Live Long, Die Short (14 page)

You’re in space, in weightlessness. Your world is now limited to just a few square feet of livable space. If you wish to move from one side of that space to the other, all you need do is push lightly on a solid object and you will propel yourself to where you wish to go. You float effortlessly. No challenge. No sweat. So your muscles take a rest. Your heart, also a muscle, takes a rest, since the column of blood it has to pump weighs less. So these highly trained muscles and your efficient physiology aren’t used much. What did your grandmother tell you? Use it or lose it. Exactly. So you return to earth. You have less muscle mass, as much as 1 percent less for each week in space,
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and you’re weaker. Your heart now has to suddenly do much more work, like pumping a column of blood up to your brain in order to stay conscious when you stand. You’ve lost the strength and efficiency you had just a couple of weeks before.

OK, so what does all this have to do with you, an earthbound creature? You don’t plan to be in weightlessness much in your lifetime, right? Well guess what—we can create our own brand of earthbound weightlessness.

My first realization of the toxicity of disuse came in my medical-training days. When a patient was afflicted with severe back pain, we routinely placed them on strict bed rest. I mean strict. No getting up to use the bathroom. No sitting up in a chair. When these patients finally stood straight again after seven days lying in bed, they frequently became lightheaded. Several nearly fainted. They complained of weakness, flabby muscles, and lack of balance. Many also felt that their mental function was affected, feeling their ability to remember or to come up with the right word was not what it had been just a week before. Upon investigating, we could see a significant drop in blood pressure when they stood. Their hearts couldn’t do the job they had been doing before the bed rest. Although we didn’t then measure muscle strength, it was clear their muscles were smaller and weaker. These people had experienced a decline. Maybe their back was better, but not
much else. In fact, we know now that just a week of strict bed rest is the equivalent of aging two years or more!
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The normal rate of loss of muscle mass is about 0.5 to 1 percent per year after age forty.
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Add to that what comes with inactivity, and Houston, we have a problem.

But unless your lover leaves you, you probably don’t plan to stay in bed a week (and if you get a new lover, your time there doesn’t qualify as strict bed rest). Well, in fact, couch potatoes, armchair athletes, movie or sports-events addicts, and probably the majority of our workers today, who gaze into a computer screen for most of the day—as much as 70 percent of us—may very well be categorized as “sedentary” by the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports & Nutrition.
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This is our earthbound version of weight-lessness, and we are therefore in the “lose it” red zone.

Now, granted, when the astronauts began moving about under one G of gravity back on earth, and after our back-pain patients began spending more time standing, they regained some of what they lost. But what if for decades we coast, using only a small fraction of what we are capable of? What if our lifestyles are such that we minimize what we ask of our muscles, and brain, and social skills, and hand-eye coordination, and reasoning, and problem solving? Do we lose those also if we don’t use them? As my friend Patsy from Minnesota says, “You betcha.” What we don’t use tends to go the way of a discarded bicycle, left out in the elements. It basically rusts to the point where it is no longer usable. We lose the ability to do what we could before.

When I was in college, I was smitten with a blonde folk singer. I would follow her anywhere. And I did—right off a cliff on a toboggan. Many operations, and months using crutches, later, I was well again. Or so I thought. Turns out the lower leg they spent so much time trying get back together was not quite right. My knee and ankle were out of alignment. So, many years later, I began to experience pain and increasing limitation of motion. My image of myself as a military guy, an athlete, and overall godlike figure was smashed. I became depressed. I was working out less, going out less, making fewer presentations, reading less, and becoming, as my wife said, “one big pain in the butt.” As I did less, whether physical, intellectual, or social, I was more and more, day by day, unable to do what I had been able to do the week before. I was circling the drain on a self-perpetuating slide to more and more limitation and impairment.

A major part of my environment is my wife, Paula. She’s no shrinking violet and this has its benefits. She reflected my downward spiral to me and “encouraged” me to seek out someone who could correct my lower-leg problem. I did, at the nearby world-class Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. There, a top surgeon with experience with my problem thought he could help me. The surgery was successful; I began to get stronger with rehabilitation. With the physical strength came a restored optimism, more exercise, more social encounters, and a renewed interest in work and life in general. I was, in fact, doing a reverse, and very positive, upward spiral.

As the human species evolved over millennia, life was about survival, requiring constant physical work, movement, and use of whatever faculties we had that could ensure the success of the tribe or village. Since this is, in fact, the experience we humans have lived for over 90 percent of the time we’ve been on earth, it is understandable that our physiology is wired to use these skills. Whether our muscles or our brains, we tend to get better at something the more we use it.

We don’t usually choose to not use something.
Over my many years of counseling people on how to stay healthy and perform at their best, I’ve never heard anyone declare, “I think I’ll let this skill wither by not using it.” Rather, it sneaks up on them like a predator. Take the bicycle we left leaning against the house months or years ago. We intended to use it, but just never got around to it. Maybe we got a new car and preferred the faster and less tiring way of getting around. Or we got a new job and had less time to ride. Or maybe we hurt our leg and couldn’t ride anymore. Whatever the reason, the result is the same: the bike rusts and eventually is unusable. And so it is with the many faculties we take for granted over many decades. They can disappear without a big announcement and we are one day surprised that we are not what we used to be.

Even though we may ignore skills for years, we still expect them to be there when we need them. But they may not be there. Once we could crouch down without pain. Once we could walk five miles without any difficulty. Once we could memorize a phone number immediately. Once we were the life of the party. Once we thought deeply about the meaning of life. But somewhere along the way, life happened.

We took a job where we moved less. Our schedules got busy and we had
less time or inclination to grow physically, intellectually, or even socially. A painful joint may have caused us to use that joint less. Difficulty with hearing, or having to urinate frequently, or trouble with memory may have prevented us from socializing, and before we realized it, we were avoiding social interaction. When learning began to take a little more time, or required complete quiet or concentration, we stopped taking classes or just avoided learning situations altogether.

Our inability to do what we could do in our twenties or thirties or forties might cause us to not want to “embarrass” ourselves by engaging in that activity at all. If we are in a sedentary or intellectually stagnant environment, our peers may cause us to “move toward the mean”—i.e., to be more like the average person in the group rather than to continue to challenge ourselves and grow. When Dr. Ellen Langer, professor of psychology at Harvard, placed older men in an environment similar to when they were twenty years younger, the group began to act younger than those in normal environments.
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Studies of obese young adults show that weight loss is influenced by the group you associate with.
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On the other hand, it’s been shown that obesity can be “contagious”—that is, more common in groups where members are obese.
⁷

So whether it’s inattention, embarrassment, or more pressing needs, when we no longer regularly use our skills or faculties, whether physical, mental, or social, those skills decline, rust, and eventually—without warning, fanfare, or any notice at all—they are unusable.

We modern humans have done marvelous things. The rate of development of technology has been so rapid that many of us are astounded by what is possible while our coworkers or family members only a few years younger consider it commonplace. We are clearly challenging our brains, learning how to use the magical tools, all while traditional ways of working, learning, communicating, and living are being changed forever, along with the skills that were associated with them.

We can readily observe this process of loss of the skills that were once so necessary for everyday life but that have now been rendered unnecessary by technology. Take reading maps, a skill rapidly vanishing with the easy availability of the GPS. Or reading analog clocks, a skill we’re losing as digital clocks become dominant. The loss of some skills or experiences is more
troublesome, however, such as experiencing nature firsthand rather than through iPads or computers.

Richard Louv, author and child-advocacy expert, calls the lack of nature in the lives of today’s wired-in children a “nature-deficit disorder.” In
Last Child in the Woods
, he links some disturbing childhood trends, including obesity, attention disorders, and depression, to this lack of a nature experience.
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Even more troublesome is our threatened basic ability to communicate with each other by voice, gesture, and touch—the way we learned to do eons ago, the way we inherited from our ancestors—in a world dominated by emails, texts, Facebook, and Twitter.

So as our society strives for efficiency, the quickness and ease of accomplishment of nearly every task, there is a subtle but powerful value system telling us what the signs of success are: less work at a task, more things done for us, less sweating to get a task done. This seems to be an unexamined, unchallenged value, something very few would dispute. But is it necessarily a good thing that we do things easier, quicker, or with less physical or mental effort? Should I, in fact, have someone else spread my mulch, as my neighbor Steve suggested in
chapter 1
?

At first look it would seem so. But while our technology develops at an accelerating rate, the evolution of our body and mind lags behind. We have, in fact, a situation where we may lose attributes, abilities, and skills we may no longer need to navigate the world but that are still necessary for our health or well-being.

For example, take something as simple as walking. Our bodies have evolved over millennia with walking as the basic mode of transportation and body movement. Our physiology and optimum functioning requires regular motion in muscles and joints, and such motion is even necessary for our brain to function optimally (see
Tip Three
for more on this). The design of our cities and the availability of automobiles, moving walkways, drive-throughs, elevators, escalators, televisions, computers, and so much more have made it not only less desirable to walk but also less necessary. We have become a sedentary society and we are paying a high health price.

Lester is ninety-eight, vital, articulate, a piano player, and still driving. He lives in a retirement community with Masterpiece Living and is convinced that his life is a model for successful aging. He tells me he’s been
very fortunate in his life: meeting Cybil, his wife of sixty-five years; being transferred from his military unit just before they went to Guadalcanal and were “chopped to pieces”; “falling into” a community-college teaching opportunity after he was retired from his career with Shell Oil Company; and now, living in his current community. It’s not that he’s been spared the slings and arrows of life: he is still raw from the loss of Cybil two years ago, visiting her every morning in “Cybil’s Corner” of his apartment. Being her caretaker for many years as she declined with diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease took its toll, too. He is estranged from his grandsons and only great-grandson, and his unbounded enthusiasm for life is not always appreciated by peers who choose to stop growing and learning. But despite this, Lester unabashedly declares, “My mission in life is to do things for people. I feel a desire and an obligation to help others … because I can.” And he takes that mission seriously. Every morning he brings the newspaper to a friend in the assisted-living area of his community and spends some moments in conversation with her, and he has assisted her in dealing with medical matters. He formed a nonagenarians club to celebrate these elders and to keep them engaged in the community. Lester was desperately isolated after Cybil died and helped to form a Guardian Angel Society, neighbors helping neighbors. He organized a popular lecture series because “it’s never too late to learn!” And of course, because the piano helped him win over Cybil’s heart, he plays regularly at community social events, still warming hearts and stirring memories.

There is no “woe is me” with Lester. In fact, he repeatedly told me how fortunate he has been, and still is, given his abilities, his health, and the opportunity to live in a Masterpiece Living community. He is determined to use his abilities while he has them and knows that he’s more likely to keep them longer by using them. His daughter calls him her “cockeyed optimistic” (and given that he spent World War II in the South Pacific, it fits). With such optimism and sense of community and purpose, Lester will undoubtedly have to begin serious consideration of forming a centenarian club.