14. How we bear our lives

Hi friends,

Welcome to the fourteenth dispatch of How Humans Flourish, a research-informed newsletter on how humans thrive.

For the month of April, we’re reading “Blue Zones: 9 Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest” by bestselling author, longevity expert, and National Geographic Researcher Dan Buettner.  

To get us oriented into this exciting, thought-provoking world of longevity research, here are a few basics to get us started:

There are five blue zones in the world: 

1. Sardinia, Italy

2. The islands of Okinawa, Japan 

3. The Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica

4. Ikaria, Greece 

5. Loma Linda, California

These five geographic areas contain the only centenarians (people 100 years old or older) in the world with lower rates of chronic disease coupled with longer life expectancy. Even at 100, they have high cognitive function, sharp memory, and immense physical vitality. 

The nine common traits of all of these centenarians are: 

1. They move naturally and are often active without thinking about it.

2. They stop eating when they’re 80% full. 

3. They do not eat processed foods.

4. They drink red wine (in moderation).

5. They have a definitive and clear life purpose.

6. They are optimists and do not carry stress. 

7. They participate in a spiritual community.

8. They make family a priority.

9. They intentionally surround themselves with like-minded friends.

According to the best longevity experts, if we adopt the right lifestyle based on these nine lessons from the oldest and healthiest living people, we could add at least ten good years to our lives while suffering a fraction of the diseases that kill us prematurely.

Dan writes, “25 percent of how long we live is dictated by genes, according to famous studies of Danish twins. The other 75 percent is determined by our lifestyles and the everyday choices we make. It follows that if we optimize our lifestyles, we can maximize our life expectancies within our biological limits.”

Scientists are incredibly careful to not ascribe specific attributes to antiaging. In fact, in 2002, 50 of the world’s top longevity experts issued a position statement sharing, “Our language on this matter must be unambiguous... There are no lifestyle changes, surgical procedures, vitamins, antioxidants, hormones, or techniques of genetic engineering available today that have been demonstrated to influence the processes of aging.”

In Dan’s words, “The brutal reality about aging is that it has only an accelerator pedal. We have yet to discover whether a brake exists for people. The name of the game is to keep from pushing the accelerator pedal so hard that we speed up the aging process. The average American, however, by living a fast and furious lifestyle, pushes that accelerator too hard and too much.” (Buettner, pg. 22)

So, what exactly is aging and how can nine simple lessons impact our relationship to it?

Dan writes, “A gerontologist would define aging as the risk of dying... In most cases this increases as our age increases. Other factors can change your risk of dying as well as aging, so it’s not that aging alone is the determiner, but it is the overarching change. People have been searching for biological markers of aging, and so far nobody has found any that are absolutely constant and separate from the onset of diseases…

People look at, for example, the loss of accommodation in the lens of the eye. Most people become farsighted, usually in their early 40s. It doesn’t happen to everyone, so you can’t say it’s a universal sign of aging. Graying of hair, loss of collagen in the skin, all of these are changes that have been described with regard to aging. There’s a change in body composition as people get older. It can obviously be influenced by exercise and diet, but in general, we lose muscle mass and gain body fat. The immune system changes with age and becomes less competent, but again, not in any universal way that we can say is a characteristic of aging.” (Buettner, pg. 25-26)

All of us have a different relationship to aging. For some of us, the idea is terrifying. For others of us, it’s the well-earned reward for a life lived fully.

Okinawans would call a life well lived, ikigai. The Nicoyans in Costa Rica would call it plan de vida. Oprah would refer to it as purpose.

While ikigai is fifth on our list of nine lessons, I think it’s an important philosophy to frame our conversation because it determines why we would adopt healthier lifestyle changes in the first place. 

Dan writes, “Dr. Robert Butler and collaborators led an NIH-funded study that looked at the correlation between having a sense of purpose and longevity. His 11-year study followed highly functioning people between the ages of 65 and 92 and found that individuals who expressed a clear goal in life—something to get up for in the morning, something that made a difference—lived longer and were sharper than those who did not…”

Since that NIH study, more longitudinal studies have found the same results: subjects without a sense of ikigai are significantly associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease (see study 1 here, study 2 here, study 3 here, and study 4 here).

Dan writes, “In Okinawa people enjoy what may be the highest life expectancy (in 2000 figures that worked out to be 78 years for men and 86 years for women), the most years of healthy life (the Japanese have the greatest number of disability-free years at 72.3 for men; 77.7 for women), and one of the highest centenarian ratios (about as high as 5 per 10,000). They suffer from diseases that kill Americans, but at much lower rates: a fifth the rate of cardiovascular disease, a fourth the rate of breast and prostate cancer, and a third the rate of dementia.” (Buettner, pg. 64)

An individual's ikigai can be as simple as seeing their child or grandchildren grow up, or it can be pouring oneself into a life’s mission/vocation.

Many of break*through’s challenges include exercises and games to help define and align one’s ikigai in a modern world, because it is so central to our wellbeing and reason for being.

A simple ikigai exercise is to observe (with no judgment) how many of your daily tasks bring you into alignment with your purpose.

The gap is the difference between drudgery and being fully connected to one’s lived experience.

More on this next week, friends.

With gratitude,

P.s. A few months ago, Netflix released a tastefully done docu-series with Dan distilling the insights from Blue Zones into four well crafted episodes.