reinvent Yourself After Midlife with Barbara Waxman - E101
24 Plays18 hours ago
Adding years to your life means nothing if the second half is weighed down by burnout, confusion, and the fear of missed potential.
Midlife brings a wave of shifting identities, changing relationships, and growing self-doubt, leaving even the most successful feeling stuck between who they’ve been and who they want to become. The endless health advice and protocols can deepen the overwhelm, blurring any sense of what really matters as you face these personal crossroads.
This episode breaks down how to cut through the noise and intentionally reinvent yourself in midlife and beyond. You’ll hear science-backed strategies and real-world wisdom from someone who has helped thousands turn this daunting phase into their most vital and purposeful chapter yet.
Barbara Waxman is a longevity and leadership expert, gerontologist, master coach, speaker, and founder of The Odyssey Group. Her work focuses on helping people navigate aging, reinvention, and purposeful living through science-backed frameworks that bridge longevity, leadership, and adult development. She is the creator of Entrepreneurship Turned Inward™, the Seven Lifestyle Levers Assessment™, and the Longevity Lifeplan™, and serves as an advisor to the Stanford Center on Longevity and Stanford Lifestyle Medicine, as well as a Master Faculty member at the Modern Elder Academy. Barbara is also the author of The Middlescence Manifesto, with her insights featured by TEDxBoston, CBS This Morning, The Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times.
“It starts with self awareness, which is that presence. It's saying your gratitude, setting your mind, practicing meditation, understanding how you work best.”- Barbara Waxman
In this episode you will learn:
- Why the idea of “middlescence” matters for personal growth and life changes.
- The limits of using standard health “protocols” and the value of being a study of one.
- How mindset and gratitude habits can shift your daily outlook and lower stress.
- The importance of social ties for both health and joy, not just metrics.
- The seven key levers for healthspan, ranging from movement to stress management.
- Tips for finding real purpose in both small daily acts and big goals.
Resources
- Connect with Barbara on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/barbarawaxman
- Watch her TedTalk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQoaus6I_NE
- Learn more about her offerings: https://barbarawaxman.com/
This podcast was produced by the team at Zapods Podcast Agency:
https://www.zapods.com
Find the products, practices, and routines discussed on the Alively website:
https://alively.com
Recommended
Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
I have relationships that are shifting. My identity is changing. I've been a lawyer or a doctor, you know, fill in the blank. What I've been doing for the past few decades, is that what I want to carry
Introducing ETI and the Home of Healthspan Podcast
00:00:11
Speaker
me forward? So ETI is a process to make the decisions as an entrepreneur of your life to create a plan.
00:00:23
Speaker
This is the Home of Healthspan podcast, where we profile health and wellness role models, sharing their stories and the tools, practices, and routines they use to live a lively life.
00:00:37
Speaker
Barbara, it is great to see you again. Thank you for coming on the Home of Healthspan. So happy to be here.
Role of Women in Relationships and Purpose
00:00:44
Speaker
Now, i as soon as i heard you speak, I knew I wanted to have you on the show. But before we get into why, how would you describe yourself?
00:00:54
Speaker
I am a lively modern matriarch. a am a woman who has grown up over the years in a time where women have been shushed even when they've been told, oh, you're not, you have a voice. And I recognize that whether people have children or not,
00:01:21
Speaker
The role of women today, even though I work as a coach with men and women, the role of women is really important in terms of our relationships, our sense of purpose, in healing ourselves, our families, our partnerships, our communities. So I would say I'm a lively modern matriarch.
00:01:44
Speaker
I mean, as major, actually got to meet your son right at the the event. And so that's, I'd love to start there.
Lifespan vs Health Span: Quality of Life Focus
00:01:51
Speaker
so we met at wu yeah Whoop headquarters when Barbara was giving her TED talk.
00:01:57
Speaker
And that's really what I thought, wow, she needs to come on the Home Healthspan. Because in that talk, you introduced a new span to me. We had lifespan and kind of in response to lifespan and let's just add years, there's this health span. well What about the quality of those years?
00:02:15
Speaker
But you brought a new one to the vernacular. And can you share what that is? Sure. So you and I have talked about this, that even experts in the field,
00:02:29
Speaker
Get
Longevity Aspirations in Aging Field
00:02:30
Speaker
longevity wrong. By the way, just a few years ago, really recently, we didn't call it longevity. We called it the field of aging. But that's not aspirational, right? We don't really want to age even though we're all doing it.
00:02:45
Speaker
But longevity, that's cool. That's something I can get behind. So one of, I'd say, my superpowers and what I do is take language in ways that people can use to their benefit and the benefit of others.
00:03:00
Speaker
And what I realized that we get wrong is that even as experts is that we think of lifespan. Okay, how long are people gonna live? do we avoid dying young, which is great, and we are living longer.
00:03:15
Speaker
health span. And here's where people are getting caught up in the wrong ways. Health span, we say is about our quality, but really people mean, how can I stay functional as long as possible? How do I minimize chronic ailments, which do happen? The wear and tear theory is real.
00:03:38
Speaker
But how do I minimize those? How do I maximize my cognitive ability?
Misconceptions of Health Span and Fulfillment
00:03:44
Speaker
So it's wellness and cognitive ability is really what health span is about.
00:03:50
Speaker
And when we do those two things, too many of us, and the research is supporting this, fail to live lives differently. where they'll have no regrets, fail to live lives where they'll feel like, I trust my intuition, I know myself deeply, I am nourished, my relationships are great, I have a sense of purpose, because we get too attached to the metrics. So what I talked about at the TED event is the third span.
Critique of Lifestyle Choices: Relationships vs Isolation
00:04:25
Speaker
There's lifespan, there's health span, and the third span of human flourishing I find it so important, you know, one of the biggest names in this lifespan, healthspan space is Brian Johnson, right? The the guy who founded Venmo, sold it, made a bunch of money, he supposedly spends $2 million dollars a year on his own personal health, has blueprint to go out.
00:04:50
Speaker
But with all the measurements that he does, and it's more than any wearable, right, tons, he's explicitly said, yeah I don't really have relationships and friends. It's kind of my my son's friends are sometimes around the house and I see them.
00:05:05
Speaker
And from all we know, right, that social isolation is the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day in terms of what it does to your health. This is why, and I'd love to get into your seven levers, but we have our our five pillars, right? You have how you move your body, how you fuel your body, what you put into your mind, how you recover your body.
00:05:28
Speaker
But then the fifth one, and it's crucial, is what you then put out into the world, how you engage with that world. Because if you're only internally focused, you're missing the point of the whole endeavor.
00:05:40
Speaker
And it's not just this theoretical, hey, the point, but it's we are hairless, slow, weak creatures that would have never survived in the wild other than together. We are biologically designed to need and depend
Human Dependency on Groups and Avoiding Burnout
00:05:55
Speaker
on groups. And when we don't have it, our body and minds know something's wrong, right? Like we would be put in peril.
00:06:02
Speaker
And so it is concerning with this kind of metric burnout, over focusing on the things that are easy to measure and missing the things that actually matter.
00:06:13
Speaker
what What have you seen in your practice? Because I know you you've come across this with a lot of your clients. First of all, thank you. That was a beautiful setup, beautifully stated. The Brian Johnson example, let me take for a minute. First of all, Brian Johnson has so much money that what he's sharing that people follow and fall for, you need to not have to have a job.
00:06:37
Speaker
In the way he's been doing it, you need not to have a lot of relationships that you want to nurture in your life. You need not to want a lot of creativity.
Flexibility Over Strict Protocols in Health Practices
00:06:47
Speaker
i was, I took myself to his don't die summit and someone in the audience stood up and said, I'm an, he has protocols. Everything is the protocol life.
00:06:58
Speaker
I'm a night owl. I'm a creative. I've worked for ad agencies. And this person said, my best thinking is after 10 p.m. That's how I'm wired.
00:07:10
Speaker
And the response was, change your wiring, go to bed early. That's the protocol. What's been interesting is, number one, what he does requires such all focus, an amount of focus, that if you need a job like most of us, it's not going to work for you. It's also not that interesting. However, here's what I see have seen that's changed.
00:07:35
Speaker
Because he's a curiosity curiosity to me, right? So I watched some of this. He's recently fallen in love. And by the way, his sex life is all over the internet. He talks about, yeah, there's a lot there.
00:07:50
Speaker
But what's happened in the process, he hasn't explicitly that I've seen, I don't track everything, admitted that he's breaking down some of his protocols. Right. but he's talk speaking differently. He's in love. He's more relational. Good for him.
00:08:09
Speaker
and sort of a cautionary tale for all of us. If you track too much and stay isolated, first of all, it's not realistic, but it doesn't bring joy. Even someone like Brian Johnson wants joy. So what do I see in my practice as a coach, an executive coach to C-suite leaders leading companies and teams that are international. So their touch touches so many others, the cultures they create, just like the cultures we create in our families, in our communities, and which we choose to put ourselves in.
00:08:44
Speaker
What I'm seeing is that people are overwhelmed by the amount of information coming at them on podcasts like this, in the newspaper. You know, you can't go a day without reading about longevity in the best of ways. And also like anything, there's a continuum, a strength overused. Wow, there's so much information can be a weakness. And the weakness is that there's confusing information coming out all the time. People are disagreeing. That's great if you have all the time to really dissect it.
00:09:18
Speaker
One of the reasons people follow me as a gerontologist is that I translate data that's kept up to date. So I change my mind and I look through it. But who how many people are doing that?
Impact of Information Overload on Wellbeing
00:09:32
Speaker
So most of the time people are bombarded and they'll say, you know, I don't know. Do I have a healthy breakfast or do I practice intermittent fasting?
00:09:41
Speaker
So they're overwhelmed, they're feeling burnt out, and in doing so, they're more stressed. Stress is a killer, and it also isolates us. So people are feeling more isolated and more burnt out. That's that's what I'm seeing.
00:09:55
Speaker
There's so many different pieces in there I'd love to double click on. I mean, one is the burnout by seeing all the things you're not doing. I had this conversation with a friend last night. She just had a very good friend pass away.
00:10:09
Speaker
and had immediately reached out to the son and was like, look, I can be, I'll be your second mom. Like I'm gonna be at graduation. You're gonna go through this life. You're not on your own. And I said, that that's amazing. And she said, well, I feel like I should have done much more this that and the other. I said, look, there's always more you can do, right?
Shifting Mindsets: From Deficit to Gratitude
00:10:26
Speaker
There's some child suffering more somewhere in the world. And every single time you buy a coffee or go out to eat, like that money could have gone to that person and you could always beat yourself up for not doing more.
00:10:37
Speaker
And you'll always be miserable. And the other side, you could look at here are the things that I'm doing that are positive, that are working towards this good thing and give yourself credit and give yourself grace. And I think the same applies to our health of, OK, well, no, I didn't do all these 80 other things that were part of the protocol, but you know I made some really good choices today. I did this thing. I did this thing. Let me go from an abundance mindset of the things I'm doing as opposed to this deficit mindset.
00:11:02
Speaker
And have you seen that with your clients and how that impacts them? 100%. Mindset is where we live. We live in between our ears, right? So the best bumper sticker I ever saw said something like, don't believe everything you think.
00:11:23
Speaker
Right. And it's so true. We need to cultivate and it's work. People think I need to go to the gym to build my muscles and my endurance. But actually, what are we doing to build mindsets?
00:11:37
Speaker
that are healthy and then work in our favor. Your examples are great. When I remember years ago, when I was raising, have three kids, but when I, when they were little and they were all at home working mom, and I would feel like I was never accomplishing enough, not just not getting exercise. I could give you a whole list. And my brother, Jeff, I'll never forget this years ago. One day he said to me, Barb by 8.00 AM,
00:12:02
Speaker
You've already done 10 things. Why don't you ever talk about those? And Andrew, that's kind of like what you're saying now, right? Ever since then, I still remember that and think, okay, it's eight o'clock.
00:12:16
Speaker
I've done so many things already today. So if we can cultivate mindsets and it starts with an exercise that I practice myself and have for years and share with clients, I'm Before your feet touch the ground, when you get out of bed, before you're going to get out of bed in the morning, think of three things.
00:12:38
Speaker
Now, the research shows if you're a writer, journal three things you're grateful for. But I'm very practical coach. If that works for you, great. Have a pad by your bed. People don't tend to do it.
00:12:51
Speaker
But if I say to them, take a breath, this will take 90 seconds to You're starting your day thinking it could be the same thing you said yesterday. It could be something tiny.
00:13:04
Speaker
It could be, I'm waking up and I have no pain in my body today. Or I'm waking up and I'm looking forward to something. It could be anything you want. What it does when you do this consistently is it cultivates your brain to look for gratefulness and to be beginning your day with a spirit that of abundance, just like you mentioned, and the research supports it. So that's a little quick tidbit about what people can do.
00:13:38
Speaker
The one thing I would build on it, cause I I'm a very big morning gratitude practitioner and and I do five. And the the trick is I don't allow myself to repeat.
00:13:50
Speaker
and And so that to me has these, a couple extra added benefits. One Eventually you use up, I'm thankful for my health and my family and all these things, right? So you use up the things that you can go back to. And so you end up where you have to basically find things from the day before.
00:14:07
Speaker
And so what it does, not only when you're going through that gratitude practice in the morning, does it put you in this mindset of gratitude, but you then are on the alert. You know, tomorrow I'm going to need five new ones. So I'm looking for things to be grateful for during the day. So you're in this more positive mindset. And then no matter what happens during the day, you've then now spent this time the next day.
00:14:29
Speaker
rewriting your memory of the day prior of all these things you were grateful for. So every day in your memory ends up being that much better. So you rewrite the, the the past, you make the future better and you make the present better. So I, I just, I love that it's that's bringing to life this idea of how do we specifically, when people say mindset, what is that? Cultivate you're cultivating, right? You're, you're building by saying, I better look for things today, so I have good grist for the mill tomorrow morning, you're cultivating a mindset that works for you. How many of us, for example, I've stopped listening to the news at night because when I do, i can't sleep well. It's too disturbing unless I build so many so much armor and cover myself that things stop impacting me and I don't want to be someone
00:15:21
Speaker
And so many of us are. So again, that helps me cultivate and know my mind works well. My sensitivity is alive, but I know the proper boundaries to keep. So I love your example.
00:15:34
Speaker
I'm going to try it. Okay. Yeah, please please do it. It's been transformative for me. i've I've probably done it for three years now. I've tried all sorts of different gratitude practices. This is my favorite. The other thing I wanted to double click on was that comment with the the creative at 10 o'clock at night. And well, that's not the protocol. You do this.
00:15:51
Speaker
And this idea that. Most studies, when we go do research, but you're getting averages. And the reality is they're super responders. They're people that goes the other way. So one example would be ketogenic diet, where maybe 20% are super responders. It does all these amazing things for them. Maybe 10% or 20%, it totally messes up their triglycerides and everything. It's terrible for them. And then other people, they're kind of in the middle.
00:16:19
Speaker
And it's similar with chronotype of you would think evolutionarily we need people when we're out there in case animals come, whatever that we're up at night and we're like keeping keeping eye on the fire. And then we needed people that were up early in the morning and going and hunting. And so maybe the majority of people that that protocol works for.
00:16:37
Speaker
But just because it doesn't work for I have friends, I have a very good friend who has almost an inverted schedule to me. She's another podcaster and she's up till three or four in the morning and sleeps till noon and she still gets her eight or nine hours of sleep. But that's that's when
Individual Health Practices vs General Averages
00:16:51
Speaker
she shifted. and She's like, look, I've tried multiple times in my life, but this is what's natural for me. This is what works for me.
00:16:57
Speaker
And with all these health things, you can go look at the data and say, hey, let me try this. This seems to work for a majority of people. But if it doesn't, there's nothing wrong with you. It might just not work for you. Because, again, that's a law of averages, not individual.
00:17:12
Speaker
This is exactly why I promote the anti-protocol lifestyle, which doesn't mean, look, I've got a friend who is just diagnosed with cancer. For the next two to three years, she has to follow certain protocols.
00:17:28
Speaker
I'm not saying there isn't a time and place. What I'm saying is the through line that I work on with people is how do I become a study of one?
00:17:39
Speaker
How do I look and accept? Because I may want to stay up later. I'm someone who has lots of fortunately interesting things in my life and that I like to do.
00:17:53
Speaker
And it requires a lot of hours of creative thinking and writing and speaking. But I know i don't do my best work at night. So I need to do what I need to do during a certain amount of time. Do do I wish it was different?
00:18:09
Speaker
Yes. Do I understand myself? Yes. Yes. So as a study of one, it's almost like a ladder. It starts with self-awareness, which is that presence. It's saying your gratitude, setting your mind, practicing meditation, understanding how you work best.
00:18:29
Speaker
Then it moves up to self-knowledge. How do I work best? Here my tendencies. My chronotype is this. Self-knowledge, when in my life has this worked for me? How have I worked around it?
00:18:43
Speaker
What are things in my actual life? The self-knowledge is my context, my circumstances, my preferences. And that shifts upward to self-mastery.
00:18:54
Speaker
And self-mastery is when we actually have experiments that we say, here's what I'm going to try to do.
Journey to Self-Mastery in Health
00:19:01
Speaker
I'm going to try to exercise later in the day because i have my brain works best earlier, but it's not my pattern.
00:19:08
Speaker
Oh, it worked. It didn't. Self-mastery is the activation of what we've learned as a study of one from self-awareness and self-knowledge. So it it builds your own protocol that's flexible and meant for you and your lifestyle preferences and habits.
00:19:28
Speaker
And it gives you the permission to recognize, hey, this isn't working for me. So you can go try an experiment and say, yeah i I read about this person and they did that, but that's not really me. I tried it.
00:19:41
Speaker
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00:19:55
Speaker
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00:20:09
Speaker
You referenced the creative side and the speaking and the writing. And before we jumped on, you were talking about this weekend, you're doing something with the the modern elders. um And I'm curious on that. And this this concept that ah I don't know if you created a getting somewhere else, but this middle essence and what that looks like.
00:20:30
Speaker
So the workshop I'll be leading, MEA, is how they refer to it now, when Chip Conley started the Modern Elder Academy, he and I would banter back and forth. And I would say, Chip, no one in their 40s or even 50s wants to be an elder. And that's, and I'll get to middle essence, but that's right after I wrote the Middle Essence Manifesto. And he'd say, Barb, no one can spell middle essence.
00:20:59
Speaker
And now he'll say to me, OK, I hate to admit it, you were right. So it's really referred to as MEA because elder doesn't necessarily resonate. And what we're doing there is really exciting.
00:21:10
Speaker
We're building, it's really a midlife wisdom academy in Santa Fe and in Baja. And I'm helping them build a longevity pillar to their various pillars about transition and purpose, for example.
00:21:24
Speaker
And I'm teaching something called longevity by design. So people can go check that out. And it's built for people who are middle essence. So let me talk about where
Middle Essence: Navigating Midlife Transitions
00:21:35
Speaker
that comes from. i didn't create the word.
00:21:38
Speaker
The word actually... was was in usage but had sort of a negative connotation. no one ever heard of it, so wasn't widely used, fortunately, referring to midlife crisis.
00:21:53
Speaker
Oh, okay. But what I did was I recognized... two things. As a gerontologist, I saw that the data shows us that in about the last century and a quarter, 125 years, we've added three decades to our life expectancy.
00:22:12
Speaker
Three decades. In 125 it is astronomical. The challenge is we didn't have midlife before then. People didn't live long enough.
00:22:23
Speaker
Your midlife was late 30s, and that would be it. So there was just that child rearing stage and then you'd work and there wasn't really any such thing as retirement because people would die relatively young. So then it skyrocketed and midlife came on the scene, but there never was one before. It wasn't really a thoughtful integration.
00:22:46
Speaker
he And yet I recognized there are so many comparisons with adolescence. And adolescence is a term that was made up by a psychologist, Stanley Hall, in 1904.
00:23:02
Speaker
And what are the components that are similar? In adolescence, our hormones change. In midlife, for men as well as women, our hormones change, right?
00:23:13
Speaker
In adolescence, our relationships are all shifting. In midlife, our relationships, we're falling in love for the first time. We have divorce and separation. We are caregivers. i mean, there are more changes in midlife than any other time. So our relationships are shifting.
00:23:33
Speaker
Our bodies are morphing. Okay, as adolescents, in kind of awesome ways, maybe not. It's more challenging in midlife, but there are ways we deal with that. and then our identities, the fourth aspect that we share, our identity Adolescents feel like I'm not a little kid, but I'm not a grownup. And when we hit midlife and it's not a specific number, we feel like I'm not young, but I'm not old.
00:23:59
Speaker
So by naming this, I try to encourage people to say, what if, what if you knew that in midlife, it had a name, middle essence, and that more than once there will be reckonings. What if we lived knowing that there are reckonings in midlife and it is not a crisis?
00:24:23
Speaker
Bruce Feiler wrote about this in his book, Life is in the Transitions, and he talks about life quakes and how they last about three to five years. We go through these in midlife.
00:24:35
Speaker
And what I do is help people understand transitions and how to deal with them. And by giving it the name Middle Essence, It gives people the freedom to not feel alone, kind of like adolescents, and recognize that if they can name it, they can tame it.
00:24:52
Speaker
So that's where it came from. Is a concept... it It really resonates. I mean, in the the change of identity, right, is you because of the relationships, all of it changing both with your own parents, but then with your own children, because they're going through their own adolescence and becoming their own people. And so your role as a caregiver down is different.
00:25:13
Speaker
How is people are thinking about it? Does your your concept of entrepreneurship turn inward? come into play as people try to take this on and say, okay, now how do i go do things differently tomorrow?
00:25:28
Speaker
Yeah. Great question. ETI is, is the coaching model I developed. So as a gerontologist, one of the things I do is normalize adult development because we continue to develop and grow. I actually think it's the messiest time of life because we have more factors swirling around and I love the mess. So ETI is built on this idea that we like to invest in entrepreneurial endeavors, right? We think they're cool. So we invest our social capital,
00:26:00
Speaker
our financial capital, our energy, all of these things. I flip that and say, what about taking care of the business of your life and looking at it with an entrepreneurial
ETI Coaching Model: Life as a Business
00:26:12
Speaker
lens? So if you're familiar with the lean startup idea, that's where you get to iterate and experiment and say, okay, life is super messy.
00:26:22
Speaker
I have relationships that are shifting. My identity is changing. I've been a lawyer or a doctor or a teacher or, you you know, fill in the blank. What I've been doing for the past few decades, is that what I want to carry me forward?
00:26:37
Speaker
So ETI is a process starting with the foundational, what you have your five areas, pillars that I call the seven lifestyle levers to be in game shape,
00:26:49
Speaker
to make the decisions as an entrepreneur of your life to create a plan. Well, could you take us through those seven? Because I think people listening may be familiar with our five, but I'd love to hear your seven lovers.
00:27:03
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. The first one similar to, yeah and I shouldn't say the first because they're not necessarily in order, is movement. which you like, i we don't call it exercise.
00:27:16
Speaker
Because when you look at research from, say, the blue zones, none of those examples are are people going to the gym and killing it. And yet the very American way, although there may be international listeners to this, the very American way is to think if I didn't get to the gym today, i haven't done enough.
00:27:33
Speaker
And that's just not true. So the first area, and by the way, this is all evidence-based. It's used by Stanford University and licensed to other organizations.
Lifestyle Levers: Movement, Nourishment, Renewal, Purpose
00:27:45
Speaker
Movement is foundational. It includes things like the Flamingo test, it's called. Can you stand on one leg for 30 seconds? Something I'll tell clients is every morning when you brush your teeth,
00:28:00
Speaker
Stand on one leg and actually use your opposite, your non-dominant hand, all of that kind of stuff. I heard an 80-year-old on Huberman that that's what she did. She said, hey, i you know I found this is important, the balance as you get older. So I started doing it when I brush my teeth. And now I just find anytime I'm standing, I just do it one leg. and you know I'm half her age, so I need to do left-handed. And then I just do like one-legged squats while I do to just add a little more to it.
00:28:26
Speaker
And then if you close your room eyes while you're standing. up I'm not good on the closing eyes. I got to work that. It's amazing. Back to mindset, but then I'll keep going. If you close your eyes, it's so hard not to fall.
00:28:40
Speaker
But if you close your eyes and you stand next to a counter and you have your hand a centimeter off the counter, you'll do much better. We have a safety bake tent. Okay. That makes sense. It's like ah people, I think with asthma, it's like if they have the inhaler, they're less likely to have an attack.
00:28:56
Speaker
Even if they don't use it, it's just knowing you have that back. That's interesting. Right. So if you start off, you're going to tap the counter and then get and you'll see and just having that. So something to try. The second one I call nourishment.
00:29:11
Speaker
I know you call it fuel. I call it nourishment because so many people can follow the diet that they have tried and they think works well for them. but there's something that leaves them feeling not nourished. They have a poor body image.
00:29:27
Speaker
And so no matter what they do, they try to stay within the diet that's good for them. Or wine, drinking wine is a great example. Wine use has plummeted for lots of reasons.
00:29:39
Speaker
But for those people, and this comes up all the time with clients, they'll say, i want to enjoy a little bit of wine once a while. If you say no to something, the we won't go into absolute versus relative risk here, but the relative risk, if you know your history, which is very important, your biological history, if the relative risk is low and you want to enjoy once in a while, enjoy the wine and feel nourished, it will be so much easier to stick to those things you want to stick to. So that's the next area that...
00:30:14
Speaker
I do think that's important though. Like the ah brave new world where if you could just get all your nutrients from pills, but you took all that joy from, yeah the big thing is breaking bread and sharing meals with people. And so this idea of nourishment, I do like, it's a difference between soylent and just, okay, great. i can kind of drink and get what I need versus,
00:30:38
Speaker
yeah, you're you're making me rethink this fuel thing. I do like nourishment. Nice. The next area I call renewal because being, it's not just ah sleep.
00:30:51
Speaker
I tried to find one word to encapsulate. It's, it's not just sleep and it's not just recovery. It's how do we live as a renewable resource, because as human beings, not human doings, and it's super important to think about, am I being a human being or a human doing?
00:31:12
Speaker
That's that self-awareness part of the study of one. I need to both get enough sleep and renew myself. So my best example is for me, I'm a power napper.
00:31:26
Speaker
I will put on my timer for 20 minutes. And usually I don't need 20 minutes. It's my fail safe. After about 12 minutes, I am refreshed. I don't sleep. People hear the word nap, they think sleep.
00:31:41
Speaker
It's a deep rest. My husband, Scott. So if we were going out, we both had a long day. I'll take a power nap. He'll take a sauna. If I took a hot sauna, I would be exhausted.
00:31:54
Speaker
For him, that's his renewal mechanism. So I call that lever renewal. Then our relationships, which I think of as the wind beneath our wings and includes the relationship we have with ourselves. who So many of us don't have healthy relationships with ourselves.
00:32:14
Speaker
Right. So relationships um then is purpose and purpose is made up of a big P and a little P. I think as a country, as a culture, we' have an obsession with purpose. The purpose of life is a life of purpose.
00:32:35
Speaker
I can tell you, having coached thousands of people, people get so stuck because it's not big enough. It's not important enough. And I try to say to people, start with small P purpose.
00:32:49
Speaker
It's a breadcrumb that will take you to your big P. It can be the ritual of making your coffee brings you joy. That's part of the purpose of what gets my day off to a good start.
00:33:00
Speaker
It can be meeting up with my friend, Andrew McConnell, because we haven't seen each other since it was months ago. And that's part of my little P purpose for today leading to, and in this case attached to my big P purpose, which is helping change the world through helping people be the best versions that they want to be for
Cognitive Maintenance and Stress Management for Fulfillment
00:33:24
Speaker
themselves. Because I believe that when people are that way,
00:33:28
Speaker
They want to make those around them in the world better. So that's a purpose, big P and small P. Cognition is another. um And that has to do with mindset. It has to do with staying sharp.
00:33:43
Speaker
One of the biggest fears people have is not just becoming dependent, but it's also becoming dependent because they can't think on their own. So there's a lot we should do around that. And technology is a great tool as long as we control it and it doesn't control us.
00:34:03
Speaker
Technology is not good for our cognition when overused and people don't tend to understand that. And then if you do all of those things, I call the seventh lever kind of a freebie. It's stress management. Because if you if you're covering those things,
00:34:20
Speaker
you're really activating the things that will help reduce your stress. But stress management is the last pillar. And much of it is because these are in accordance with the American college of which I'm a member of lifestyle medicine, the fastest growing certification in the healthcare field.
00:34:36
Speaker
And thank goodness it is. i mean, because so many things get addressed in isolation. And I think that's the point of the seven lovers You can over optimize on one or two and if you're missing the other, you're still not living joy filled, healthy life. you You need it together. So this idea of lifestyle is no, we need to look at it all together.
00:35:00
Speaker
It has to be the future, if not the present of where all true health care goes, not sick care. Right. And that's the third span, right? That's integrating the third span.
00:35:11
Speaker
What are the foundational things I need to do to extend my health and extend my health span functionally and cognitively staying strong? And also what makes life worth living?
00:35:23
Speaker
What makes my life have no regrets? It's that every day i have a point of connection with people I care about. Making time for that, sometimes in place of having the longer workout that I also would like to do. Right. So it's a no regrets view on life.
00:35:41
Speaker
Yeah, Barbara, you know, it's like they say with planting a tree, you know, the best time was 10 years ago. The second best time is today. Like, I wish I met you a decade ago. i think the past decade of my life would have been richer and better for it. But the second best time was right when I met you and getting to learn all this from you. And same for our listeners.
00:36:00
Speaker
Thank you so much for today, but for all your work. That's so kind and right back at you. I am so glad we've connected and the best is yet to be. Thank you for joining us on today's episode of the Home of Healthspan podcast.
00:36:14
Speaker
And remember, you can always find the products, practices, and routines mentioned by today's guests, as well as many other Healthspan role models on Alively.com. Enjoy a lively day.