Sunday, January 28, 2018

I Really Want To Live A Long Time

As I approach the end of January 2018, I am experiencing a flood of so many emotions- A professional acquaintance, younger than myself, recently passed away in her sleep after being seen by the medical profession for flu like symptoms. Her memorial service is tomorrow. My contemporaries surround me with physical aliments and threats to their livelihood and well-being. Often, I am confronted with the vulnerability we all live with and how random the success-failure outcome is. 

Lately, I realize how much I want to live. It is hard for me even to imagine myself ever wanting to die and yet I know for certain that was once my strongest intention. How sick I must have been to even consider such an action. It has been over 10 years now since my serious bout with depression.     I found a way to embrace new dreams and discover wonderful adventures to excite me as I approach retirement. Very few things that I once thought mattered is really that important anymore.  Although I want a condo in Ventnor City, and a Lincoln Navigator to pull a small travel trailer, I also know without any of that, I am fortunate because my relationships are a priority for me. I tell my loved ones how much they mean to me until I make them nausea. I say "Thank You" and "You Are Welcomed" routinely. I offer to help other every chance I can. I am accountable and will easily apologize if I have been inconsiderate or disappointed someone. And I forgive. I forgive myself, which makes it easy to forgive others because being a human being is hard work and hurts from time to time. I give everyone the benefit of the doubt. If I could use one word that I want to be said about me it would be KIND. 

Below you can read about the studies about predictors of longevity and see the difference between kind and nice. And trust me- I ain't so nice much of the time anymore. 

The Difference Between Being Nice and Being Kind
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You've heard the phrase, "So-and-so is a really nice person," and probably thought nothing of it. In my work, though, I think a lot about what it means to be "really nice" as I see a major distinction between being nice and being genuinely kind.   The way I understand it, kindness emerges from someone who's confident, compassionate and comfortable with themselves. A kind person is loving and giving out of the goodness of their heart.   At the root of extreme niceness, however, are feelings of inadequacy and the need to get approval and validation from others. Overly-nice people try to please so that they can feel good about themselves. Genuinely kind people are giving because it's in their nature to care, and since they have no ulterior motives, they aren't concerned with whether or not other people like them. Genuinely kind people are giving because it's in their nature to care, and since they have no ulterior motives, they aren't concerned with whether or not other people like t Kind people can be assertive and set good limits. Nice people, on the other hand, bend over backward to be obliging. They deal with potential conflicts by placating the other person because they can't bear to have anyone upset with them. Kind people have good self-esteem and because they love themselves as much as they care about others, they expect to be treated with respect. Nice people are desperate for approval, so they're often mistreated or taken advantage of. Nice people tend to do too much for those who don't deserve it and are easy prey for users. They get into co-dependent relationships in which they care-take others in the hopes of eventually being cared for themselves. This co-dependent interaction, however, is a lose-lose for everyone involved. The nice person fails to get the love and approval they seek, and the person on the receiving end never feels like they're getting enough care. Instead of being grateful, they become resentful toward the pleaser. Kind people take responsibility for their own self-care. They're generous, even altruistic, but don't get caught up in a user-pleaser type of relationship.  The nice person is careful not to offend anyone and wouldn't dream of expressing a "negative" emotion. They focus on being good to others, to the detriment of their own needs. In fact, they're afraid to ask for what they want for fear of creating conflict.  Nice people stuff down their feelings, not wanting to be a bother to anyone, but the problem with this is that emotions can't be kept down indefinitely. Feelings and needs are meant to be expressed and when they're repressed, they find another outlet.
Being nice, then, has unforeseen consequences: it's painful to seek affirmation but receive contempt. Always holding back needs, feelings and opinions adds to their frustration.  Ultimately, the frustration grows into anger, but showing this anger is unacceptable to someone so invested in always being pleasant. They're compelled to suppress any "bad" feelings.
As the nice person continues to please everyone and the anger simmers underneath the surface, the pressure builds up. At some point emotions begin to leak, in the form of snarky comments, whining, needling, sarcasm, passive-aggressive behavior or even outbursts of rage.  When a nice person leaks resentment it's usually met with surprise or with more anger, which reinforces their belief that anger should never be expressed.
A vicious circle is created in which the nice person pleases others, becomes resentful, represses and then leaks their anger and then represses their feelings some more. As a result, I believe they'll often get caught up in addictive behaviors which are meant to compensate for their mounting frustration.  I have found that nice people will often turn to starchy, fatty or sugary "comfort foods" to help them to stuff down their anger and soothe their hurt feelings. They'll sometimes abuse alcohol or turn to tranquillizers to anaesthetize their pain. Some will go on spending sprees, trying to buy themselves happiness.  The nice person is overly-invested in the emotional pay-off they're hoping to achieve by pleasing and taking care of others. They're also unwilling to face how much hurt or anger they're carrying. They're resistant to changing their behavior, despite the consequences of their compensatory addictions.
Kind people are happy people to begin with, and add to their happiness through acts of generosity and altruism. Nice people are needy people who inadvertently create more and more unhappiness for themselves.  The nice person has to understand that their self-worth can never be improved by being a pleaser. They must learn how to validate themselves independently of others, and let go of the co-dependent relationships which foster mutual animosity.  When the overly-nice person can let go of the urge to please, they'll be able to identify their real needs and feelings and begin to take proper care of themselves. They can find happiness in pursuing meaningful activities and relationships instead of giving too much, becoming resentful and developing nasty addictions along the way.

What if there was a study dedicated to unearthing the secrets to a happy and purpose.
We may not be able to live forever, but we can live well.
What if there was a study dedicated to unearthing the secrets to a happy and purposeful life?  
It would have to be conducted over the course of many decades, following the lives of real people from childhood until old age, in order to see how they changed and what they learned. And it would probably be too ambitious for anyone to actually undertake.  Only, a group of Harvard researchers did undertake it, producing a comprehensive, flesh-and-blood picture of some of life’s fundamental questions: how we grow and change, what we value as time goes on, and what is likely to make us happy and fulfilled.
The study, known as the Harvard Grant Study, has some limitations — it didn’t include women, for starters. Still, it provides an unrivaled glimpse into a subset of humanity, following 268 male Harvard undergraduates from the classes of 1938-1940 (now well into their 90s) for 75 years, collecting data on various aspects of their lives at regular intervals. And the conclusions are universal.  We spoke to George Vaillant, the Harvard psychiatrist who directed the study from 1972 to 2004 and wrote a book about it, in order to revisit the study’s findings. Below, five lessons from the Grant Study to apply to your own pursuit of a happier and more meaningful life.
Love Is Really All That Matters       
  It may seem obvious, but that doesn’t make it any less true: Love is key to a happy and fulfilling life. As Vaillant puts it, there are two pillars of happiness. “One is love,” he writes. “The other is finding a way of coping with life that does not push love away.”
Vaillant has said that the study’s most important finding is that the only thing that matters in life is relationships. A man could have a successful career, money and good physical health, but without supportive, loving relationships, he wouldn’t be happy (“Happiness is only the cart; love is the horse.”).
It’s About More than Money and Power
The Grant Study’s findings echoed those of other studies — that acquiring more money and power doesn’t correlate to greater happiness. That’s not to say money or traditional career successes don’t matter. But they’re small parts of a much larger picture — and while they may loom large for us in the moment; they diminish in importance when viewed in the context of a full life.
“We found that contentment in the late 70s was not even suggestively associated with parental social class or even the man’s own income,” says Vaillant. “In terms of achievement, the only thing that matters is that you be content at your work.”
Regardless of How We Begin Life, We Can All Become Happier
A man named Godfrey Minot Camille went into the Grant study with fairly bleak prospects for life satisfaction: He had the lowest rating for future stability of all the subjects and he had previously attempted suicide. But at the end of his life, he was one of the happiest. Why? As Vaillant explains, “He spent his life searching for love.”
Connection Is Crucial
“Joy is connection,” Vaillant says. “The more areas in your life you can make connection, the better.”
The study found strong relationships to be far and away the strongest predictor of life satisfaction. And in terms of career satisfaction, too, feeling connected to one’s work was far more important than making money or achieving traditional success.
“The conclusion of the study, not in a medical but in a psychological sense, is that connection is the whole shooting match,” says Vaillant.
As life goes on, connections become even more important. The Grant Study provides strong support for the growing body of research that has linked social ties with longevitylower stress levels and improved overall well-being.
Challenges –- and the Perspective They Give You — Can Make You Happier
The journey from immaturity to maturity, says Vaillant, is a sort of movement from narcissism to connection, and a big part of this shift has to do with the way we deal with challenges.
Coping mechanisms — “the capacity to make gold out of shit,” as Vaillant puts it — have a significant effect on social support and overall well-being. The secret is replacing narcissism, a single-minded focus on one’s own emotional oscillations and perceived problems, with mature coping defenses, Vaillant explains, citing Mother Teresa and Beethoven as examples.
“Mother Teresa had a perfectly terrible childhood, and her inner spiritual life was very painful,” says Vaillant. “But she had a highly successful life by caring about other people.
Creative expression is another way to productively deal with challenges and achieve meaning and well-being.
“The secret of Beethoven being able to cope with misery through his art was when he wrote ‘Ode to Joy,’” says Vaillant. “Beethoven was able to make connection with his music.”
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Close relationships, more than money or fame, are what keep people happy throughout their lives, the study revealed. Those ties protect people from life’s discontents, help to delay mental and physical decline, and are better predictors of long and happy lives than social class, IQ, or even genes. That finding proved true across the board among both the Harvard men and the inner-city participants.
The long-term research has received funding from private foundations, but has been financed largely by grants from the National Institutes of Health, first through the National Institute of Mental Health, and more recently through the National Institute on Aging.    Researchers who have pored through data, including vast medical records and hundreds of in-person interviews and questionnaires, found a strong correlation between men’s flourishing lives and their relationships with family, friends, and community. Several studies found that people’s level of satisfaction with their relationships at age 50 was a better predictor of physical health than their cholesterol levels were.  
“When we gathered together everything we knew about them about at age 50, it wasn’t their middle-age cholesterol levels that predicted how they were going to grow old,” said Waldinger in a popular TED Talk. “It was how satisfied they were in their relationships. The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest at age 80.”
He recorded his TED talk, titled “What Makes a Good Life? Lessons from the Longest Study on Happiness,” in 2015, and it has been viewed 13,000,000 times.
The researchers also found that marital satisfaction has a protective effect on people’s mental health. Part of a study found that people who had happy marriages in their 80s reported that their moods didn’t suffer even on the days when they had more physical pain. Those who had unhappy marriages felt both more emotional and physical pain.
Those who kept warm relationships got to live longer and happier, said Waldinger, and the loners often died earlier. “Loneliness kills,” he said. “It’s as powerful as smoking or alcoholism.”
According to the study, those who lived longer and enjoyed sound health avoided smoking and alcohol in excess. Researchers also found that those with strong social support experienced less mental deterioration as they aged.
In part of a recent study, researchers found that women who felt securely attached to their partners were less depressed and more happy in their relationships two-and-a-half years later, and also had better memory functions than those with frequent marital conflicts.                                                                                 “Loneliness kills. It’s as powerful as smoking or alcoholism.”   — Robert Waldinger
“Good relationships don’t just protect our bodies; they protect our brains,” said Waldinger in his TED talk. “And those good relationships, they don’t have to be smooth all the time. Some of our octogenarian couples could bicker with each other day in and day out, but as long as they felt that they could really count on the other when the going got tough, those arguments didn’t take a toll on their memories.”
Since aging starts at birth, people should start taking care of themselves at every stage of life, the researchers say.
“Aging is a continuous process,” Waldinger said. “You can see how people can start to differ in their health trajectory in their 30s, so that by taking good care of yourself early in life you can set yourself on a better course for aging. The best advice I can give is ‘Take care of your body as though you were going to need it for 100 years,’ because you might.”
The study, like its remaining original subjects, has had a long life, spanning four directors, whose tenures reflected their medical interests and views of the time.
Under the first director, Clark Heath, who stayed from 1938 until 1954, the study mirrored the era’s dominant view of genetics and biological determinism. Early researchers believed that physical constitution, intellectual ability, and personality traits determined adult development. They made detailed anthropometric measurements of skulls, brow bridges, and moles, wrote in-depth notes on the functioning of major organs, examined brain activity through electroencephalograms, and even analyzed the men’s handwriting.
Now, researchers draw men’s blood for DNA testing and put them into MRI scanners to examine organs and tissues in their bodies, procedures that would have sounded like science fiction back in 1938. In that sense, the study itself represents a history of the changes that life brings.
Psychiatrist George Vaillant, who joined the team as a researcher in 1966, led the study from 1972 until 2004. Trained as a psychoanalyst, Vaillant emphasized the role of relationships, and came to recognize the crucial role they played in people living long and pleasant lives.
“When the study began, nobody cared about empathy or attachment. But the key to healthy aging is relationships, relationships, relationships.”   — George Vaillant
In a book called “Aging Well,” Vaillant wrote that six factors predicted healthy aging for the Harvard men: physical activity, absence of alcohol abuse and smoking, having mature mechanisms to cope with life’s ups and downs, and enjoying both a healthy weight and a stable marriage. For the inner-city men, education was an additional factor. “The more education the inner city men obtained,” wrote Vaillant, “the more likely they were to stop smoking, eat sensibly, and use alcohol in moderation.”
Vaillant’s research highlighted the role of these protective factors in healthy aging. The more factors the subjects had in place, the better the odds they had for longer, happier lives.
“When the study began, nobody cared about empathy or attachment,” said Vaillant. “But the key to healthy aging is relationships, relationships, relationships.”
The study showed that the role of genetics and long-lived ancestors proved less important to longevity than the level of satisfaction with relationships in midlife, now recognized as a good predictor of healthy aging. The research also debunked the idea that people’s personalities “set like plaster” by age 30 and cannot be changed.
“Those who were clearly train wrecks when they were in their 20s or 25s turned out to be wonderful octogenarians,” he said. “On the other hand, alcoholism and major depression could take people who started life as stars and leave them at the end of their lives as train wrecks.”
“We’re trying to see how people manage stress, whether their bodies are in a sort of chronic ‘fight or flight’ mode,” Waldinger said. “We want to find out how it is that a difficult childhood reaches across decades to break down the body in middle age and later.”The study’s fourth director, Waldinger has expanded research to the wives and children of the original men. That is the second-generation study, and Waldinger hopes to expand it into the third and fourth generations. “It will probably never be replicated,” he said of the lengthy research, adding that there is yet more to learn.
Lara Tang ’18, a human and evolutionary biology concentrator who recently joined the team as a research assistant, relishes the opportunity to help find some of those answers. She joined the effort after coming across Waldinger’s TED talk in one of her classes.
“That motivated me to do more research on adult development,” said Tang. “I want to see how childhood experiences affect developments of physical health, mental health, and happiness later in life.”
Asked what lessons he has learned from the study, Waldinger, who is a Zen priest, said he practices meditation daily and invests time and energy in his relationships, more than before.
“It’s easy to get isolated, to get caught up in work and not remembering, ‘Oh, I haven’t seen these friends in a long time,’ ” Waldinger said. “So I try to pay more attention to my relationships than I used to.”
The Grant Study found that "the capacity to love and be loved was the single strength most clearly associated with subjective well-being at age eighty."                                     In a study led by Derek Isaacowitz, we found that the capacity to love and be loved was the single strength most clearly associated with subjective well-being at age eighty.  The leader of the study said the main thing he learned from the research was:                    "That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people."
1) Relationships are the most important thing
There is a single question that best predicts whether you'll be alive at age 80:
"Is there someone in your life whom you would feel comfortable phoning at four in the morning to tell your troubles to?"
2) Be a good person
It wasn't getting help from others that conferred a long life. It was giving help.
3) Get your act together
Was there a personality trait that was tied to a long, healthy life? Yes. Conscientiousness.
4) Stress isn't always a bad thing
Don't avoid all stress. You need some stress. Research shows those who work the hardest live the longest:
5) Want to live a long time? Make yourself happy.
We associate health with having to do things that make us unhappy: don't eat that, go jogging, etc.
The research shows a fascinating link between what it takes to live a long life and what it takes to have a happy life.
Via The Longevity Project: Surprising Discoveries for Health and Long Life from the Landmark Eight-Decade Study: "…many (but not all) of the recommendations for happiness are nearly identical to recommendations for maintaining health."
For example, those trying to improve their happiness are advised to do the following things:
1. Watch less TV
2. Improve social relations — spend time with friends
3. Increase levels of physical activity — go for a long walk
4. Help others and express gratitude to those who have helped you
5. Take on new challenges to remain fresh and in-the-moment
Laugh a lot. Be happy. Be optimistic. Have lots of good sex. Get enough sleep. Stay out of debtForgive.


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