How Old Are You, Really? (Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night)

(9-minute read)

How Old Are You, Really? (Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night)

Chronological vs. Biological vs. Psychological Age… what really matters?

I am a practitioner of Design Thinking, a method of creative problem solving that features, at its heart, the notion that when we fail to see progress in solving a problem, we have most likely framed the problem wrong. Life expectancy in the USA has flattened in recent years, and health span has even declined… Despite billions or even trillions of dollars spent to address this problem… So, back to Design Thinking, what if the way we are thinking about aging is all wrong? (emphasis on “thinking.”) What really defines your “age”? How do you think and feel about your age? Let’s try for some definitions:

Chronological Age (The default): What typically defines your “age”? Have the numbers from the Gregorian calendar become your de-facto yardstick for your perception of a life lived? Have seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, and decades become the defining mechanism for describing and prescribing where you “fit” into the grinding machinery of life?” Have the digits on your driver’s license or passport become the arbiter for the facets of what you do and how you live your life? Do you “act your age?” out of conformity? Have the social relationships and shared suffering with others in your chronological age group become the backdrop by which your thoughts and behaviors are shaped?

Said differently, do you grunt getting up from the couch like dad or grandpa? Have your conversations started to circle around domestic cares, illness, logistics, and money? My parents, god love them, in many ways were “old” by the time they were in their late 30’s. Like most of their generation, they were expected to gracefully fade into the wood paneling of their 70’s homes and dutifully raise children who would bring the lifeblood back into the line.

What about all the experiences you’ve had? What about those days when you were or are still superhuman? To their credit, my parents moved to the foot of Powder Mountain in Utah in their late 50s to ski out their days well into their 70s. What if we can be vastly “older,” in terms of our experiences, than many of our calendar age group, and yet younger in terms of wonder, curiosity, or even physical capacity? Speaking of which…

Biological Age (The new fad): Perhaps, instead, you are focused on fighting the Arabic numerals on your ID and instead are channeling your energy into shifting your “biological age” to be younger and healthier than others in your chronological cohort. There are now several competing (and questionable) tests that supposedly measure your biological age. How predictive are they? Are these tests even partially correlated to an individual’s “healthspan” or just an average of averages? (For example, we know smoking = bad, being overweight = bad… but… we also know that people who exercise regularly and are either obese or smoke, actually outlive their sedentary counterparts…) Are you using diet, exercise, Wordle, multivitamins, yoga, meditation, a study of “blue zones” and a gratitude journal to hopefully slow the “inevitable” passing of time to squeeze out a few more years of “healthspan”? Is this the best way to address aging?

From the math, it appears that we can strongly correlate a drastically calorie-constricted diet (<1300 daily calories), and the associated very low BMI (body mass index) and avoiding sun exposure to equate with a longer lifespan. Yes, this will add a few extra years onto the average person’s life - but are the trade-offs worth it?

By the way, one of the missing aspects of any “what is your ‘real’ age” test is the increasing “agency” you have the older you get: the ability to influence outcomes. As your chronological age stacks up, so too does your wisdom, your collection of friends, your network, and your financial resources. Even as your physical capacities may diminish, your agency most often increases.

“Lifespan” to me, is a poor metric. I have zero desire to live a long life without my health. “Healthspan” is better, but not a good enough metric for me. It seems to describe physical health in a very narrow way that ignores the most important aspects of “life” itself – our relationships, our influence, our experiences, and our memories. I think we should be talking about “energy-span” or “agency-span” or one from my friend Chip Conley, “zest-span” because becoming a listless but heart-healthy human at 95, starving away to cling to a few extra years of “life” is not, to me, a model of what successful aging should look like. Maybe Def Leppard had it right, “Better to burn out, than fade away”.

Psychological Age: What if both of the previous metrics were capriciously subject to a more influential but seemingly arbitrary mechanism for gauging the passing of time, our energy, our healthspan, and our capacity to have agency in this ever-accelerating world? What if the best and biggest driver for our “real age” was simply, “How old do we think we are?”

This would, of course, be the “placebo” effect on a grand scale.

The old adage, “I think, therefore I am” (As Descartes first put it: cogito ergo sum) might then become “I think I am young, therefore I am.” (Cogito ergo sum puer ego sum)

Could it be true? Could this work? As someone with a long obsession with time, I stumbled upon this idea quite by accident. As will be detailed below, I found myself “aging backward” over the last few decades, and so, about 5 years ago, I just “decided” that I “identified” as someone 20 years younger than my chronological age, borrowing from that newly emergent term for gender identity and other things. I thought to myself, “Why not? Going forward, I will “identify” as my age minus 20.”

And, at least for now, it seems to be working. And there is at least one profound, if not statistically significant precedent.

In 1979 Elizabeth Yanger conducted a short, non-statistically significant study of elderly men (only 8 of them) where she placed these older men (mid-70s) into a controlled environment to try and wind back the clock by about 20 years. Magazines, architecture, decor, and the schedule all were designed to rewind the clock by 20 years. Her aim in this venture was a little unclear, but the outcomes were quite surprising.
From a summary of her book in the online journal “The Care Side:”

Outside that residence, it was still 1979. But inside it, the eight elderly men involved in Langer’s experiment became young again. And by the end of the week, their physical health reflected that psychological reversal of time: they showed substantial improvements in flexibility, dexterity, memory, hearing, posture, cognitive ability, and general well-being. They even looked younger to outside observers who were shown photos of them before and after the experiment. 

The “markers” in all her participants by the end of the short study were quite dramatically different. It was like they had un-aged to the tunes of the period they were programmed back to. Simply put, when they “thought” they were 20 years younger, they quickly started to “become” 20 years younger. Was this a permanent change? Would it work for everyone? How long do the effects last… etc. etc? We do not have these answers - it was a small, non-statistically significant study…

But for sure we know from tons of research on the placebo effect that our brains our powerful mechanisms that can vastly influence our lives in various ways and almost certainly the quality (and quantity) of our years. If you can convince tens-of-thousands of people in a double-blind study that a sugar pill is as powerful as a heavy painkiller, then why can’t we simply convince ourselves, “I’m not 55…. I am 35.” I wish there was a statistically significant longitudinal survey of aging adults who were prescribed an anti-aging “thought” regimen.

But wait, enter a 2002 statistically significant Yale study about perceptions of aging. To quote the article, “Thinking positively about getting older extends one’s life by seven-and-one half years, which is more than the longevity gained from low blood pressure or low cholesterol or by maintaining a healthy weight, abstaining from smoking and exercising regularly".

For now, we only have this study and other anecdotal evidence, including my very own example, of reverse aging. What if we can, with the stroke of a mental pen, re-write our life story and add a few chapters? Our telomeres are subject to all kinds of mental processes that can slow (or speed) their shortening.

As a lovely punctuation mark to this idea, we have the story of Satchel Paige - who in 1948 played his first major league baseball game. He played his last game 17 years later, retiring in 1965. A good career if not one for the record books… except that Satchel Paige didn’t actually know his own age at the time of his entry into the majors and it turns out that his first major league game was at the ripe young age of 42, and he played until age 59! He only learned his real age when the Cleveland Indians owner traveled to his hometown to find his actual age. As Satchel had no idea of his chronological age for much of his life, he worked and played based on how he felt, achieving major league greatness well past when most other athletes would have long been retired. His famous quote shows his attitude: "How old would you be if you didn't know how old you was?"

Satchel Paige was "age-fluid: "Age is a question of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter." ”Perhaps we can be too.

I have decided to be agefluid myself and it is working. Read on below if you wish to hear my own experience.

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I have been (accidentally) reverse aging for nearly 30 years now. Over that period, vast changes in my environment, in the form of physical stress, mental stress, and diet have led to this perception… and quite possibly, reality.

I had my 60/70’s in my 20’s. As an elite athlete in two sports (speedskating and cycling) with my sights set on the Olympics for both, training, after college, was my only job for almost a decade. A typical day included 3 (sometimes 4) workouts, 3 pre-workout warmup sessions, 3 post-workout warm-down sessions, 6 sets of stretching, 3 showers, and 3 or 4 giant meals as we were burning 7000+ calories a day. This regimen, which was inevitably held in the heat (summer) or the cold (winter) meant that every movement outside of training was exhausting and we avoided expending any unnecessary energy.

I can promise you that none of us on these teams EVER took the stairs. Even climbing up one floor meant pushing the button on the elevator if there was one. Like our grandparents, we walked with a stoop, had trouble getting out of bed or off a couch, groaned constantly, and complained about our joints and sore muscles. We played cards in the evening and each night begged for the blessed release from our pains in the form of sleep. We were old in our youth…

My 50’s came in my 30’s… After retiring from sport, I had to catch up in the corporate world and was working 80 hours a week for a decade and a half, first as a consultant and then climbing the corporate ladder in a Fortune 500 enterprise. In those years I only slept 4 - 5 hours a night and in my first 12 months after retiring from sport, I gained nearly 30 lbs, briefly assuming the “doughy office-boy look” so common in corporate America. I quickly realized that exercise was core to my mental (and physical) well-being and re-adopted a daily exercise regimen. However, the lack of sleep, the high stresses of work, and a tempestuous home life took their toll and I looked and felt constantly fatigued. I sported my first wrinkles, my first belly, and wore my ill-fitting suits and khakis to work to put in my time.

My 30s came in my mid-40s (and are still going). In 2014, while working at the Olympics in Sochi, Russia, I had two major epiphanies that completely changed my life. The first, which I will not overly explain, is that, with the help of one of my best friends, I realized that I had been in an abusive relationship for more than a decade. It was not her fault, she had developed a family-inherited mental illness, but it did represent an incredible daily stress that could not be favorably resolved. My friend’s observation that changed my entire life in about 15 seconds? “John, you say you are staying in this relationship for your daughter, but it sounds to me like you are teaching her that it is OK to stay in an abusive relationship…” We were walking across the Olympic campus in front of the giant torch and I stopped short. It was like the top of my cranium blew off, and 5 seconds later I resolved I would move out immediately after I returned home. The wash of relief from the endlessly looming anxiety I had been dealing with for a decade put me 20 times lighter on my feet.

Simultaneously, after arriving in Sochi, while visiting the “USA Olympic house”, where I took my meals daily (only current and retired Olympians are allowed in) had two food stands: pasta, rice, and bread to the left, and meats and greens to the right. I had wanted to try a low-carb diet for a long time but hadn’t found the right opportunity. So, starting day one I simply ate from the food stand on the right.

Between the acknowledged exorcism of my relationship (I moved out the day I got home) and the new diet, I reverse-aged at least a decade in 3 weeks. Here is a picture of me on the 3rd day of the Olympics (note how swollen and tired I look) and here is me just 2.5 weeks later. I am practically glowing. I had lost 15 lbs and was full of life and energy… and for the first time in a while, hope.

That was 10 years ago, and I continue with a couple of things: 1) All my controllable relationships are positive and supportive, 2) I eat a healthy, organic, mostly low carbohydrate diet, and 3) I exercise nearly every day. I also now work for myself and get plenty of sleep. I have a friend circle from all age groups, but when it comes to adventures, hiking, skiing, biking, more often than not I’m with my millennial friends.

I now qualify for AARP benefits, and I just laugh when I see the envelopes come in the mail. My daughter, who is always direct and honest, thinks that it is my ego competing with my age and that “aging gracefully” should be perfectly fine. It is possible she’s right, but for me, right now, after recently watching my father fade into dementia and pass in December, I will quote the first and last lines from the poet, Dylan Thomas:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

After spreading my dad’s ashes last weekend on the ski hill he loved so much, I now am raging, raging against the dying of his light…

Maybe we shouldn’t go gently either.