Good news for getting better
Oh, and thanks Canada for the study!
I realized I’d hit an age milestone when a colleague reacted with empathy to the news that I had to have a minor medical procedure—and I replied like this:
“Hey, it’s better than the alternative!”
Honestly, that seems like such an old person thing to say, and I laughed more and harder than it was probably worth when I caught myself. Still, most of us eventually reach the point where we realize we’re fighting a bit of a battle against the sands of time.
That’s why my eyes nearly popped out of their 50-plus-year-old sockets when I came across a major new study from Canada that suggests that even older adults whose health has declined have a really good chance of bouncing all the way back to optimal well-being within 3 years — if they can set the conditions.
Not what I had expected
Researchers at the University of Toronto analyzed data from 8,332 Canadians over age 60 who initially reported being in poor health, and then checked back in with them 36 months later.
They found that nearly one in four of them were able to recover completely in every measurable way.
“That is not what I had expected,” Esme Fuller-Thomson, a professor at the University of Tornoto who co-led the research told The Washington Post.
She worked with Mabel Ho, a recent doctoral graduate at the University of Toronto, and their definition of “optimal well-being” they used wasn’t just about being disease-free.
Instead, it included things like:
having good social support,
having high levels of physical health,
having robust mental health, happiness, and life satisfaction, and
being free of limitations in daily activities, disabling pain, severe mental illness, or cognitive decline.
Nearly 25 percent of the people who started out in poor health had regained that optimal well-being within three years.
Mental health was the key
The study found that people who had good mental health at the beginning were nearly five times more likely to achieve optimal well-being three years later compared to those who didn’t.
Theory; If you’re blessed with good mental health, you’re much more likely to find the motivation to do the other things that are important for improving your health.
Thus, the researchers emphasize that addressing psychological and emotional needs should often come first, especially if you’re dealing with loneliness or social isolation. And you don’t have to become a different person to make this work.
“I don’t want the message to be that you have to be a raging extrovert to age well,” Fuller-Thomson explained. “Social connection is how you define it. So if you have one or two dear friends that are all you need in life, but they are wonderful, that’s really important.”
Other factors that matter
Beyond mental health, the study found several other lifestyle factors that predicted whether someone could bounce back to optimal well-being. None of them will shock you, but it’s powerful to see them backed up by data from thousands of people:
Don’t smoke (or quit if you do)
Maintain a healthy weight (not obese)
Stay physically active
Get good sleep (tackle sleeping problems)
Manage chronic conditions like diabetes, arthritis, and osteoporosis
The study also found that being younger than 70, being married, and having income above the poverty line all increased the odds of bouncing back.
One important caveat: This study was done in Canada, which has a very different medical and health insurance system than the United States. The researchers acknowledge that the findings might not fully apply in places where people have differing levels of access to healthcare.
Never too late
As Ho put it: “It’s never too early to engage into an active and healthy lifestyle. Eat well, exercise, sleep well, and that would be something that we can all prepare for our own aging.”
Fuller-Thomson added: “I mean, these are all the things your mom told you.”
The study included some inspiring examples, like 91-year-old Florene Shuber, who started working with a trainer at age 82 after she kept falling. Now she says she feels younger and stronger than she did a decade ago.
“You can improve. I see it in myself, for sure,” Shuber said. “But you have to be consistent with it.”
Anyway, I’m a lot younger than Shuber — heck, a lot younger than she was when she started working out. But I can also remember when the age I am now seemed like the distant future.
Maybe we can’t quite turn back the hands of the clock, but we can definitely get healthier and stronger.
As Fuller-Thomson put it: “Too often, the focus in aging research … is on decline and disability. Our findings disrupt that narrative.”
All together now: “Hey, it’s better than the alternative!”
7 other things
Thousands of plaintiffs’ complaints, millions of pages of internal documents and transcripts of countless hours of depositions are about to land in U.S. courtrooms, threatening the future of the biggest social media companies. The blizzard of paperwork is a byproduct of two consolidated lawsuits accusing Snap Inc.’s Snapchat; Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook and Instagram; ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok; and Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube of knowingly designing their platforms to addict users – allegedly resulting in youth depression, anxiety, insomnia, eating disorders, self-harm and even suicide. (Bloomberg)
President Donald Trump posted a bizarre AI video to Truth Social over the weekend, in which he’s seen dropping feces on “No Kings” protesters from a fighter jet. In the stunning 19-second clip, the president — donned in a king’s crown — is seen flying a fighter jet to the tune of Danger Zone, the iconic song from the soundtrack of Top Gun. The video then pans out to show the plane — which has the words “King Trump” written on its side — dropping massive amounts of excrement on a target which quickly reveals itself to be New York City. (Yahoo News)
Amazon Web Services, a leader in the cloud infrastructure market, reported a major outage on Monday, taking down numerous major websites. Many sites came back online within a few hours, although Downdetector showed another spike in user reports around noon ET of outages at Amazon, AWS and Alexa. (CNBC)
Pope Leo XIV has created seven new saints, including a one-time satanist priest who reconverted to Christianity, at a canonisation mass in St Peter’s Square. Huge portraits of the seven, who included a lay catechist from Papua New Guinea, an archbishop killed in the Armenian genocide, a Venezuelan “doctor of the poor”, and three nuns who dedicated their lives to the poor and the sick, were unfurled from the facade of St Peter’s Basilica at the start of the service. (The Times)
In a minutes-long strike Sunday inside the world’s most-visited museum, thieves rode a basket lift up the Louvre ’s facade, forced a window, smashed display cases and fled with priceless Napoleonic jewels, officials said. The daylight heist about 30 minutes after opening, with visitors already inside, was among the highest-profile museum thefts in living memory and comes as staff complained that crowding and thin staffing are straining security. The thieves fled on motorbikes. No one was hurt. (AP)
A New Orleans family cleaning up their overgrown backyard made an extremely unusual find: Under the weeds was a mysterious marble tablet with Latin characters that included the phrase “spirits of the dead.” “The fact that it was in Latin that really just gave us pause, right?” said Daniella Santoro, a Tulane University anthropologist. It turns out the slab was the 1,900-year-old grave marker of a Roman sailor named Sextus Congenius Verus. Further sleuthing revealed the tablet had been missing from an Italian museum for decades. (WDBJ-7 TV)
Too burned out to travel? This new app fakes your summer vacation photos for you. (TechCrunch)
Thanks for reading. Photo by Salah Regouane on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this Inc.com. See you in the comments!
I am Canadian. Although our health care system is far from perfect, no one goes into bankruptcy for healthcare. We have a huge shortage of family doctors - which government knew for years was coming and did nothing about - and it can take months to get in to see a specialist. Now we re running into lack of long term care spaces - again a problem the government knew about for years and has done little to prepare for.
I learned from my mom “use it or lose it” she was active well into her 90’s. While it is tempting to sit and watch tv or scroll the internet all day, that turns your brain to mush and it’s gone, the rest of you will follow. Get out and enjoy and appreciate where you live.
What are the chances the story of the found grave marker happens the same time the theft from the Lourdes happens? Too random!
If there was ever any doubt we know for sure how trump feels about American citizens, especially the ones that did not vote for him.
It is so embarrassing to have a president that thinks using juvenile bathroom humor against people he does not like is funny. However, it is not surprising given his “locker room” boasts of being able to grab women by their crotch. How anyone - particularly women - can see him as leadership material is beyond comprehension unless they like entitled teen age boys for the job.