[Neurons] 2023 Neurons #20 HEALTHY AGING AND INTENTIONALITY

Tue May 2 02:36:51 EDT 2023

From: L. Michael Hall

2023 Neurons #20

May 1, 2023

Healthy Aging #6

HEALTHY AGING

AND INTENTIONALITY

To live healthily and to age healthily, you have to have something to live
for.  Viktor Frankl discovered that in the concentration camp.  He noted
that those who had something or someone to live for were able to live longer
and better than those who did not.  Without something or someone to live
for, they tended to give up, to become depressed, and their body became less
able to handle the stresses of concentration life. 

When you have a purpose to live for-what you are activating is your
intentionality.  That's the part of your brain, your pre-frontal cortex,
that enables you to live forward, directing you to the values and purposes
that give you energy and motivation.  This shouts at us, "Never retire!"
Retirement, as we have learned from medical science, is bad for your health,
it undermines your well-being and especially the ability to age with energy
and vitality.

A European study that tracked 16,827 Greek men and women for 12 years found
that those who retired early had a 51 percent higher mortality rate than
those who kept working.  A study that followed 3,500 Shell Oil employees
found that those who retired at 55 were twice as likely to die during the
next ten years as those of the same age who continued to work. (The
Longevity Revolution, Public Affairs, 2008).

The solution is to use your intentionality to set continual purposes that
will give you a reason to get out of bed in the morning.  Intentionality is
your internal capacity to set intentions, that is, to set goals that you
then strive for.  Once you stop striving for something, your whole system
becomes de-activated and you get old.  Do that and now you have nothing to
live for. 

Therefore, long before you reach "retirement age" (what a toxic phrase!),
establish goals and purposes that get you out of bed and give you a reason
to exert your energy.  Use your intentionality to set goals that will give
you direction into your future.  Set goals which will enable you to live for
something that goes beyond yourself, that transcends just you and yours.
Those who fail to do this end up merely "trying to stay busy" and the
statistics about life after retirement is that people live just a few years
and then die.  Human nature requires that we live for something- something
big enough and bold enough to activate our mind-body-emotion system.

A growing body of research today suggests that is it meaning and purpose
that enables us to age healthily.  "A 2005 study that followed 12,650
middle-aged Hungarians found that those who felt their lives had meaning had
significant lower rates of cancer and heart disease than did those who
didn't feel this way."  Another study of centenarians noted a common trait,
namely, "having a reason to get out of bed." 

Now intentionality tends to play a significant role in people who have a
sense of the spiritual.  Herold G. Koenig, M.D. at Duke University Medical
Center writes, "People who feel their life is part of a larger plan and are
guided by their spiritual values have stronger immune systems, lower blood
pressure, a lower risk of heart attack and cancer, and heal faster and live
longer." 

A 1999 study published in the journal Demography tracked 20,000 Americans.
They found that those who regularly attended church lived an average of 7
years longer than those who did not and 14 years longer for Black people.
The reason?  It gave their life meaning.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

ISNS Executive Director

P.O. Box 8

Clifton Colorado 81520 USA

(970) 523-7877

drhall at acsol.net  

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