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The Five Key Traits Of Healthy Aging

Plus: how to stop drying out (and losing) your hair with shampoo

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The 10almonds Team
August 23, 2023

Today’s almonds have been activated by:

❝When each day is the same as the next, it’s because people fail to recognize the good things that happen in their lives every time the sun rises❞

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⏰ IN A RUSH?

Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

  • Today’s featured expert is a neuroscientist with a special interest in healthy aging

    • He advises that we make sure to foster five key character traits that, according to science, are heavily correlated with healthy aging, reduced cognitive decline, and increased healthspan:

      • Curiosity

      • Openness

      • Associations

      • Conscientiousness

      • Healthy practices

  • Most health advice is based around “the average person”, and while this is generally a mathematically sound approach to public health, nobody is actually average, and we all have our physiological quirks.

    • Sometimes, this means that what we need might be a little different than what “the average person” needs.

      • Today’s sponsor, Viome, offers (from a single test pack) 50+ health scores and very many personalized health recommendations based on those, tailored for you

Read on to learn about these things and more…

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👀 WATCH AND LEARN

5 natural ways to stop hair fall and grow thicker hair

To stop damaging your hair with shampoo, use any of the 5 ways mentioned in the video to wash your hair for healthy hair growth:

Note: a YouTube commenter added the advice:

❝The last recipe is tried and tested and works wonders. Just make sure to wear gloves while straining the liquid, it may make your nails and hands black (due to the natural color).❞

🧓 MAIN FEATURE

The Five Keys Of Aging Healthily

This is Dr. Daniel Levitin. He’s a neuroscientist, and his research focuses on aging, the brain, health, productivity, and creativity. Also music, and he himself is an accomplished musician also, but we’re not going to be focusing on that today.

We’re going to be looking at the traits that, according to science, promote healthy longevity in old age. In other words, the things that increase our healthspan, from the perspective of a cognitive scientist.

What does he say we should do?

Dr. Levitin offers us what he calls the “COACH” traits:

  1. Curiosity

  2. Openness

  3. Associations

  4. Conscientiousness

  5. Healthy practices

By “associations”, he means relationships. However, that would have made the acronym “CORCH”, and decisions had to be made.

Curiosity

Leonardo da Vinci had a list of seven traits he considered most important.

We’ll not go into those today (he is not our featured expert of the day!), but we will say that he agreed with Dr. Levitin on what goes at the top of the list: curiosity.

  • Without curiosity, we will tend not to learn things, and learning things is key to keeping good cognitive function in old age

  • Without curiosity, we will tend not to form hypotheses about how/why things are the way they are, so we will not exercise imagination, creativity, problem-solving, and other key functions of our brain

  • Without curiosity, we will tend not to seek out new experiences, and consequently, our stimuli will be limited—and thus, so will our brains

Openness

Being curious about taking up ballroom dancing will do little for you, if you are not also open to actually trying it. But, openness is not just a tag-on to curiosity; it deserves its spot in its own right too.

Sometimes, ideas and opportunities come to us unbidden, and we have to be able to be open to those too. This doesn’t mean being naïve, but it does mean having at least a position of open-minded skepticism.

Basically, Dr. Levitin is asking us to be the opposite of the pejorative stereotype of “an old person stuck in their ways”.

Associations

People are complex, and so they bring complexities to our lives. Hopefully, positively stimulating ones. Without them to challenge us (again, hopefully in a positive way), we can get very stuck in a narrow field of experience.

And of course, having at least a few good friends has numerous benefits to health. There’s been a lot of research on this; 5 appears to be optimal.

  • More than that, and the depth tends to tail off, and/or stresses ensue from juggling too many relationships

  • Fewer than that, and we might be only a calendar clash away from loneliness

Friends provide social stimulation and mutual support; they’re good for our mental health and even our physiological immunity (counterintuitively, by means of shared germs).

And, a strong secure romantic relationship is something that has been found time and again to extend healthy life.

Note: by popular statistics, this benefit is conferred upon men partnered with women, men partnered with men, women partnered with women, but not women partnered with men.

There may be a causative factor that’s beyond the scope of this article which is about cognitive science, not feminism, but there could also be a mathematical explanation for this apparent odd-one-out:

Since women tend to live longer than men (who are also often older than their female partners), women who live the longest are often not in a relationship—precisely because they are widows. So these long-lived widows will tend to skew the stats, through no fault of their husbands.

On the flipside of this, for a woman to predecease her (statistically older and shorter-lived) husband will often require that she die quite early (perhaps due to accident or illness unrelated to age), which will again skew the stats to “women married to men die younger”, without anything nefarious going on.

Conscientiousness

People who score highly in the character trait “conscientiousness” will tend to live longer. The impact is so great, that a child’s scores will tend to dictate who dies in their 60s or their 80s, for example.

What does conscientiousness mean? It’s a broad character trait that’s scored in psychometric tests, so it can be things that have a direct impact on health, such as brushing one’s teeth, or things that are merely correlated, such as checking one’s work for typos (this writer does her best!).

In short, if you are the sort of person who attends to the paperwork for your taxes on time, you are probably also the sort of person who remembers to get your flu vaccination and cancer screening.

Healthy practices

This means “the usual things”, such as:

Want to learn more?

You can check out his book, which we reviewed all so recently, and you can also enjoy this video, in which he talks about matters concerning healthy aging from a neuroscientist’s perspective, ranging from heart health and neurodegeneration, to the myth of failing memory, to music and lifespan and more:

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❤️ OUR SPONSORS MAKE THIS PUBLICATION POSSIBLE

Viome | Full Body Intelligence

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Viome offers, from a single test pack, 50+ comprehensive health scores and a stack of personalized health recommendations based on your scores, instead of just "the average person".

Because, you're not average. Nobody is. And you deserve better than impersonal guesses.

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Please do visit our sponsors—they help keep 10almonds free

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🌍 AROUND THE WEB

What’s happening in the health world…

More to come tomorrow!

📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us – by Michael Moss

You are probably already aware that food giants put unhealthy ingredients in processed food. So what does this book offer of value?

Sometimes, better understanding leads to better movation. In this case, while a common (reasonable) view has been:

"The food giants fill their food with salt, sugar, and fat, because it makes that food irresistibly delicious"

...but that doesn't exactly put us off the food, does it? It just makes it a guilty pleasure. Ah yes, the irresistible McDouble Dopamineburger. The time-honored tradition of Pizza Night; a happy glow; a special treat.

What Pulitzer-winning author Michael Moss brings to us is different.

He examines not just how they hooked us, but why. And the answer is not merely the obvious "profit and greed", but also "survival, under capitalism". That without regulation forcing companies to keep salt/sugar/fat levels down, companies that have tried to do so voluntarily have quickly had to u-turn to regain any hope of competitiveness.

He also looks at how the salt/sugar/fat components are needed to mask the foul taste of the substandard ingredients they use to maintain lower costs... Processed food, without the heavy doses of salt/sugar/fat, is not anywhere close to what you might make at home. Industry will cut costs where it can.

Bottom line: if you need a push to kick the processed food habit, this is the book that will do it.

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Wishing you the very best of health in all ways,

The 10almonds Team