Neuroscientist Reveals The Secret To Long Term Brain Health | Dr. Dan Levitin

the number one factor that influences how you're going to fare at any age is a personality trait of a mindset of conscientiousness which is a cluster of traits relating to stick-to-itiveness reliability dependability doing what you'll say you'll do that's the biggest single factor in terms of whether you're going to be healthy and unhappy at age eight or age 108 sedan welcome to the feel better live more podcast thank you dr. Chatterjee so down how are you been in London for so far almost two weeks C weeks all to do with the book promotion yeah well not all London I was up in in borough and York and had a trip to Manchester a few days ago and I'm here again yeah all to do with the book yes and how's the reception being so far well it's been wonderful because as you know it's fun to go to meet people who are interested in the topic and engage in conversation every audience has different questions and different issues they're concerned about and it's a nice way for me to better understand what people are thinking about yeah for sure I mean I think it's a brilliant book the changing minds a neuroscientists guide to aging well so it's a great title and it's not finished at all yeah there's so much depth in here that I think it's gonna be incredibly helpful people who want to age well and live well and understand the science behind it so Pete's been very very comprehensive which one of the things I've really enjoyed about it well neuroscience has had this explosion of information in the last 10 years much like genetics and most of what we've learned hasn't trickled down to the average person and I was thinking I'm a neuroscientist I want to read a book about the latest findings and how they apply to tilting the balance again you know you know you can't ensure that you're gonna live healthy and long but you can you can influence the trajectory of your life at any age and so it was really just an attempt to share what neuroscience has learned in genetics for example if you genetics books 10 years ago a whole lot of what's in it is wrong so for example identical twins don't have identical DNA their environmental factors from the environment of the womb there's transcription problems we always used to think well identical twins are identical genetically they're not we used to think that if your parents both have blue eyes a recessive trait it's impossible for you to have brown eyes not true so you know Adam Rutherford has written a book that catches people up on on genetics I try to bring in a little bit of genetics and neuroscience to to help the average person make sense of what really is a complicated literature yeah well I think it very much is needed I think we all understand that you know certainly in the in the West at least we're living longer generally speaking but living longer doesn't necessarily mean we're living healthier and happier and you do talk about that writers start that you talk about lifespan versus health span yeah so I worked at the Salk Institute for a while on and off over the years and the our former director Elizabeth Blackburn who won the Nobel Prize for discovering telomerase she she makes this distinction which I really like it's it's obvious what your lifespan is it's the amount of time you have from when you're born to when you die but she divides it up into your health span and your disease span and so the basic idea is for most of us you're born and you're healthy and you run along with some ups and downs you get the flu or you know maybe get pneumonia or whatever but you basically running along most of your life healthy and then somewhere near the end you get really sick and that kills you and there's a lot of research and a lot of talk about extending lifespan not much about extending health span and it's a quality of life issue so I think everybody needs to make the choice themselves for whether they'd like to live longer or better and they're often trade-offs but the idea is that I think we should be talking about maximizing healthspan minimizing disease span not just purely trying to increase the number of years you're on the planet yeah and I think if you ask most people would they like to live longer generally speaking people I think often say I don't want to live longer because they associate old age with pain with disability with being immobile with not being able to do the things that they want to do in their life and that's why I think lifespan versus Halfon is so interesting because I think the research is now supporting that it is quite possible that you might be able to live to 90 or 100 in really good health and I guess you're trying to shed the science but also tips in your book on how people can do that exactly and you mentioned genetics so I just want to sort of get this established what are the starters conversation are some people just lucky they're born with good genes so they're gonna age well or do all of us have the opportunity to do things that are going to increase the likelihood that we can also age well we're all as a strong word if you've got a genetic disease that's that's fatal and it comes up early I mean often nothing you can do about that but for the vast majority of us genetics is not a prescription it's not deterministic its probabilistic it's like quantum physics it's a statistical tendency that you might be prone to cancer or alcoholism or heart disease or living a long healthy life and the choices that we make in three areas can really there's a whole lot that's still under our control genes make up depending on the trait or quality you're looking at they make up between seven and fifty percent of the variability and outcomes that leaves a whopping amount that's under our control and it's basically things like mindset healthy practices and then luck you know if you if you get hit by a bus and you get a concussion no matter how careful you were that could happen and that will change things I'm curious to know what conversations you have with your patients as you know I'm not a medical doctor I'm just a simple country neuroscientist so do you talk about quality of life and are there trade-offs in your patients where you have to say well look you can do this you'll if you do this it'll make you live happier but maybe not as long yeah look I told my patients about a whole variety of different things so you know typically people will be in to see me with a specific problem so I wouldn't say that many people are coming in well saying hey doc what can I do to enhance and optimize my longevity you do get a couple of times but it's not that common so typically the attention goes to what is that person suffering from now my bias is that we overmedicate in medicine we suppress symptoms along and that often if we are quite often if we're careful with lifestyle interventions you can make big changes not just instead of prevention and says preventing getting sick but often when people are sick it can make a massive improvement in their symptoms and you know sometimes you know you can reverse things but I'm talking about giving patients a sense of agency over how they feel absolutely I think's really important I think certainly in almost 20 years of practice I'd have to say that when a patient feels as though they can't do anything right they've just got this condition and there's nothing they can do about it oh yeah I just see you know you don't see that good outcomes there people feel very disengaged in the process I always want to give people a feeling that they can do something about it even if it's five minutes of meditation a day it's gonna help change that perception offense but often what I do is when I taught some about those lifestyle changes I'll also explain what that's going to do for them long term so yes it's about helping them in the short term with their symptoms but also I say we yeah but this can also like you know sleep for example I suppose a Matthew Walker on the podcast may be here ago I was horrific yeah me absolutely fantastic and you know me and Matthew were talking about some of the research that is suggesting that sleep deprivation chronic sleep deprivation can be causative in absolutely the dwellings of Alzheimer's absolutely and and in interestingly there are many misdiagnosed cases of Alzheimer's or somebody's got memory impairment and it's they're simply sleep deprived yeah exactly so if I had a patient who was struggling with their sleep and who also had a family member without some for example the conversation could very easily be about the things that they can do in the short term to help but I might also bring up some of that research and say hey look you know that summers doesn't just start you know this six months before you get it it's probably been going on for twenty or thirty years in your brain before hands and chronic sleep deprivation is one of those factors so not only will you feel good in the short-term but you're gonna help insulate yourself from potentially going down the path that you family remember dead so I guess that's the contest of which I might bring it up is that what you were getting at yeah that's terrific yeah I'm I'm really interested in that and it sounds it sounds I agree with you completely if I were a medical doctor it would be I'd be having the same conversations yeah because for me and I wonder if you subscribe to this down that it's often the things that we can do day to day that are going to help us feel good day to day are also the sort of things that are gonna help us age well right yes well although there are some funny exceptions yes what are those exceptions well my favorite example of an exception is jogging okay there's there's dozens of studies now that show that for every hour that you jog you get an extra hour of life so if you're jogging five hours a week you're getting it five hours adding on to the end of your life it's a pretty robust finding but if you unpack it a bit if you step back and you say I love jogging well that's a good trade-off you're enjoying it in the moment if you hate jogging like I do I like power walking I can't stand jogging why would I want to spend an hour a day now to get an hour a day later at the end of my life when I'm you know possibly catatonic and drooling all over myself it doesn't seem like the right trade-off I'd rather have the hour now if it was a two to one ratio that'd be different but it's not so I guess your approaches about giving people information and letting them decide what they want to do with that information absolutely in fact that's that's my whole thing for the through the last three books is that I I wouldn't presume to tell anybody what to do about anything I feel that my job as a scientist is to just lay out what I know about the science of various issues whether it's productivity and creativity as in the organized mind or the science of trying to sort out what's true and what's not in the newspaper and in facebook posts the field guide to lies and statistics and here these are the these are the trade offs these are the choices you have to decide it's a very personal thing ya done is it's interesting you're saying that as a neuroscientist but I would echo that as a medical doctor I actually don't believe it's my job to tell anyone what to do oh I appreciate that because a lot of doctors are paternalistic they are and I I fundamentally believe that you don't really connect and make long-term changes with someone when you opportunist and you tell them what to do I guess going back to the book because I do think it's it's really interesting and there's quite a few probably things in there that I think people listen to this podcast can start thinking about applying into their own life which is awesome Utley I think the goal of you sharing that information with people it's yes to educate them but it's also so hopefully empower them to think hey I can start dealing that Riots so let's actually go into that sort of granular the nitty-gritty of what it is what is the number one thing people can do to help ensure that they aged well the number one factor that influences how you're going to fare at any age is a personality trait a mindset you might call it of conscientiousness that swamps all other factors in terms of whether you're going to be healthy and unhappy at age eight or age 108 now think about it conscientious kids don't cross against the light so they're less likely to get hit by a lorry conscientious teenagers and adults are less likely to end up in prison because they follow some marginal rules conscientious adults go see a doctor when something's wrong they say it hurts here you know and and then yeah well conscientious adults have a doctor and they at least in the u.s. their insurance payments are current and the doctor tells them to do something they do it conscientiousness which is a cluster of traits relating to stick-to-itiveness reliability dependability doing what you'll say you'll do that's the biggest single factor and although it's unevenly distributed throughout the population some people have a lot of it some people have none and on the one extreme if you've got too much of it it becomes obsessive compulsive disorder you know compulsive hand-washing or things like that you can change that as well as any personality trader mindset quality at any age it's never too early to start and it's never too late to start yeah and that's super interesting because when you talk about personalities you're basically saying the number one factor that predicts if you're gonna age well as to how conscientious you are yeah and some people will hear that and think oh my god I'm not that conscientious a person so that number one factor that Dan said and Dan that neuroscience has said I don't have it but what you're betting saying is that you can change your personality well you can and though the whole field of psychotherapy is based on this idea and although not all psychotherapeutic techniques work for all people you know there's a bunch of studies coming out about behavioral change just to take one example cognitive behavioral therapy has been shown to be better at improving symptoms of depression and lack of conscientiousness and it.this CBT is is not used lying on a couch and talking about your childhood and you know your monthly relationship with your mother it's practical tools that the therapist gives you to help you reach the goals you said that you wanted to reach sort of like your patients coming to you CBT doesn't tell you what to do they tell you how to do it and it's been shown to be more effective than drugs even antidepressants and interestingly perhaps counter-intuitively CBT alone is more effective than the combination of drugs and CBT but it's not just therapies meditation yoga finding inspiration from literature or art or somebody that you've read about in the news who has made a change maybe somebody in your family and saying you know I'm inspired by that I'm gonna do that super interesting isn't it that consciousness is that number one traits and that it's something that you can train or work on certainly at any age at any age which it which is very encouraging now when you were described in consciousness I was thinking okay so sometimes conscientious they're not gonna think in a wait for the green man to cross the road they're gonna go and see the doctor when they're sick are you talking about someone then who just follows rules because I guess and I've read you a previous book and I know you talked a lot about creativity and you know there's so many benefits to being creative and I guess challenging a lot of the assumptions that are already there in society and actually you know sort of navigate your way around that is there a clash there somewhere can you be someone who is highly conscientious but is also very creative and willing to challenge things well I believe so to see what I'm getting at I do yeah because conscientiousness although rule-following is a part of it it's not all of it yeah and there are cases where you really have to not follow a rule if if you're starving and you see a roll I mean really starving you're about to die and you see a roll left out on a table in a restaurant that hasn't been picked up yet I would say you're morally and ethically justified to pick up that roll even though you didn't pay for it there are all these kinds of thought experiments about ethics I think that if you had the opportunity to murder Hitler murder is supposed to be against the rules but you know there's an argument to be made that that would have been a good thing to do so and these are I'm not talking about creative act here I'm talking about more practical ones but I think of the people I know Joni Mitchell's a good example one of the most creative people I know and she's very conscientious although she breaks all kinds of rules with her songwriting and her painting she's a wonderful painter the way the conscientiousness shows up as she finishes what she starts she'll spend months working on a single line of a song to get it just right that's a kind of stick-to-itiveness and she's happy to break rules in songs for one thing she doesn't use standard guitar tunings like everybody else does she invents her own interestingly she this is not well known but the reason she did it is because she had polio as a child she doesn't have full I can tell you this cuz you're a guitarist she doesn't have the full strength of her left fingers to be able to make conventional chords for the most part she can only play two strings at once kind of like Django Reinhardt so she invents these tunings that allow her to basically take two fingers and move them up and down the neck I would say that's an interesting case of rule breaking and conscientiousness yeah I mean uh it's super interesting that that reminds me of I think if you had a bank or crowded house sure Neil Finn yeah they were one of my favorite oh yeah I've seen them a few songs play dream it's over yeah there is reason within reason with that this is such a great track my friend Mitchell froom plays the organ on it the b3 organ really yeah it's amazing this conversation could fast go down a track your music which I'm gonna go down for a little bit because I'm super interested the b3 is what are my favorite sounds I think out of all musical sounds I absolutely love it and one is just sitting there in the background it's it's just beautiful and I think that Mitchell managed to get it as close to the Tambor and the sound of Booker T yeah Booker T Jones I think he managed to get that sound the Booker T sound green onions and all that and it's hard to do it's it's all in the drawbars and it's in the the micro adjustments you make with touch yeah I mean he nailed it it's yeah I mean by that an on the on credit house what was relevant in my head basement we said about Joni Mitchell is that I remember seeing an interview with Neil Finn once and he's is you know not verbatim but he says something like you know we're a four-piece bands so our limitations become our strength so he was all from from certainly my interpretation of what I heard was that we're gonna only record stuff or play live so that we can do the four of us so we're gonna have to create around that rather than bringing in extra people to be able to play this part well that part of that part's the opposite of a latter-day Beatles or Steely Dan approach yeah they're alive man like you - yeah exactly and it's fascinating that Joni also because she's she's got a limitation that lends that that gives her some new creativity because if she didn't have that maybe she would play instead under tuning and therefore she might not be as crazy who knows but it's it's super interesting but I guess done we are talking about aging well in the brain and you've read a book on music and the brain swap mentor I said does music play a role for us in terms of how way aging well yes and no we now believe that 5% of the population are sorry for a buzz word but anhedonic for music meaning they they don't get pleasure from music and you know this just due to genetic variation or environmental factors we see anhedonia failure to receive pleasure in many domains some people don't like chocolate some people don't like sex we're being touched some people don't like music but for the rest of us who do there are some interesting connections between music and aging some of which are well known if you've got Alzheimer's or extreme dementia and you no longer recognize where you are or who your friends are you don't recognize yourself in a mirror in many many cases you still recognize songs from your youth they're preserved and this is not just kind of a cool fact it's an essential part of adults living with cognitive impairment in in relaxing them or causing them to be less agitated imagine what it's like if you look in the mirror you don't recognize who it is you were put in some home or facility after your memory impairment started so you don't know where you are you don't recognize the caregivers who come in every single day and often we see in these patients as you well know a great deal of agitation and anger and of course they're angry they don't know where they are but you put on the headphones the earbuds whatever you play him a song for when they were 14 years old they suddenly reconnect with themselves there's home there's something in their memory that they recognize and that's who I am this is this is something I can get ahold of and we find that in these cases the the patients as well as their families are tremendously relieved now that's sort of an extreme case of music a less extreme case it's not as well known is that older adults who start to learn an instrument or if they already play a new instrument that learning is neuroprotective one of the many myths that I try to bust in the chain changing mind is that you can't grow new neurons after a certain age or you can't make new neural connections neuroplasticity the buzzword for making new neural connections new sign APS's that goes on in your entire life and the more you can learn especially new things the more neuroprotective it is because you're building up neural and cognitive reserves so mind could be anything there right you're just learning anything whether it's music or sport or absolutely you know but there's a new language so this sounds like one of the key things we need to be thinking about as we get older is what keep trying new things yeah and in particular there's this new appreciation for what we call embodied cognition Barbara Traverse key and Scott Grafton both have new books out about this the Scott's is called physical intelligence fantastic books the idea is that your body actually helps your mind grow through the experiences you have manipulating your body so learning a new language is neuroprotective but learning something that involves I hand coordination musical instruments being one not so much singing but playing an instrument or or taking up tennis or ping-pong or you know anything that involves this kind of body intelligence very powerful is simply going for a walk on an uneven trail as you probably know some Scottish doctors are now writing prescriptions for their patients go for a walk outside you know it's because as you're walking on an uneven surface your foot and your ankle and your legs are me and your vestibular system are making dozens of micro adjustments every minute you have to change the pressure and the angle and you have to get feedback about what's happening so you don't fall over and it's hugely important so would you say that you know would you death will not be recommending as people age that they work out in a gym on a treadmill or on an exercise bike or can you do a bit of both well you can certainly do a bit of both I've I mentioned at the beginning of our conversation I've changed a few things in my own life one was I didn't know about sarcopenia how would I as I say I basically know about stuff from the chin up a little bit of spinal cord but sarcopenia is to muscle what osteoporosis is to bone and so I've started doing resistance training I go to the gym I'm not trying to bulk up like Arnold Schwarzenegger but I do a round of 20 either sorry 12 different weight machines just to keep my muscles going I spend about 40 minutes there four or five times a week Jane Fonda has started and told me she started doing the same thing enjoy it I do I do I can't I couldn't tell you why but I do and I also do the elliptical because I'm trying to get my heart rate up and I do what's called high-intensity interval training but better than both of those really is the difference between said and tourism and moving outdoors if you only do one thing you should move outdoors but yeah adding the others is great yeah I mean that's that's great because there's all of information we're giving people and sometimes getting too many things to do too many things that are great to do can sometimes seem a bit overwhelming you have to prioritize now if you're in a wheelchair get somebody to take you out the visual stimulation of being in nature is neuroprotective not as much as if you're walking and if you can push your own wheelchair even better or walker yeah that done you've got a long history in music how many you're a music producer as well yes yeah and I heard you on anis UEC talked about you have the opportunity to meet sting once and you scanned his brain yeah so I'm interested so you know sting Lydon how old's thing is but it's a few years older than me I'm 62 I think he's 67 ish yeah so look I haven't seen a picture sting for a while but the last time I saw him certainly there's no way I would have guessed that he was in his late 60s it's clearly someone who seems to be aging very well so sting has a lot of practices certainly they come across in the media that we read about how many of those are true that I don't know but why the tantric sex is not true first example it's not true no okay do you know what he does I do I do sting had read this is your brain on music and he reached out to me at some point in 2007 or eight and said he wanted to visit the lab and meet me and talk about the findings and so he came to Montreal and I said you know while you're here if you want we can scan your brain and we can you know see what it looks like it wouldn't be an actual study I guess it's a case study but not a proper experiment and he was into it and you know we we found that his corpus callosum is thicker than most people's that's the fiber track that connects the left in the right hemisphere and we often see thicker corpus callosum people who are very creative who were shuttling information from the left to the right hemisphere we learned some things about how he organizes music in his memory that were quite novel we published a paper about it Scott Grafton Anaya the embodied cognition guy in a journal called neuro case it's available for free on my website as all my peer review papers are ok great and we'll link to all of them there as well in the show notes sections people can easily find that I mean it is a article written for other scientists but I think that the average person could glean the punchline from it and then we kind of got a lot we got we got along well and he invited me to come and tour with him and the police reunion tour for a few shows you gotta be kidding me it was terrific Wow and so I did get to see what his life is like he does yoga every afternoon he has you know for at least a couple of hours sometimes for he earmarks alone time apart from the yoga to either practice something musically or learn a new song or or write something just to experiment around he give himself play time to play every day when he's on tour and then the other extraordinary thing was we talking about conscientiousness I've never met anybody with the work ethic that he has and you know I I'm a professor I know a number of Nobel Prize winners most of the professors I know are workaholics we work 75 80 hours a week that's nothing compared to what sting does he is working all the time he enjoys himself but he is work ethic just to give you an example I asked him how is it that you play bass and sing at the same time I'm a bass player that's very difficult to do because it's not like strumming guitar finger-picking where everything's in sort of lockstep time-based parts tend to be syncopated you know you're not always singing when the bass hits a note you're sometimes singing in between notes and an odd integer ratios and so just as as a demonstration of work ethic I said how do you do it he says well he says when I know that I'm gonna go out on tour and I'm gonna have to play these songs that in the studio yeah you can track it differently yeah he played the bass first he's saying second or vice-versa if he's gonna have to do it live so he writes out on a piece of paper the lyrics and the chords or the notes and he writes a kind of visual map for where the vocal note is versus the bass notes sometimes they're synchronized sometimes they're anti-phase and then he'll sit down and he'll practice one measure at about one-fifth the normal tempo and he might do that for half an hour that one measure and then he'll put it away and go to another song and the next day he'll come back and he'll add another measure and he says it could take him six months to work up a tune at the proper tempo and I thought well oh my god is it a bit like you know some again I'm not trying to compare the two but just to sort of make it really relevant for people at home who maybe not musical or don't play the bass and I never tried to play the bass and sing at the same time you know like I'm sure it's the same in America we have the same way you have to twine patches stomach and sorry you know put your hand around your stomach and pat your head at the same time which some people find quite hard to do unless you but I think mostly or when they focus on it and practice well it requires what we call Liam the independence yeah so yeah it's there something similar to that that's going on with sting when he's trying to just teach him maybe not limb independence but you know voice and hand independence yeah and we find this in a lot of activities flying an airplane requires limb independence you're using both feet you're using both hands one of the things I did in order to adopt the advice that I gave others in the book is that I realized I had to push myself out of my comfort zone and so I took flying lessons and studied for my private pilot's license because it is very complicated it's not like playing Jones you'll do this to help you age better I did yeah yeah and you know because it's a new skill and it's it's sort of taxing your brain you and your brains happen to fire up different neurons yes up in a nutshell what it is it's exactly that it was taxing my brain in ways I hadn't texted before not only that but I'm terribly afraid of heights and so it was a way for me to get some agency over my own feelings and life I mean I find if we just go back to sting for a second what I find really interesting is you start stop talking about a sting and saying that he makes sure he does some yoga every afternoon sometimes but to has since has about three or four hours he ensures that he's got some time alone and then you followed that up by saying he's one of the most if not the most productive and conscientious people you've ever had the opportunity to meet yeah that's a lot of people that won't makes sense it will be like the whole in a minute how can he be conscientious and hardworking when he's got time to do yoga in the afternoon and he's got time to spend an hour by himself each day unless of course those are things that help him be productive in conscientious well it's exactly that it's if if I don't go to the gym in the morning there's always this tension that I like you probably I'm Way behind in my work I'll never catch up no matter what I do and I always feel that if I take 15 minutes off I'll fall 30 minutes behind and so when I wake up in the morning do I go to the gym and and basically lose 45 minutes well for me anyway if I do I gain that back later in the day in terms of productivity I get more done in an hour of work if I've had that and sting must have worked out that these things help keep him on an even emotional keel and help inspire him to do his best you know the whole sting story reminds me of something else that maybe your listeners will be interested in I saw this fantastic magic trick it was the it was the signature trick of a guy named Glenn Falkenstein who's passed away and I saw it several times and what he does is he goes into a room you know it's usually a concert hall or a venue and he's on the stage and his assistant put some silver dollars over his eyes and then wraps them with plastic and then puts on some sort of thing to block his vision even more and then she goes out in the audience and she asks somebody to without saying what they're doing pull something out of their pocket where their purse or off their table and hold it up and so I was a I was a participant in this a couple of times I love this trick one time I pulled out a credit card and she says to him okay you know this person is ready do you do you know what he has and the Glenn says well it's a credit card and she says okay what else can you tell us about it he says well it's a visa it's not a MasterCard or a diners club or an Amex she says what else can you tell us anything else he says well it's the Chase Bank and she says okay and she says and now I'm wondering if you can read off the numbers the 16 digits and he does in groups of four after each one she says keep going or you know that's right what's next you know these kinds of things now I imagined that this was a super high-tech trick that she's got a hidden camera in her hand and the reason for all of this stuff around his eyes that he's got some kind of a screen or maybe he's got an earpiece and somebody is you know talking in his ear he can read off the serial number of a dollar bill people pull out a lipstick he can tell you it's an Estee Lauder and it's this color and it's it's amazing and so right before he retired I asked him how he did the trick and of course magicians aren't supposed to tell you but he had retired he worked on that trick with this assistant for five years everything she says is code when she says this person's ready that means it's a credit card she says he's ready to start that means it's a bill of some sort if she says ok let's go that means it's a piece of silverware it's the most elaborate code you can imagine and they memorized it it took them five years of working on this two hours a day but in the end I mean to me that it's a marvel of conscientiousness and and and work ethic but in the end they had this amazing trick that nobody can figure out I mean it's incredible so hair that is credible so here the capacity of the human brain if some could also hit that story sting story and just think how hard and how dedicated some people are to mastering their craft and then I'm always thinking about how can I bring that back to someone who's out on a run at the moment who's listening to this who maybe like the title of the podcast thought oh how I'm gonna age well and then what can they take from that into their own life and I guess it's as you said right at the start you know the number one trait that's gonna help you age well there's conscientiousness so I guess can you finish a task you started can you and can not only that but can you do the best possible job you can can you do not just good enough can you try to push yourself to do more to do better can you can you grow in whatever it is that you're doing if it's keeping a garden if it's cooking for yourself and your family if it's choosing vegetables learning which ones to choose at the market so you get the most flavorful and healthy ones with the most nutrients any area of a human endeavor where you can learn and keep learning is what's neuroprotective and it's fun it is fun yeah it's curiosity really which is a separate trait it's number two on the list after conscientiousness is it really who were curious do better in life so conscientiousness and curiosity the two sees both aging well right and you know with this book like all my other books the version of it that got published was roughly version 52 that is I wrote the manuscript I went back over it and rewrote entirely 52 times I've never published anything that I had fewer than 12 revisions on those tend to be short articles or scientific papers where it's you know there's a formula but for it you know for the books or further New Yorker articles or things like that it's always 40 or 50 drafts and I have this friend named Mike Lankford who is I think the best writer I know he published a wonderful book that I think you'd like called life in double-time okay about his early years as a drummer in a touring band that nobody's ever heard of but it's hilarious and insightful and then he wrote another book which is both other two of my favorite books of all time the other one is becoming Leonardo it's a biography of da Vinci it's so much better than Walter Isaacson's bio which came out at the same time and I said to Mike here books are so amazing how many drafts froot becoming Leonardo he says 75 he worked on it 10 years that's a masterpiece it couldn't be any better I have much to learn and I guess all of these stories whether it's your friends their or yourself just the act of you writing this book forget about your other ones for a minute just this book and doing 52 or so revisions that is conscientiousness that is dedication that is actually I guess helping you to age well well and it's curiosity I'm curious to know what I can do to make it better I'm curious to know if there's a you after our conversation I'm gonna go right take notes because I get a chance between now and the paperback to do another few revisions yeah and in stimulating conversations like this I always think well there's probably something I can take and change it for the better and it's interesting I mean as we record this town I mentioned just before we went on air my 100th episode of this podcast has probably gone live whilst we've been chatting gratulations yes thank you it's it's been something that sort of as an idea just over two years ago 300 yeah episode 100 goes a week what yeah pretty much one a week I have taken August off the last as he is because you know for me I've got two young kids they're off in August I want to just switch off and we have to spend proper quality time with him when they were off school so you know I've done that the last couple of years but what's interested in me is the feedback we get the way it's grown so rapidly and the fact that people say oh look each week it's it's such a very gasps I'm learning new things that's making me think about my life in a different way I can't wait for the next one I'm really curious for what's coming next so I guess I'm thinking or I'm silly hoping that actually people who listened to this podcast each week with that curiosity maybe in some way this is helping them say age well oh I hope so I believe so if you can remain curious and learn new things that's neuroprotective it doesn't mean that you won't get Alzheimer's or that you can reverse it or slow it down but it does mean based on the research that you may get it and know but he would notice it for years because you've built up this cognitive reserve think of it this way if you go to the gym and you can benchpress 200 kilos on a bad day you could still do 50 I can't but you've got some muscle reserve same thing with the brain you build up this reserve through doing new things whatever they are just to bring this full circle the other third quality that we can all work on is gratitude yeah I as you as you as you know I had the opportunity to meet with the Dalai Lama yeah in doing the research for the book and he meditates on gratitude and compassion two to four hours every day and he believes the real secret to happiness not necessarily longevity but happiness is to embrace gratitude if you're happy for what you have and you're not focused on what you don't have and feeling slighted or carrying around anger and such and how come so and so has a Tesla and I don't know so-and-so got promoted and I didn't someone so spouse is better looking than mine all of that stuff throws our brain into a kind of fear mode it activates the amygdala it releases cortisol but you know Warren Buffett agrees the idea of experiencing gratitude my grandmother was a an immigrant to the United States from Germany a Holocaust survivor she escaped the Nazis and she had written out on a piece of paper the things she was grateful for yeah and she recited them every morning when she woke up in every night before she went to bed she was not religious but we were talking about how you can affect change and we talked about meditation and medication and psychotherapy another thing that works is religion all the world's religions teach you that you can change yourself you can become more compassionate or generous or tolerant or express more gratitude so she had this list and she told us that every day she woke up stoney me and my mom around the time she was 79 that she's saying god bless america every morning god bless america written by another immigrant by the way or ving berlin another jewish immigrant and she felt that it was her purpose to do that she had to express gratitude that her family was saved so for her 80th birthday my mother and I bought her a little $80.00 electronic keyboard and I got pieces of masking tape and put them on the keys to play the song and I put numbers on them Wow so she'd know what order to play them in and she loved it she'd never played an instrument before so she's doing one two three four or five so you know it's like this and then by the time it was her 81st birthday she hadn't lifted the masking tape off and was playing it from memory by her 82nd birthday she had worked out a rudimentary harmony with the left hand she kept improving she did this every single morning and every night before she went to bed until she died at 97 and we found the keyboard on her bed table well you know it's it's it's an amazing story that and if I'm honest and I tell you what pops in smile is you was telling me that my mum lives really nearby she lives by herself as my dad died almost seven years ago and you know recently mom got admitted to hospital literally just about maybe ten days ago she had a slip and basada Blair she couldn't get up her cell she was by herself for seven eight hours and she was in for a night she's come out I've moved her downstairs I brought some things down for her and you know helping I stayed a couple of nights where they're trying to just get her settled into being back at home but as she was telling me that story I thought you know mums been an amazing singer her whole life upstairs so mum came over from India she's a brilliant Indian classical singer she's got harmonium upstairs what part of India Calcutta oh yeah so she's got a harmonium and I'm thinking wrong and you should go after this conversation MIT Browns get the harmonium and bring it downstairs and put it in a bedroom yeah because ultimately about something that gives her joy gets a pleasure so she'd be incredibly grateful for and I mean I know we're not here to talk about that but I'm just sort of sharing openly and honestly what that was triggering for me it's love that I can go and do that literally after this after this conversation I could go and do that and I wonder what will happen but I'm pretty sure that will give mum a sense of meaning and enjoyment and just a bit more agency over oh you know this is something I enjoyed didn't you know what I mean that's gonna help her rage well right absolutely you know this thing of a bad agency is well known in the research community but not so much in care facilities there was a famous study about this where people in a old folks home in inverted quotes were given a potted plant and half of them were told that a staff member would come by and water it and and trim it and they didn't need to do anything the other half were told you have to water this and you have to cut off the leaves it's your responsibility and then they simply waited a couple of years and looked at outcomes how many people had Falls how many people died how many people ended up being admitted to the hospital and the ones who had this sense of responsibility an agency something is simple and trivial as watering a plant we did do twice as well as the ones who didn't nice incredible and that makes me think for you know for some of our elderly population who need help is there a danger that we sometimes give them too much help absolutely okay absolutely this is something I've been advanced this is literally a conversation I had with my mum's humor let's go I went - give her breakfast I've actually thought literally five days ago or a week before that Mama's getting rain breakfast every day and if I start coming around every morning or someone does and start giving her breakfast because I want to help her and care for her am i potentially conditioning her to needing that care and actually I said this is that what I says I said mom I think you get your own breakfast I can come and watch you or sit with you whilst you eating if you want and actually the last whom one she's just gone and done just that so I think this interesting there isn't there about our desire to care for people but sometimes we might be doing them a disservice by doing too much potentially you're absolutely right it's it's what's called learned helplessness yeah and this is interesting really interesting yeah my aunt who I write about in the book my mother's sister it's a tragic tragic story she had come over from Germany in 1939 and she married a man who was 15 years older than she this is back a long time ago she was I think 15 and he was 30 they were from the old country you did that back then and he did everything for her he doted on her and she never had a checkbook she never paid any bills he made all the decisions for the family and he pampered her well when he died at age 80 and she was 65 she had no sense of agency and she very quickly went into a downward downward spiral and she passed away a month ago at the age of I think it was 93 having spent from 65 to 93 in a catatonic state she couldn't communicate people were having to do things for her she she could not make up her mind about anything because she had learned to be helpless and no amount of therapy or cajoling could fix it it may also be that she was emotionally crushed at losing him it's I'm not it's hard to say what the factors are but this of course one needs to temper this allowing people to do things to themselves with reason and prudence yeah so my grandmother before we had to put her in a facility had was doing your own cooking but she wouldn't forget to turn the burner off and she had set fire to the kitchen a couple of times you know so and and her hands were shaky and Michoud cut herself with a knife so my mother would go over and cut the vegetables and then we got her a hot plate with a timer on it so it wouldn't stay on too long right but you know I'm certainly not suggesting that we shouldn't be caring for people and giving them assistance it's just it's worth us all considering that anyone who isn't a caring role I guess it is worth just considering keeping the backi minds you know are we doing a little bit see you know I'm a making sure that they're maintaining independence as much as they can there's an interesting overlay here with what I do for a living now which is that I helped to found a new University in San Francisco called Minerva and we run our classrooms very differently than almost any other university program in that our undergraduates we don't teach them anything per se we don't tell them what books or articles to read we tell them what questions were gonna ask in class and they have to figure out themselves how to teach themselves what they need to know they work with each other to test their understanding of things and the teacher becomes kind of a coach or a I guess a conductor and they because they're helping themselves we're not giving them everything on a silver platter they become lifelong learners they have a sense of agency and curiosity and responsibility for their own education and knowledge which has been a huge change in the way people run universities I mean you you'll do that at a university level now as a father of two young kids mine and nine and seven I'm thinking about the education system and thinking you know not in every school of course but there is a big exam pressure in a lot of schools from a very young age which is putting a lot of stress on kids a lot of people are being schooled to do exams so they can get into a certain school so they're getting trained for the types of questions going to be asked how to answer those questions well so they can achieve the right score to get into the right school and I understand that but what you're presenting seems to be saying well hold on a minute are we actually potentially doing them a disservice by doing that because if we want to encourage lifelong learning lifelong curiosity is teaching them how to answer things so they get the right mark for that particular paper for that particular school is that gonna help them in the long term be lifelong learners and and I must be honest part of me is feeling it's probably not the best thing that we could be doing for them I'm with you and you know I I one kind of a lottery in terms of genetics and culture and opportunity and family and that I was raised in a household where my parents valued reading and learning and they taught me to learn at a young age and my grandfather who was an MD starting when I was six he would bring over these little science experiments that he had gotten in the mail where I'd learn about magnetism or optics or gears and you know you can tell somebody to memorize what you know if you have a small gear versus a large gear which one do you want to turn to move a heavy object but if you experiment with it yourself yeah you you you quickly learn it's the large gear or you know the optics magnetism all these things he taught me to taught myself to teach myself and I have to say I I'm I'm I I don't consider that myself to be particularly intelligent I've just had all these great mentors and experiences that unfortunately other people may not have had and I'm all for figuring out how to give everybody these kinds of experiences yeah done I was about to be a cadet myself and it's a it's a theme that's come up before on this podcast is this hole right there if you know often what we're exposed to as kids is what we deem is possible in the world what we think we might be able to achieve you know I've said before that you know I have a surrounded by daughters my dad was a doctor or my mum and dad's friends were doctors there was at least one doctor in that family and so I grew up around that so I don't think it's any huge credit to me that I actually went to medical school and became a doctor because that was my norm and I become acutely aware of this you know I've worked in some very deprived areas of the country as a doctor when I was making this BBC documentary series called doctor in the house I went and lived alongside people all over the country with very different you know in very different areas and where I live and yeah I really would would see that actually depending on where you live depending on what you're exposed to that absolutely plays a huge role in determining where you end up in life of course it's not like a it's not it's not definitive you can absolutely break out of that you know you can have people with great upbringing is a great opportunities and may become serial killers yeah or they don't take advantage often I may flunk out or for whatever reason or and vice versa people can break out of poverty let's say and going to achieve amazing things so well that's that's the interesting thing at Minerva we decided that you I mean we realize that intellect and nobility is not confined to the wealthy and so our policy is to admit anybody who meets our requirements and we pay a hundred percent of their tuition and living expenses if they can't afford to or their families can't afford to and one of my favorite stories about I'm a nervous student is a girl a woman now who came from rural China her parents it was the one child per family law and her parents did not want a girl and they let her know from the very beginning that she was not wanted they were farmers they they didn't have access to anything like a good education but she somehow had the bug to read and learn and she managed by the time she was in secondary school to get to a you know I think she had to take a mule or something to this school that was 20 miles away every day was nobody from her village was going there except she and then she got admitted to Minerva and she graduated a last year and now has a job at one of the big creative companies in the US the she's working for uber and she had done internships at Google and Wow that's somebody who rewrote the course of her life through these kinds of things we're talking about generally mindset it's not conscientiousness it's not curiosity it's another factor that I call resilience it's the ability to make lemonade when you get lemons to to not feel easily defeated I'm not worthy is an incredible story yeah where does that come from where is that desire that resilience that you just mentioned that it's such an important traits look Dan we spend a lot all kinds of different things there's all kinds of stories we've touched and some music but there's some really concrete things so far that people can think about it conscientiousness mindset you know trying new things getting outside and being active as much as possible you mentioned resilience there which I think super important I've highlighted this little passage in your book which I just love I mean I think one of the reasons I love your work so much a its brilliance be it's very consistent also with the things that I've been writing about as well this there's a lot of similar theme there is we have a similar outlook yeah which of course you know my bias is of course I'm gonna like that because it's helps support the narrative that I'm saying but I've really liked these four lines reducing stress and increasing resilience the ability to bounce back from adversity can be coached and taught through specialized psychotherapy strengthening of social networks physical exercise and programs that help people find meaningful and purposeful activities in their lives I absolutely love that because it just encompasses so much of what I also stand for and I think is inspiring for people to listen to because you know you can you can code you can you can increase your ability to be resilient yes someone listen to this might be thinking I'm not ever silly no I get bad it down no no hold in a minute you can change that right that's what we're trying to say doesn't matter how old you are just matter where you are in life you can change that so I think this we've not covered yet which I'd really love to discuss with you are well in that you mentioned social networks strengthening the social network so this is something again I've touched on in many conversations on this podcast before but why is social networks so important well I have a lot to say about this but I'll try to say less what you and I are doing right now wrong gun is the most complicated thing for the brain that we know of having a conversation with somebody you don't know it activates more regions of the brain than anything else that we know of its it requires turn-taking we can't put both talking at once it requires empathy and compassion I have to read your body language so if you say to me that's interesting and you're looking right in the eye that's different than if you say that's interesting and you roll your eyes on the top of your head I've got to be keeping track of all these signals talking to somebody on the phone or through texting or through social networking is not the same actually talking to somebody is very very important and you know we talked about changing your life in becoming more resilient or more of anything that you want many of us don't need psychotherapy or meditation or drugs we need it simply to have friends and family who are spurring us on and you know my wife will say to me every once in a while you haven't been to the gym in a couple of days and I I don't feel like she's nagging me we don't have that kind of relationship but she's spurring me on helping me to remember the things that I want to do and I hope I do the same for her social support networks the other thing is that one of the biggest killers in old age is loneliness which is not the same as solitude because you can feel lonely in a crowded room and you can feel not lonely when you're by yourself but loneliness is the biggest predictor of fatalities and an interesting way to not get lonely is perhaps counterintuitive it's to have what barb Fredrickson from Stanford now at University of North Carolina she know her Stanford students together again serendipity I had this great education and I learned about her work back then she finds it micro communications just conversations with people on a bus or in the checkout line at the store just a little 15-second hi how are you how's the weather I see you bought these new cookies I've never tried them do you like them having a few of these micro conversations throughout the day is a real cure for loneliness even for people who say I could never do that ya know I love that and this whole thing about loneliness I mean you mentioned the elderly it's you know bear that if you look at the research in the UK yes the elderly loneliness is a big problem men between the age of 30 and 45 in this country are one of the loneliest groups and society which absolutely is a big contributing factor to the growing tide of mental health problems of the age group and the growing rates of suicide and I sort of can't help thinking but the digital world is in some way for all this benefit is contributing to this problem and you mentions that that digital communication is not the same as human connection do you know why that is no we don't know why it is but it keeps showing up yeah I may have to do with attention I don't know of any work on the blind or the deaf which is which would be helpful to have if to sort this out but if you and I are in the same room I can tell whether you're checking Facebook the side or if you're texting somebody and you know if we're just communicating digitally in some fashion it's different there's different requirements yeah nonverbal communication I mean I don't depending which stat you reads and you may know the you know some more currently research than me but it's something like sixty seventy percent of the communication is nonverbal right right so it's it's all that body language that obviously you can't pick up over a computer or over your phone and I love that thing about micro communication something I've written about quite a lot and in my in my latest book which is all about 5-minute things that people can do and there's a section on hearts what I call heart which is not really about the physical structure of the heart it's about human connection yes and there's so many suggestions are made but one of them is look if you all if you drink coffee every day and you go to a cafe and pick it up and you you're in a rush and you get in a take away okay if you have to get it in a take away say something nice of the barista you know just say hey I really appreciate or you know hey the latter you made me yesterday was amazing I hope this one's as good today whatever it's amazing when you struck at this little micro what did you got Micro Communications yeah micro contacts whatever I've always liked doing things like that and you know if you if you work it like sometimes if I'm getting an early train to the London I'm up early I say I'm feeling a bit tired and you you grab a drink on the way and you do that you you feel different right it change you've had a bit a bit of meaningful human interaction and it changes the way you feel you don't feel quite as insular or stuck inside your heads right in in a big city like Manchester or London or any big city generally our experiences we see all these people and we don't know any of them yeah we feel like we're on the outs we're not part of the fabric of this community and so just having a couple of quick conversations with 70 in the street you now feel like you're an insider you're yet part of the community and people who know the names of their neighbors and chat with them a few times a week are happier than people who don't now people always say well I could never do that I'm too shy or I'm too nervous or people won't like me or yeah but what we find is that if they can get over that could be through therapy or just willpower or inspiration or going out with a friend and letting the friends start the talking and then you ease yourself into it that makes a huge difference yeah yeah absolutely and I think once people get over that hump and starts it's actually a lot easier than you think you know because we're wired for that social connection that the other human you're in starts with also it's highly likely to want and crave that human interaction as well because we're all walking around you know pretty lonely cuz certainly compared to how we used to be as a society of course there's individual differences I don't think once you start you find actually people want that that they really do so I think that's another key takeaway for people's social connections are importance I wouldn't want to talk to you about memory and I think there's a certain societal narrative which I know your keys a challenge about what happens as we get older so is it true that our memory declines as we get older well you know I think that globally the the societal narrative is that after you're born you begin acquiring skills and abilities you know when you're an infant you begin to learn to talk and then when you're a toddler you begin to crawl and walk and you learn to share when you're a young child and what you know it's it's a matter you've got a university or a trade school and you pick up a bunch of skills and the idea is that you keep adding and adding and then at some point you start to fall off a precipice maybe it's 50 60 70 but you know depending on your own story that you hold in your head that aging is accompanied by an evitable decline and that's not true the the brain does slow down it can take longer to solve problems or retrieve a word but there's no evidence that most of us will experience a real memory deficit now of course memory deficit is a hallmark of Alzheimer's but Alzheimer's is rarer than we appreciate or realize you can go through your 80s and 90s with no with no memory decrement apart from the fact that it might take you a little while longer to retrieve a memory but if it was a memory impairment you'd never get it it would be lost it just takes a little longer because of demyelination and other factors so why is it then that so many of us think and take as fact that our memory declines as we get older well I I don't know I think part of it is that the story was developed for the way we lived maybe 40 years ago we're living longer and healthier than ever before when my grandfather was 65 in 1966 he wasn't particularly healthy a 65 year old today is in general much healthier he admit I mean oh he was a doctor they all smoked I mean in fact you know at least in the u.s. there were ads that doctors would recommend smoking yeah that they were good for your brain you know it's just it is so crazy to think of that now isn't it I mean yeah that wasn't that long ago really no it wasn't and I think that you know the way that older adults are portrayed in them in movies and in jokes is that their daughter and that they are losing their memories it almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy doesn't it in the sense that if that's what the movies are telling you and that's what media is telling you and then let's say you're in your late 40s or early 50s and you forget something you then will say to yourself well yeah that's because I'm getting older and almost it's reinforcing that belief and it's that part of the problem like rather than actually I think that's an example you use either in the book or an issue I've heard you say before that we just create a different narrative around it when we're older yeah so I teach college students and nineteen year olds are very forgetful they lose their cell phones and their keys they forget their computer passwords this happens to 79 year olds - but the story is different when a 19 year old you know has one of these memory lapses lost my cell phone can't find it they just say oh I've got to get more sleep or I've got too much on my plate the 79 year old or even 59 year old says it's Alzheimer's I know it thing is it's downhill from here part of the problem is that if you forget something and you obsess about it or stress about it that's gonna release cortisol and adrenaline which are going to shut your memory down and they make it even worse so if you're trying to find a word and you're just beating yourself up and say oh I have it here it's you know it that's the worst thing you can do it's better to let go now we we do know that when older adults have this memory lapse or delay in getting a word or a name it's not actually the concept that they've forgotten it's what's called the the phonological word form that peculiar set of vowels and consonants that represent the word that's what you lose and there's a very particular area of the brain that is a little bit decremented as we get older so you might know that you're thinking of a flower and you can picture it and you know it's use but you can't get the name gladiola but sooner or later you'll get it it's that and you might even know it starts with G it's four syllables I mean we've had this tip of the tongue kind of a phenomenon but the the proof that it's not really a memory deficit per se is that you get it eventually and and you know just don't stress out about it let it let it go I mean can we train that to be better let's say we're thinking of that flower we can't think of gladiola is there something we can do to make it more likely that we can think of the word we don't know other than just letting go and moving on it's not that most of the time it's not that important that you get exactly the right word I don't think that's important isn't it that whole idea that but really circles but something you said right at the start of this conversation about you know yeah these are something about diet you don't don't stress about it too much and you're saying now when you stress about it and you release cortisol cortisol in itself when you know too much of it for too long a period of time will be detrimental to your memory so chronic stress is detrimental to your brain right absolutely it's it's it's an I mean we've been listening big killers chronic stress is is a huge killer yeah the fact is though you do need a little bit of stress stress is actually neuroprotective and it kick-starts the immune system the this is why I say you know if you if you retire from something you should retire to something else you need the modicum of stress that requires you to get up out of bed in the morning and groom yourself and go be with other people and make some work product that's got a deadline all these things are important as long as they're not stressing you out completely without that small amount of stress we often see a great decline in mental and physical health but yes chronic is it's like with everything in the body there's this Goldilocks zone yeah you know too little is no good too much is no good you've got to come right just right in the middle you know I teach a course I created with with some colleagues of Michael prescribing why some medicine accredited course that we teach too you know GPS and specialists and other health care professionals about the science of various lifestyle factors and how we can use them to help our patients and I show this graph I think is from a 2015 journal and the name the learning memory icon the name of the journal but again there is a journal of learning and memory I think journals I think it's that one and this is beautiful graph showing stresses impact on the brain and how again it's that you know you start off the stress increases your brain function is improved but then you start to get diminishing returns and then it starts to come detrimental and we know that you know chronic stress you know kills nerve cells in the hippocampus and when we essentially the brain so as you say there's that Goldilocks zone you need enough to get you engaged in life but not so much that you're worrying about every little thing and I think you you you actually mentioned there but don't you people who ruminates a lot that go over and over things and worry and and the kamancheh cebause it's you think that actually makes your body awash with those stress hormones that can actually be detrimental to aging well yes that's exactly right yeah let me super super interesting okay and and the stress hormones not only damage cells in the hippocampus they damage your microbiota in the gut they get it out of balance and you know your microbiome is creating 95% of the serotonin that ends up in your brain and doing all other kinds of things in terms of immune function yeah I mean it's incredible I mean Dan there is so much that we could talk about going back to before before we closed it off with some really practical sets of people you know one thing I really was absorbed with in your book was that was the stuff on pain and I think you quite a statistic saying that pain is the source of 80% of doctor visits in the US or something like that which which was really staggering and it's interesting also that the way we treat pain today is basically the same way we've treated it for 2,000 years with the bark of a tree aspirin or it's it's synthetic equivalents or the seed of a poppy opiates and there's synthetic equivalents we we have not made advances in 2000 years well I wonder if that's because we're looking at it maybe through the wrong lens and what I mean by that is you say in your book that pain and then why this is so important as we're talking about healthspan versus lifespan sure you can live to a hundred but if your last 10 years are in chronic pain you know that is gonna influence the quality of your life and how much enjoyment you get and what you're gonna get out of that life and you say that pain is influenced by cultural environmental historical and cognitive factors isn't that interesting so in the SS doctors all know especially ER doctors emergency room doctors I call them something else here I think yeah but AAA or lassie departments yes all of them know that if you're a member of a certain cultural or ethnic group the standard pain scale of one to ten if you say that your pain is three and you remember this particular group they prepare the operating table these are people who are not custom to expressing pain you know zero is no pain ten is a lot of pain if they say three it's time to prep the operating room there are other people who they'll say they have a nine and it means you can you know just let them sit in the waiting room for a few hours there are these different ways we have of being in the world that are cultural and I guess in many levels pain well not many levels pain is subjective riots so what's absolutely that yeah so therefore if we're using a subjective scale nor to tend to tell the doctor in front of us or the healthcare professional how much pain were in of course my three may be different from your three absolutely and you know and and it's it's a matter of context so if I'm hiking and I've got a rock in my shoe and it keeps pressing on this part of my foot I'm really annoyed and I'll stop and take the rock out but I might pay forty quid to go to a massage therapist to press on exactly that part of my foot and give me the same level of pain so it could be at let's say a seven with a rock it could be a 7 with a wither with a vigorous and strong massage but you will interpret that differently where you oh this is good for me because there's tension here that the massage therapist is releasing as opposed to all something's that haven't I guess in a nutshell and we could do two hours on just pain alone it's it's that complex because there is it's very clear I wasn't it's it's not just it's just certainly not just mechanical it's all there are emotional stress psychosocial components to deal with pain which makes it very challenging to treat for somebody but it's interesting it quite a lot of my talks both the doctors and the public I've had chronic pain consultants come along and I've often had chats with them afterwards and they've said to me you know wrong and we really like a lot of your work and all of the books because we can use these tools with our patients with chronic pain cuz ultimately we are the medications often they don't work we do sometimes they do of course as well but it's really fascinating this whole idea of pain you know how come you wrote a chapter on pain well again I think part of it was that a lot of what we know about pain hasn't trickled down to the average person a lot of it came out of McGill where I ran a lab for 20 years from Ron melzack and in fact I include the melzack pain scale in the book because if people can refer to it before they go to see their doctor or go to the A&E they're using the terms that doctors might be expecting them to use for example is the pain stabbing or is it dull is it focused or is it isn't based on pressure or based on laceration these kinds of things but the other reason I wrote about it is that again part of this societal narrative is that as we age we're going to be miserable and in pain and actually the available evidence is that yes we do get aches and pains and they get worse and worse and then they start getting better there's a point of inflection it depends on the person but around 75 or 80 are the aches and pains somehow disappear for many of us or become manageable yeah unless that's very optimistic notes which is a great way to start ending this conversation that I've really really enjoyed I wish we did have another two hours until you mentioned I think another another exciting statistic is that 82 is the happiest age statistically that's what I read in your book yeah incredible I mean so that gives us for anyone who's listening to this podcast or watching on youtube right now who is under the age of 82 which is probably many if the majority serving our I would guess that's pretty exciting it means our happiest days are still to come right and I think we can push that out another 10 or 20 years if we can get rid of ageism and treat older adults with more dignity and respect not allow them to fall into complacency and learned helplessness I think 82 is movable yeah well I love that Dan I absolutely love that and you know I always like to close off the conversations with tips to people so the podcast is called feel better live more when we feel better in ourselves we get more out of life and I think the tips that you are you know the habits you're talking people about in your book yes it's gonna help them age better but it's also gonna help them feel better today yeah agreed and that's what's really exciting so I wonder you know you've done a lot of torch being on a book tour for over two months now from everything that you have put into this book from all the feedback you've had at events you know what are some of your top four or five tips that people can think about applying into their everyday life immediately it's to improve the way that they feel will follow healthy practices a moderate diet there's no one diet that's been clearly shown superior to the others the Mediterranean diet the Aikido the Paleo none of them have panned out you know statistically your research wise and actually as you say and we didn't get a chance to cover this but you say as I absolutely agree with that often it's more important what you don't eat than what you do eat right don't eat heavily processed foods and it's also more important than we realized when you eat yeah your metabolism is linked to your biological clock that finally named suprachiasmatic nucleus and if you eat at the same time every day you're going to digest the food and draw the nutrients out of it more completely yeah so moderated lifestyle in terms of diet to eat more plants than you usually do probably but a varied diet and get a good night's sleep and movement which I see is the imprisoned corollary of exercise it's not about whether you get an extra 20 minutes on the treadmill it's about whether you actually get outside and move your whole body especially in nature so that's three things the healthy practices of diet exercise and sleep yeah and then I would talk about mindset trying to cultivate curiosity openness to new experience conscientiousness and resilience and then the final thing number five is to associate with new people especially younger people as you get older keep your social networks and I don't mean your digital ones I mean your in-person ones going because that is really an important part of brain health and brain happiness love those tips I think my listeners are gonna absolutely love them as well thank you for making time today people want to sort of stay in touch with you are you on social media yep I'm at Daniel Levitin official on Instagram and at Dan Levitan on Twitter and those are the best ways to find me and I said well then look I hope you recover from this cold that you've got at the moment you recover soon how you enjoy your talk in Manchester tonight's it's great to see a talk outside London thank you view time and I have no doubts that if you're willing next time we're in the UK with a bit of time we will continue this conversation oh I would look forward to that thank you press subscribe to get more inspiration and ideas on how to feel better so you can get more out of life and if you have a moment why not check out this conversation that I've picked out as a perfect follower remember lifestyle change is always worth it because when you feel better you've lived more

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 68,767

Rating: 4.8362169 out of 5

Keywords: The Four Pillar Plan, NHS, GP, Four Pillar Plan, lifestyle medicine, the stress solution, feel better in 5, feel better live more, fblm, health, paleo, wellness, drchatterjee, rangan chatterjee, how to make disease disappear, low carb, vegan, keto, podcast, apple podcast, obesity, type 2 diabetes, joe rogan, sleep, jay shetty, health advice, richroll, therichrollpodcast, dan levitin, neuroscientist, ageing, mental decline, the changing mind, memory, old age, brain health, reverse ageing

Id: RPu1Ip8k6YA

Length: 86min 38sec (5198 seconds)

Published: Tue May 12 2020