Posts Tagged ‘baby boomers’

This is the second installment from our new book Booming On. Next week we will post part three…

Both couples had satisfactory lives in their mid-50s. They had success and hope for the future. But their future was actually in the midst of a profound transition, one in which there would be little room for error, few if any second chances. It is hard to believe in our mid-50s that such an intense and unforgiving storm is just around the bend. But it is. Linda and Ted saw it one way. Heather and Jack saw it another. Both couples made choices and set out to live their choices. 20 years later those choices point out two crucial elements about quality of life beyond 50-something:

1. The individual has immense power to reinvent their future.
2. Modern medicine is has limited power to reinvent a poorly structured future.

Quality of life is not based on cosmetic surgery, new drugs or the latest medical procedures. The clinic cannot save us from bad choices or poor game plans. It all starts with us, but we need a plan. That is where many of us get stuck. When we look for a plan, the choices are overwhelming. Do I eat organic food and meditate? Should I sign up for a marathon? What are the good “carbs?” Should I take St. John’s Wort to handle stress? Did I need a body scan? Just finding a plan proves more complicated than just doing what we have always done. Surely not all of the thing we have been told to do for our health, our quality of life, can be right? How do we know what is right? What’s the plan?

We have asked ourselves this question for many years, both for ourselves, for family members, for friends and for patients. What plan is simple, easy to work with, offers realistic baby steps and, most importantly, actually works? By works, we mean a plan that has been around long enough to validate its effectiveness, meaning real people have used it with great success. For a long time we used a variety of approaches, a mix and match approach to our own health and the advice we gave others. And then by chance we discovered a plan by the most successful group of people we had ever encountered. We discovered the centenarians.

The centenarians are people who have lived to 100 and beyond. Who better than those who have actually lived the journey with good health and great engagement to provide us with insights and strategies to obtain both quality of life and the potential for longevity? We were intrigued, but we wanted to know more. Here is what we found.

Currently in the US, we have 58,000 individuals who are at least 100 years old, a number that will increase to 1,000,000 by 2050. Some of the centenarians are fortunate enough to have longevity genes (evidenced by a family history of “long lives”), but up to one third have achieved long and high quality lives by a healthy lifestyle, even in the face of major medical problems. How did they do this?

The how is what this book is about. Not about the “how” to live to 100, but rather the “how” of their game plan that took them through the passage from their mid-50s through their 70s and 80s. This is the most likely passage for the majority of baby boomers. Some of us will get to 100, but most will get to between 70 and 90. This is our focus. How we can get to 70-something with the best quality of life.

Our research on the centenarians demonstrated that as a group they share common traits that impact the quality and length of their lives. Despite their diverse backgrounds and experiences, their lifestyles follow a common path, a common set of habits that offer a plan, a road map that is both profound and yet surprising simple in design. We call their common traits the “centenarian markers,” the unique building blocks that account for their impressive quality of life. Taken as a group the centenarian markers offer up a game plan that is both an assessment tool and a coaching tool. It can tell you what’s working and what can benefit from an upgrade. It offers the global view we need to see the big picture as well as the practical coaching tips we need to make changes. It addresses life, as we know it.

It is easy to forget with the avalanche of health messages we get from the popular media that we are more than blood pressure readings or cholesterol levels. Our lives are embedded into a complex landscape that has children, grandchildren, older parents, challenging jobs, marriages, and uneven health. Any road map that does not give us the tools to manage the whole process, life as we really live it, can’t help us. We don’t need a diet as much as we need a clear view of how the physical and psychological issues of our lives either work for us or against us. This is the value of what the centenarians have to teach us.

The goal is to upgrade the quality of our lives. Knowing the whole plan makes upgrading the parts so much easier. Why? Because we see how they are connected together in ways that makes sense to us. Because we see how even a small step in one area yields huge results in the other areas. Because we see that one part of the plan does not replace or overshadow the other. Because we finally see that no doctor, no diet book, no fitness program can provide us with the invaluable perspective from the end of the journey, the advantage of looking back at what worked and why. This is the centenarian’s gift to us, the plan they lived and now pass on to us to help us invent our future.

We wrote this book to provide you with a clear understanding why the centenarian markers are so crucial to quality of life and how they provide a clear road map that anyone can adopt at any age to upgrade the quality of their life. Knowing the centenarian markers is one thing; putting them into practice is another. The value of the book lies in its common sense approach to incorporating, most of the time in baby steps, this wisdom into our lives. It is not the big decisions that influence our lives so much as it is the small, determined decisions that yield profound influence over what we become. We are big on baby steps.

So as millions of baby boomers turn 50, they are entering a critical period of time that will determine their future, the last major 20-year segment they have to invent a different outcome to their health story. For a larger portion of baby boomer population, this is a wake up call, like it or not. Which brings us to another important aspect of this book. It offers a plan that allows anyone to upgrade the quality of their life, on their own time schedule, in the order that suits them best, and in the manner that reflects who they are. Like we said, we are big on baby steps. Just choosing one new habit, one new goal from the nine markers we outline in the book can have a dramatic impact on the individual and those around him or her. This is what happened to Alan.

Alan heard us give a presentation on the centenarian markers. He can up afterwards to discuss a number of issues. Alan was looking for an upgrade in many areas of his life. Where to begin? What is the one step you can take in the next 90 days we asked him? Maybe a health check up he suggested. He was 55 and was long overdue for a physical. He decided to take that baby step and get a check up, colonoscopy and all. To his relief, everything was normal. He was relived and inspired. He opted for another small step. He began to test ways to get better connected in his community. Baby steps, piece by piece, building an upgraded future, on his own terms, piggy backing off of one goal after another, using the centenarian road map for keeping on course, remembering how the whole game was meant to be played.

While this book incorporates the wisdom of those who have lived to a 100 and beyond, it is not about longevity. Life is not a contest to see who last the longest. This book is about quality, about a balanced life that is more meaningful and satisfying. We won’t promise you that following the wisdom of centenarian markers will get you to 100, but wouldn’t it be wonderful as you approach 80 years of age and beyond to be like Jack and Heather? That is the purpose of this book, to provide you with a set of tools and strategies to minimize the development of future disease and to preserve good health, to upgrade your life to the highest quality you can have, for yourself and for those who are connected to you.

One of the new mantras of aging in the twenty-first century is the refrain “sixty is the new forty.” Maybe. Good health and an impressive array of lifestyle options certainly make many of today’s sixty year olds look different compared to their parent’s generation. But appearances can be misleading. In their rush to celebrate biological vibrancy, sixty year olds could miss a crucial piece of information about what occurs developmentally on the journey to seventy. Biology is not psychology, and failure to appreciate the difference could leave elders uninformed and ill prepared for their final mission.

Sixty year olds represent an “in between generation,” meaning not quite middle age and not quite old. Developmentally, “in between” is an appropriate characterization of a transition period marked by “agenda crossover.” What do I mean?

Middle age and old age have markedly different developmental agendas. The transition between these age groups is not sudden. It is a crossover process where one agenda ramps off while the other ramps on. From a psychological perspective, knowing where you are coming from is interesting; knowing where you are going is essential. Here is where elders are coming from.

Middle age is dominated by two primary developmental tasks, the “mission” of being fifty-something:

1. Preserve stability in world of increasing personal volatility.

2. Reinvent purpose and direction for the second half of life.

The instability of middle age is well known. It is an involuntary passage into life changing currents that include death in the family, unsettled children, chronic illness, career upheavals, aging parents, and changing partnerships. It is a complex and sobering period that requires super-human effort just to “keep things together.” Truth be told, most of us don’t keep things together, but we do get better at coming to terms with the “physics” of how life operates, negotiating a fragile peace with a vast list of items that remain outside of our control.

The other task of middle age is reinvention in an environment essentially devoid of public goals. This is in sharp contrast to the clear marching orders of the first half of life, a period in which society offer young adults concrete guidelines for their life’s journey. Getting an education, landing a good job, finding the right partner, starting a family, and becoming successful are themes that inundate conversations in the first half of life. As such, they are a public refrain that define and reinforce social goals. And then, almost overnight, this social broadcasting mysteriously ceases. In middle age, public goals give way to private goals, a navigational shift in which life’s purpose and direction becomes like a 401K, self-directed with the increased burden of trying to sort through a long list of confusing and at times conflicting choices.

Despite the demands of the middle age, by sixty most adults have successfully adopted to the tasks. They have found their version of personal stability and made significant headway in defining what they want and where they are going in the second half of life. But beneath this success is a new set of developmental currents that are beginning to surface as middle age recedes. Their arrival over the next ten years will usher in what is arguably the most difficult and magnanimous mission in life. As Bette Davis remarked, “Old age is no place for sissies.”

In my next blog, I will discuss the final mission, what it is, how it surfaces by age seventy, and its profound impact on elders and their families.