Longevity's Open Secret No One Talks About

TL;DR:
Our habits at work don’t always form the best personal health and fulfillment habits. We spend most of our professional lives acquiring things, then wonder why we’re under-fulfilled personally. Life is relational, and decades of research shows us that the quality of our relationships influences our physical health and sense of wellbeing. Here’s why building strong social connections reduces mortality risks. And a counter-intuitive approach to putting it in to practice.

Every profession re-wires our brain significantly, because our professional thought processes and habits become personal thought processes and habits over time.

Thought habits formed during the majority of our day shape the remainder of it. The part we call “life”.

Most of us attempt to balance work and “life”, and fail. Or feel we’ve failed. Which seems inevitable when the time each gets is so imbalanced. Work gets our best, high-performing weekday daylight hours, and our personal life gets leftover scraps. Weekends are supposed to be enough, somehow. Are they?

Our normal, default metric is quantity. Our brain prefers it. Fewer calories per unit of information. It’s easier to comprehend. Quality, on the other hand, has layers. It’s more subjective. We have to think about our self. Trains of thought take more effort.

But when it comes to our personal health and wellbeing, quality counts first. Quantity second.

Take sleep, for example. Our first question usually is, how many hours did I get? But when we study sleep deeply, as I have, we find quality counts first, quantity second.

We’ve all experienced days after sleeping four or six hours but feeling fully rested. And days when we’d slept eight or more hours, but feel a sleep deficit. That’s the sleep quality variable. And measuring it as a weekly sleep budget. Not each night in isolation.

Same applies to “life” (the not-at-work parts). Quality counts first, quantity second.

Yesterday I was MIA, here, when I’d normally send you this. To pay back a little of the time-debt I’ve run up in my personal life. My quality of life. My relational life. Life with my wife, who’d asked for a payment.

“Life” is inherently relational. A web, a network. Our quality of life is relative to our connective, interpersonal, relationship network.

So I both apologize for being MIA yesterday and ask your understanding, and a pass, as I neglected you in favor of someone my personal quality of life depends on most.

Professionals at a certain career stage have usually achieved it through personal sacrifice. We’d put career first, “life” second. Eventually - sooner for some, later for others - comes a sense of “life” deficit. A sense of not having lived fully, or well enough. And desire for compensation.

Those of us who had intoxicated or distracted or numbed ourself after work or on weekends for short term self-gratification, and relationships of convenience, were only deepening our long-term debt to our self.

The proverbial “mid-life crisis” is an industrial age hangover from capitalism’s demand for a certain amount of self-neglect. That’s the bargain we make with it. But because it’s expected, assumed, and typically unconscious, we’re surprised by an eventual, but inevitable, crisis of accumulated self-neglect.

I’m not anti-capitalism on the whole. Just pro human health first and last. For that, sometimes we have to claim our power in the face of capitalism’s power asymmetry. And remind ourself of our deeper nature. Which is inherently social, by evolution.

Or by creation, if you prefer. We are our brother’s and sister’s keepers.

Compensating for self-neglect with self-indulgence looks selfish, because it is. Little wonder then that our interpersonal and intimate relationships can continue to fray or come apart when we act out as consumer culture had long taught us to.

There’s another way. A counter-intuitive one. But one that brings self-actualization through self-recognition.

Recognizing our brain’s inherent neuroplasticity - its ability to change and “rewire” itself - comes first. Followed by harnessing our energy to our intentions, to overwrite old habits (neural pathways) with new ones.

If you think I’m going to revisit the health benefits of sincere altruism, you’re partly wrong. It can certainly help us self-actualize. But not if we’re exhausting our time, energy or money with little or no sense of reward.

Healthy self-sacrifice has three minimum requirements:

I’m not going down the “peer matching” social program rabbit hole. But simply put, our peers are those who’ve experienced the same type or category of pains we have, too. Age and other demographic details are secondary. Personal tastes, superficial likes and dislikes, follow.

This is why many who’ve suffered from but survived substance addiction report retrospective gratitude for having suffered from and survived it. Despite being a persistent challenge, their sense of purpose through service, and positive feedback, is highly self-fulfilling. Self-actualizing.

The journey of facing a lack of control with enough humility to accept others support, and subsequent opportunities to pay it forward for others benefit, can give us profound interpersonal connectedness together. And a personal sense of social value, in turn. Which evolution (or design) requires for our health and wellbeing.

This seems counterintuitive to so many of us because helping ourselves heal by helping others heal is not a broadly held western or modern social value. It may or may not come from our family or community. And it certainly isn’t part of our formative age education curriculum.

In the capitalistic model of social value, an individual’s material accumulation holds the highest place. Thankfully, we can have both material success and self-actualization. Contradictory as they can seem. If not without some sacrifice of one, for the other.

We are not islands in a sea of loneliness after we recognize the archipelago of human suffering we all share. And can reduce through effortful mutual support.

Reduced loneliness, increased social connectedness, results in better biological health and longevity, with strong evidence of lowered all-cause mortality.¹

Until next time, eat fresh foods and stay active Beautiful Self-aware Brain!
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