There are habits and there are habits.
Let me start with the habits that can either cut down your life’s timeline or extend it.
After monitoring nearly 5,000 adults for 20 years, researchers have come to this conclusion: four common bad habits combined—smoking, drinking too much, inactivity and poor diet—can age you by 12 years!
These findings provide another sobering reason to drop those four bad habits.
On the other hand, good healthy habits can add nearly 15 years to your life expectancy! That’s from a study done in 2021 by Harvard researchers. The healthier the lifestyle, the greater the increase in life expectancy.
Let us set aside these hard data for a while and reflect on our personal experiences, at least from my own.
The first time I met some friends and ex-schoolmates after many years of not seeing them, I was aghast. They looked much older than me and yet we’re about the same age. It was like they were afflicted with a case of belated progeria, which is a genetic disorder that causes people to age rapidly, starting in their first two years of life.
Think about it this way. Suppose you were given money to spend on a one-week holiday in a resort, but in just the first two days, you’ve used it all up and you’re forced to pack up and end the holiday. Or you’re watching a movie and before you know it you’re at the end sequence already, with a missing middle sequence. WTF you say.
My friends’ bad habits have put their life’s lifeline on fast-forward. Still, they’re lucky to be still alive.
Others were not so lucky. R. died of cancer of the liver in his mid-forties. Just two weeks ago, a text message told me a young video director and a friend of mine had died of a heart attack. He was in his early 50s. I was also surprised to learn that at least 2 ex-classmates in high school have passed away when we could be enjoying each other’s company now.
Without bragging, I am 70 years old but I can pass for a 60-year-old man. Lots of people are surprised when I tell them my age. They have this expectation of a 70-year-old man as feeble, wrinkled, unable to walk without a cane and all that.
Anyway, what’s my secret? Nothing special. It’s simply because I never smoked, drank, or over ate. My life’s mantra is “moderation” in everything, including moderation, as one Buddhist monk says.
Actually, we know all this. But we still fall into the trap of bad habits. We are good at rationalizing and denying. Consider the case of J. who is at least 15 years younger than me. I know for a fact that he used to be a chain smoker before he suffered a stroke three years ago. For a long while, he had a blood pressure of 179/100 and when told to stop smoking he just laughed it off and bragged that his heavy smoking was what made his life worth living. He even scoffed at us for taking maintenance medicines. He thought his youth would immunize him from the afflictions of the elderly. I wonder what he’s now thinking, when half-paralyzed, he can no longer drive his car, which he loves more than his late wife.
But not everything about habits is bad news.
Let us now talk about what I call “habits of the heart,” taken from the title of a book I read many years ago. These are emotional dispositions designed to help people develop their social-emotional intelligence.
I know senior colleagues who have developed good habits of the heart during the long pandemic lockdowns.
They not only stopped smoking and drinking, they have become walk-a-holic. They may not admit it but they have become plantitos, goaded by their plantita wives.
While marooned at home during the pandemic, they developed the habit of listening to good music and watching good documentaries, which are mentally and spiritually enriching. They now have a better AQ (artistic quotient).
Personally, I want to keep cultivating a new habit I acquired during the lockdowns. I want to keep physically distancing myself from toxic people and those who waste my time on trivialities.
Then there is the habit of readiness, which my wife and I have mutually engendered in ourselves during the pandemic. It’s the habit of expecting the unexpected or the worse. In the wake of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, we have adopted this motto: horrible stuff happens, and people rebound from it.
Mark Brennan-Ing, a senior research scientist at a Center for Healthy Aging, calls it “crisis competence.” This means, “As we get older, we get the sense that we’re going to be able to handle it. These things happen, but there’s an end to it, and there’s a life after that.”
Then one of the most meaningful habits of the heart that many have acquired during these times is compassion. I know a lot of people who have gotten into the habit of being sensitive to the needs of others, and sharing what they have.
My wife, for instance, has made it habitual to respond to online cries for help. Relatives, acquaintances, even friends of friends—everyone has an equal chance of being a receiver of her compassion. Sometimes even people who have hurt her before but who are now in need.
With the bad habits, and keep the best habits. They will not only add years to your life but they will also enrich it with new meaning.