Longevity Science Without the Fear or Bullshit | Dr. Kerry Burnight

An expert in Gerontology shares the four core habits for aging well. Dr. Kerry Burnight https://drkerryburnight.com/ is a gerontologist, caregiver advocate, and founder of the Gerontology Institute at UC Irvine. Her new book, Joyspan: The Art and Science of Thriving in Life's Second Half https://www.amazon.com/Joyspan-Science-Thriving-Lifes-Second/dp/1546007350?adgrpid=180038477402&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvadid=748008426858&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=10043822493591370295&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9198314&hvtargid=dsa-2414841786406&hydadcr=&mcid=&hvocijid=10043822493591370295--&hvexpln=67&tag=googhydr-20&hvsb=Religion_d&hvcampaign=dsadesk, offers a practical framework for aging not just longer, but better. In this episode we talk about: Misconceptions about the aging process  The anti-aging industry and what it gets wrong Four core habits for aging well How to  diversify your "social portfolio" Coping strategies for adapting in the face of change The key question to ask yourself if you want to live a longer and happier life  The strengths that come with age Tools for navigating inevitable psychological dips And much more Join Dan's online community here http://www.danharris.com/ Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD Additional Resources: Dr. Burnight's social: @the_gerontologist https://www.instagram.com/the_gerontologist/reels/?hl=en Tickets are now on sale for a special live taping of the 10% Happier Podcast with guest Pete Holmes! Join us on November 18th in NYC for this benefit show, with all proceeds supporting the New York Insight Meditation Center. Grab your tickets here https://www.nyimc.org/event/great-cosmic-joke/! Tickets are now available for an intimate live event with Dan on November 23rd as part of the Troutbeck Luminary Series. Join the conversation, participate in a guided meditation, and ask your questions during the Q&A. Click here https://troutbeck.com/culture/luminaries-series-conversation-meditation-with-dan-harris-2025/ to buy your ticket! To advertise on the show, contact [email protected] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris Thanks to our sponsors: AT&T: Staying connected matters. That's why AT&T has connectivity you can depend on, or they will proactively make it right. Visit att.com/guarantee http://att.com/guarantee for details. Northwest Registered Agent: Protect your privacy, build your brand and get your complete business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/happierfree and start building something amazing. HomeServe: Help protect your home systems and your wallet with HomeServe against covered repairs. Plans start at just $4.99 a month. Go to homeserve.com http://homeserve.com/ to find a plan that's right for you.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Dan Harris?

  It's the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

• 0:46Dan Harris?

  Hey, hey, everybody. How we doing? I love this story. When my uncle, it's a short story, don't worry. When my Uncle Peter, shout out to Peter, when Peter turned 60, he was asked how he felt and he said, "Off the hook." I love that story. And it represents two of the good things that can happen and often do happen when you get older. First, you start taking yourself less seriously. And second, you care less about what other people think about you. In other words, you have fewer fucks to give. The other good news about aging is the fact that your genetics are not your destiny. In other words, just because your parents may not have aged well, that doesn't mean it's going to happen to you. You have some agency here. There are practical things that you can do

• 1:31Dan Harris?

  to increase your so-called joy span, which my guest will explain fully in a minute. But for now, just know that increasing your joy span increases both your health span and your lifespan. And there's more good news. Working on this stuff now, no matter what your age is, can not only lengthen your life, but it can also improve your life. In other words, it is possible to get the benefits of age, the wisdom that naturally accrues to many of us. It is possible to pull those benefits forward, whether you're in your 20s, your 30s, your 40s, your 50s, whatever. My guest today is Dr. Keri Bernite, who spent many years teaching geriatric medicine and gerontology at the University of California Irvine School of Medicine.

• 2:13Dan Harris?

  She's got a new book called Joyspan: The Art and Science of Thriving in Life's Second Half. We talk about some big misconceptions about the aging process, the many problems of the anti-aging industry, four core habits for aging well, how to diversify your social portfolio, coping strategies for adapting in the face of change, the key question to ask yourself if you want to live a longer and happier life, the strengths that come with age, some tools for navigating inevitable psychological dips, and much more. If you want to go deeper on how to make peace with the non-negotiable fact of change, we have a new meditation that comes with this podcast. It comes from our Teacher of the Month, Cristiano Wolf. You should go check it out. Also to say Cristiano will be leading our next live

• 2:57Dan Harris?

  meditation and Q and A session tomorrow, Tuesday, November 18th at 4 Eastern. We do these every Tuesday at 4. Reminder, we're now doing these on Zoom instead of Substack. If you sign up at DanHarris.com, you'll get access to our twice-weekly meditation drops and once-weekly live meditation sessions. Go sign up. Finally, if you want to meditate with me in person, I've got two events coming up. I'll be doing a live taping of this podcast in New York City on November 18th. It's going to be a conversation with the comedian Pete Holmes, who's not only very funny, but he's got a long and deep spiritual practice. This event will be a benefit for the New York Insight Meditation Center. And then coming up on November 23rd, I'll do an intimate little meditation and Q and A sesh at a lovely little hotel in the Hudson Valley called

• 3:42Dan Harris?

  Trout Beck. There are links to both events in the show notes. Okay, we'll get started with Dr. Keri Bernite after this. If you care about supporting independent media, and if you care about being a node of sanity and an insane world, there are a few quick, easy, and free ways that you can support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for. One way to do it is to sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week. The second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you're listening or watching right now. That really helps. Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low stakes way to connect with somebody in your orbit.

• 4:26Dan Harris?

  And not for nothing, it also helps us grow. And all of these things take about 30 seconds and they really do help. You will be supporting me and my team and our mission. And I, as I said, would be immensely grateful. You can find everything we do at danharris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show. If you care about supporting independent media and if you care about being a node of sanity and an insane world, there are a few quick, easy and free ways that you can support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for. One way to do it is to sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week.

• 5:08Dan Harris?

  The second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you're listening or watching right now. That really helps. Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low stakes way to connect with somebody in your orbit. And not for nothing, it also helps us grow. And all of these things take about 30 seconds and they really do help. You will be supporting me and my team and our mission. And I, as I said, would be immensely grateful. You can find everything we do at danharris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show. Dr. Carrie Burnight, welcome to the show.

• 5:45Speaker 02

  Thanks very much. Glad to be here.

• 5:48Dan Harris?

  I'm glad you're here. And let me just start with a really basic question. I'm just curious because I was raised by doctors and married to one. What was in your mind when you chose gerontology as your specialty? Why that?

• 6:01Speaker 02

  Right. Sometimes when I tell people I'm a gerontologist, their face kind of makes like that ugh, yuck face, or they makes that, oh, poor you face. So I think that because I was, I call it a surprise, some people might say mistake, in my parents' lives, they had these grown teenagers, and then a surprise pregnancy that was me. And I came out, my dad already had gray hair. So I think it was just on my radar when people would talk smack about older people, as we do. It felt personal. And when I realized that there was something

• 6:40Speaker 02

  called a gerontologist, somebody who worked with and learned from older people, it really just felt like a fit.

• 6:49Dan Harris?

  I love that story. That completely lands. And I'm starting to think about like my own son, who I was 43 when he was born, and he likes to point out the proliferation of grays on my pate. Just as an overarching question as we move through this conversation, I read your material as not being just for senior citizens. I read this as something that, it's content that I would have liked to have had in my 30s. How does that go down with you?

• 7:17Speaker 02

  Here's who it's for. It's for people who are aging. And who is aging? Every dang one of us. And if you're not, you are dead. So what we have found, and what your podcast does every day, is finding ways about living our best life. So things that help you do that between the ages of, say, 23 to 24, also can hit between 93 and 94. So it is truly never too early, but also never too late.

• 7:53Dan Harris?

  There's a lot of good news here. And there's one aspect of the good news I want to get you talking about in a second. But the first piece, the first aspect of the good news is, if you're listening to this in your 20s or 30s, Or 40s, or like me in your 50s. The good news is that the stuff you can do now to help you age well, will just make you happier right now, anyway.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  Correct. And so, a lot of times you will say, hey, when should I start this stuff? And I say, now, think about it, about with your body, for example. Would you ask me, well, when should I start cardio? It's like, yesterday, right? Start as soon as you can. So, I am very interested in what fortifies us internally for aging, because it's not easy. And when people say, I just want to age gracefully, I say, I've watched thousands of people age, and I have not ever seen one age gracefully. It's not a graceful thing. It's as hard as heck, and a lot of things happen.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  And because of that, we want to fortify ourselves as much as possible. So, it's the opposite of toxic positivity. It's the opposite of head in the sand. It's like, nah, we're in it for this whole time, and the end result is always the same. And that is that we are all gonna die. And I don't think that's a bummer. I just think it's a fact. So, why don't we try to live and use this bonus time rather than languish in the suffering and regret and misery of it, which I have seen for way too many years with people that I've worked with.

• 9:41Dan Harris?

  Side note, it's interesting and hilarious for me, as somebody who says fuck a lot, to hear you say heck, as much as you do.

• 9:49Speaker 02

  Well, just give it a try.

• 9:52Dan Harris?

  Okay. No, no, actually, I will not. So, I don't know why I said, okay, because I don't mean that. Anyway, I agree with you, and I appreciate your candor, but you just said that aging is not easy, it's not graceful. And yet, one of your core arguments, and this is the second half of the Good News thread that I was pulling on just a moment ago, one of your core arguments is that aging is something to celebrate, not to dread, that it's an opportunity. So, how can all of those thoughts work together?

• 10:21Speaker 02

  Great question. Okay. So, our default thought process.

• 10:28Speaker 02

  Myself included, is that aging is all decline. Everything about you and your life gets worse, less relevant, less attractive, less strong. And we believe it so much because it's our societal, like what we've come to believe, that the notion that actually there are things that get better as you get older, isn't even on the radar screen. So when I say it's something to celebrate, it's because in the research and in watching thousands of people go through this phase ahead of us, I've seen reason to celebrate. You might be wondering like, what the heck gets better?

• 11:11Speaker 02

  Oh, what the fuck gets better as you get older?

• 11:14Dan Harris?

  Thank you. I consider that to be a personal victory.

• 11:21Speaker 02

  So things that get better as you get older are not caring as much what people think. Greater appreciation of friendship, more emotional regulation, less self-importance often, greater humility, my God, the world needs that. Appreciation of music and nature and not getting entrapped in as much in all the trappings of fame and self-importance. So yeah, there's a lot to look forward to, but we won't even know that if we don't pull our head out and stop with this fear-based anti-aging nonsense.

• 12:02Dan Harris?

  I have a million things I want to follow up on in what you just said, which was awesome and super interesting. But the thought that just keeps going through my head is, I get that there are aspects of getting older that are worth celebrating and relishing, and I'm here for all that because I have no alternative. However, the end of the line is still death. And death usually is, you know, I say this to somebody who's spent a non-trivial amount of time in a hospice, you know, there's some discomfort that comes with the process, if not, you know, agony. So I just bump against that hard fact when you talk about celebrating.

• 12:43Speaker 02

  Yes, and I love that we're all thinking the same thing as we're listening. So here's the choice. Long life, hard stuff.

• 12:55Speaker 02

  And make it miserable. Long life, hard stuff. Find a way to make it less miserable. And that is a choice and that is possible. And I, because I don't love suffering and I'm not relishing misery. I'm going to do what I can to try to think the result is the same. It's death. And how can we maximize this time that we have? Given that I guarantee you there will be hard things, things you haven't even thought of. But I don't want to compound the misery by throwing up my hands and saying, yep.

• 13:40Speaker 02

  When something tough happens to you, when you get a diagnosis, when your spouse dies, when you can't walk, you just say, yes, now my life is awful and sucks. To me, that's the tragedy.

• 13:55Dan Harris?

  Okay, so you're saying you're not soft pedaling death. It is a reality. It is scary for most of us. And it can, depending on how things go, be painful. But if we all accept that that's the truth, how do we want to live now? And how do we want to prepare to live up until that moment? Do we want to make that a slog, a fear-based marathon of misery? Or do we want to increase the odds of as much happiness as possible up until and including that moment?

• 14:22Speaker 02

  That's what the caveat I wanted to add to what you said, which is it isn't up until that moment is within those moments. So the privilege of being a gerontologist is that I have been bedside of so many people dying, so many people with very tough diagnoses. After you lose your spouse, people after they lose an adult child or a grandchild. So the goal isn't like, oh, just be happy until that rough time. It is, how can I continue all these learnings that you every day are promoting with people and giving people?

• 15:03Speaker 02

  How can we bring those into even the hard times and especially the hard times?

• 15:11Dan Harris?

  Yes, that lands for me. And I apologize to people who've been listening to this show for a long time because I've mentioned it before. So I hope I'm not being too repetitive. But I did volunteer for many years in a hospice and so was able to witness many of the same things that you've been able to witness. And I have to say, generally speaking, while I, physical discomfort can be part of the package and no two deaths are the same. But overall, I noticed two things. One, there's an interesting sort of serenity that often kicks in toward the end. And I don't know what it is about the human animal that makes that so common. And then the other thing I noticed is, just given the reality of modern medicine, and especially if you've chosen the hospice route, we can make you comfortable.

• 15:56Speaker 02

  Yes, that's exactly right. And the things that you are teaching and studying of meditation and love and otherness and all these millions of topics impacts that aging experience, that being old experience and that death experience. It's not separate. And what we're doing now is not wasted. It's pulled into this final phase. And it becomes, in my opinion, most important then.

• 16:25Dan Harris?

  What do you think it is, if we're both right, that anecdotally, it is quite common for people facing death to be pretty calm? I mean, it's not everybody, for sure. But if we're right that that is a quite a common human experience, to achieve a kind of equanimity in the face of imminent death, what is it about the human organism that enables that?

• 16:50Speaker 02

  I don't know, number one. And number two, I try to think of it like birth, right? So if somebody were to say, okay, Dan, what you're gonna do is you're gonna squeeze through a tiny hole and be all bloody, and then like your arms are gonna frail out, and you're gonna scream, and then strangers are gonna grab you with gloves on. I mean, it's pretty like, what in the heck? And yet, that is birth. And I think as beings, as humans, death is also that same thing on the other side that every single one of us is gonna have. And I'm not saying it's easy, or even always beautiful, but it is, right?

• 17:33Speaker 02

  It is factual. And so maybe, when we get there, That kind of takes over of like, yeah, I was born and I'm on my way out. And that is natural and normal and not one person has ever escaped that.

• 17:47Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 17:48Speaker 02

  All the time, people come to me and they say, if my partner dies, or if I die. It's always if. And so I do often take people's hands. I say, when, my friend, when?

• 18:00Dan Harris?

  Yeah, two things come to mind as I listen to you. One is that there's a Indian epic that I've never read and I'm going to pronounce the name poorly. I think it's the Mahabharata, Mahabharata, something like that. That sounds like the Mahabharata sounds like really good cheese, but.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  I was gonna say my barada. I think I had that.

• 18:18Dan Harris?

  The Mahabharata or whatever, however you pronounce it, there's a line from that. And I'm going to mangle this too, but it's like, what's the most wondrous thing in the world? The most wondrous thing in the world is that we can all be surrounded by aging, illness and death. And yet not take in that we too are going to go through those things. The second thing that came to mind as I was listening to you, especially the first part of your last answer was that. When you were talking about people kind of accepting that this is just the way of things. I just remember being in the hospice and talking to an elderly gentleman who was out of his bed and but, you know, he was in hospice. So he was sitting on a chair and, you know, in his final days, but able to have some level of mobility.

• 19:03Dan Harris?

  And I was asking him, are you afraid? Cause I asked everybody that because I'm afraid. And he said, you know, I'm really not. I just feel like I'm part of something larger.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  Yes, like the Dalai Lamas, we are all one. That's exactly right. And he said that over and over and over. I think that is part of it too. And conversely, I've seen people who are so rallying against it. Like, no, no, no. And it feels like suffering twice.

• 19:33Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  It's gonna happen.

• 19:37Speaker 02

  And hopefully, by sort of putting in the work and thinking, I mean, seems to me that when you get there, you'll have thought more than anyone I know about all this stuff.

• 19:47Dan Harris?

  My pain tolerance and anxiety levels are high enough that I probably just need to do more of this contemplative work in advance, but I can't promise I'm going to ace the test if there isn't even such a thing. Before I get into the details and the sort of pedagogical flow of your book, which is called Joyspan, before I get into that, I just want to ask one other question based on something you said earlier. You were talking about the anti-aging industry in not the most flattering terms. Can you say more about why that sucks and what it's getting wrong and the messages that we should bat away?

• 20:22Speaker 02

  Okay, so the messaging is how not to age. And it's appealing. Great, I just want to stay young forever. But the reality is, is that you do age. And even if you do all the stuff, you still age. So I would propose that we think how to age. And that is with vitality, with purpose, with friendship, with beauty, like all the stuff. But it's sad to me when I see people putting so much of their time, capital and attention to not age

• 21:04Speaker 02

  and they're so proud that people might think they're younger than they are. Again, because I have seen it play out and those people, they age. And it's really not fooling anybody. And here's a gerontologist thing, wherever I'm at a party, some like older people will come up and go, "You are not going to believe how old I am. Guess." In my mind, I think 82. And they want me to guess 70 or 60. And when I was a younger gerontologist, I went with it with the game because I wanted to make them feel good. I'm like, "Oh, I don't know. Are you 53?" "Oh, no, no." And now I just say it right out and go, "82." And they go, "Oh, yeah, that's right."

• 21:46Speaker 02

  I said, "How wonderful. What a radiant 82." Like, oh, I love that. Because that, to me, that's the flex, is like being awesome at the age that you are. But it does take a reformatting of our mind to not buy into... A multi-billion dollar industry that profits when we fear and loathe ourselves for doing what we are supposed to do, which is growing older.

• 22:17Dan Harris?

  Okay, so let's see if I can inject a little bit of nuance here. I'm on your side, 100%. I get it. And does it not make a certain amount of sense to,

• 22:30Dan Harris?

  I just, and even as I'm saying this, I'm thinking, you know, maybe this, the words coming out of my mouth are gonna be reflective of my internal delusion on this score. But like, to look our best to a certain extent, you know, like, I'm reluctant as I say that because who sets the standards, right? You know, look our best by whose metrics. But there's a certain amount of like skincare and et cetera, et cetera, that might be defensible and might not fall into the trap of being suckered by the fear mongers.

• 23:01Speaker 02

  Fair. And I love looking my best. My mom, who is 96, loves looking her best and we both put time and effort into it. And so I think it's just trying to disentangle that that needs to be young. Like, if we can say, I want my skin to be as nice as possible. I want my hair to do what I want my hair to do. And for some people, I want like piercings and I want to wear colorful clothes and I want glasses. I want all that. Everybody, it's different what good is, and I'm all for good. But where, in my opinion, I have gotten bogged down is when I think that good is young.

• 23:46Speaker 02

  Like, if those are the same things, that's a little rougher of a gamble than just saying, yeah, I want to look good and to me, this is what good is. And then I just heard somebody's thought out loud of saying, yeah, good is young. That's what it is for me. I want to look young. If you keep thinking about it a little bit more, like I do, because I'm obsessed with the topic, if you take it really far, you'll probably find that there will come a point, regardless of what you do and how much money you spend and how much effort you put into it, that you won't look young.

• 24:28Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 24:29Speaker 02

  And Could you still find a way to look and feel good? Yes, if you could start to differentiate those.

• 24:38Dan Harris?

  That way lies guaranteed suffering. If your goal is to look young, you will run out of road. So it's okay to wanna look and feel good by whatever standards you choose. Hopefully, they're healthy standards. But as long as it's the standard isn't, I wanna look 30 years younger than I am or whatever.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  Right, and I don't care for the judging of other people because I don't know where the line for that is. So people assume as a gerontologist that I would say like, oh, don't do any. No, I'm not the boss of what other people do. Like, people are doing different things. If somebody wants to do Botox, if somebody wants to do surgery, if somebody wants to color their hair, especially women, there's a lot of judgment about that. I think being a woman, being an aging woman is hard enough as it is without having to prove that you don't color your hair or prove that you do. So it's gonna be different from everyone. And sometimes I'll see somebody with a lot of plastic surgery and it looks to me like a little like scary.

• 25:43Speaker 02

  Then I have to talk to myself to say, shut up. That's how she's doing it. You know what? That's her way and we're gonna do this path a different way because there isn't a right and wrong. Those of you who are thinking, yes, there is. Be natural. You need to just be completely natural. Oh, so then you don't, you're not okay with lipstick? Oh, you're not okay with a haircut? Like, don't brush your hair? Like, where is the line? So that's why I think doing it for yourself but from a thoughtful place is probably gonna lead you on a better path than trying to stay young or having these absolutes of what a person can or cannot do on this journey.

• 26:25Dan Harris?

  I was talking about this. I've been very influenced by this woman whose name I drop a lot on the show, Evelyn Tribbley, who is one of the progenitors of intuitive eating. The idea of intuitive eating, as you're nodding your head, you already know what it is. But for the listener who may not know what it is, it's kind of like the anti-diet. Instead of following somebody's rules about what you should and shouldn't eat, you have a kind of backdrop of like a basic gentle understanding of what's healthy. But you then allow yourself to eat what you want, when you want it, with the caveat that you're tuning into what your body actually needs. So you're just learning to trust your own intuition about when and what to eat. And there's quite a bit of data to suggest that this is a healthy routine.

• 27:08Dan Harris?

  I've adopted it as my own. I don't take sides in the diet wars here. You should do you. This is just what's worked for me. And I was talking to Evelyn the other day and was complaining a little bit. I'm willing to complain to her more than I do in public, although I guess now I'm about to do it in public. Complaining to her a little bit about, you know, I work out a lot, but I still don't have the, I don't look the way I used to look when I worked out a lot in my 30s. My body just doesn't respond the same way. And I was asking like, what's a thing I can say to myself in the moment when I'm looking in the mirror, being like, yeah, like, why do you have such a paunch or whatever? And she said, when you look in the mirror, in that judgment spiral, just reframe it as like, look how far this thing has gotten me. You know, this meat sack has been around for 54 years.

• 27:52Dan Harris?

  I've dragged it all over the planet. I've mistreated it in many aspects of my life. And I can still work out and I can still walk and I can still, you know, work. And I found that to be really helpful in that, like, it just, I like those little moments of counter-programming.

• 28:08Speaker 02

  I think that's so important. And I was thinking intuitive aging, that would be such a good corollary.

• 28:15Dan Harris?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 28:16Speaker 02

  I, the other day, had my shirt inside out, as I do sometimes. And my girlfriend said, your shirt's inside out. Because I had a sports bra on, I thought, okay, I'm going to take my shirt off and switch it around. And as I did so, I know that I showed my... Pooch. And, you know, I'm like you, I'm 55 and there's no washboard there despite lots of exercise. And then I thought, if I saw someone else with that, I wouldn't like them less. I'd like them more. I would think, look at you, you're like me, you know, and these bodies, as you said, have been around for a long time. And they're not going to

• 28:58Speaker 02

  look like we see, because even the people we see don't look like that. And sometimes I run into celebrities, because I live near Los Angeles, and they don't look the way they look on social media, or on TV, or movies. I mean, nobody actually really looks just like that. So we're supposed to look a little bit different as we get older and get used to it. I love your thought.

• 29:24Dan Harris?

  I wish I could take credit for it. It's Evelyn's, per usual.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  I love Evelyn's thoughts.

• 29:31Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Dr. Carey talks about the concept of Joyspan, four core habits for aging well, three critical factors for continued growth, how to diversify your social portfolio, and much more.

• 29:51Speaker 03

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• 30:21Speaker 04

  How do I recover from a friendship breakup? How come there's nowhere to hang out anymore? Why do I feel lonely when I can communicate with anyone and everyone through my phone? These are the questions that you're not alone in asking. And that's where our new podcast, Cornerpiece, comes in, to start small on life's biggest questions. I'm Taha, and with my friends Sabrina and Melissa, we're going to explore life's ungooglable questions on this new podcast with TED. Come hang out with us on Cornerpiece, with new episodes every other Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 30:56Dan Harris?

  I forced you to do a lot of chatter before we've actually gotten into the meat of your book, so let's talk about your book. It's called Joyspan. If you're open to it, I would love to hear you explain what the title refers to very specifically.

• 31:08Speaker 02

  Yes, so in the longevity world, we rightly talk about lifespan, how many years you live. And we understandably want to maximize that to 100 years, to 110 years, some 120 years. Then, more recently, we've expanded the notion to what we call health span. How many years you live in relatively good health? And the work of Peter Attia and a lot of people has moved health span to a common word. And I love it because we want to live as healthy as possible and do these things physically.

• 31:48Speaker 02

  Health can be defined to include both physical health and emotional or psychological health, but too often, it seems to be stuck on physical health. And there wasn't enough conversation because I would have patients who would live a long life, lifespan, in pretty darn good health, health span, and they were miserable. So that is just a long life of miserable. That's not great. That's suffering. And I don't want that, and I don't want that for anyone. So I started to think, how can we address the well-being component, the psychological, emotional, spiritual part to it?

• 32:29Speaker 02

  And I tried out different words with my patients. I tried out well-span, and people thought I was saying wealth-span, which is important too. But I landed on the word joy or Joyspan because joy, as defined by the American Psychological Association, is defined as well-being and satisfaction. And so I thought, yes, joy is not ecstasy. It's not smiley-smiley. It's well-being and satisfaction. And there is a great body of research, as you well know, of what practices contribute to well-being, to satisfaction with your life, or, as a more catchy term, to your Joyspan.

• 33:17Dan Harris?

  Well, let's talk about it because in the book, you've got these four areas where we can focus in order to increase our joy span. If you're cool with it, let's just kind of march through the four.

• 33:30Speaker 02

  Okay, so when I dug into the literature to find out, why do some of my patients thrive in longevity, even with this rough stuff that they carry? And my other people, it's awful. Like, what is this? There were thousands and thousands of variables from different research articles. And I was like, I can't work on or suggest thousands of things. That's daunting. So I spent years digging, like, how do they group? And happily, they do group into four categories. And I made sure to phrase them all as verbs, because they all take work. And so the easy thing is to look at somebody thriving at 95 and say,

• 34:14Speaker 02

  oh, man, she's got great genes. Or, wow, she's just so lucky. But what we found in the research, that genetics is less than 25% of it. In some studies, it's only 13% of it. So that means there are things that we can do. And I tried so hard to make these four areas a little catchy acronym. And I would spend hours and hours in coffee shop making it spell stuff. And it was artificial and hokey and lame. And then one day, in disgust, I said, I'm just going to have it be the words that they are. So, sorry. But you can remember them. It starts with a G and ends with a G, like, oh, G.

• 34:58Speaker 02

  And then CA is in the middle. And I'm from California, so that gives you a little something. But the first G, which is a verb, is grow. That humans are intended to grow. And the research shows us that people who consciously decide to keep growing, and it can be in many, many different ways, are people who tend to have that greater emotional stability and higher sense of well-being. And that means doing hard things, like not taking the foot off the pedal and saying, I'm not going to do anything hard now that I'm older. It means really sparking your intellectual curiosity.

• 35:41Speaker 02

  And so that's something in the book I have kind of a checklist to get you going, but it's only the start. That's the first one, grow.

• 35:48Dan Harris?

  Let's stay here for a second because I want to, I want to go deep on each of these.

• 35:51Speaker 02

  Yay.

• 35:52Dan Harris?

  So you said the first of the four starts with G and it's grow. In the book, you write that there are three critical factors for ongoing growth, self-acceptance, curiosity and humor. Can you dig in a little bit with these?

• 36:11Speaker 02

  Yes. So in order to grow, there has to be a level of self-acceptance. And that's hard, right? Because if we think like, oh, I'm just constantly not enough and I'm, oh, I'm not going to be able to do all this stuff. And look at this old fat belly with all these neck wrinkles. It doesn't put us in a place to have enough kind of headspace to think, how can I put some attention to growth? So like a first step is recognizing I am getting older. This is a new phase for me. And we talked a little bit about self-acceptance, about consciously countering

• 36:54Speaker 02

  that narrative in our head that we are failing because we're growing older or that it's not okay that we have wrinkles or that we need glasses. And so even just like something simple as looking in the mirror. And when your mind says, oh no, look at that, ugh. Just to say inside your mind like, yeah, who cares about that? You have so many other things, like just to try to counter the narrative that is pounding in our mind. So that's self-acceptance. I know the third one is humor and the second one is?

• 37:28Dan Harris?

  Curiosity.

• 37:29Speaker 02

  Curiosity. So curiosity is allowing yourself the space to think, hmm, now what? Am I a little bit interested in Bitcoin? Am I, gosh, would it be cool if I could grow a vegetable garden? Or wow, I know my next door neighbor has, is having some real troubles. Like, I wonder if I could go over and help it? Just to kind of open up that spark of curiosity, knowing that you might have 40 years ahead and would want to try to.

• 37:58Speaker 02

  Continue to grow, it takes that initial spark. And then the last is humor, which is with all this hard stuff, you gotta laugh. And I found in my patients and in the literature that humor plays a role in enabling us to have the bravery to move forward. And maybe you're gonna stink at something that you're gonna try, and that's a good thing. It's good to stink should be something that we take from this. You're going to be bad at things, and being bad at things is the first step in growing in things, and it's good for your mind, and it's good for your longevity, and it's good for your inflammation. So that was, the last one is humor.

• 38:39Dan Harris?

  Are there levers we can pull to get better at the humor piece?

• 38:43Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 38:43Dan Harris?

  I mean, I, I kinda think of it as a factory setting, but I'm curious.

• 38:47Speaker 02

  No, I don't think so. The research shows that hanging out with people who make you laugh, with making a decision to laugh out loud and say out loud. So this morning, it has cleared the air, but I put some eggs and cottage cheese and spinach on the stove, and then went upstairs to do something, and I burned it. So my whole house is filled with smoke, and so was the little fire detector was going off and making so much noise. I just decided, like, I have to laugh. Like, what, I'm doing my dream podcast, and it's gonna be all smoky in front of me. I can't figure out how to turn this fire alarm off. I have 10 minutes till this thing starts.

• 39:28Speaker 02

  And wiggling, wiggling, uh, came down, and I broke the whole thing. And I was like, nice, Carrie. Like, that's a choice right there, to decide I'm going to laugh, and I have unending material as a human, because humans screw up every day. You can laugh at those things. You can choose to watch funny movies. You can choose, especially in this environment where there is so much that is heartbreaking and scary and awful, that we can feed ourselves by also deciding to find the humor in the things that we can find the humor in.

• 40:04Dan Harris?

  Amen to that. On this issue of being open to growth perpetually as a way to increase your... Joyspan, specifically on learning, I was struck. My parents are both in assisted living. They're a lot younger than your mom. My mom's about to be 82. Or actually, by the time this posts, she may be 82. I go there once a month and teach some meditation. And I was sitting in the session before. My mom goes to like, she carries around the activity sheet and just goes from activity to activity all day long. And this woman was an editor at the New England Journal of Medicine and now plays bingo. And to watch her adjust to this new phase of her life has been really cool because she's really taken to it. I never, she was not super social as a younger person.

• 40:49Dan Harris?

  And now she's like the mayor of this assisted living facility and does all the stuff. And I was in the middle of the session before my meditation class and they were like doing some not very good slideshow for the codgers. And my mom was like totally engaged and asking questions and asking for more information. And I was so impressed. And that just speaks to, I think, what you're talking about of growth as a necessary contributor to Joyspan.

• 41:17Speaker 02

  And how incredible because she could just as easily poo-pooed this all as beneath her because she's the editor of New England Journal of Medicine. But she didn't, right? She decided, I'm going to jump in. I'm going to do this phase, which is a choice of reduced suffering because you're going with it.

• 41:37Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 41:37Speaker 02

  That's my hope for myself is that I would follow your mom's path of saying, and I get to this too, is how can I adapt to try to make the most of this and continue to grow? And sometimes the growth is things that we would see, but sometimes it isn't. I have a patient, for example, who is very well regarded businessman. And he made a realization that he has never been actual real listener. He is a person who imparts his wisdom and leadership and he's not a big listener. And he decided like, that's going to be my growth. I'm going to learn to listen because I never actually learned that. And so the act of shutting the heck up was his growth.

• 42:19Speaker 02

  And interestingly, his kids and grandkids and people he's around now flock to him. Because I think we all crave being authentically listened to. And that gave me hope. I thought, gosh, I could be a better listener. And that's something I continue to grow on all lifelong.

• 42:36Dan Harris?

  Yes. I mean, these stories about people who pick something up late in life or make a change late in life are, there's a reason why they're so galvanizing, so exciting. So my friend of mine, two days before this interview, sent me an article about a woman who started powerlifting in her 60s. That was really just achieving some virality, the article was. And, you know, I found it incredibly exciting to read. Yeah, it's just a liberating notion that you can make substantial changes at any point.

• 43:05Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I read one recently. It's a man who had a very high position in the military. And when he retired, he found that there were a real lack of bus drivers after COVID. And so he thought, well, I'll just try it out. I don't know if I would really do that. And so he started driving the bus and he started impacting each of the children. And then he changed it. So instead of going to the bus wash every Saturday, he held a bus wash where all the children and the families would come and wash the bus. Well, he's really changing lives in a way that he actually never had before. And that, you know, you store these things. You think, wow, it's not an anomaly to continue to grow. It is what humans do when they flourish.

• 43:50Dan Harris?

  Yes. My nanny growing up, Juanita, she's no longer with us. After we got into high school and we didn't need a nanny anymore, she moved to Maine and became a school bus driver for students with special needs. And every kid who got on the bus every morning got their own hug from Juanita.

• 44:10Speaker 02

  Wow. Wow. And talk about a win-win-win.

• 44:14Dan Harris?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 44:15Speaker 02

  For the parents, for her, for those children.

• 44:19Dan Harris?

  Yes. She also used to smack us with a spatula. So, you know, it wasn't all perfect.

• 44:24Speaker 02

  So did my mom. So, so there's that.

• 44:29Dan Harris?

  Just one little factual point on my mom. She was not the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. She was an editor, but she was an eminent physician at Harvard for many, many decades. And it's very cool to watch her adapt to her life as a resident of a assisted living facility.

• 44:45Speaker 02

  As the mayor.

• 44:47Dan Harris?

  As the mayor, yes. So, okay, there are four ways to increase your joy span. We've talked about one, which is growth. The second is connect. Please say more.

• 44:58Speaker 02

  So, an abundant amount of research, much coming out of Harvard in the longitudinal study, that was an 85 year study of what really were the biggies in a long life well lived and satisfaction with life, or what I'm calling joy span. And what they found, it was connection, the degree to which people felt that they had meaningful relationships. And sometimes, some of us who like to be alone, I am one, you can think, oh, well, not me. I don't really need anybody. I'm just happy just to chill by myself. It's actually, when you dig into the research, it's all of us have a need for human connection,

• 45:42Speaker 02

  even though it's expressed a little bit differently. And the problem is, as we get older, my mom, at 96, has lost, I'd say 99% of her friends have passed away. So, one of the things we talk about is diversifying your social portfolio in the same way you diversify your financial portfolio, so that you don't have all your eggs in one basket. So, that is making younger friends. And that requires you to recognize how much you have to offer, because sometimes we say, oh, gosh, you know, now I'm 55, I don't know if a 30 year old would want to hang out with me. And actually, there's so much benefit to hanging out with people who walk in front of you and...

• 46:27Speaker 02

  It's usually not the younger person who is saying, I don't want to hang out. It's often the older person putting these limits on themselves. So that's one step of it is diversifying. If you just have one best friend and then they die of cancer, you're in worse shape than loving your best friend, of course, but also thinking, I'm going to have multiple friends. And then when you think, how do I do that? I call that being that friend. And that friend is the one who picks up the phone, who does the text, who makes the plan, who says, can I drive you to your chemo appointment? Who remembers that it was two years ago today that your dad died? Who has a list of things? So it takes quite a bit of proactive.

• 47:11Speaker 02

  And when my patients come to me and say they are lonely, I, of course, I take it very seriously because loneliness is as dangerous to our health as smoking 14 cigarettes a day. And I ask them, tell me what you're doing in terms of reaching out. And they'll say, well, nobody's reaching out to me. Nobody's including me. That's why I'm lonely. And so then we always have to turn it around and try to think, what can you do? So if your mobility is limited, a text is a way to work. If you don't text because your eyesight is limited, you know, there are phones and solutions where people can go next door and knock on the door and say, hey, I picked some lemons. Or when you go to the coffee shop,

• 47:55Speaker 02

  do you know the name of the person who is serving the coffee? Because over time, those connections, those micro connections are what enable us to build this social portfolio that will sustain us for these very long lives.

• 48:10Dan Harris?

  Yeah, and your comments there seem to be directed toward your gerontology patients, but this is massively important at any age. And if you want to live a long, healthy, happy life, you need friends. And that's true for introverts. You just need fewer friends, or you may just need fewer friends. So it's just a key thing to work on. I'll say just, I feel like I may have maybe doing too much talking in this episode, but I'll say one last little anecdotal thing here, which is that one area of growth for me in my 50s has been I really have become the guy who organizes stuff. I never was that guy, would go to your party, but I never organized stuff. So now like I organize a A little meditation retreat for some friends every year, two actually.

• 48:54Dan Harris?

  And then I have three or four recurring dinner groups. And two of them, I'm like, I really am like, I set up the WhatsApp chat and I book the table and I do the headcount. And I have to say, I get enormous amount of enjoyment out of it. I'm surprised how much I like it. It's also a pain in the ass. And like you see, when you're organizing a thing, people are kind of rude. And I realize how rude I've been in the past. It's like, oh, they're going to bail out the last minute or they don't give you an RSVP, you know, so you can't get a headcount. So I can find myself getting a little resentful at times. And yet it doesn't outweigh how good it has been for me and knowing that it's doing a lot of good for the other people.

• 49:33Speaker 02

  I couldn't agree more. And the earlier we start, the better. And it is a pain in the rear and you kind of get uncomfortable because you're putting yourself out there.

• 49:41Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 49:42Speaker 02

  As some girls were talking about their book group. And I had this realization like, I love books and I'm not in a book group. So I reached out to them and I said, oh, I love books. Maybe, you know, I could be in that book group. And they're great girls and but they just, they're women. But they said, oh my, we made this pact that was going to only be the same group and that we're going to travel with that group because it's really well established, which I understand. But then I needed to do the next step, which is to make my own book club. So I called it the no NBD, no big deal book club. And it's not even required that you read the book. You could just come and we'll never judge you. And we're on about our third meeting. I thought, why didn't I do this 10 years ago?

• 50:24Speaker 02

  Why didn't I do this at 45 or 35 or 25? I, I too was a person who waited to be included. And then maybe, like you said, I wouldn't show up or wouldn't respond. So yeah, I was one of the annoying people, but I'm trying to move to the other side.

• 50:41Dan Harris?

  Well, come on in. The water is lukewarm.

• 50:47Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Dr. Carey talks about some coping strategies for adapting in the face of change, the strengths that will come with age for most of us, and some tools that you can utilize when your joy dips.

• 51:07Speaker 03

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• 51:38Dan Harris?

  The next skill set for increasing joy spans, we've talked about growth, talked about connection. The next is adapt. Please say more.

• 51:48Speaker 02

  So the recognition and the realism that there will be changes on this long life journey if you live a long life. And so rather than we're just denying aging, we're just, don't think about it. Don't ever think about it. I had somebody the other day tell me, I was watching your mom who lives home alone at 96 and I just can't understand why, you know, she said she needs to use a walker because I'm not going to ever do that because my legs are going to always stay so strong because I do leg exercises. And I had to say, like, I think you really haven't been around older people quite enough because there are changes.

• 52:29Speaker 02

  And you can do the whole checklist of all the wonderful things and every burpee and every green drink and all the stuff. And still there will be changes. A diagnosis you didn't expect, or maybe macular degeneration, or maybe your partner dies. In my case, when I was writing and researching about adaptation, using some research from Israel about measuring how adaptable you are, my middle daughter, who is 25, was diagnosed with a brain tumor.

• 53:01Dan Harris?

  Sorry.

• 53:02Speaker 02

  I was like, no, this is wrong. It could be me, it could be my 96-year-old mom, it could be my 57-year-old husband, but wait, my daughter? I hadn't factored in that that could happen. But she's doing well and she's in medical school and every six months we're doing an MRI. But it's not my first choice, but also it made me realize like, yes, there is going to be stuff in this journey. I guarantee it. And when your stuff comes, it's how you respond, how you adapt, how you get your mind around it. The work that takes to adapt to that which you didn't want really impacts the quality of your life.

• 53:45Speaker 02

  So my patients who are just consistently pissed off about something happening, it's a choice to stay forever mad and shaking our fist at that thing. Like, it's not fair that my kid has this. Or I can't believe I had all these plans to travel with my husband and then he passed away suddenly, like all, all these things. So adapting, it's not that it's easy, but it is possible and we know it's possible because I see it all day, every day with people of all ages.

• 54:17Dan Harris?

  So in the book, you talk about some ways to boost our ability to cope, which is a cousin, if not a synonym with adapt. And you list some internal strategies and some external strategies. Can you just pick a few and walk us through them?

• 54:32Speaker 02

  Sure. I call these the coping strategies toolbox. And some are things we do inside of ourselves and some are things that we reach out. So I'll give you just a couple of examples. An internal coping strategy that many people find helpful is even just journaling to try to process the emotions. And in the book, I list out maybe about 10 different options. And then you can check off, have I tried this? Was it even helpful? Because some things are helpful for some people. Another internal strategy is something you might know a little bit about, which is to meditate. That is one that I often fall off of. And then when I get back to it, I think, oh, my goodness, I have resources.

• 55:14Speaker 02

  Internally, that I didn't know I had because this incredible gift called meditation. Something that my mom and I both do is a gratitude practice where every single day we write down three things in a journal that we're grateful for. And she, in her book, is up to 590 items. And she'll flip through those items on days that she's feeling blue. And sometimes it's just as simple as, I'm grateful I have a bed. I'm grateful I have a pillow. I get to have my cup of coffee. I get to take a shower. So then if we turn to the external coping strategies, seeking support from friends and family and letting them in to know that I am having a hard time with this.

• 55:58Speaker 02

  I am a person who loved to walk, and now I can't walk. And I am mad and frustrated and disappointed, and I didn't expect this to be my thing. And I hate this. Let's talk about it. And that can be really helpful because they also have a thing. And you guys can talk about those things. Sometimes your friends don't know what to say. And so consulting a therapist or a counselor can be really helpful. And there are therapists and counselors who can help at every age. And that includes in our later years. There's gero psychologists and gero psychiatrists who do absolutely incredible work. And I'll just name one more external coping strategies.

• 56:41Speaker 02

  One is thinking about not marinating as much in that thing that is rough, that you're needing to adapt to, and consciously trying to go to somebody else and what their thing is. And so when my daughter was diagnosed with that brain tumor, all I could hear was vestibular schwannoma. It was just like my walking thing. And it was all about me. And then I tried this to try to look up. And I looked over at my friend who had lost a child. And I said, I, first of all, I'm so sorry that when you were going through this, I wasn't there.

• 57:22Speaker 02

  And second of all, I want to think about you and learn from you and be with you now. And getting my focus away from my own problems and onto somebody else made a huge shift. And I think maybe good for her, too.

• 57:39Dan Harris?

  One of my, perhaps, two glib.

• 57:43Dan Harris?

  Taglines is, you know, the view is so much better when you pull your head out of your ass. And to be clear, this is not about catastrophic altruism or people pleasing. It's more that it just feels really good. We're wired. We survived as a species because of our capacity to cooperate. And so if you can just get out of your own stuff and be useful to somebody else, it really is elevating.

• 58:07Speaker 02

  It saved me. I watch it a lot with people of all ages where you all of a sudden, like you said, you pull your head out and you're like, what? Other people have stuff too, you know? Yeah.

• 58:19Dan Harris?

  Okay, so the fourth.

• 58:21Speaker 02

  So we're at the fourth. And so you know, it started with a G, so it's going to end with a G. And this one is give. And that gets out nothing new, the age old, from all these different philosophies and practices and religions and learnings of the ability to give of yourself really impacts how you will experience your longevity and indeed how you will experience your life. And so often when people think about legacy, they're thinking about giving money. And for most of us, money isn't the thing that we have.

• 59:03Speaker 02

  So that's why I think it's more apt to think about giving of yourself and thinking of ways you can look for needs and then step in and fill them. And our internalized ageism sometimes prevents that. So we think, man, you know, here I am, I'm 87. What do I have to give? And that's such a shame because the world has what older you brings. And so in this world where everyone's saying, look at me, look at me, look at me, myself included with having just done a book tour, the fact that humility matters and that it can get stronger as we get older.

• 59:44Speaker 02

  And if I have an 87 year old come to me and with their presence and with their words remind me. About what humility does and the power of it, I need that. So get out of your way and think, I do have what the world needs and I'm going to offer it. And it's not going to land every time. So an example recently, I have a friend who I think is about eighty four. And her neighbor has four young children and she's a single mother. So my friend said, I would love to, because I had four children as a single mother. I'd love to go and knock on the neighbor's door and say, at dinnertime, if it's helpful to you,

• 1:00:29Speaker 02

  maybe I could hold or entertain some of the kids so that you could cook. And I encouraged her because that's, I would have loved that. And this woman practically closed the door on her face. And so it was like, oh, God, that didn't work. But then we said, okay, it was such a good thought. That just wasn't the right one. We got to kiss some frogs. Let's find it. And she did, she found another, this was a single father who is an incredible guy. And he has two kids and she with gusto and bravery offered it. And now she goes over every Tuesday and Thursday. And she's there with the kids while he's putting dinner together and they have this beautiful friendship.

• 1:01:12Speaker 02

  And it's really giving of herself with what she has, which is her time and her desire to give.

• 1:01:18Dan Harris?

  And expertise, actually.

• 1:01:20Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:01:21Dan Harris?

  So you made a nod to the fact that some people may have a whole story about like, I don't know what to give. You in the book have a, so four steps for cultivating this habit of giving. I'll just say them all out loud and you can just pick up on whichever one you want to say more on, if not all of them. The first is to like, find what sparks you, like reflect on what your passions and interests are. The second is to brainstorm ways to use that spark. The third is to imagine the future you, you know, like your older self and what they're doing and how they're giving. And the fourth is to try out some form of giving, to just do some experiments. Do I have that right? And if so, like anything more to add?

• 1:02:04Speaker 02

  You have it right. And I wanted to expand on the one that is imagining this best possible future you. So often we forget to continue to. Dream about the best possible. So it does require you picturing, wow, I see myself. I'm at the whatever, doing this. I'm like, go ahead and dream it first. And then we, as humans, naturally work toward that. So really picture yourself, let's say, at 90 years old. And what do you look like? What are you doing? But do it the best possible version. Because I think sometimes we do the opposite. We imagine this old spooky, decrepit, you know,

• 1:02:48Speaker 02

  poop in our pants version. And I don't think that's helpful. I think that, yeah, you then kind of are inadvertently working toward that. But this 98-year-old Dan doing his thing, organizing his meditation groups, right? Like, really picture that, how you're gonna do it.

• 1:03:07Dan Harris?

  This is a move I've made several times throughout the course of this conversation. But you, given your training, you really do, I think, focus, quite rightly, many of your comments toward your patient population. And I just want to say that if you have an altruistic mindset, which again is not people pleasing, and it is not giving away all of your shit and leaving yourself with nothing. But just as the great meditation teacher and author, Ram Dass, no longer with us, wrote a book or co-authored a book called How Can I Help? If you use that as just a lens through which you see the world, and look, you're not always gonna be in that mindset. Sometimes you just don't want to help.

• 1:03:51Dan Harris?

  You need to set boundaries, and that's fine. But just more often than not, if your mindset is, how can I help? There's a lot of data to show that that will improve your life at any age.

• 1:04:03Speaker 02

  Absolutely. At every single age, and I love that simple, like, how can I help? I love Eleanor Roosevelt, who said, "When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die." And there is research out of UCLA, Stephen Cole, where he looked at how people who feel that they have a sense of purpose, age have different epigenetics than those who don't. And by that, I mean how genes are expressed in terms of inflammation and antiviral load are impacted when you feel that there is something for you to do or give of yourself. And he didn't expect that. And so they wrote about it in the New York Times.

• 1:04:48Speaker 02

  And I remember thinking, look at that. I mean, if purpose and giving was a drug, we would all be clamoring for it. And yet it is something that is within our reach, that can be done, but takes work. It doesn't just happen.

• 1:05:06Dan Harris?

  The penultimate chapter of your book is called Filling Your Joy Tank. You talk about a couple of things in here that are interesting to me. One, you kind of referenced this earlier, but one way to fill your joy tank is to reflect on the things, the strengths that come with age. Again, you did reference this earlier, but can you just say a little bit more about the good stuff that inevitably accrues to us as we get older?

• 1:05:31Speaker 02

  Yes, I like to talk about it because you don't ever hear about it. And there's no money in it. I can attest to that. So the, one of the things that research shows gets better as you get older is that you don't care quite as much what other people think about you. And that can be really liberating. And we could, and I've asked my patients who are ahead of me, like, does this continue? This liberation that I have, like, oh, well, I have crap on my teeth. I don't, that doesn't kill me anymore like they did when I was a teenager. And people say, yes, yes, I have continued to be less encumbered by what other people think about me, and it feels great. Other things that it shows that are emotional stability,

• 1:06:16Speaker 02

  so we don't get as rocked about things as we used to. And that continues as we get older and older to be, just have this nice not so up and not so down place to be. Other things are our appreciation of our friendships, our appreciation of nature, and

• 1:06:37Speaker 02

  Art and music and stillness and recognizing the collective unity of things that sometimes in our younger years, we're so identified with being a separate self, achieving in accolades and trying to make ourselves enough. And when we get older, we can have a tendency to recognize we're okay as we are and we don't need to keep somehow proving that we're okay because we can start to say, yeah, this is me. There's some literature showing that we become more ourselves as we get older. And then the question is, is that a good thing or a bad thing? And so by starting this stuff early, that's the way to make

• 1:07:21Speaker 02

  it a good thing to become more like yourself as you get older.

• 1:07:26Dan Harris?

  My Uncle Peter was asked on his 60th birthday how he felt and he said, off the hook. And I really like that. You know, it's like he didn't feel like he had so much to prove at that point.

• 1:07:36Speaker 02

  That would be a great name of a book, Off the Hook.

• 1:07:40Dan Harris?

  And it strikes me that we can pull forward the naturally occurring benefits of age if we work on it.

• 1:07:49Speaker 02

  Yes, it doesn't just happen. Like it's not just not like, oh, yay. I'm, you know, I have met plenty of older people who are not wise. So it's not a natural thing. But with intention and effort, in the same way that we work on our physical body using cardiovascular strength training, flexibility and agility training, we can work on our inside self, which is about growing and connecting and adapting and giving. And it just gives us a little bit of a vocabulary to think, hmm, with this Joyspan matrix, where am I strong right now? Where am I not strong right now? And you might think, huh, yeah, actually,

• 1:08:31Speaker 02

  I am connecting and I'm adapting to this thing and I'm giving over here through my volunteer. But man, I don't actually have a grow right now. What would it be like? What would be something that I might add or subtract that would enable me to grow as a person? So.

• 1:08:51Dan Harris?

  And then toward the end of the book, you talk about what happens when your joy span dips. And there's some science behind why this inevitably happens, even if we're going whole hog on all four aspects of the joy span matrix.

• 1:09:06Speaker 02

  Yes, I call it when your joy span dips because it is when, not if. So, these are the things that can cause dips and will cause dips. You feel frustrated by health setbacks. You feel left out or disconnected. You feel discounted by society. Like, people look at me differently now that I'm in my 80s or 90s. It could also be that you feel like a burden. Maybe you can have some care needs and people are helping you and it doesn't feel very good to be helped when you've always been the one to pride yourself on being the helper. So, there are some very real reasons I'm feeling heartbroken, right?

• 1:09:48Speaker 02

  You know, the death of somebody that you love, a friend or a partner. Or maybe you feel like the best days of life are behind you. So, when these things happen, and they will, things that we can do is things like finding role models, like looking to people who have experienced these same kinds of things. How did they walk with it? Focusing on things that are possibilities rather than everything being like consuming yourself with the limitations. And these small, meaningful steps toward recognizing that you can, you're not just a victim to these changes and that you can be making a little change that impact what

• 1:10:33Speaker 02

  this period of life is gonna look like. Things like cultivating gratitude and self-compassion. So, sometimes I'll even talk out loud to myself when I'm going through something rough and I'll say, even out loud, like, "Well, you did your best," or, "That's okay, Care." I'll call myself Care, like, "That's okay, Care." Just to try to, and you've heard this before, is to be as civil to ourselves as we are to other people. Because sometimes our inner voice is a real bitch. And like countering that and saying, you know, "Yeah, that was rough and you gave it your best," or, "Well, at least that's a laugh," or, "Maybe I'll do that differently next time."

• 1:11:17Dan Harris?

  Another evidence-based practice, I can't say this enough, self-compassion, ton of evidence. It's not letting yourself off the hook. It is moving from an inner drill sergeant to an inner coach. Coach doesn't let you off the hook. He or she will point out when you've made mistakes, they're just not jerks about it. And you can do that for yourself. And one of the ways to do it, care just demonstrated, which is literally just talking to yourself the way you would talk to a good friend. And it's massively, massively helpful. As you know, because you've listened to this show, I end by asking two questions. One is, is there something you were hoping that we would get to that we haven't?

• 1:11:57Speaker 02

  Yes, I just want people to remember that they can actively reshape, revolutionize what it is to be old. Because I think most people go, yeah, the way that we're doing old isn't right. The way we treat older people isn't right. The way that we change it is by our road. And I don't think it's ever going to be a 20-year-old saying like, aha, I see the value of aging. I think it's going to be people stepping in. And when people say, oh, my gosh, you don't even look 75. You could say, this is what 75 looks like. I think that we can, in the same way that we used to say things like that women couldn't

• 1:12:39Speaker 02

  run businesses because they were too emotional, we have proven that is baloney. And this whole thing that old people don't have value, or that are less than, or gross, or scary, or irrelevant, it isn't true. And it is very harmful to ourselves and to society. So I call it the joy span legacy. Let's try to change the way that we perceive our own aging so that the people who follow us can have a different path to take. And what a world that would be if we could like step into old being like, yeah, I'm old. Bring it.

• 1:13:20Dan Harris?

  Right, you frame it that way of like, it's less about some rah rah thing for myself, but it's more about creating a world where my son can age happily. It's very motivating.

• 1:13:35Speaker 02

  It is, and it is possible. And just because for listeners, if you parent died early, it doesn't mean that you're going to die early. Or if your parent lived with dementia, it doesn't mean you're going to have it. And conversely, like for me, my mom had this, she really worked hard on her joy span. She did, does all these things. It doesn't mean that I'm automatically going to live this really long life or enjoy a long joy span. That each of us are contributing to our path. And so it's just not default. Because I have a few friends who say like, my mom died at 52. I don't even really need to think about getting older because I'm probably not going to get older.

• 1:14:20Speaker 02

  And that's actually a fallacy. It doesn't mean your parents' experience is your experience.

• 1:14:26Dan Harris?

  Final question, can you just remind everybody of the name of your book? And also, please just plug anything and everything that you're working on.

• 1:14:34Speaker 02

  That is so nice. So it is called Joyspan and it is sold everywhere. And I would be so grateful. And I want to tell the listeners that I put the workbook inside the book. Like you can mark it up. But I didn't do another workbook. But all these kind of scam artist AI things did. And so there are tons of Joyspan workbooks that have nothing to do with me. So I just want you to save your money and know that there's no workbook. It's just the book. And if you're a person who likes to listen to things on Audible, I read it on Audible. I can't listen to it, but other people say that they can listen to it. So that's a good thing.

• 1:15:19Speaker 02

  And then sometimes because it's a workbook, some people are doing both of those so that they can mark it up. And it's for any age. You're not too young for it. And it's a polite gift to give to somebody who on a big birthday, if they're turning 60 or 70, or because it isn't saying like, oh, this is a book called You Are Old. This is a book of joy span, like lifespan and health span. So it can make a nice gift. And I am not selling anything except the book, but I do have a website. If you want it, I put some stuff on there, drkerryburnight.com. And I do kind of do a lot of Instagram because I've learned that by turning the camera on my 96 year old mom, we can really show the

• 1:16:03Speaker 02

  learning points as opposed to, and we have somewhere like six million people watch her do things. And that has been funny for us. And we don't sell anything on that either. We just do it because it's fun. And that Instagram is the underscore gerontologist. If you'd like to follow that. And I'm just really so grateful that we're talking about aging. That's my absolute dream. Talk about it. Think about it. Be proactive about it. And know that old is not a bad word. And staying young is not actually a real thing.

• 1:16:40Dan Harris?

  Well said. Dr. Kerry Burnett, thank you very much.

• 1:16:45Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:16:51Dan Harris?

  Thanks again to Dr. Kerry Burnett. That conversation made me feel much better about many things. Don't forget, this episode comes with a custom meditation to help you deal with the nonnegotiable fact of change. That comes from our teacher of the month, Cristiano Wolf. If you sign up at danharris.com, you'll get our meditations that come with each of our Monday, Wednesday episodes. You'll also get access to our weekly live meditation and Q and A sessions. Cristiano will be doing our next one tomorrow at four Eastern. We do these every Tuesday at four. Also, don't forget the two events I've got coming up. If you want to come meditate with me in person, New York City on the 18th with the great comedian Pete Holmes, and then on the 23rd, a little event at Troutbeck, the hotel

• 1:17:36Dan Harris?

  in the Hudson Valley. Links in the show notes. Finally, thank you to everybody who works so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vassili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

• 1:18:07Speaker 05

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