Aging with Grace: Goals, Roots, Attitude, Companionship and Environment

Welcome to the Living to 100 Club Podcast. Here's our host, Dr. Joseph Casciani.

Welcome everyone to the Living to 100 Club Podcast, where we discuss strategies to live longer and stay positive about aging. We hear about programs and services and personal stories about successful aging and making it over the hurdles. Our goal is to create a mindset about living to 100 and turn aging on its head. Thank you for joining us today. I'm your host, Joseph Casciani. Our guest for today is Dr. David Bernstein. We'll explore the essentials for living a long, healthy life from the eyes of a physician who has 40 years of experience in the care of the elderly. He has written several Amazon top 20 books, including his latest, I've Got Some Good News and Some Bad News: You're Old—Tales of a Geriatrician. Stay tuned as we discuss the longevity recommendations from our pioneering medical doctor. First, a little background. David Bernstein, MD, is board-certified in both internal medicine and geriatrics with 40 years of experience in his field. His insight and ability to monitor patient patterns and outcomes make him a sought-after expert and presenter. He is a graduate of Albany Medical College and has served as chairman of his hospital's pharmacy and therapeutic committee for 20 years, helping to improve patient safety and outcomes. As an associate clinical professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of South Florida College of Medicine, he has taught his acquired skills to first and second year students. Other books he has authored include What to Expect in Your Sixties, Seventies, Eighties and Beyond, also Senior Driving Dilemmas: Life-Saving Strategies, and The Power of Five: The Ultimate Formula for Longevity and Remaining Youthful. David, welcome to our program.

Thanks, Joe. It's a pleasure to be here today.

You're welcome. You're a prolific writer. That's great.

Um, it was something to do to get my mind occupied and engaged in a, in a new process while I was practicing medicine.

Good, good information. We'll hear more about your books So I always like to begin my program by asking the guests to tell us a little bit about the journey that brought you to where you are today.

Well, I'm glad you asked. I grew up on Long Island in New York and always was influenced by my family to go into a profession like to be a physician, and it was more than encouraged in my family. And somewhere as an 8th grader, somebody asked me what I wanted to do and become, and I said I want to become a doctor. And some people gave me the nickname Doc. My lab partner followed me along through junior high and high school so he would have someone who's proficient in science. And somewhere in high school, toward my senior year, I obtained a National Geographic magazine with a picture of an old man on the COVID I was really intrigued, and I opened it up and I learned all about centenarians, people living to be 100. This was in 1973. 1973, here we are talking about living to be 100, but in 1973 it caught my attention, and I thought about doing something in medicine or in a profession that was sort of an underserved area. I also experienced my mother's frustration dealing with the healthcare system and physicians while she was attending to the care of my parent— her parents, my grandparents, whose care was not the best according to my mother. And, um, you know, it kind of solidified my thought that taking care of older people and making a difference in their lives, uh, would be important. I went to medical school, I did my internship and residency, and started practicing in, of all places, Clearwater, Florida. Um, you know, some people say that and St. Petersburg are God's waiting room. Yes. I located my practice, um, around the corner from a condominium complex with 10,000 units and built a practice providing care to people as they aged.

Sure. And you did some teaching? You, you do teaching or did some teaching along the way?

I love to teach, so if there were nurses in a hospital, I would make sure they would learn something. I was really fortunate in my early years that I had registered nurses working in my office, so I loved sharing my knowledge with them and then had the opportunity to have medical students shadow me in my office and, and learn some of the skills that, that I obtained over the years so I could share that with them.

And are you still practicing, David, or—

I retired about 11 months ago in December 2020. Good. They made me an offer I couldn't refuse.

Yes, good. Sure. So help our listeners understand, you're, you have a specialty in geriatrics. What does a geriatrician do?

Typically, a geriatrician takes care of people as they age. So I know about activities of daily living and physical therapy and get people going and encourage them along and, and manage their preventive health and manage your acute care and, and manage chronic medical conditions, of which most people as they age have. I work on preventing them. I also tell young people when they would come into my practice and they'd scratch their head and say, "Well, why? I don't know. Why did I end up in a geriatrician's office?" And I said, "Who better to take you through life than someone who knows what it's like to take care of people in their 80s, 90s, and 100s?" And I prided myself when a patient turned 100 that I could look in the computer and see their date of birth. And say, your next appointment is going to be— oh yeah, that date. And I would pick their 100th birthday and say, you're going to be my last patient of the morning. You're going to get the 11:45 appointment. I'm going to book out lunch. It's you and me and my staff if they want to be there. I'll order whatever you want to eat, and we're going to have an hour to chat about what it's like to be 100 and on your 100th birthday.

That's great, that's great. I love that. Sure. Yeah. So helping people adapt to physical decline, acute events, chronic events, chronic disease. How do you become an expert on longevity then and remaining youthful? I mean, obviously you're talking with people of all ages, especially middle-aged adults that start taking some steps today, right, to live longer. How do you pass that information, or what did you glean from your client base to share with younger adults?

The first thing I did was recognize that I was invited to speak at a couple of retirement communities, and maybe I was just entertaining. At the end of those presentations, or during the presentation, I would ask questions, usually ask for a show of hands, and ask people. I said, what is your secret? What is your secret? And I would go around the room and I would keep track of them, and I sort of formulated my list. There's another little philosophy that comes into play with this, is that when I was a resident, one of my instructors said, "Remember, doctors, when you do a consult, only make 5 recommendations, because even doctors can't remember more than 5 things to do." So when I've written my books and, and give people lists. I limit it to 5. I also remember I had 5 members of my family. We have 5 senses. I love basketball. There were 5 players on a team. So 5 always made sense to me, and I made pentagons out of, out of words that I use so that people can remember them. And, and as I would talk to audiences and kind of calculate or tabulate what their successes were, I was able to distill it down to 5 things. And so people can remember 5 things, and I'm going to be able to talk about them today as to the things that led them to be successfully aging. Sure. And, and so here they are. Good. People who have goals or a purpose in life, they have something to get up for in the morning, they have a job to do. I love my patient who, after having a career in real estate in Manhattan, moved to Florida and took a job at a, um, a Landmark Hotel down in Clearwater. And I thought it was great. He would get up in the morning and he would drive on a road with palm trees, and he'd see the sunrise or sunset— it depends which way he was going at what time— and He had camaraderie where he worked. He felt useful because he kibbutz with people. That's a special word. Sure. But also felt useful. He'd tell me, you know, I was down there and I saw some people taking advantage of— they were trying to steal something and I intervened and felt really useful. I also got to know his wife and realized that had he not taken a job one of them would have been charged with murder and gone to jail, and the other one—

out of the house, right?

Yeah, so having a purpose and a goal and something to get up to every day was really important. The second letter, the second thing is roots. Having DNA, having good genes, uh, it really propels you a long way. However, you could have bad genes, and if you have bad genes, it means here's a really good reason to do something about it. If there's a family history of heart disease or diabetes or cancer, make sure you're screened, you see the doctor, you get it taken care of. And if you have good genes, don't flaunt them. Do the best you can to make the most out of, out of your good genes. And, and one of the things when we talk about living to be 100 is there's one thing to live to be 100, but there's one thing to thrive and have a great healthspan and make it to be 100, because People can live to be 100 and not have much of a life, an existence, but you want to be healthy. So know what those genes are. The third thing that I discovered is people had positive attitudes. Sometimes it was a sense of humor, is what people would say in my audiences. But what I did find was one of the best attitudes was— we hear about it a lot— the attitude of gratitude. And so in one of my chapters, yeah, it was kind of like a writing chore, but, you know, I wrote a chapter about how I hit home runs, people whose lives I saved and sort of made a difference. And I realized toward the end that it was a horrible chapter. I didn't save many people's lives. As an internist, you do preventive care and you make their lives better and longer, but you don't always see the fruits of your labor. But when I got a chance to listen to people express their gratitude to me for doing something that made a difference in their lives, I realized they got so much out of that expression, the ability to, to do that and share that. And I even experimented myself by expressing my gratitude more than I had been. And it's a wonderful warm feeling you have when you can thank someone for something. And, and I read about it a lot, um, I've incorporated into myself, I do it more and more, and I, and I know it's something that makes my neurochemistry and brain and, and overall physiology, my body, better. And I've read about it and it's true. So those are the first three. Companionship. Companionship is incredibly important, and I talk about it a lot, and I've even written some blogs about it recently, but having a companion in your life— and we know that people who are married will live longer than people who aren't married. It may be from the intimacy that they have, or it may be from someone who nags at them and says, you know, you have a cough, go to the doctor. You know, I'm tired of listening to you complain about this or that, go to your doctor. But it's someone who, who you share your life with or have other companions within your family and social group that make your life better. I'll digress for a minute and say that right before we got together today, I had lunch with 4 of my friends. They're older than me. We sit around and we talk. Sure. I'm embarrassed to say that when I talk to these guys about sports, we all know things from the 1960s. And it's like, how do you know this stuff? Can't you get it out of your brain? Like, why do you have to know about the Philadelphia Phillies from 1964? But all of us at the table knew about it, and we knew the same story. So having that companionship is incredibly important. And the fifth in my grouping here is environment. And environment can be looked at in a lot of different ways. You could look at the environment in which you live, and I usually use a picture of a nice stream, and I compare it to a city with some smokestacks and pollution. And that's one take on environment. But the other environment is the environment in your body and, and what's inside of you. Are you eating right? Are you exercising? Are you doing yoga, tai chi? All the things that would make the inside of us better. And so when you think about what I talked about— goals, roots, attitude, companionship, and environment— and now we have an easy-to-remember word, GRACE. GRACE is goals, roots, attitude, companionship, and environment. And people should think about incorporating them in their lives because that's what I observed in people who age successfully.

I love that. That's a great list and good examples, good description of the elements there, Grace. So goals, roots, attitudes, companionship, and environment. That's nice. Yeah. And you're writing a book that will detail this? Is that what you said?

The first book, the one you mentioned, the I've Got Some Good News and Some Bad News You're Old, outlines that. And I have lots of stories about each individual with examples of how how those things came about. And I have some superstars in there too. I have some patients who just knocked it out of the ballpark with all of them. I didn't mention, I'll do it now. I have an Aunt Flo in California, and she turned 100 this summer. And I visited her a couple of weeks ago. Every time I sit down with her, she said, "Why didn't you come for my birthday?" And I said, "Well, when I come for your birthday, there's about 50 people here and I get you for like 5 minutes." I said, when no one's around, I get you for 2 hours and I get to hear your secrets. I'll tell you about that in a minute. But she'd also say, well, are you going to write your next book about me? Are you going to include me in your book? She said, I do have this secret. I'm just going to tell this to you, Joe. Do with it as you wish. She uses a Hebrew word or Yiddish word to describe how she made it to 100. And she says, "I have mazal," which means luck. And I say, "Anne Flo, um, I don't know how I can match that up with the fact that goals, roots, attitude, companionship, environment are the things that I really believe that make people successful, but somewhere luck comes into play." And by the way, I don't talk about the fact that if you smoke too much it's not good and you drink too much it's not good. Um, but, but there's also an element maybe to that luck part that has to do with safety. And people who flaunt safety aren't taking risks. They take risk if they fall down and break their hip because they weren't careful. Um, or if they go on ladders, I tell people over the age of 65 not to go on ladders. It only has a bad outcome. Sure. There are people who can turn in, you know, change your light bulbs, but you fall off a ladder and you won't make it to 100.

Yeah, so luck, maazal, I mean, there is a certain amount of serendipity that comes with, you know, living longer and the odds being in our favor. And sometimes, as you say, we can kind of tip the scales when we know these solutions. So you've been able to distill a lot of what you've heard from your, not only your patients, but people in the audiences when you present it. So these are 5 key elements. I think they're great. In terms of what you see in terms of the chronic conditions for older adults, diabetes, emphysema, heart disease, do you, do you see things that they have in common? Is there, do you see this metabolic syndrome in, in your, in your practice? I had a physician on a few weeks ago who talked about metabolic health and metabolic syndrome, and how all of these things kind of interplay and interact and really impair the person's overall functioning. Do you, do you resonate with any of that, David?

Oh, absolutely I do. And, and when I would speculate on what the things are that, that lead to the most common causes of illness and death in our country— heart disease, cancers, and neurodegenerative and neurodegenerative diseases are all forms of dementia and Parkinson's disease, and there might be a few others that will creep in there. That's most of what I saw every day. And I wanted to communicate what the common thread through that was. And the common thread is this condition underlying— of underlying chronic inflammation. Inflammation, sure. And so this chronic inflammation And, and some people would, would equate that with fragility or being fragile. And if you're fragile, you're going to break when you fall, you're going to get really sick if something happens. So this chronic inflammatory state affects our blood vessels, and when blood vessels get inflamed, those are the ones are more likely to cause clots, accumulations, heart attacks, strokes, There's a lot of literature about the fact that inflammation— that dementias are an inflammatory disease of the brain. And just the aging process, when we're inflamed, we age more rapidly. There's a great deal of research going into this and trying to find different inflammatory markers that can be altered. Not totally clear how much of which things that need to be altered that that we can impact. But I did start thinking about what are the things that people can do to reduce inflammation in their body. And believe it or not, I mean, I believe most Americans live— older Americans anyway— live with a condition of chronic inflammation. So we can all adopt the, the 5 things that I'm going to tell you. And again, I'm going to still distill it down to 5 things that we can do to to reverse that inflammatory state. Are you ready for them? Yes, great.

Looking forward to this. Sure.

So the first one is stress. Now, stress in our body releases certain chemicals, and it's— they're like adrenaline chemicals. They cause blood vessels to constrict, blood pressure to go up, and there's this blood vessel damage and release of chemicals that continue to influence this inflammatory state. The second thing that people do is eat a horrible diet, and the American diet is much too overly weighted with carbohydrates, starches, and particularly sweets. Sugar is an incredibly hazardous chemical, and that we take in our bodies, and we don't even think about how damaging it is. But, but that's a leading cause of this inflammatory state. And, and you mentioned metabolic, so the The sugar and carbohydrates that people take in their diet, the SAD diet, Standard American Diet, gets stored in the liver and leads to fatty liver, which is part of this whole metabolic process. And there are solutions to what we can do, but we first need to recognize that sweets, sugars, carbohydrates are hazardous, and they have an impact on coronary artery disease, heart attacks, strokes, a neurodegenerative disease. Some people even think that Alzheimer's disease could be type 3 diabetes. I've heard that, yes. So that the, the third thing is sleep. Our society has been really bad about getting adequate sleep. And so if you think back to someone who lived on a farm 100 years ago, when the sun went down, they had dinner, and they went to sleep. And they would sleep until the sunlight came up, and they can go work at their farm. They may sleep 10 or 12 hours. Well, we've distilled ours down to 5 and 6 hours and think that it's our badge of honor if we pull an all-nighter or we stay up too late. Or a doctor saying, oh, I had no problem. I got a phone call at 2 in the morning, at 4 in the morning, and I managed my patient. I wrote this— this chapter was all about me. Is that I deprived myself as, as a physician of sleep. And only when I had a chance to really research that, I found out how hazardous that was for my health. And I began and continued to make changes. In the latter years of my practice, we'll say the last 10 or 12 years, I saw so many cases of sleep apnea that my head would spin how many times I had to order tests to detect their sleep disorder and, and, and initiate treatment and basically initiate a wrestling match to get them to accept this form of therapy because it's horrible to the brain. The brain needs time at night to process the metabolic waste products of the daily activity and filter them out. And that's what sleep allows us to do. And without that period of time, we're creating havoc in our brains. It doesn't work and function very well. And, um, is one of the things I believe leads to dementia. All the things that I'm mentioning are things that people can do to avoid these serious problems.

Is this, uh, deep sleep specifically, would you say, that we need, that we're so deficient in? Not necessarily that specific.

Well, there are different forms, there are different stages of sleep, and I agree with you that deep sleep is incredibly important. And one of the problems with, with my patients who had sleep apnea is that they would say, "Why? As soon as I hit my, my head hits the pillow, I'm asleep." And I go, "Yeah, that's exactly why I know you have sleep apnea. I can look at you and see that your neck is more than 14 inches. I can see that your waist is more than 45. I can do the rest of this with my eyes closed and know that that's the problem." And so what happens is Yes, you fall asleep, but someone— your neck comes around and suffocates you and wakes you up. And so you're never getting into your REM sleep, your, your deep sleep, and processing that. And it's, it's as if someone comes and puts a pillow on their face shortly after they fall asleep. Well, what do you think would happen to either of us if someone put a pillow on our face? Well, we would start suffocating we would start to wake up, our heart rate would race, our blood pressures would race, and it would be another contributor to that inflammatory process going on in our body. So addressing not only inadequate number of sleep hours of sleep, but also the quality of sleep is incredibly important. And, and addressing that with your— with a, with a physician becomes really important and setting that straight. It's really overlooked as a contributor to the aging process. And, you know, I, I use both parts of the aging process— aging of your body and aging of your brain. And like you said earlier, you want to make it— if you want to make it to 100, you want to have a good brain and a good body, not a good one and not the other, because you kind of need a good balance of both.

We want them both. That's right. So that's—

I, I talked about sweets, I talked about I talked about sleep. The next item is sweat. That's my euphemism for exercise. It doesn't have to be serious amounts of exercise. 30 minutes, 5 days a week, which is 150 minutes to 240 minutes, seems to be around the sweet spot of being able to offset some of those inflammatory processes that people have. It could be walking. It could be doing some functional activities. It could be doing core activities. You should be doing. One of the things that, things that I've enjoyed in, in my life is tai chi or yoga. With tai chi and yoga, you're combining both a stress reduction thing and, and a physical activity that can be really helpful. Sure. And, and it's important for people to, to start slow, progress over time, and realize It's never too early to start exercising, and it's never too late. We can, we can do it at any time in our lives. That's good, that's good.

So this one, I think I can anticipate, um, the fifth strategy.

I, I think I want to make sure I mentioned stress, but, but there's stress reduction techniques. That's true. And then the last one, and they all begin with the letter S if you haven't been paying attention. Is sex. And I included sex because in my generation and yours, we believe that sex sells. So talking about sex is important, and sex and the intimacy of sex really is important. I know that in talking to my patients, that they wanted to talk about that part of their life. They wanted it to be as fulfilling as it could be. And I know from my research the intimacy between people is important, but it goes beyond that because it's about intimacy in your family, it's about intimacy and socialization with friends like I did for lunch today, and that is something that has a calming anti-inflammatory effect on our bodies. One other thing about that intimacy that I talk about, the opposite of intimacy is loneliness. We have a pandemic going on in this country due to COVID, but there's also an epidemic of loneliness in this country. Our demographics have changed in a way that families are further apart geographically than, than ever before, and so the, the connections between people are— have broken down. And loneliness is the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day. So we need to do things that would offset that, right?

And loneliness is distinct from being alone, right? We both know that. I mean, people, people may live alone, have a rather solitary lifestyle, but they're not necessarily lonely. 100% agree. Yeah, yeah, because loneliness can occur in crowds too, for that matter, right? Yeah, sure. Yeah. So these are the 5 keys to anti-inflammatory. I never considered that, um, I mean, I like the 5 S's. This is your power of 5 formula?

Good. Yes. Okay. And so if I, if I can interject, there are those things you can do in that formula to offset that. So eating, eating properly, avoiding sweets, um, it's easy to recommend a Mediterranean diet because that's the diet, and I avoid using the word diet as much as I can, but it's a Mediterranean lifestyle. Fresh fruits, vegetables, um, I'll say little or no meat, fish, etc. Personally, I've transitioned from the Mediterranean diet to a vegan diet and taking it one step further, but making some adjustments so that you're putting food in your mouth that's much healthier. And the processed foods are also part of this problem. I've heard people say, and I'll echo it, that if you look at a label and it has more than 5 ingredients in it, you ought not eat it. And I know what I took for a snack today, my apple only had 1 ingredient in it, apple. Yeah. So the fewer ingredients, the healthier things will be.

Yeah, it's easy and it's fast and it's convenient, but processed food is really the killer.

And one study after another has demonstrated that. So the second one is stress. What do you do about stress? Well, learn to meditate, join a tai chi class, learn to meditate as part of yoga practice. There are apps you can get for your phone. One I'm very acquainted with called Headspace gives people an opportunity to learn how to meditate and meditate. But there are opportunities to learn that technique and even do it in a group setting if you like. If your job is stressful, make it less stressful or find another one. If your family is stressful, well, oops, you can't find another family, but you can figure out ways of reducing the stress in family relationships. And in terms of sweat, put a routine together of exercise. It doesn't have to be the same one. My sister-in-law walks a lot, and my wife and I will talk about the fact that she only walks— it's a straightforward straight direction, and you have to do some lateral movements too to maintain maintain the strength in your, in your body to go either, either direction. Again, yoga, tai chi, strength training is incredibly important. You want to maintain good strong bones and, and work on things that will improve your balance, because, you know, the sure way to end your 100-year striving is to fall and break your hip and, and, and lose your mobility. Sleep— set up an opportunity to get 7 or 8 hours of sleep every night. I have a watch that indicates how my sleep cycles went and how much time I slept, and I frustrate myself when I don't reach my goals. Sure. Oriented person. And, and even with sex and socialization and intimacy and avoiding loneliness, there are things you can do— joining clubs, getting closer with family, visit people more often. And I know the pandemic has had a negative impact on that, but there are things you can do. And I, I learned a really interesting word, or to use an interesting word with all of this, and, and I use the word intention, that these things need to be done with intention. Um, and even I've heard people say take action on it, but I like the intention because it means you, you can write stuff down and say, I'm committing to I'm committing to going to bed at 11 o'clock instead of 12 o'clock. I'm committed to making my sleep 8 hours instead of 6 and a half. I'm committed to Meatless Mondays, Mediterranean Monday, just something to make your, your day, your week better than it was before. Incremental changes, and particularly addressing companionship and socialization. Those of us as we age think, oh, we shouldn't have to do this with intention. It should come naturally. People should knock at our doors and come in for coffee all the time. And, you know, that doesn't happen. People have to take action. They need to get involved and say, I'm going to do these things because they're not coming to me. There's no way I'm going to break my chain of loneliness just by staying home waiting for someone to call. I have to go out and do things and put myself in those situations. And it's kind of like saying, calling up Joe and saying, Joe, I want to be your friend. Well, Joe's not going to be your friend unless you call him and set something up and arrange to have coffee and things of that nature that seem like they should occur more naturally, but they don't.

Yeah, that's a good point. And it's, you know, what you said, the success of the solutions don't come knocking on our door. The other point I like to emphasize is that every time we take these steps, even tiny steps, baby steps, and we get a little bit of reinforcement, it creates that momentum that we need to keep moving forward, right? Because it's hard to change behavior, it's hard to make those phone calls, it's hard to go to, you know, the gym or create some new exercise routine. But those little tiny steps bring that reward, that sense of reinforcement, and that's what keeps us moving forward. That's what builds that momentum. I think that's, you know, that's so critical. And I love your, your 5 steps here and your 5 approaches because, you know, it's all connected. The inflammation is there, but it's also part of our, you know, just our human connection and engagement. You know, to me, it's all about engagement. For you, intention, and for me it's engagement, staying connected, not just a busy kind of lifestyle, but really connected to some things that have that importance, that meaning. Yeah, truly.

And one of the things that I'll urge people to do one way or another is keep track of it, write it down, set a plan for the week. In our house, we generally set up our menu of what we're going to have for dinner during the week and I have a fairly good routine of 2 or 3 different items I have earlier in the day, but we have our dinners planned, and that way we control what we eat and the calories and the healthfulness of what we're eating. I'll write down my schedule for physical activity. I work out with my trainer these days. I do my spinning those days. What I do for stress reduction, you know, I have pretty much a plan of how I'm going to get my sleep. And without writing it down, it doesn't stick as well. Sure. I wanted to ask—

I know we're kind of running out of time here, but I want to make sure I asked you about— one of your books was about driving and driving dilemmas for older adults. Any way you can capture your recommendation in a few sentences here?

Yeah, I believe if you're the younger family member of an older adult who shouldn't be driving, I can distill it down to beg, borrow, and steal to get them off the road. My Aunt Flo is no longer driving, but I can tell you well before her kids took away her keys, she drove with her foot on the gas down a mountain road with me in the car on the way to a family event. And it was like terrifying. Oh, you know, if they don't like you anymore after you take away the keys, that's too bad. But you've never been on the receiving end of having a parent or a friend be found by the police 500 miles from their home because they were, they were driving on a road and they said they knew they had to turn after the Home Depot. And you know, if you drive on your main highway or your main road or my main road, there's a Home Depot and there's an Olive Garden and, and people just get mixed up and they just keep going and going. And it's a terrifying thing. Silver alerts are posted. I remember I live in Florida, but, but they're posted all the time and You're saving lives by doing it. And I had some success in doing it with my patients, not 100% because there's loss of independence. And in generations, our generation and the one before us, there were never any restrictions on driving. And they say, well, no one told me I was ever going to have to give up my license. You know, this is for good. This is forever. I go, no, that's not true anymore. You're endangering other people. And so in my— in that small book that I wrote, I came up with some ideas and items for people to do to save their loved ones' lives.

Yeah, it is a difficult adjustment, and we all know that. Giving up the car keys, a loss of independence, and how do we adjust to that? Driving is my whole life, right? But that's one of the adjustments That's one of the bumps. That's one of the obstacles that come along as I talk about managing obstacles and getting around those hurdles. So yeah, it's a tough one, but you're right. Let's find other ways for the person to get around, right?

Right. And you know what, as a physician, knowing how important that was, I used all my skills to get people to stop. And those skills included channeling Inspector Clouseau and Lieutenant Columbo. Just one more thing, or, you know, suspect everyone, trust no one. You know, it's like I would turn over every, every thing that I could find and try every trick that I could apply to get people to realize that they are endangering themselves and others.

Yeah, good information. So let me just ask you before we wrap up What's one message you'd like our listeners to take away from today's show?

That they should set up a mantra of the things they want to do and to live that real great healthspan. You got my grace, you got my Power of Five things, and begin to incorporate them and have the attitude of gratitude and have a positive outlook on things and live to be 100. Enjoy your lives, plan them well, respect your family when they ask you to stop driving, or move to a safer environment if that's what becomes necessary too.

Sure, good advice. It takes some planning, it takes some determination, it just takes that motivation to keep adding some substance and some structure, but at the same time Setting our goals for years ahead. Well, uh, looks like we're out of time. Before we wrap up, uh, I just want to remind our listeners about a few items. I'm pleased to announce a co-sponsor for our podcast, A Mighty Good Time. Are you looking for ways to engage and stay active? Check out amightygoodtime.com. It's a one-stop shop for events and activities for those 15 over. It's free to search and it's free to post. A Mighty Good Time dot com. Also, there's an offering on my website where individuals can arrange one-on-one coaching calls with Dr. Joe— that's me— to discuss bouncing back from setbacks. How can we tap into our resilient self? How can we find ways to make it over those obstacles we face on our different journeys? Take a look at the work with Dr. Joe Tab on the website. Livingto100.club. Be sure to subscribe to our email list to receive our newsletter and other announcements. Finally, pick up a copy of my book on Amazon, Living Longer Is the New Normal. I think that whatever age you're at, inspiration and a positive mindset can be put to good use. That's my message in the book. You've been talking today with Dr. David Bernstein. David, thanks so much for being a guest on our show today. For those who might want to contact you, how can they do that?

My website's davidbernsteinmd.com, and if they want to contact me, david@davidbernsteinmd.com will reach me.

Great. davidbernsteinmd.com and david@davidbernsteinmd.com. Correct. Great. Okay.

I'd love to hear from, I'd love to hear from your guests.

Great. Great. Well, thanks again. This was great conversation, a lot of really good information for our listeners. Thanks for sharing it, and thanks to everyone for tuning in to this episode. Hope to see you next time.

Hey everybody, Jared Sebaste here, host of Retire Repurposed. This podcast is dedicated to help people transition into fulfilling and purposeful retirements. Retirement is a big life change. In fact, the two most dangerous years of a person's life are the year they were born and the year they retire. Few people could just flip the switch from working a career 30 or 40+ years, retiring on Friday without methodical steps to living what we call a repurposed retirement. To listen now, search Retire Repurpose on your favorite podcast platform, Senior Resource, or Life Audio.