Life Reimagined: The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife

Choose where to invest your energy, and do so intentionally, because the clearest path to a robust midlife is purposeful engagement.

Lonely people were not faking their symptoms. Their own bodies were reacting to loneliness at a cellular level, trying to nudge them to make friends and get back into the warm, safe center of the herd.

At the bottom of every dilemma, he says, is fear, and the brain always prefers the bird in the hand to venturing into the bush, even if you are clutching a scrawny black crow.

Of Post-Traumatic Growth: Rich Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun coined the term in 1995, when they noticed that some people did not recover from their traumatic experiences in a typically resilient fashion. Rather than return to their set point, everything about them radically changed: their worldviews, their goals in life, their friendships. "It's not just bouncing back," Tedeschi explains. "Most people talk about that as resilience. We distinguish from resilience because this is transformative. " "The one thing that overwhelmingly predicts it is the extent to which you say, "My core beliefs were shaken,'" Calhoun adds. What kind of core beliefs? "The degree to which the world is just," Tedeschi says, "or that people are benevolent or that the future is something that you can control. Beliefs about, basically, how life works.

Carlo Strenger believes that for most people, changing course in midlife is not a luxury but an “existential necessity.

In fact, people with little purpose were two and a half times more likely to develop dementia than those with a mission.

The two researchers collaborated on a pilot study.32 What they found was that loneliness reprogrammed a person’s genes in the same way that fear of being outed altered the genes of closeted men. Loneliness changes the immune system. Specifically, feeling isolated turns on genes for inflammation—which are the first responders to tissue damage or bacterial threats—and it puts the brakes on genes that stop inflammation

Every idea in this book runs against our natural tendency to want to relax, take it easy, reward ourselves for decades of work and childrearing. Our default mode at midlife is entropy. The default is not destiny, and on this, the research is unequivocal: for every fork in the road, you are almost invariably better off making the harder choice. Harder in the moment, that is, but easier over the years, as your body and mind remain strong. By resisting entropy, but pushing through the inertia the beckons us to rest a little longer, to slow down just a notch, until your life has narrowed to a pinprick – by resisting those forces, you dramatically up the odds that your life will be rich to your final breath, deeply entwined with family and friends, engaged in intellectual pursuits, and infused with a purpose that extends beyond yourself. Yes, it's hard. Yes, it's worth it.

Your thoughts and attitudes today chart your destiny tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that.

Our brains resist change, they rail against it, our amygdala will always want the safe bet. But are the obstacles truly insurmountable? Is it a brick wall? Or is it a sliding door, which, once you decide to approach it, begins to swish open? Because even though our brains prefer safety in the short run, in the long run they crave meaning, challenge, and novelty.

The people who seem happiest are the people who feel like they’re able to express aspects of themselves that feel vital to them, that make them feel alive. It’s not any particular path you have to take, it’s being able to express the core of who you are.

...what predicts fulfillment at the end of life? ..."Engagement," he said instantly. "Maintaining engagement with the world." ..."When we think about older people who are vital, it's often because they're still thinking and the world and the future. They're keeping up with current events. They're excited to tell you about the book they've read. They're thrilled about the way the garden is coming in this year. They're engaged." Robert Waldinger with BBH

That is the beauty and terror of midlife...one day...I began to wonder: Can I tweak my script? Is it possible to play up the core elements of my identity in my own life that I glimpsed as early as kindergarten - curiosity and listening, telling stories and using those skills to entice people into caring about big ideas - and eliminate the parts I no longer had the desire or energy to do? And how on earth do I do that? ...Part of midlife's challenge is to closely examine the old script - the one that family and society writes for you, the one in which you are meeting everyone else's expectations - and see if it needs revision. The new script is tailored to your core identity - your own talents, passions, and personality - and these should shape your goals. For some, this means a major revision...For others, it means rechanneling one's energies just a few degrees into something that gives them meaning and verve.

There are no periods, no paragraphs, there’s no punctuation,” Utzschneider said. “There’s no structure to give us a sense of order.

Develop thought patterns, particularly purpose in life, now, in one’s forties, fifties, and sixties. Find a purpose beyond your career—because you will one day retire.

The men and women who scored highest on conscientiousness—that is, who control their impulses, who were dependable and goal-oriented—had 89 percent lower risk of developing symptoms of Alzheimer’s than the least conscientious people.

Fully a third of people who, as autopsies indicate, have the disease show no cognitive decline, no evidence of Alzheimer’s.1 At first, other scientists raised their eyebrows; now, after some five hundred autopsies, the finding is beyond dispute. Bennett tells me that he and his colleagues are approaching Alzheimer’s disease sideways. “Most of the world is focused on ‘How do we stop that pathology from developing, or how do we reverse it or get it out of your brain?’” he says. “We’re interested in those questions, too. But on the flip side, let’s assume for the moment that it’s going to happen. Then how do you build a better brain so that despite the accumulation

researchers (with Ph.D.’s). “It turns out that if you get dementia, you’ll get it later, but you’ll also progress a little bit more rapidly” at the end, Bennett adds.

In general, the older you are, the more adept you are at managing your emotions. Compared with young people, middle-aged and especially older people tend to look at the glass half-full, and they seem to bounce back from adversity more quickly.

We watch our bodies and our brains slow down as younger bodies and brains zip past us, and we just accept it, not realizing there is a whole world offering to sharpen and improve us. We simply need to look for it.