Brain Rules for Aging Well: 10 Principles for Staying Vital, Happy, and Sharp

by John Medina

When it comes to causes of aging, wear and tear is less detrimental than a failure to repair.

We’ll also discover there are benefits to aging, with dividends paid not just to your head but to your heart. Your ability to notice the glass is half-full actually increases the older you get, and stress levels decline. That’s why you should never listen to anyone who tells you old age is automatically filled with grumpy people.

you do it right, old age can be some of the happiest years of your life.

Geroscience is the field of inquiry dedicated to studying how we age, what causes us to age, and how we can reduce the corrosive effects of aging. • Aging is mostly due to the breakdown of our biological maintenance departments, our body’s increasing inability to repair the day-to-day wear and tear adequately.

Today, we humans are living much longer than we have for the majority of our existence. We are the only species capable of living past our prime. • The human brain is so adaptable that it reacts to changes not only in its environment but also within itself. Your aging brain is capable of compensating for breakdowns in its own systems as you get older.

Social interactions are like vitamins and minerals for aging brains, with ridiculously powerful implications. Even socializing over the Internet provides benefits.

You can have many relationships with people, but if they’re negative, they’re unhealthy. Studies show that it’s not the overall number of interactions that benefit health, but the net quality of the individual interactions.

What’s the secret to a good interaction for your brain? It’s a willingness to consistently take the other person’s point of view, actively seeking to understand a different perspective. You may agree with the other person or you may not, but the effort transforms casual conversation into meaningful brain food.

It’s also a scientifically nice way of saying: stop being so self-centered.

You can create an environment conducive to quality relationships. Social psychologist Rebecca Adams summarized how in a New York Times interview a few years back, if you cultivate the following: • “repeated, unplanned interactions,” spontaneously rubbing shoulders with good friends • “proximity,” living close by to friends and family members so those shoulders are available for rubbing • “a setting that encourages people to let their guard down”

The more intergenerational relationships older people form, the higher the brain benefit turns out to be, especially when seniors interact with elementary-age children. It reduces stress, decreases rates of affective disorders such as anxiety and depression, and even lowers mortality rates.

So become someone’s favorite grandparent, as well as a mentor, friend, and confidant. Create peace in your marriage. Make friends with your neighbors. See your friends often.

By the time people are in their eighties, loneliness is the single greatest risk factor for clinical depression.

The most dramatic effect of social isolation on the elderly is death. The probability of death is 45 percent greater for lonely seniors than it is for socially active ones.

excessive loneliness causes brain damage.

This leads to some practical advice. If you are a younger person, learn how to dance, then keep up the activity clear into your retirement years. If you are already old enough to think about retirement, this recommendation is even stronger. If you already know how to dance, find a place where you can cut a rug regularly. And if you don’t know how to dance, take a class, then start your rug cutting.

SUMMARY Be a friend to others, and let others be a friend to you • Keep social groups vibrant and healthy; this actually boosts your cognitive abilities as you age. • Stress-reducing, high-quality relationships, such as a good marriage, are particularly helpful for longevity. • Cultivate relationships with younger generations. They help reduce stress, anxiety, and depression. • Loneliness is the greatest risk factor for depression for the elderly. Excessive loneliness can cause brain damage. • Dance, dance, dance. Benefits include exercise, social interactivity, and an increase in cognitive abilities.

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been. —Mark Twain

Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory. —Albert Schweitzer

You can genetically manipulate mice in such a fashion that they can’t make dopamine by themselves. When you do that, you give them a death sentence. The reason is startling. The animals starve to death.

The erosion in humans has three parts. First, the manufacture of dopamine slows down in specific regions of the brain.

Second, dopamine receptors begin to disappear.

Third, dopaminergic neural circuits begin flickering off, mostly because of cell death.

the brain is surprisingly good at conjuring up compensatory behaviors for cognitive functions it knows are eroding. The happiness data may represent the determined effort of a brain, faced with inexorable dopamine decline, refusing to go down without a fight.

Seniors who take it in stride, convincing themselves the glass is still half-full, live a healthy 7.5 years longer than seniors who don’t. Optimism exerts a measurable effect on their brain. The volume of their hippocampus doesn’t shrink nearly as much as the glass-half-empty crowd’s does.

The gratitude visit 1. Find someone living who has meant a great deal to you. 2. Write that person a three-hundred-word letter. Describe concretely what he or she did to make you want to pen the letter, and explain how that still influences your life. 3. Go visit the person, letter in hand. Read it aloud (without interruption), then discuss.

A “happiness psychometric inventory” (yes, those exist) found a noticeable boost in the writer’s happiness a week after the visit. The effects lingered even one month later.

“What went well” (or “Three good things”) 1. Recall three positive things that happened to you today. 2. Write them down. They can be smaller (“my husband brought me coffee”) or larger (“my nephew got into the college he wanted”). 3. Beside each positive event, describe why the good thing happened. “My husband loves me” might be written beside the coffee comment. “My nephew worked his butt off at school” might go next to the college comment. Do this every night for a week.

This exercise can be quite powerful. It not only boosts happiness scores but also successfully treats depression. The elevation takes longer to observe (about a month), but it also lasts longer. Though the experimental exercise lasted only a week, improvements were still measurable six months later. If these gratitude behaviors become habit, so do their long-term benefits. Here’s how Dirk Kummerle of the Massachusetts School for Professional Psychology couches the findings: “[The] gratitude visit and three good things were not only able to reduce depres...

Seligman has codified the science into what he calls “well-being theory.” It is composed of five contributing behaviors, summarized in the acronym PERMA. These represent an actual recipe, a to-do list for people of any age interested in authentic happiness

P: Positive emotion To be happy, you must regularly experience positive emotions. Generate a list of the things that bring you true pleasure, then marinate yourself in them, allowing the items on the list to become a regular part of your life. E: Engagement Consistently engage in activities so meaningful you actually stop checking your cell phone when you do them. Losing yourself in a hobby can be like that. So can good movies, books, sports—even a dance class. R: Relationships As long as the relationships are positive, insert the entirety of the chapter on friendship into this recommendation. M: Meaning Identify and pursue a purpose that gives your life meaning. For most people, that requires solidly connecting their actions to a purpose larger than themselves. Religious practice and charitable work are examples. A: Accomplishment Set specific goals for yourself, especially if that requires you to achieve mastery in something over which you currently have no mastery at all. This could be physical, like training for a marathon, or intellectual, like learning to speak French.

SUMMARY Cultivate an attitude of gratitude • Older people tend to score higher than younger people on clinical tests aimed at measuring happiness. • The positivity effect is the phenomenon in which older people selectively pay much more attention to positive occurrences in their surroundings. They tend to remember these positive occurrences much more than negative ones. • As you age and realize your own mortality, you tend to prize relationships above anything else. Prioritizing these relationships makes you happier. This phenomenon is called socioemotional selectivity theory. • The risk of depression increases in seniors who face more health challenges—hearing loss, for example—than in healthy seniors. • Optimism about one’s own aging exerts measurable, positive effects on the brain.

Worrying is like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn’t get you anywhere. —Anonymous

The first concerns rhythm. Somewhere around age forty, baseline cortisol levels begin to rise. They stop following that lovely morning-high/evening-low rhythm and instead start sloping upward as if skiing uphill. Your body begins to experience the type of damage that occurs whenever stress hormones are elevated.

The second manifestation is that you don’t respond as rapidly—or as vigorously—to the presence of threats.

the hippocampus increasingly loses the ability to turn off your lifesaving cortisol elevations after the threat has gone away.

The amygdala, which governs your primitive emotions, is supposed to act like a chained beast, shackled to a strong, well-functioning PFC. With the PFC increasingly out of the picture, your brain shifts to a sustained, emotional state of “fight or flight.” Your emotions appear to be losing their governors.

People who feel younger than their chronological age do better on cognitive tests than those who feel older. The magic number appears to be twelve. If your subjective age identity is twelve years younger than your actual age, the improvements really spice up your cognitive scores.

“Age isn’t how old you are but how old you feel.”

Rats of both sexes detected the sex of the researcher in the room. They changed their stress responses depending on whether the researcher was male or female.

If the experimenter was male, animal stress responses increased (about 40 percent above baseline) during the experiments. If she was female, the animal’s stress response decreased (yep, below baseline). Turns out the rats were responding to the underarm sweat of the human,

The first concerns changes in hippocampal volume, which supposedly shrinks with age. Take sex into account, and a different picture emerges. It’s mostly the male hippocampus that shrinks with age. Female structures contract somewhat, but the correlation with aging is four times as strong with men as women.

The second finding concerns behavioral reactions to environmental stress. We now know that elevated cortisol levels affect older women more negatively than men when it comes to both emotional well-being and cognitive ability.

HPA axis, short for hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal) is much more reactive in postmenopausal women than in premenopausal women.

Dementia can indiscriminately raid any aging brain, like a marauding band of Vikings, but it tends to prefer female tissue. Alzheimer’s is the classic example. According to the Alzheimer’s Association, two-thirds of all people diagnosed with the disease in the United States are women. About 16 percent of women older than seventy-one have the disease, compared with 11 percent of men in the same age group.

his technique is one of the most powerful anti-stress therapies ever shown to actually work in the elderly population. That’s why I’m making it the crown jewel of my stress reduction recommendations. I advocate a healthy, daily exposure to mindfulness, as long as you’re careful about what type of mindfulness you practice.

Mindfulness, put simply, is a series of contemplative exercises that gently and nonjudgmentally ask you to focus your brain on the now rather than on the past or future. Kabat-Zinn puts it this way: “Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way; on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally.”

No question our busy lives don’t take naturally to mindfulness. But if we stick with it, really good things will happen to our brains. These good things fall into two categories: emotional regulation (especially the ability to manage stress) and cognition (especially the ability to pay attention).

Quoting from a review article: “The strongest finding was significantly enhanced attention (e.g., lower stimulus overselectivity, increased sustained attention and significantly smaller attentional blink) after mindfulness-based meditation practices. There was also evidence that meditation may improve overall cognition and executive functions.”

When people who practice mindfulness are shown distressing environmental stimuli (like slasher movies), their amygdalae show reduced activation compared with untrained controls. The resting state of mindfulness pros is at a lower base level, too, which suggests regular practice of mindfulness leads to a general overall calming.