Mindful Mondays #25: Longevity Edition
How to live longer, be less miserable, and protect your telomeres
Good morning, and welcome to Mindful Mondays. As I mentioned last week, I’m participating in the 10th cohort of Write of Passage, the online writing course that inspired me to start this newsletter. So, for the next 5 weeks, I’ll be writing an original essay each week and sharing them here. That means the format may be a little different, with longer pieces of writing by yours truly, and less links… or, I may decide to send out the essays separately. Please bear with me as I figure it out! Either way, I’m looking forward to writing some longer, more in-depth pieces and sharing them with you.
Mindfulness and Longevity
If you’re an internet-dweller, I don’t need to tell you that there’s been a lot of hype lately about longevity. Right now, in Silicon Valley, some billionaire is trying to upload his consciousness into a computer in order to live forever, while others are trying to turn themselves into immortal vampires with regular transfusions of teenager blood.
That’s not what Dr. Peter Attia’s new book is about. The Tim Ferriss fans among you may already know Dr. Attia as Tim’s doctor (or at least, one of them) and an expert on things like nutrition and disease prevention. In Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity, Dr. Attia takes an evidence-based approach to a longer, healthier life by focusing on preventing what he calls the Four Horsemen: heart disease, cancer, neurodegenerative disease (including Alzheimer’s), and type 2 diabetes.
To his credit, Dr. Attia also includes a chapter about the importance of emotional health, sharing his own, sometimes harrowing, experiences of learning to deal with his anger and other difficult emotions. If our goal is to increase healthspan (our health as we age) and not just lifespan (the length of time we live), shouldn’t we aim to be happy in our old age, rather than miserable?
This made me wonder about what role mindfulness could play in longevity. And as it turns out, there has already been some promising research in this area. This paper from 2009 suggests that by changing the way we react to stress, mindfulness meditation could protect our telomeres, the caps on the ends of our chromosomes, which shorten as we age. A more recent article in Nature (2020) found that—surprisingly—age was no longer associated with telomere length in a group of long-term meditators.
While this is a new area of research, and, as the Nature article notes, “highly exploratory,” it seems that meditation and mindfulness have the potential to be powerful tools for living longer, healthier, and happier lives.
Podcast of the Week
Dr. Peter Attia—The Science & Art of Longevity. If you’re an audio learner, check out Dr. Attia’s latest appearance on the Tim Ferriss Show. It’s almost like taking a Medicine 101 class, as you learn about the leading causes of death—including heart disease and cancer—and how to prevent them, including what tests to get from your doctor and what lifestyle changes will help you beat the odds.
Quote of the Week
“There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.”
—Archbishop Desmond Tutu
That’s all for today. As always, I appreciate your feedback on Mindful Mondays. What was your favorite thing I shared today? What would you like to read more about? Let me know by replying to this email, commenting on Substack, or hitting me up on Twitter.
Thank you for reading,
Chris Cordry, LMFT
PS: Interested in getting into mindfulness practice but don’t know where to start? Have you tried to meditate before, but gotten stuck? Personalized guidance can help. Just reply to this email to ask me about 1:1 coaching.
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Excited to see your WOP writing in the next few weeks. I decided to do the newsletter and essay during WOP and it stuck ever since. If you think you can handle it, I'd recommend doing both. At least for the next 5 weeks as a test.