The Most Important Longevity Secret
Dear Natural Health Solutions Reader,
If you’re a regular reader of these missives, you know: I’m a nuts-and-bolts guy.
Most of my advice on how to keep your body and mind strong centers on what might be called “biomechanical” tips.
Eat more saturated fat to keep insulin low. Exercise to maintain muscle mass. Swim in cold water to stimulate nerve function. Fast occasionally to “upregulate” cellular housekeeping.
But while human beings are like machines in some ways, this characterization misses a deep truth about who and what we are — a truth fundamental to robust health.
Machines have no fundamental belief that they are here for a reason. Human beings — the smart and/or lucky ones, anyway — do.
And when it comes to health, that matters immensely.
A new analysis1, published Dec. 3 by Drs. Randy Cohen and Alan Rozanski and their team at Mt. Sinai St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital, New York, looked at previous studies that examined how a sense of purpose in life was associated with the risk of death or cardiovascular disease.
In all, the 10 pooled studies they examined included more than 136,000 participants, mostly from the U.S. and Japan.
The study participants’ average age was 67. They were tracked for an average of seven years. During that period, just over 14,500 died from any cause. And about 4,000 experienced cardiovascular “events” such as stroke or heart attack.
The conclusion: Risk of death was about 20 percent lower for those participants who reported having a strong sense of purpose and/or a sense of usefulness to others.
These findings “indicate a robust relationship between purpose in life and mortality and/or adverse cardiovascular outcomes,” the authors wrote.
Studies like this remind us that there is more to good health than ticking the diet, exercise, and sleep boxes.
You no doubt can think of many friends and relatives who made it to age 90 or beyond despite smoking, or eating terrible diets, or getting little exercise.
It’s common to argue that such statistical outliers have “good genes,” but I’ve seen little evidence that this actually explains the situation.
In my experience, the common denominator was a strong sense of purpose, which could be as lofty as parsing the complexities of quantum physics or as humble and human as caring for a beloved dog.
So…
As we pursue health and longevity, it’s profitable to ask ourselves — often — why we’re doing it.
Long life for the sake of long life is as empty as that tautology sounds.
The good news, however, is that purpose can be discovered and rediscovered at any age. If yours is unclear to you, make 2016 the year in which you consciously bring your purpose into sharp focus.
And if you need a kick-start, here’s a quote attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson:
“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”
My purpose is to share this kind of information with you. I wish you Godspeed in discovering your own unique purpose in life.
Brad Lemley
Editor, Natural Health Solutions
Citations
- Randy Cohen, Chirag Bavishi, Alan Rozanski. Purpose in Life and Its Relationship to All-Cause Mortality and Cardiovascular Events. Psychosomatic Medicine, 2015
