AIPIS 30 – “The Longevity Project” with Howard S Friedman

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Welcome to today's show. This is Jason Hartman, your host. And as you may or may not know every 10th show, we kind of do a special tradition here that originated with my Creating wealth show where we do a topic that is actually off topic on purpose. Something just to do with Jeff life and more successful living. And that's exactly what we're going to do today with our special guest. Again, 10th show is off topic and it is very much intentional just for personal enrichment and I hope you enjoy today's show and we will be back with our guest in just a moment.

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My pleasure to welcome Howard S. Friedman and Leslie R. Martin to the show. They are the authors of the Longevity Project and this is about surprising discoveries for health and long life From a landmark 80 year study, the longest study that has ever been done, I believe on longevity. Leslie and Howard, welcome. How are you?

Thank you very much.

Good.

Glad to be with you. Thanks.

Well, likewise. You have really done something phenomenal here and there's some really amazing information. This is the longest ever done, right?

Yes. Everybody knows that some people stay healthier and live longer, and other people seem to become ill and succumb before their time. But no one's ever been able to really track that over many decades to see exactly why that is. So we were able to have access to an archive that started back in 1921. Data was collected by Dr. Lewis Terman at Stanford University, and he started following over 1500 children to see how they grew up. And he collected all kinds of information about their personalities and their social relationships and their families when they were children, and then followed them into young adulthood and then as they got married and went into careers themselves. And we picked up the study about 70 years after that, around 1990, and we followed them for the last 20 years, gathering death certificates to see who thrived and lived long and who died before their time. So, yes, this is the first study that's ever been able to follow a large number of people intensively throughout their whole lives, gathering information about what makes some people live long and some people die young.

Now, were most of the things that you found in this landmark Long Long study, were they mental and psychological things or were they purely empirical things like eat your veggies or were they a combination of both? I assume you're going to say both.

We did look at both.

Go ahead, Leslie.

Yeah, we looked at personality characteristics. That was one of the things that we were initially quite interested in. But we certainly looked at other things too. Social ties and bonds with other people, career paths. And everything is quantitative and empirical. What we found is that a lot of the picky details and the things like which food exactly you should be eating or exactly which kind of exercise you ought to be doing, those things really didn't matter so much. There were some much broader categories of things, personality traits, psychosocial factors that were much more important.

I recently remember hearing about a new malady that's been diagnosed entitled orthorexia, which is about people who are really, really picky about their food and their eating habits and, you know, only eat organic everything and all of this kind of stuff that's not maybe as important as some people think, huh?

Well, everybody knows that it's good to be eat healthy foods, eat mostly a plant based diet. So why isn't everybody healthy? What's really unique about the Longevity Project is that it shows why some people stay on the healthy pathways and other people fall. And so it has a lot to do with the kinds of people you associate with the kinds of careers you get involved in and the kinds of personality patterns that you develop over the years. So the Longevity project found that you can predict good health years later by what you're doing earlier on, but it's not invariant, it's not unchangeable. Some people did become healthier in their patterns, and they wound up staying healthier and living longer.

I've been fascinated for many years with Norman Cousins and the whole psychosomatic medicine type of field. I find really interesting personalities make it the longest and have the better lives. I assume being optimistic is good for one's health. No.

Well, that was actually one of our biggest surprises and something that, based on the literature that exists out there, the large body of it, we did expect that being cheerful and optimistic in childhood would lead to a longer life. But when we looked across all those decades, we actually found exactly the opposite. The kids who were the most cheerful and optimistic had the best sense of humor and really sort of had this idea that, oh, life is great, everything is. They lived shorter lives. When we looked at this more carefully, what we saw was that they really did approach life differently because of, or at least partially because of those attitudes and those beliefs. They were more likely to grow up to be smokers, they were more likely to be heavier drinkers, they had riskier hobbies. And so when you place those in counterpoint to those who were less optimistic and cheerful, who didn't necessarily expect that everything would go right or go their way, we really saw that they were at. At a significant risk. And those who worried a little bit more were a little bit more careful and thought about the things that could go wrong and realized that things often do. They fared better.

So because though, Leslie, their behavior, like in physical activities, was less risky. For example, they wouldn't jump off the high dive and maybe kill themselves doing that. They were pessimistic about that or was it more subtle?

Well, we did see that their behaviors were different, but that didn't explain the entirety of the effect. So when we looked at what they died of, for example, they were more likely to die of accidents and injuries, but they were also more likely to die of cardiovascular disease and cancers really all cause mortality. So we see that some of this is playing out through various health related behaviors, but other things may also certainly be going on as they encounter daily stressors and disappointments and things like that. They may be a bit less well prepared to handle that. And so there's multiple factors going on.

Yeah.

And I want to be clear that when you say they. You're talking about the optimistic people, right?

Yes, the optimistic, cheerful, those who were quite high on that. So we're certainly not arguing that you should be pessimistic and dour and always think the worst. That's very clearly not the case. But the idea is that you can be too high on cheerfulness and optimism as well, and that a simplistic view that says, oh, be cheerful, that's going to help you or, you know, anything, that's really a simplistic approach that says this is always going to work this particular way is probably going to be wrong. And the Longevity Project really did show that over and over again that humans and how they live their lives and what the outcomes are quite complex.

Very interesting. So the optimistic people maybe tended to be more indulgent, so they would drink more smoke, they would just sort of do all of that stuff which ultimately led to their demise, maybe, huh?

Another way to look at it is in terms of the characteristics that really did predict good health and long life. And we found that in the Longevity Project, the people who thrived and stayed healthy and lived long were those we called conscientious. And conscientiousness means being prudent and planful and especially persistent. So the people who stuck to it, whatever they had to do, actually wound up staying healthier. And part of that was that the conscientious participants in the Longevity Project entered into better relationships. They had better friendships, they had better marriages. The conscientious people in the Longevity Project wound up in better jobs and succeeding in their jobs, and often found their jobs more interesting because they were able to be promoted, because they were kind of the kind of people you wanted to have in responsible positions. So it wasn't that they lived really boring lives because they were really careful. It was that they wound up really living really exciting, interesting lives because those were the kinds of positions they could be put in. So if you think about it, who are you going to hire as your CEO or as your army leader or as your astronaut? And you know, it's going to be someone who has a sense of adventure, but also is able to pull it off, is careful enough and focused enough, and can stick with it. So that was really one of the main findings of the Longevity Project, that being conscientious is one of the secrets to staying healthy and living long.

What about extroversion versus introversion? I'm sort of maybe lumping these two together. I'm sure I am. But it seems like the more optimistic a person is Maybe the more extroverted they are. I'm not sure if those two always align, but being sociable, is that better for your health?

Well, we saw over and over again that social ties were very important. So individuals who had more contacts with other people, who were actively engaged with others, they really fared better. On top of that, if some of those social engagements involved helping other people, doing for others, doing things that benefited others, that was an additional bonus on top of the benefit that they already had from simply having those social contacts. So we do see that social ties are important and that having and maintaining those connections is something that is worthwhile putting some effort and energy into doing so.

Friendships are important to a long life, huh?

They really do seem to be so, yeah.

And in the Longevity project in the book, there are different scale self quizzes that you can take, and some of them will tell you if you have different kinds of sociability that are relevant to staying healthy. And you can also assess yourself on the nature of your social support, how tied you are to other people, how happy your marriage is. So we say a good thing to do is get the book, fill out the scales, and see where you are on life's trajectories. Are you heading in a healthy direction or not? Another thing you can do is have your friends rate you on the scales that are in the book. So they can often give you even more objective information on your personality that's relevant to health and on your social relations that are relevant to health. And once you've done that, the Longevity Project points out the different pathways that lead to more and more healthy kinds of steps or that lead to more and more unhealthy kinds of steps. One of the things we found in a longevity project was that it wasn't just random how you would wind up later in life. Stress and challenge wasn't random. Some people made good luck for themselves and some people brought bad luck on themselves. So we could predict earlier in life who was going to kind of have more stress later in life and who is going to be on healthier paths.

Yeah, very interesting. Now, was there much emphasis on the qualitative aspects of one's life? I mean, some people say, well, it's better to die at 50 but have a really great life than to live to 80 and have not such a great life. Any thoughts or study on that?

Well, that's a really great question. I mean, I hear that a lot. You know, I'd rather live a shorter life but enjoy it. And what we found consistently in the Longevity project is that the people who were doing things that promoted the length of their life, that helped them live a long time also tended those same things, tended to make them happy in their lives. So people would report that they felt they were living up to their potential, that they were doing things that they were finding meaning in. And that sort of consistent contentment and finding meaning in life also boded well for the length of their life. We saw that people who were committed to things that they did tended to do well, that threw themselves into their work, that tended to be a good thing also in terms of length of life, even if that work sometimes brought stress to them. And so, all in all, I think, although our focus wasn't precisely on the quality of life, we saw a little evidence that a good, fulfilling, enriched life comes from the social connections and the being committed to work and all these other things that are also contributing to longevity seems to be one.

One common theme that you seem to be hitting on is that maybe having a mission bigger than oneself or outside of oneself maybe is a better way to say that is important, whether it be work, volunteerism, kind of something beyond just one's own selfish needs. Right?

Well, that's right. And first, let me say that the Longevity Project is not really about why some people will live to 100 or into their hundreds. It's really about why some people thrive into their 70s and 80s and others succumb in their 40s, 50s, and 60s. So it's something that most people really should be concerned with. And in terms of what really is a principle underlying a lot of the success of people in the Longevity Project, there's a sense of. Of having a meaningful life, having a significant life. So we found that the people who were really honest, dependable, hard working, helpful, socially involved with others, those are the people who thrived. In fact, you might have heard the old saw that says, the best of men cannot suspend their fate. The good die early and the bad die late. Well, we didn't find that. Again, the people who were really the good guys, who were working hard, doing something meaningful, involved with others, they're the ones who thrive. So we sum that up by saying generally, it's the good ones who can actually help shape their fate. The bad die early, but the good do great.

Yeah, that's good to hear because I guess Billy Joel is wrong in his song, Only the Good Die Young. Right? So that's good to hear that if you're living a virtuous life, you're going to have a better one, hopefully. What about Physical activity. You touched on it earlier, but I remember a long time ago the famous runner, Jim Fix I believe was his name, he died young and that's a surprised everybody. And he was so into health and all that kind of stuff. I mean, I know there's always an anomaly in everything, but not super important on the exercise side or moderately important.

Well, being physically active is certainly important. What we did though is we looked at the kinds of activities that people did and what we really found in the Longevity Project is that the consistency is what really matters. So kids who were physically active and then continue that trend throughout their lives, that was wonderful. But a lot of times we saw that kids were physically active and then as they got older they tapered off. And by the time they reached middle age they were really quite sedentary. And for those individuals having been physically active as a kid, that didn't give them any sort of years in the bank, so to speak. What really mattered was being active, starting about middle age and continuing that. So I think that's good news in one sense, that it's not too late to start. The other thing though, that was really interesting is that it didn't so much matter what people were doing. What mattered was that consistency. What we recommend from this and what I think the Longevity Project really tells us is that it's better to find something that you like doing because you're much more likely to do it consistently. If you love going out and running long distances, fabulous, do that. But if you don't like it, don't torture yourself. You know, you're not likely to keep it up anyway. And you're better off finding something swimming, gardening, hiking, woodworking, whatever it is that you really resonate with that you'll be committed to continuing.

Yeah, very good point. It seems like the people who live the longest are the ones who are the end. They're caught up and they still got another project they're working on or something they want to really make happen. And having that mission seems to be important. And you seem to be corroborating that. If there's sort of one or maybe two things that you'd say overall, what would they be? Just like the elevator pitch for longevity if it were.

The best advice we give people based on our really 20 years of studying this eight decade study is throw away all your lists. So we're always told, do this, do that, don't do this, don't do that, take it easy, don't work so hard, get married, eat this, eat that, cheer up all these Kinds of things, many of many of them, which we found, as we've been discussing, are just wrong. But really the most important thing is that making lists and trying to do simple kinds of things doesn't work in the long run. So because we were able to look across the whole lifespan, Longevity Project revealed that patterns and persistent habits are what's really most important. So the best kinds of things to do are to associate with other people who are healthy. Look at your friends, see if they're doing healthy things, and the kinds of people you really want to be around with. Look at the kind of work you're doing over the long term and, you know, change that if you can. Look at how you generally lead your life and the people who do get involved in more positive, meaningful things, involved with others, slowly change. So it's not something you can make a New Year's resolution and say, I'm going to do this and then I'm going to be healthy. Six months later. The Longevity Project gives a lesson like, think in longer terms and get yourself on the right path. And you'll be surprised how easy it is and how one good thing brings another and it keeps you healthy.

That's great. Maybe just one other kind of topic I want to touch on, because it obviously is a huge part of people's lives, and that is the topic of marriage and divorce. I have read studies that say that married men live longer than single men, yet married women don't live as long as single women, which on the face of it, would kind of seem to say that marriage is good for men, but. But it's a little hard on women. But maybe that's because mates don't want to be without one another at the end. So I know there's some thinking on that too. What did the Longevity Project show us about marriage?

Well, there were some really interesting sex differences, as you've just alluded to in the Longevity Project. We found, first of all, that a good, steady, long term, healthy marriage is good for people and it's good for men and women. But you're right, much better for men than it is for women. Most of what's driving that positive association is the male side of it. We also looked at people who stayed steadily single, so they were never married. And we saw that that was also not too bad for men. I mean, that steadiness was good, but being steadily married was better if you were a man. But for a woman, being steadily single was virtually the same as being steadily married. So that was kind of interesting where we, we Saw the biggest difference, though, was when we came to divorce. So divorce is a traumatic experience. It's not good for anyone. But it's much worse for men in terms of the mortality risk associated with it. But men are in a unique position in that they can substantially mitigate that risk if they get remarried following divorce. And for women, that's really not the case. They are just as well off to stay single following divorce as they are to get remarried. And that, I think, is really kind of surprising and very interesting. And it speaks to the power of, I think, the social ties and relationships that women on average have. Women typically have girlfriends, people with whom they can talk about deep issues from whom they can elicit support, and they seem to often be more comfortable doing that. But men, on average rely more heavily on their wives for social connections, and she often is the primary, if not the only real confidant he has. And so that may be part of the explanation for this really pretty big difference that we're seeing in terms of outcomes following divorce for men versus women.

Now, I would have to concur with that because it does seem like women have, or they tend to have. Not always, of course, but tend to have better support networks and are closer to their friends. And I assume you're talking about girlfriends almost always than men do. Men with their guy friends are more competitive in nature and they're buddies, but it's not as deep. Is that what you're saying?

Yeah, the dynamics of the relationship, I think, often are different. And another thing I'd like to mention, too, although this wasn't directly your question, but we also looked at what happens following widowhood, and you mentioned, you know, you don't want to be without your partner. We still that widowed women typically did quite well. Many of them went on to live quite long lives after their husbands died. But for men, the risk was the mortality risk associated with that was greater. But interestingly, the men who were more worrying and anxious, kind of neurotic, they actually did better. If you were a widowed man and you were higher on neuroticism, you were more anxious and worried. You were at about a 50% less risk of dying in the subsequent few years than men who were not warriors. So it's kind of interesting, you know, maybe the men can step in and fulfill that caretaking, sort of nagging, reminding role that perhaps the wife filled for themselves. If they're warriors.

I can't imagine. I mean, Howard, what do you think of that? I can't imagine that the Longevity Project is recommending Neuroses.

Well, in some ways we are not neuroses, but we're recommending people being concerned. So especially as an antidote to the advice, everybody's saying, don't worry about anything, just be cheerful all the time. And that's the secret to good health. And we didn't find that at all. We found the people who were prudent, who were concerned about things, who were thoughtful. They're always being told, oh, you worry too much. You're going to worry yourself to death. But in fact, those are the people who did not worry themselves to death. They worried themselves to life. So Longevity Project is really, I think, going to be beneficial for many people who are on the right healthy paths and are always being told to do this and do that, things that are really not helpful to them. So that's why we really recommend people look at the book, you know, look at the self quizzes, the assessments, and see maybe they are already on a healthy path. And let me mention also that we do have a website for the book. It's howardsfreedman.com which has links to other kinds of information, including to a Facebook page. So there's a Facebook page, the Longevity Project, which has all kinds of information. People comment and have discussions on that.

Fantastic. Well, that is great. Leslie and Howard, thank you so much. The Longevity Project is certainly fascinating. It certainly affects everybody listening. So they should go out and get a copy of the book. And I assume in addition to the website, available on Amazon, bookstores, etcetera, right?

Oh, yes, available everywhere.

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for joining us today and live long and prosperity.

Same to you. Thank you. Jason, great questions.

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