#1585 The Psychology Of Ageing - Harps & Tiff

I've got quite a few comments on and a few people sent me messages about and I'm just fascinated with this, and some people will think, well, you're fascinated with this topic because you are old, And while that is true that I am old, that is not the reason I'm

fascinated with it. I'm fascinated with this topic because I think it plays a it's going to say massive, Well, let's just go with significant role in the way that we age, the quality of our lifespan and health span, and some of the interesting good and bad conversations that had around the way that we age. And so this is probably going to be called something like the Psychology

of aging this podcast. But so here's what he's what I writ Here's what I writ and this is on Instagram, Facebook and all that if you want to find it and you want to refer to it or showbody or show somebody it because it's broadly relevant the psychologist. So this is the whiteboard post part the Psychology of aging. There's what you're actually capable of doing, creating, learning, and becoming, and then there's the story of what you should at

and shouldn't be doing at your age. One is an ocean of possibilities, one a self created prison, and here's the words around it. Of course, we need to navigate the inevitability of chronological aging. But the way that you and I age mentally, emotionally, and physically is a variable that we can manipulate via our choices, behaviors and atypical thinking. Eat well, move well, set goals, learn new things, have new experiences. Have a bigger purpose than you laugh at

silly shit. Can control your controllables, do everything, and I mean everything in your capacity to optimize your potential for long, healthy and happy life. And before anyone asks. While we can't change our genetics that is the DNA sequence of our genes, we can influence genetic expression through various factors

such as lifestyle, environment, diet, attitude, and behavior. These changes in gene expression can impact various aspects of our health, including a imne function, energy levels, health span over a longevity and more So, there's the practical reality of aging,

which is like chronological inevitability, a chronological constant. That is, tomorrow, I'm going to be sixty years and two hundred and thirty seven, not two hundred and thirty six days, and the next day two hundred and thirty eight days or whatever the number is for me, and that number is never going down. The only thing that will happen is we'll stop going forward one day when I when I fucking bite the bullet, no pun intended, Sorry Donald, when

I die, let's just go with that. But for the moment, hopefully in my day numbers, my chronology keeps kind of moving in that forward direction, and I keep getting chronologically chronologically older. But the way that we age, and the way that we talk about aging, and the way that we think about aging, and the way that we limit ourselves and others by virtue of the stories that we tell ourselves about what is normal in inverted commas, what is you know at your age? What is one of

my least favorite terms in the world. Is age appropriate If you're talking about very young people, perhaps, But if you're talking about old people, to me, age appropriate is just another way of saying self limiting, or you know, it's some kind of barrier. Now. Of course, there is the practical reality that as we get older, of course,

there are physiological limitations. But the rate at which those limitations come into existence, or the way they do, is to an extent, as I said in my whiteboard post, controllable, So I remember, and I'll shut up after this tiff and then you can jump in. But I remember when I started my PhD, there was more than a couple of people who said to me, because I started my

PhD fifty six, how long will it take? I said, I don't know, four or five six, I don't know however long it takes maybe five years, which looks like it's going to be around five years. And a bunch of people said to me, when I say, a bunch somewhere between five and ten, people said, oh, so you're going to be like sixty one when you finish, and I went, yes, yes I will. And I said, but here's the thing. I'm going to be sixty one anyway. Like let's hope I make it, but let's assume that

I'm still alive in five years. Then I'm going to be sixty one with a PhD or sixty one without a PhD. So if that's my choice, I'm choosing the PhD. Thanks very much, you know. But if I was starting that PhD at twenty six, nobody would talk about my age,

or thirty six, nobody would talk about my age. Nobody would go, oh, hang on right, And if for example, I had some significant I mean with this with respects, say intellectual disability or some extreme limiting factor that meant it was very, very, very difficult or almost impossible for me to then I would understand that. But most people's curiosity was just around. But you'll be so old, you know, and that, and I understand that, by the way. I'm not one bit offended by that at all. What I

am is I'm curious. I'm curious that we have these stories. I know I said it shut up, but I will I'm curious that we have I'm very aware of that because I'm doing it. P Hdan awareness, did you know? But I'm very cognizant that we all have these stories. And I'm not saying there that I don't understand them. I'm just leaning into it and saying are these stories helpful or hurtful? Like when we go, oh, well, you're this age, therefore you probably should be thinking about these things.

I looked at a guy this morning, Tiff, and he came through on my feed on Insta, and he's eighty three and he bench presses three hundred and sixty pounds, which is about what one hundred and seventy or seventy five k's. But my dad so he's two years younger than my dad. Yeah, and he's a fucking mom and he's just this big, strong Now, a lot of people would think, oh, that's that's too much like the dude. I looked at the dude. You know, I don't have

a crystal ball. But while he's eighty three and he's doing it right. So he's outlived the average Australian male by three years already, So very strong, very functional and not following the script, you know, and I just think that it's really I mean, you're still young. But as we spoke the other day, we're talking about, you know, between now and death. You and I did a podcast, but just the stories that we tell ourselves, and you know, we don't want to be unrealistic and we don't want

to be reckless. But at the same time, from an experiential perspective, like how we age, is one really up to us to a point, like we can manipulate food and exercise and attitude and sleep and to an extent, stress and cortisol and all of those things. We can at least work on those things. Lifestyle behaviors, habits, you know, situation, circumstance, environments, work life balance, a work life relationship. All of those things we can at least influence, if not completely control.

All right, I'll be quiet now.

is the story that we develop behind the control. So when people talk about someone who's young and fit and they just they collapsed and had a heart attack and their life and they were only whatever, and they ran marathons and they were they never ate junk and they never drank, and we list all of these these material reasons why they're fit and healthy, but we don't think about what's driving them to run every day while you know, how much are they stressing and obsessing over all of

those other things to control their health outcome and what what neurochemistry is getting pumped into their mind as they're stressed about it.

a bloke on a skateboard. Do you remember that, right?

I said, how long have you been skateboarding? He said, basically since they got to Australia, So he'd been skateboarding since he was ten or twelve years old, you know, since the seventies, had never stopped, and you know, he had a car, he said, but when I've got to go anywhere that's just within a few k's I skate. It's like it's not and he doesn't do it because it's trendy or it's hip, or but to look at this motherfucker move I'm like, oh, yeah, like this guy

has not stopped right. And I looked at him anyway, we said goodbye, and he headed off, you know, in the other direction. And I watched him get on his board and he stood on his board, he jumped on his board, and he pushed off down the road like literally, like from the back, you would think it was an athletic twenty five or thirty year old, like the way

that he moved. And I'm like, well, he moves like that because he's just always done it, you know, like there's nothing somebody else would say, what the fuck are you doing? You're in your sixties, your bone density is low, this yere pretty. Oh you're just you're putting yourself at risk of injury. And like this guy and yeah, like I said, he wasn't able to prove anything. He wasn't on a mission. He didn't think he was a big deal. He was like, well why wouldn't I This is convenient,

Like it's just it's it's way better than walking. I get everywhere four times quicker, and it's fun and he loves it. And yeah, I just think that that for me, that that kind of just turned on a light bulb in my head because even I was surprised, and I'm the optimist in this, I'm like, for a moment, I'm like, fuck, how old you? When I saw him, and even I'm like, well, even though I didn't think it was inappropriate, I thought it's unusual, and what a pity that it's unusual.

now at eighty three. Because she was always around young girls. She would always had this team of young girls.

my kindergartens. It's like a pack of kindergarten kids. And that is contagious and we have to be careful of it. And I think workplaces and the places where we're spending the most of our time with the people that we may not necessarily be choosing, that's who's influencing our mindset around this stuff.

But it had Joe Biden right on the stage, and you know, and like with complete respect, I think when you know, it's not a revelation to say there's like there's some real cognitive decline and physiological decline and full respect for him and all of that, but you know,

there's stuff going on there. And then in the parallel video was Mick Jagger, right from a concert like two weeks ago, fucking sprinting across this stage like forty meters to one side, rocking out, then sprinting, I mean sprinting right,

and then dancing and rocking on. And I looked up how old he is just before we went live on the twenty six of this month, which is ten days as we record, he's eighty one eighty one, So he's running round and I mean, again, you know, you would think that that's not possible, but and this is the whole of course, there's a physiological limit, and there's a physiological kind of reality, of course, But I don't think virtually any of us are anywhere near our threshold, you know,

Like I know that, and I'm not the role model or the high watermark for anything. But you know, our brain is a physical organ, right, just like you're living, your heart, your kidneys, all physical organs. Your brain. Your brain is not your mind, right, your mind is not. But your brain is a physiological organ. It's organic. And how well it works, how well your brain works has got a bit to do with genetics. We don't know exactly.

Everybody goes, oh it's fifteen percent. We really don't fucking know. But my guess is that it's a bit somewhere around twenty percent. That's my guess. But I'm we don't know, but I reckon it's about eighty percent about behavior and lifestyle and choices and nutrition and sleep and thinking and stories. And you know, I'm sixty one this year. I'm sixty one at the end of September. September twenty eight. Put in your diary. Don't get any trouble tip just something

big and expensive. But did you just write that down?

maybe I'm delusional. I don't think I am, but I'm pretty sure they're is good or better than twenty years ago. Now that shouldn't happen, or that doesn't typically happen, I

should say. But what we can do is we can either wind back the clock, a metaphoric clock, doing all of the things that improve cognitive function, that improved physiology, that improve immune system function, strength and power and speed and balance and agility and range of movement and flexibility, all of these things that at any age we can manipulate. My dad at eighty five, as everyone knows because I've been banging on about him. You know, he's gone from

four months ago not working out at all. So now he's working out three days a week, and like, honestly almost by the week. I can see improvement in this eighty five year old body. Now he can three months later, he can do stuff now that three months earlier he couldn't do. So from a functional perspective, he is lowering his biological age at the chronological age of eighty five.

And another thing that's worth mentioning here, And I want your thoughts on this is the high regard, the ridiculous high regard that we hold in our culture, that we hold retirement like it's some something to celebrate and to look forward to. When we turned down the emotion and we get away from the story of how amazing retirement will be, the reality, the psychological, emotional, sociological, physiological reality of retirement for many people is catastrophic and what we

see with many people. So think about this, you know, Friday, and this is my dad's story. My dad was running a multimillion dollar shopping center on a Friday. He had purpose, He had lots of connection, He had responsibility. He was using his brain all day every day. He was solving problems, he was being challenged, negotiating deals, he was having meaningful dialogues with interesting people. He was working forty to fifty hours a week. And then the following Monday, all of

that was gone forever. All of that was gone forever. Now he had fifty years of that or a version of that, you know, meaning focus, per purpose, skill development, acquiring knowledge, understanding, resolving conflicts, solving problems, dealing with people and personalities, you know, navigating the career that we all have. And then boom, none of it. Him and Mary looking at each other, going, what do we do now? It's

one o'clock. Now, that's fucking terrible for you. Now that's not to say we should all work to wear one hundred, but it is. It is to say that working or not, we need engagement, We need connection, We need to solve problems. We need to use our brain, we need cognitive stimulation, We need to be challenged, like because the moment that we stop using our body and brain, that shit goes into free fall.

think of that. I always think of why did my nan live to ninety five and my grandfather is one hundred and still going strong and he eats chocolates every day? And what are the traits and the lifestyle things, because they weren't you know, he played sport. But it's community and connection, it's personality, it's mindset, it's thoughts, and I just try and take so much about what I can observe from them and embody it.

how well his body and brain worked. Not all of it, but a lot of it is just probably to do with one obviously, his lifestyle and behavior and how much he moved and how much he used his body and how well, but also the fact that he didn't have a story right, he didn't have an underlying psychology that said you shouldn't do this and what do you go on?

I don't think for the most part that works. That may have a minor influence, but what really has an influence is when you go and do something, and then you progress and you evolve and you get stronger, or you go from being able to walk slow to walk medium, to walk fast and then a bit of jogging, and then you see some and you're like in your fifties, sixty seventies or beyond, and you start seeing improvement and function and so you've done something, and then all of

a sudden, your thinking changes, your self belief, your expectation, changes your stories, your standards. You create a new normal, Like what was normal is now you look back on it and you're like, what the fuck was I thinking

and doing? You know, it's it's I think the way that I think, primarily because I have a way of living and being and operating, and nothing in my head thinks, oh, like we're recording now at two thirty two, and you and the Crab and Chris and Odco and all these people that we know a meeting in fifty eight minutes to train at the gym, right, And I don't think, oh, geez, I'm good at sixty to go to the gym. What

a fucking achievement for me? Just Chandy, look at me, at my age doing it like there's nothing in me that thinks it's a big deal or that it's an accomplishment. Because to me, it's cleaning my teeth. To me, it's putting on my socks. To me, it's getting out of bed. To me, it's fucking reading the newspaper. It's just a thing that I do. Right. But when your psychology is ah, and this is one of the other problems, is AH,

I went for a walk. You know, I'm amazing. When you're telling yourself that you're amazing because you walked a kilometer or you ate a salad, it's going to be a fucking battle, you know. So we need to question one question all the self limiting bullshit and all the age based storytelling, self limiting fucking garbage that we tell ourselves and then go do. Now, the doing doesn't need to be joining a gym or becoming a crossfitter. The doing might be you might in your fifties or sixties

going you know what, I'm going to go to university. Cool. I read an article the other day about a lady who went back. I think I spoke about this once recently, and she really trained as a nurse in her sixties and she just graduated. Now she's starting as an rin a registered nurse at seventy. She's seventy and she's just starting her nursing career and she looks like a fit, healthy, bright eyed fifty five year old, right, and she's fucking

loving it. I'm like, so good for her now, apart from the good that she's going to do the world, because she's going to be so great with patients, right, because she's not you know, she's done a lot, she's seen the world, and clearly she's not driven by money or she would have done something because it's not like

being a nurse's the high watermark for fucking income. Love you nurses, you know, Like, for me, what excites me is the benefit people are going to get from her, but also the benefit that she gets in not putting herself in some sign of kind of psychological or emotional box that says, oh this is inappropriate, or this is unlikely, or this is irresponsible, or this is reckless at your age?

Like the problem. Yes, of course there is a reality of what the body and the brain can and can't do, but for most of us that is not the limitation. This is my point today, is like, what's the space between what your body can do and your story about what your body can do? You know, what's the reality of human potential? Your human potential? Take age off the table, rip the calendar off the wall, throw it in the bin, and just think about not what's possible at your age,

but just what's possible for you. Imagine if imagine if we didn't record birth dates. Imagine if no one knew how anyone was. Imagine if you met a person and they didn't know if they were forty or sixty. Imagine if there was no record. You would just have to treat people based on who they are and how they are, because we couldn't judge them. But what we do is we like, for example, I did an interview the other day on ticket TV and there's no there's not a bad thing at all. I did it with Kate save

right and Kate God bless Kate. She's great, and I understand why she did this, and I'm completely fine with it. But she put up a picture of me and her doing this thing, and she went, you know, Craig in great shape, bloody jacked and all this stuff into his sixties, right now, that's what we do. And I understand why she did that, not at all bothered by that, and it's kind of good pr and marketing. I get it.

I would have done the same. But imagine if we lived in a world where we could only understand people or perceive and process and experience people just on how they show up. We didn't know anyone's age, because like

it or not, all of us, including me. You know, if I know someone's eighty, I automatically will have even though I don't want to be judgmental, I'll all already have an expectation, I guess, right, And that's why so many peopleeople, I guess, are somewhat surprised of how functional and operational I am at a time when many people are really beginning to slide. And it's not because I'm genetically gifted or because I'm special, or better, because I'm

not genetically gifted. I'm not special I'm not smarter, I'm not better. I just do things that create a certain outcome. But the other bit of the psychology of all of this is doing the things that create the outcome are uncomfortable, and as we've said one million times on this show,

we don't like discomfort. So there's a certain acceptance that needs to happen with people if they want to optimize their genetic potential at any age, their health, their wellness, their performance, their nervous system, their endocrime system, their bone density, their muscular potential, their health span. There's a certain price that needs to be paid, and that is work and effort and courage.

I'm like, oh, what's age appropriate clothing? And she goes not that and I'm like, how come? Like who can wear that? And then we had this whole philosophical discussion about okay, well what's the age? You know? And I said, what about what about Sonya Krueger? Have you seen Sonya Krueger?

embarrassed that I do? Yeah, of course, of course, But that whole kind of age just thinking, it's just something that I think we need to become because I think we all do it, myself included. I think I do

it less now than I ever have done. But you know, I know because for me, I understand the potential negative consequences of negative thinking and negative storytelling around age that I think you know so much in our culture and all the medical shows, and we've got stuff at the moment with Chris Hemsworth which is called I Can Live Forever or something, and you know, the vast majority of everything that we talk about is really about the physiology and the biology, and we talk about food, and we

talk about micros and macros and sleep and sets and reps and volume and heart rate and supplements and all of those things which are crucial. But the way that we think about aging and the way that we talk about aging and the stories that we have in our society about aging are a big part of the problem as well. But it pretty much goes, you know, unnoticed and unaddressed.

the way, like I really started running again. I ran a lot when I was a kid. I've run bits and pieces through my adult journey. But I'm really starting to run again. Not long, not far, but and I'm amazed that how quickly m and remember sixty. My fitness has improved. I'll probably run fifteen times now. And what I'm doing is I was doing every day short. Now I'm doing a bit longer. Two or three k's still

not long, but long enough. But I run like you know, I run like I stole something, right, I run out the side gate like a crazy person. So last night was my running night, and I kept waiting for the rain to I like running in the rain, but it was fucking sideways rain. It was three degrees. I don't know what it was, but it felt like felt like

zero degrees. It was sideways rain. It was windy, and I thought, if I run outside, everything that I wear is just going to be one I'm going to get hype thermia, and two I'm going to I'm going to everything's going to get soaked. So I went fuck it. And I've got you know that skinny red singlet that I trained in periodically, that it's about forty two years old, right, It's about as big as a postage stamp, and it's held together with fucking gaffer tape. So I put that

motherfucker on, which covers my left nipple. And you know, four hairs around my belly button, nothing else, right, So I put that on and I went running and I ran for three k's which was or maybe just done. I was out for about quarter of an hour. Right, it was fucking freezing. I mean it was so cold, and also because and I was thinking of you, I was thinking, this is my ocean swim and the wind on top of that, and I'm sure it wasn't as painful or as cold as your ocean swim, but that

was my little moment. But I got home yesterday and you know, when you're so cold, as you were talking about with your ocean swim, I was freezing, freezing, freezing. And then I got in the house downstairs upstairs as warm downstairs, not so warm downstairs, and like my whole body was tingling. My hands were like they were on fire. My whole body was tingling. And the room, even though the room wasn't downstairs wasn't warm, it felt real warm.

And then I came upstairs. It felt like I'd just gone to fucking Darwin.

get the metaphoric wheels turning. You might surprise a few people, and most importantly, you might surprise yourself. Tiffany and Cook, as always for a woman in her you know you're in your fifth decade now, don't Yeah, you're in your fifth decade. You've been here for a minute.