What if we had an insight into real data - that revealed successful paths to a healthy long life? Join Cathleen as she speaks to Dr. Howard Friedman, a distinguished professor in the Psychology Department at the University of California, Riverside who gives us practical tips and insights on data that reveals successful paths to health while also addressing some of the common myths surrounding longevity.
Episode 30: Dr. Howard Friedman was the past president of the Western Psychological Association (WPA). He received the James Mckeen Cattell Award from the Association of Psychology Science, a top career award for applied scientific research in psychology for his work on ‘Changing How we Think About the Nature of Health'. Professor Friedman has also received multiple teaching awards, with ‘Elizabeth Hurlock Beckman Award' being the most recent.
Longevity Project, co-authored by his former Ph.D. student Dr.Leslie Martin, has won worldwide recognition including 1st place in the “Wellness” category in the books for A Better Life Awards and was one of the ten books on J.P Morgan's Annual Summer Recommended Reading List and Editors pick by the journal Nature.
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Cathleen: We've all heard the popular myths about how to live longer. Some say if you marry you'll live longer. Others say if you don't work too hard, you'll be healthier. Still others say thinking positive will lead to longer life. Well, they are all myths. What leads to healthy longevity may surprise you but stay tuned to hear the result of an eight decade study that began in 1921. Started by a scientist obsessed with data. The study has been compiled into a book that features practical data driven insights into aging. What the scientists learned changed his assumptions about aging. Maybe it will change yours too. Stay tuned. Welcome to Seniority Authority. I'm your host, Cathleen Toomey, and I tracked down experts to answer your questions on aging. Let's get smarter about growing older. Thanks to our show sponsor, the Riverwoods Group, Northern New England's largest family of nonprofit retirement communities. We're active adults find community purpose and peace of mind visit riverwoodsgroup.org. What can we learn from those who have lived a long life? What if we had an insight into real data that revealed a successful path to health and long life? Today's guest will discuss exactly that Dr. Howard Friedman is a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California and author of the book, The Longevity Project, surprising discoveries for health and long life from the landmark eight decades study that began in 1921. But Dr. Friedman learned about how to stay healthy and live longer, may surprise you. Welcome to Seniority Authority, Dr Friedman.
Dr. Friedman: My pleasure to be here with you. Thank you.
Cathleen: It's so terrific to have you here and for you to be sharing the results of your labor and for those of you who are listening to the show, Dr. Friedman is a remarkably young-looking professor to be talking about an eight decade study that started in 1921. Can you go back to how this study started Dr. Friedman with Dr. Terman and what he was trying to achieve when he began this body of research in 1921.
Dr. Friedman: That's correct. I was not there 100 years ago when Dr Lewis Terman at Stanford University started studying about 1500 bright boys and girls in California to investigate why some people go on to intellectual leadership and to productive careers. He was interested in success and the betterment of society but we turned it into a study of health and longevity called the longevity project. More than a half century later, we could see who thrived and lived long and most importantly, why this was the case. Not that long ago I attended a 104th birthday party of determined participant as we call them, who was a child in the original study.
Cathleen: That's extraordinary and it's great that you took this research subject and really extrapolated some of the data you mentioned in the book that one of the advantages of a study like this is that you can avoid a research bias or trap and indeed Dr Terman changed some of his assumptions during his study. As you said, he started out to, he chose very smart, you know, young boys and girls. What were some of the assumptions that Dr Terman made that he changed as his study progressed.
Dr. Friedman: Well, who we are, how healthy we are accumulates over the years. Most studies only looked at relatively short time periods and individuals differ in so many ways that it's hard for scientists to figure out what's causing what and what we can do to intervene to stay healthier over the years. Most studies only report correlations that his associations. But as Dr Terman started studying the Children in the 1920’s, he realized that by continuing to follow them, he could learn a lot more. So although he was initially focused on the ideas that derived from Charles Darwin and Francis Galton about evolution and how abilities are inherited from their parents. He kept gathering more and more information about the participants and their interests, their families, their education, their hobbies, and much, much more. He just, basically everything he could think of. And has his own views started shifting away from the fact that these Children started out smart and accomplished when they were 10 years old. But what happened in the rest of their lives? And there were a lot of individual differences among the different participants. Some thrived and some faltered.
Cathleen: Would you say this goes back to the nature versus nurture debate and that was one of the things, assumptions he was testing?
Dr. Friedman: He didn't set out to test it directly. He wanted to see how nature best unfolds, what we can do to nurture the best. But it turned out it turned into a study, since these participants had a lot of variation among themselves on so many characteristics, personality traits, families, love, careers, we could kind of see how all these came together. So it's one of our conclusions is understanding how your nature, which you were born with unfolds as a function of the circumstances that you are you grow up in, that you were exposed to and that you seek out. So that was an interesting conclusion that I drew at the end was that you could make a difference by selecting the correct environments for your individual personalities. So we're not talking about things that apply to everybody like everybody says eat this or don't eat that, but it might vary from person to person. What's important. We know that what's healthy, what's likable and we do that with the same kinds of things in behavior and personality and social relations and work and all those kinds of things that really make a big difference.
Cathleen: What I think it was fascinating about the book and what was incredibly intimidating to me, never mind to you is the wealth of information that Dr. Terman collected. He was encyclopedic when it came to collecting information about these Children's backgrounds. Can you tell us a little bit about that. And did you have any trepidation at the idea of synthesizing all of this information into a book?
Dr. Friedman: Well, he recorded how many books were in their houses and how active they were in their play time and how happy their parents, marriages were, measured their personalities with a prudent or extroverted or cheerful. People talk about about being cheerful. He then followed the participants as they grew up. They made their career choices. They had families of their own. So we had a huge amount of information over 10 million individual pieces of data. And we had to spend many, many years refining it and following up on the term in participants. So many grew up to be teachers and writers and businesspeople and lawyers and physicians. But many had usual jobs. There are many clerks and some artists and policemen technicians. One became a truck driver and although they were all initially healthy when the study started, some lived long lives while many died in middle age, just like in the rest of the population. So we were really focused on what what us about, what we intimidated what we set out. We were just going to spend six months or a year or two years looking at this. And as the study got going, we said, hey we can find out how long they live by gathering their death certificates. Hey, we can create their personality by looking at the measures that terman had when they were rated by their parents and teachers when they were Children. We could look at when they got married, when they got divorced, when you know when they died, when the spouse died just dozens and dozens of things. And so the study kept going and going and going. We built a team Doctor Leslie Martin, my co author and other people, other scientists, deputy neurologists, cardiologists, developmental psychologists. We all got together and study unfolded and now we've been working on it for decades ourselves.
Cathleen: That's incredible. And I love the fact that while you were uncovering all of this, all of the researchers were personally interested in how do I measure up based on what we're finding and you yourself turned out to be one of the ideal personality profiles if I'm not mistaken. But all of the researchers wanted to measure themselves against what you were finding from this research.
Dr. Friedman: That's correct. It's very intriguing to try to see well how do I fit in here. And for example, when our grad students who are helping analyze all the data, looked over the initial statistical findings on personality and a long life. That was just one of our variables personality, they laughed as they read the results, they told me Howard Friedman that personality sounds like you. So that's because the findings reveal that the best early childhood personality predictors of longevity was what we call conscientiousness. These are the qualities of a prudent persistent, very well organized person like a scientist, professor, somewhat obsessive. Maybe not the first thing that usually usually pops to mind when you're thinking about personality characteristic of longevity. So it was not cheerfulness that predicted long life across the ensuing decades and other factors were also relevant. But the prudent dependable Children lived the longest, and the strength of this finding was unexpected. It's comparable to many medical risk factors, but it proved to be very important and enduring and unfortunately, much research in the last 20-25 years has been conducted by other researchers. Once they saw our initial findings and it confirms pretty much that this is the most key personality predictor of staying healthy. So we do have lots of self assessment scales in our book on the longevity project. So people can kind of assess themselves and see if they have healthy characteristics which they might want to work on changing and which behaviors they have and which patterns are going to be most healthy for that individual.
Cathleen: And we have to have a link to the book in our show notes, and I would highly recommend buying the book and taking these self assessments that have been derived from some of the original term in research. What is pretty interesting Dr. Friedman is that this conscientiousness that has emerged as one of the characteristics of long life really presents itself as young Children and that I think is unusual. And you also have indicated that people that don't necessarily naturally have this conscientiousness as a young child can develop it later in life. Is that accurate?
Dr. Friedman: Yes, that's right. So way back in 1922, almost 100 years ago, the participants, parents and dissidents, teacher rated them rated the child the Children on dozens of trade dimensions. And then, and when they were young adults in 1940, heading towards middle age, the participants were asked a bunch of personality questions themselves and so you can't assess Children directly. So we worked for many months to create valid measures in childhood from the ratings that we had and we validated them against current scales. So we really have a very reliable and valid measures of individual differences. And it turns out this, yes, this is a very strong effect of personality that's comparable for example, to the effects of cholesterol and longevity.
Cathleen: Wow.
Dr. Friedman: The adults for example, checked items like they were thrifty and careful about making loans. They were dependable. They were persistent in the accomplishment of your ends. So you like we were doing, you could think about yourself to what am I that way and you know, how could I possibly become more that way. So being dependable, prudent persistent, that's important if you're well organized and you and you like to plan. Don't think you have to worry less and become carefree. That's some of the bad advice we often hear being persistent is much healthier than being impetuous and carefree, we found and even some worrying can be okay. There's not much evidence that trying to treat people to stop worrying will improve their health. Although we hear that advice a lot in popular culture and we often hear that anxiety and moodiness is stress, but it's not really in terms of you look across the years, it's kind of how you deal with the stress the situations you're in and I really caution against feeling bad if you're working hard or worrying. And sometimes the people who were the most cheery actually took more risks, which turned out not to be so good for their health. And you asked why? Well it turns out that the focused planned for Children, they tended to move into a more stable jobs, they had more long lasting marriages and they generally worked in a persistent and thriving and responsible matter. So they got promoted and they became more conscientious. So how can something from childhood predict so many years into the future and how can something from young adulthood to predict how you're going to do in middle age. It's because it leads to one step, which leads to another step, which leads to another step and getting a good education helps make you more persistent and prudent. Getting a good education helps you get a good job, a job where you have responsibility and you become more persistent, more prudent and more conscientious and so these things feedback becomes kind of a positive cycle, a positive circle where you thrive more and more.
Cathleen: So it's like a building block of how you approach your life and how you start problem solving.
Dr. Friedman: It's even more than a building block because again it circles back so using building blocks of putting one on top of the other. But with this as you do certain things, if you have certain inclinations and put yourself in the right situations, you actually strengthen those positive kinds of things. We can talk more about some of these other ways as we go on.
Cathleen: Sure. And did you find the firstborn Children were more prudent and persistent. The youngest far less or vice versa? Or did you do any examination of birth order?
Dr. Friedman: It's funny as we did look at that and it didn't really make a big difference. People try to get some simple characteristics like that. There's all kinds of books about things like that, but it really depends on everything else. That's one of the lessons that we drew. Yeah, there's a difference between firstborns and last borns. Everything else equal, but it's almost never the case. Everything else is equal rights. So people have different families, they have different socioeconomic studies, different environments, different relatives, different schools, you know, and different personalities. And so we don't really turn to particular single variables like birth order. We look more at patterns and how we sometimes call them trajectories, How are you going over time. So you know, let's say you look back over the last 10 years, are you becoming more this way or more that way? Are you doing more of this and more of that? That seems to be the key. And that's what a lot of other studies underestimate.
Cathleen: I think if you're getting smarter, help us reach more minds, leave us a review on apple podcasts so others know, we're legit. Tell your friends to follow us on social or subscribe to our newsletter at seniorityauthority.org. So if you're listening today and you're not, you don't feel that you are naturally a person that has this conscientiousness is all lost or can you develop some habits or practices that would enhance your life? And right now I'm thinking in particular of the story of James from the book.
Dr. Friedman: Yeah, we did also write many biographies to help bring the statistical conclusions and findings to life, so to speak. And James was one of those so people can and do actually slowly changed their patterns and habits how and why? Well when they seek out situations that promote responsibility. So for James, the transition took over a decade in childhood in 1922 he was very unconscious. His conscientious score was very low. His mother and teacher described him as vain and said he lived holy in the present. He didn't look far ahead. He didn't plan. He wasn't reliable or so truthful, but he was smart. But he started changing as he got into a good college and started doing his work and that helped to make him more planful and he got bored and he took a year off so he wasn't on the straight narrow path. He returned to college and then by the times in young adulthood he had a steady job in public relations. He had recently gotten married and by the time he was in his late thirties and forties, he had moved into the top quarter of the conscientious people in the sample. So he had gone from the bottom quarter to the top quarter he liked his work. He was now more detail oriented and persistent and he had definite goals. So he was more prudent than he was in his youth. And he survived to actually a seasoned old age. So this is one of the interesting findings of the longevity project is that it's not fixed and not stuck in a certain path. You can and do change. And he didn't do it overnight. That's what is important. He took on more responsibilities as he became more mature adult. He adopted more and more healthy habits and then he sped back and made him even healthier. So for example, he was always pretty physically active and increased his physical activity and that was important, but that wasn't the key to longevity was most important for him was that he entered healthier social environments, like a good marriage which we could talk about and that in turn fostered his health, his wife agreed they had a good marriage. His job was not exotic, but he took pride in doing it really well. And this is I think very interesting as an adult. He described himself as an honest person of high integrity. So that's the hallmark of someone who's back on the right path and has slowly altered his trajectory, provides a solid foundation for health as you're in middle age and looking towards your later years and those who help others are also usually such mature, thriving people.
Cathleen: Well, it sounds like he definitely changed from a vain and self involved childhood who lives for the moment to be someone who was much more conscientious and planful and satisfied.
Dr. Friedman: Exactly. And the way we looked at this, which I thought was kind of interesting is that dr Terman had compared the scientists and the sample to those who had gone on to other things like became lawyers and scientists were, you know, more shy unless someone you would see is really extroverted and active, but they were very careful in how they live their lives. And it's not that they didn't have fun. They had very, very satisfying lives because they were doing work that was really valuable and surrounded by really interesting people. But as it turned out that compared the scientists to the businessmen and lawyers, we recreated dr trumans groups years later after we saw how they turned out, it wasn't really just sociable schmoozer. Like some of the lawyers were the ones who thrive again. Created a meaningful life for themselves by doing work and being environments where they could thrive in that in that kind of way. So you could think about like the different buildings you could walk into. At least if you walk into a university setting, you see a lot of people you know, really focused in certain good positive ways or if you walk into certain environments in your town. You see people helping each other to do unhealthy thing. It depends. We saw the pathways in who surrounds you that influences how healthy you are. And maybe we'll talk a lot about how this affects something you can do you can actually do to make a difference.
Cathleen: Yes, I want to get to that. But you mentioned marriage and in the earlier when we introduced the show, we talked about the myth of if you're married, you live a longer life and that's not necessarily true. So what does the study say about marriage and or divorce as indicator of long life?
Dr. Friedman: Well, a good question of course, it's not the presence or the absence of a marriage certificate. Just a piece of paper that matters. But all the other things that surround social relations and marriage. So some marriages are happy and helpful and some are not. And we asked other differences for men and for women in the lunch every project, we actually looked into this in quite detail because we had very good information on marriages and happiness of the marriages and divorces and widowhood even. And we found that the divorce determined men, especially those who got and stayed divorced for a much higher mortality risk in their later life. The men who got married and stayed married, they were likely to live to old age comparatively to age 70 and beyond. But fewer than a third of the divorced men who stayed divorced steadily. Single men though who never married. They did pretty well. They outlive those who divorced and they will outlive the men who stayed and got divorced people remarried often did quite well. So did have some stress of divorce. So it's not like, again, one event affects your whole risks across your life. It's what you do afterwards. We found this in various studies that we did and what happened to them after some event that was maybe disappointing or even tragic. If you got yourself back on track within the next few years within the next decade, then your health and longevity could return to that of the people who didn't face the trauma, but people who had some kind of very serious disruption or trauma who then went off negative pathway maybe started drinking maybe became angry at everybody broke their social relationships. Those are the people who spiraled downward so vicious cycle. The other way the women in determined study showed really fascinating and unexpected results. So like their male counterparts, the women who got married and when good marriages, they often lived long lives. But the surprise emerged for the women who had gotten divorced and they didn't remarry. These women didn't fare so badly, certainly not as nearly as badly as a divorced male. Male peers usually lived long lives. So that is a surprising number of the women who divorced their husbands and stayed single did fine on average. They lived nearly as long as the their married counterparts. So being divorced was much less harmful to a women's health than it was to men's health. Many got rid of their husbands and thrived. And there are other studies that show this and there's also many case example, some of the longest lives of women in the world have gotten rid of their husbands earlier in life. So as my co author Leslie Martin, like to put it, she says, if you're a single woman with you have friends and you have an interesting life, don't think you need to get married or remarried to improve your health. So women who stayed single or again who had gotten divorced and remarried, they usually not remarried, usually long lives. So it fits with other research, some one of my friends does that shows that being single can often be just as healthy, especially for a woman as being in a marriage. If she has been other kinds of things like social relationships, close friendships, meaningful memberships and organizations, family ties, some purpose and meaning in her life.
Cathleen: It is the working theory of that women more naturally form social connections and men do at a later age. Is there a theory behind why women thrive as single people older in life than men?
Dr. Friedman: Yes, I think you put your finger on one of the main important variables there that we all know that in many marriages it's the women who arranged the social relationships, right? That was their job. Especially more traditional families. The guys would be more concerned with their careers and especially in this sample that started 100 years ago, many of them had significant careers, but they still had more responsibility to arrange the social dates and friendships. And so the women when they didn't have a partner, they actually had many good social ties and social relationships where the men didn't. So, but it depends a lot on the particular man in the particular marriage. Some men could do that and find their way and you didn't have to be really extremely sociable. You could be a man who had a few deep and meaningful relationships or activities and if you were volunteer, any of those kinds of things help. Yeah. But in general, you're right that since the women found it easier generally to move into more extended social networks, that was a big influence, we found on their health. And we were able to look at that by examining different kinds of activities that people did a different kind of social ties what they did. Because again, Terman and his followers who picked up the study in the 1950’s before we took it over in the 1990’s, they really looked at that they tried to see what was happening with these people.
Cathleen: There's such a big difference to so it it makes sense. One thing I thought was fascinating was we know that wishful thinking doesn't necessarily lead to a longer life. But one thing I learned from the study is that catastrophic thinking tends to lead to a shorter life. So for those warriors of us out there, can you tell us a little bit about why that is or talk a little bit about this finding?
Dr. Friedman: That's another interesting question. Thank you for that. The catastrophizing as people who catastrophizing, we might say the chicken littles of the world, they always think of the sky is falling and they often bring trouble onto themselves. So they have a pessimistic view of life that sees every stumble as a calamity. And when they were young and all the participants wrote about their flaws and the bad events, they had faced their disappointments. So we had a baseline measure and some were very harsh self criticism. So we could see who over generalized their problems and who saw their life as a total mess. So those were the catastrophizing what happened as they aged and this is true for people even in the forties and their fifties, what happened as they age? Well, the catastrophizing others get on these more downward spirals and they died sooner, especially the men. So partly as we said, the catastrophizing has generally had only superficial relationships with the people and that they couldn't really deal with a lot of their problems and they were also especially more likely to die accidents or violence, although some had heart attacks in middle age. But again, like I've been saying, many catastrophizing others improved their viewpoints over time and then and change directions of their lives. So I want to emphasize that the longevity project is not all pessimistic. We found many people who gradually changed their life pathways in so many ways, but we were different from most advice, is not giving advice and tell you what we found, but the people are drawing conclusions from it that you have to look across some trajectories across some pathways and the pathways something you can deviate from, you can change your pathway. So nothing is fixed. If something happened at a certain age or a certain time in your life, it's how that affects what you're going to do next.
Cathleen: And that makes sense. And what I love about this research is it's so detailed and it gets into your response to things that happen in your life and shows pattern over time. Because I think as we sit here today and we think about, we're all going to live generally much longer than we anticipated. How do we do that in the best way? And the longevity project book and research really debunk some of the urban myths that people spout so freely that if you're married, you'll live longer and if you don't worry, you'll live longer. And what we're finding is a little worry is a healthy thing. Not all stress is bad stress and it's how you respond to the situations that you are given. It's your ability to problem solve to look frankly at the world, not catastrophizing about it. It's your social network is very multifaceted approach to what makes for a long and healthy life. And one of the things that I also thought was interesting is you note that by age 60 most of the term in adults, even those who have been active when they were younger lost energy and vigor, which makes sense. But you write that those who stayed active and maintained or increased activity as they got older lived longer, which is really encouraging for me because I was never an athlete growing up. I was a girl in a traditional family with four boys and they were the athletes. I was not later in life, I discovered running and then weight lifting. So to me, this is a hopeful thing that it's not about the college football star that is going to have energy and figure it's something that if you've never walked into a gym at age 60 you can walk into a gym and regain energy and vigor. I thought that was really exciting personally.
Dr. Friedman: That's great. Great to hear that you're on that healthy pathway and that's exactly right. And let me mention that 100 years ago when the study was getting going, there's hardly any gym. So people couldn't walk to the corner gym. So that's a new thing. So yet people often thrived and stay healthy and live long. So it's not necessarily tied to particular individual times in history that make you healthier or not and telling everyone knows that fit and active people are healthier. But the average american eats much more and is much less active than the average american of 50 years ago and of the average terman participants from 100 years ago. So you hear advice, you know, spend 30 minutes four times a week and spend energy at a certain rate. That's good up to date medical advice, but it's poor practical advice. So if you take up New Year's resolution or birthday resolution, you're unlikely to keep that right. So you just make a general one, but take a look at your past history finding so that the patterns of activity tend to persist. So just as you said, as you start doing some more physically active things, You'll do more and taking these patterns into account can help you I think select the activities that fit well with your preferences. So I was swimming in a neighborhood pool a number of years ago when this was getting started and there was a woman swimming next to me furiously and she stopped and said, I'm glad I'm done with this. And I said why? Because I hate it. Someone told her to do it, but it wasn't going to really help her health. You wouldn't stay on that trajectory. But if you don't like jogging, don't jog. You don't like swimming but start doing the things that you really enjoy and you can keep up. So it could be a long walk at lunchtime or in the evening with your friend or your spouse or your dog. Some people tend to their garden. Some people go bowling with their buddies but not bowling alone. You don't have to do the same thing all the time and you definitely don't have to do something that irritates or bothers you. And some say that I think Dr. Martin agrees with this, especially choose activities that will benefit your body and your soul. So choose a partner is okay. But we recommend anything that doesn't force yourself to get out there. The successes of the active determined participants for those who developed patterns and social ties whatever they were that get you up and out of your chair.
Cathleen: I love that. Get out of your chair, get off the couch and find your own way to move in a meaningful way that brings you some joy.
Dr. Friedman:Exactly.
Cathleen: And so it's not do this, do that, but it is do something become more active and that's important
Dr. Friedman: and do something based on what you know about yourself and what your friends do. And if most people, if they sit down and think about it, they could generate lists. And we have, again, self assessment short quizzes in the book on the longevity project if you want that help, but it's pretty easy to sit down and figure out what kind of trajectories you're on, which are the healthy days and weeks of your lives and which are the less healthy and you can make small steps in the right direction and they snowball.
Cathleen: Do you find that at some point some particular age people start reassessing how they live and have a desire to rethink or restart? Or do you feel that this is something that happens during a crisis or at retirement? At what point in time? Are people open to hearing this and re thinking their life's trajectory in your experience?
Dr. Friedman: Well, yeah, there's other research that not conducted by us that looks at these kinds of things and we were able to do it because we had a lot of data from the participants when they were in their forties and that's kind of one transition. So people in their forties often come to the realization that they probably have fewer years of healthy life ahead of them and they have behind them and that's like, okay, I'm not going to live forever. And so I want to be healthy for the time. I have it to do the things I want to do. And as you said, another transition is around retirement, although retirement is kind of a loaded term and we advise against the society generally pushing people into retirement. Some people have terrible jobs and they are very stressful and they were very happy to get away from that work and do something more meaningful to them and that's okay. But people who are doing things that are meaningful to them society, we think shouldn't have the pressure to force people out of those jobs. Often people who have done, I'm 65 I'm gonna be done with my work. I'm going to go sit on a beach somewhere and do nothing. Those are the people who tend to not make it into their seventies and eighties and nineties. So it's the people who stay involved with something later in life. And we actually did a study of this, looked at determined participants through the seventies and the ones who stayed involved with something you didn't have to be paid work, it could be, if they were doing something that was helpful, it could be voluntary work and community work could be church work. It could be anything that kept you motivated to get up in the morning to go and do something to interact with other people, to help other people, all those things make a difference even later in life. So I pushed hard against the stereotype that, okay, you know, get to 65 66 67 go on Social security and don't do anything that's usually not a good recipe for thriving in later years.
Cathleen: And I love that. I love the fact that you have researched this and found that again, the urban myth of I'm going to go sit on a beach or I'm going to golf every day of my life, multiple holes. That's not a recipe for a long and healthy life. We have to be doing something else.
Dr. Friedman: It can be for some, certainly for short periods of time. And I don’t want to discourage people from doing the things they like. If you're doing things you love, that's great. But if you can make it meaningful to, so let's say you're playing golf, but you're raising money for a charity while you're doing that, you're interacting with other people who are interested in raising money for a charity. That's the kind of thing that makes it even more helpful and much more involving.
Cathleen: Yeah, no, I think that's really important to realize, especially because so many people, the people listening today are living so much longer post retirement, and I do want to give a prize to the person who can come up with a new word besides retirement because I think we're all kind of done with that word. So many listeners. If you want to send me your suggestions, please do. I always like to end by asking my guests what they would recommend that everybody who's listening today do today next week or next month to improve their chances of a long and happy life. So what would you recommend based on other than to buy the longevity project and take this quiz and learn about the research, which I would highly recommend. What would you suggest people start doing?
Dr. Friedman: The first thing I would say is throw away your lists to do this and to do that. You’re 10 new Year's resolutions, your off to the gym, go to sleep early, eat blueberries, you know, take it easy, take vitamins, smile more join facebook quit facebook learn facebook, get friends, all the advice we're constantly getting. There's two simple, these maybe good things, but a list is not a pathway to a sustainable, healthy community and lifestyle. So one excellent thing you could do, which I tell people when they ask me about who was healthy and determined study is to be sure to make friends with or go to gatherings with other healthy people, other conscientious people are the people who are trying to teach to learn to recreate and make the world a better place and it's pretty easy for us to do that and we can look around and we know who our friends are, who are bad news are going to lead us in less healthy directions and it's pretty easy to go see or make dates with people who you think are kind of doing the right things we've been talking about. So some people are facing hardships now and they're also helpful lesson to those people. It's to position yourself on a healthy pathway that's again appropriate for your own personality and your own circumstances. We didn't find stress reducing activities in the short term to be the problem or the help of the solution. Rather long term patterns were key. Those who maintain healthy relationships and positive social networks help others, those are the most likely to thrive. So again, this means more involvement with meaningful work, doing good things for family, for friends, for society. And we like to say that it's hard to know that the bracing the lessons of these 1500 americans who are followed and studied for their entire lifetimes reveals that striving for a socially meaningful and productive life also as a side effect, increase the chances of a long and healthy life.
Cathleen: So I like that. It's giving back to a cause bigger than yourself to other people and then that will feed its own positive energy to you. And I also like it's kind of what your mom says, hang out with nice people, you know, don't get in with the bad crowd. So there's a lot to that, a lot to choosing companions that are going to reflect the kind of life that you want to lead and that you can continue to do that at every age.
Dr. Friedman:Exactly.
Cathleen: My last question is, what are you doing now with the term and study and what is your goal? Is it to get the news of the research out there to more folks. It was quite a project getting all of these different professors and researchers together. An enormous task to boil this down the results that are encapsulated in the book. What's next for you?
Dr. Friedman: That's an interesting question because it was about 30 years ago that we first started publishing some of the findings from this and then which we've been doing ever since. So one thing I'm trying to do is integrate what we've learned, what other people have found, who actually then often confirm replicate our findings and launched a whole series of studies by others on the characteristics and patterns that lead to a long and healthy life and I'm trying to get a better sense of just what it means to be healthy. We tend to think that if we don't have a disease right now, if you go to your physician and he or she says I don't see anything wrong, then you're healthy. Well we know, that's too limited a definition of health and it affects how we allocate our resources in the public. How we think about what we should be doing and so if we had a better understanding of what it means to be healthy in terms of how it's going to help us stay on the right path ways, then we'll be able to deal with the situations that we encounter in the future and much more easily overcome them and then not to develop the disease is by the time you get to the physician with the disease, it's often too late. Right? You're already on a downward pathway. Not that people can often recover from that. Modern medicine does wonderful things, but it's much better to be thinking more broadly about patterns and this thing society can do for that.
Cathleen: That's great. And it is about thinking proactively and developing the patterns early on or changing them early on so that you don't run into these problems later in life. Well, it has been a pleasure to have you on the show Dr. Friedman. I am going to post the book and some of the notes in the show notes, I would encourage everyone to get a copy of the longevity project wherever books are sold. That's our show for today. If you enjoyed it, please visit our website. Seniority Authority to submit questions for future shows and watch past episodes, spread the word visit us on facebook and subscribe on your favorite podcast site until next time, enjoy the opportunity to get smarter about growing older. Thank you. Thanks to our show sponsor the Riverwoods Group. Northern New England's largest family of a nonprofit retirement communities where active adults find community purpose and peace of mind visit riverwoodsgroup.org. That's our show for today. Did it spark a question? If so, send us your questions at seniorityauthority.org and will track down the answer. Meanwhile, don't forget to subscribe like us on facebook, follow us on Youtube and rate us on your favorite podcast platform until next time. Let's get Smarter about growing older.