HEALTHY AGING AND INTENTIONALITY

To live healthily and to age healthily, you have to have something to live for. Viktor Frankl discovered that in the concentration camp. He noted that those who had something or someone to live for were able to live longer and better than those who did not. Without something or someone to live for, they tended to give up, to become depressed, and their body became less able to handle the stresses of concentration life.

When you have a purpose to live for—what you are activating is your intentionality. That’s the part of your brain, your pre-frontal cortex, that enables you to live forward, directing you to the values and purposes that give you energy and motivation. This shouts at us, “Never retire!” Retirement, as we have learned from medical science, is bad for your health, it undermines your well-being and especially the ability to age with energy and vitality.

A European study that tracked 16,827 Greek men and women for 12 years found that those who retired early had a 51 percent higher mortality rate than those who kept working. A study that followed 3,500 Shell Oil employees found that those who retired at 55 were twice as likely to die during the next ten years as those of the same age who continued to work. (The Longevity Revolution, Public Affairs, 2008).

The solution is to use your intentionality to set continual purposes that will give you a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Intentionality is your internal capacity to set intentions, that is, to set goals that you then strive for. Once you stop striving for something, your whole system becomes de-activated and you get old. Do that and now you have nothing to live for.

Therefore, long before you reach “retirement age” (what a toxic phrase!), establish goals and purposes that get you out of bed and give you a reason to exert your energy. Use your intentionality to set goals that will give you direction into your future. Set goals which will enable you to live for something that goes beyond yourself, that transcends just you and yours. Those who fail to do this end up merely “trying to stay busy” and the statistics about life after retirement is that people live just a few years and then die. Human nature requires that we live for something— something big enough and bold enough to activate our mind-body-emotion system.

A growing body of research today suggests that is it meaning and purpose that enables us to age healthily. “A 2005 study that followed 12,650 middle-aged Hungarians found that those who felt their lives had meaning had significant lower rates of cancer and heart disease than did those who didn’t feel this way.” Another study of centenarians noted a common trait, namely, “having a

reason to get out of bed.”

Now intentionality tends to play a significant role in people who have a sense of the spiritual. Herold G. Koenig, M.D. at Duke University Medical Center writes, “People who feel their life is part of a larger plan and are guided by their spiritual values have stronger immune systems, lower blood pressure, a lower risk of heart attack and cancer, and heal faster and live longer.”

A 1999 study published in the journal Demography tracked 20,000 Americans. They found that those who regularly attended church lived an average of 7 years longer than those who did not and 14 years longer for Black people. The reason? It gave their life meaning.