Hit the gym. Eat lightly. Drink a glass of red wine every day. Get married—and stay married. Scientists have no shortage of prescriptions for a long life. But which of these tips really help you live longer? A new book reports the results of a unique study may answer that question better than any that came before.
In The Longevity Project, which was published by Hudson Street Press in March, psychologists Howard Friedman of University of California, Riverside, and Leslie Martin of La Sierra University in Riverside, California pull together the results of a study that tracked 1500 people born in 1921 for more than eight decades, recording their childhood personalities, their adult behaviors and psychological well-being, and their life span.
Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman, who helped develop the Stanford-Binet IQ test, initially designed the study to disprove a common idea of the time—that children who were too bookish would grow up to be a sickly maladjusted people, Martin says. So in the 1920s he recruited 1500 smart children from schools in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other parts of California, tested them extensively for personality traits, and tracked them until the mid-1950s, noting alcohol consumption, smoking, physical activity, marriage, divorce and career success.
Another researcher continued the study for several decades, then in 1990 Friedman and Martin, realizing that it contained a trove of data, returned to track the subjects to find out how their personalities and lifestyles combined to affect their longevity. The results were full of surprises.
Being a workaholic in a high-stress job was not a killer at all, if it was the right kind of stress, Martin says. People in high pressure jobs—such as a high-level banking executive and a nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project—lived long lives. This ran contrary to dire predictions for so-called Type A individuals that scientists had once made. Cheerful, optimistic, laid-back kids grew into adults who died about three years younger, on average, than more uptight but conscientious types. “That was surprising to us,” Martin says. Perhaps conscientious types made more careful, cautious choices about what they ate and how they lived, Martin explains.
Getting divorced was “never a good thing” for longevity, but getting remarried eased the risk for men. Women, however, were almost equally well off staying single after a divorce. “So that whole idea that if you’re a spinster, not only are you lonely and sad, but you’ll be unhealthy—that’s unfounded,” Martin says. Parental divorce as a child knocked a full five years of people’s average lifespan, but Martin cautions that the stigma behind divorce was greater in that era, and the results might not hold today.
Other results were less surprising. Exercise was good, though sweating it out in the gym wasn’t necessary. Instead, ordinary activity such as walking, gardening or chopping wood sufficed. “If you go out and jog and you hate jogging, that’s creating animosity and probably counteracting the benefit,” Martin says. “So do exercises you enjoy.”
And “being connected to one’s community was really important,” Martin says. “Talking to friends, and getting together with people was good, but doing so in context of giving back—that was a big plus.”
The researchers found no magic formula for a long life, Martin says. “If there was a single take-home message, it was that there’s not a particular list or a prescription” of how to live.
But there are steps you can take, she says. If you don’t exercise, start, and remember you don’t have to do anything fancy. If you eat too much fat, cut back. Connect with other people, especially those who practice healthy behaviors rather than those who do unhealthy things, such as smoking or drinking heavily. And gradually take steps to become more organized and responsible, such as writing notes to yourself to back up the computer so you don’t stress out over losing all your data.
It all sounds like a smart prescription for a long and healthy life. What are you doing to combat age-related health problems?
CONNECT THE DOTS
Read an overview of the Longevity Project here. Read tips from the National Institutes on how to age well here. For more news on healthy aging, read our blog posts, “Why Do the Japanese Live The Longest?”, “Mental Fitness 101,” and “Eating to Arm the Immune System.”
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