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“Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you have to start young.”

—Fred Astaire

Lifestyle makes up 75 percent or more of how you we age. You are a collection of your habits. Your habits are who you are. The biology of aging is extremely complicated, involving so many systems of the body, brain, and the nervous system. Not to mention that behavior can be complicated. What should you change, how can you change? It can seem overwhelming and impossible to change behavior. Yet if you can change one thing at a time, you can increase your confidence. Then you will realize you can change your habits slowly over time. You can make a big difference in your behavior with small, gradual changes. Super Agers cultivate healthy habits as an integral part of their aging plan.

If you’re lucky, you started life with healthy habits that have continued throughout your life. The truth is not many in the western world begin life this way. Many who live in Blue Zone® areas won the habit lottery by being born into cultures that naturally integrated healthy aging habits. Don’t worry if you didn’t have healthy habits modeled around you by family and community: you are not alone. You can change your habits, and it is never too late!

There is no “typical” in aging; people age at vastly different rates. As humans increase in life expectancy and achieve better health through diet, lifestyle, and habits, there will probably be even more disparity in how people age. Many will increase their healthspan through good daily, weekly, and seasonal habits. There will be a steep increase in the numbers of outliers, known as Super Agers. The growing population of aging adults and our ability to remain healthy longer has made a mockery of previous stereotypes of aging. Even the World Health Organization has created a campaign to reduce outdated prejudices around aging, stating, “Ageism is everywhere, yet it is the most socially ‘normalized’ of any prejudice, and is not widely countered—like racism or sexism. These attitudes lead to the marginalization of older people within our communities and have negative impacts on their health and wellbeing.” Human bodies are complex, with a myriad of diverse internal biological factors that influence our aging, as well as the external environmental and lifestyle factors that influence aging. Genetics is believed to account for 20–25 percent of the aging process, and the other up to 80 percent is in our hands. This book is about all of the relatively easy and inexpensive lifestyle changes that you can make to become a Super Ager.

Geroscience

This is an interdisciplinary field that aims to understand the biology of aging, age-related diseases, and quality of life, as well as other issues of aging. Geroscience spans multiple disciplines, including molecular biology, genetics, neuroscience, endocrinology, and genetics, among others. Traditionally, aging research focuses on single diseases and isolated conditions. Many scientific studies centered around aging fail because of the complexity of aging. “Geroscience” as a discipline was coined in 2007 by aging scientist, Gordon J. Lithgow of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. Geroscience was recognized by the US Senate in 2010. “What has come out of our work is a keen understanding that the factors driving aging are highly intertwined and that in order to extend healthspan we need an integrated approach to health and disease with the understanding that biological systems change with age,” according to former Buck Institute CEO Brian Kennedy. The Buck Institute is “focused on the connection between normal aging and chronic disease,” as well as extending the human health span.

Recoding

In 2014, Dr. Dale Bredesen of UCLA and the Buck Institute published the results of a small clinical trial on a multipronged protocol for treating Alzheimer’s disease. The study scientifically demonstrated the possibility of the reversal of symptoms of Alzheimer’s, a disease that is presently believed by western medicine to be irreversible. In his book, The End of Alzheimer’s, Dr. Bredesen likens Alzheimer’s to a leaky roof with thirty-six holes. The current medical model can’t cure Alzheimer’s because it only treats one cause at a time, which Dr. Bredesen likens to patching only one of the holes in the roof. If there are thirty-six holes, patching one of them will not do much good. The Bredesen Protocol, also known as ReCODE, is a collection of healthy lifestyle habits, combined with specific supplements that target biomarkers of Alzheimer’s. By following the ReCODE protocol, you patch up many holes at the same time. Both the clinical trials that were published and Dr. Bredesen’s continued work with Alzheimer’s demonstrate that by patching even half of the “holes” in the Alzheimer’s roof, symptoms can be reversed or arrested. Many declared Dr. Bredesen’s protocol was “too complicated,” or simply did not believe that it was possible to reverse or cease the progression of Alzheimer’s in patients, yet the protocol is an oddly familiar set of healthy habits along with more complicated and specific supplements. The ReCODE protocol also divides Alzheimer’s into three categories and uses specific protocols for each type of Alzheimer’s.

The reason Dr. Dale Bredesen’s work excites many health coaches, integrative doctors, and wellness professionals is because western science almost always focuses on one cause and effect and rarely, if ever, examines the effects of multiple lifestyle changes on chronic diseases such as Alzheimer’s. There are many reasons that go into the one cause, one effect scientific model; all you must do is to take a look at the efficacy of Dr. Bredesen’s comprehensive protocol to understand that this will be the future of medicine. Patients diagnosed with Alzheimer’s can enroll in online support programs for Dr. Bredesen’s protocol. In many degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s there are multiple holes in the roof. Using one drug is like patching one hole. And Alzheimer’s is no different; if there are thirty-six different ways that brain health and physical health are degrading, you won’t change much by patching up one hole with one drug or one therapy. Dr. Bredesen has found that he can reverse or stop the progression of Alzheimer’s even by patching only half of the holes, so to speak. In a small trial of what Dr. Bredesen calls the ReCODE protocol, promising results were found for reversing or arresting the symptoms of Alzheimer’s. Dr. Bredesen’s ReCODE protocol gives hope for more mainstream adaptation of holistic lifestyle protocols for the treatment of Alzheimer’s and many other degenerative diseases.

Bredesen Protocol, ReCODE:

•Optimize Diet

•Eat 3 hours before bedtime

•Eat during a 12-hour period and then fast for the other 12 hours

•Enhance autophagy (cellular clean up, especially in the brain) and ketosis (see Chapter 6)

•Meditate/Reduce Stress

•Optimize Sleep

•Exercise

•Optimize your microbiome

•Reduce Inflammation

Start with Small Steps

As a Yoga Health Coach, I am familiar with helping people to change habits gradually, as I will outline techniques in this chapter. It can take time and it is important to change gradually. I am trained in meeting people where they are and helping them to slowly transform their habits. When you change your habits, early success is important as it creates a momentum. Neuroscience affirms that the way to feel confident and cultivate success in habit change is to start small and build. I feel that this is the crux to changing and altering our habits, especially as we grow older. You start with small steps and things that are very easy to change, building to greater and greater levels of difficulty. Working at your own pace and building to more complicated habits or to habits that you may be resistant to ensures greater success.

As you read this book, you will be thinking about your own habits. You may read about something that does not appeal to you. Never worry about what you can’t or are not ready to do. Ignore those habits that seem impossible or unappealing. Those are habits you can change later, or never. You are going for low-hanging fruit at first. As you realize the practice of Super Aging, I am imagining you will become emboldened and take on other small steps. Don’t disregard the power of community. One of the biggest factors in healthy aging is strong support and community. Many of us in the western world don’t have the traditional family ties and close knit communities that are a part of every Blue Zone® community. I predict that in the next thirty years, the human race will be rethinking communities. For now, begin to think about how you can look for support around you right now. Maybe you can read this book with a friend or start a book club. There’s lots to read on aging, and you will be hearing about a lot more studies and advice about aging well in the next few decades.

Form Your Own Community to Support Your New Habits

Support can be critical to healthy habit change. Start with a buddy or a group. When you act in unison, the support becomes palpable. Suddenly changing long-ingrained habits becomes doable. Start a walking group, a volunteering committee, a healthy book club, or join a meetup focused on healthy habits or healthy aging.

Those that follow Dr. Bredesen’s ReCODE protocol have an online support group for his complex protocol. Members of the group meet once a year and if it is their first time at the meeting, they are thrilled to meet online buddies in person. In my own experience as a Yoga Health Coach, my colleagues and I have found that creating support groups online or in person leads to far greater success in changing habits. The fact that our habits are part of our inner and outer ecosystem and are reinforced by friends and family can sometimes go unnoticed. When you feel supported in taking a step away from an old model of living, it can make change seem less overwhelming and scary. Have compassion for yourself as you transform.

It is never too late or too early to start your healing your lifestyle by embracing new habits that help you to feel good, look good and age well. When you feel isolated and alone, you will have more challenges in changing habits. Fear and apprehension can take over your mind when you lack support. Many of us live isolated lifestyles, so don’t compare yourself to Some Super Agers who are a part of a culture that naturally supports Super Aging habits, like those who live in Blue Zone® regions. Some Super Agers have developed healthy aging habits at various stages of their lives, on their own, for many different reasons. It is possible to develop habits to find optimism in aging. Among all Super Agers, habits form the structure from which their purpose, dharma, or ikigai flourishes.

Science of Life

I am a longtime student of Ayurveda, which considers daily habits to be integral. Ayurveda, meaning “science of life” in Sanskrit, codifies an optimal way of life, one that is in harmony with nature and the world. A person who lives in union with the here-and-now, who they are at the deepest level, and then in harmony with nature will live a long and happy life, according to Ayurveda.

“When I studied Ayurveda, yoga and enlightenment, I was told which habits I should be doing daily. Almost no attention was paid to behavioral science or how humans actually evolve their habits.” observes Cate Stillman, in her book, Body Thrive: Uplevel Your Body and Your Life with 10 Habits from Ayurveda and Yoga. I resonate with this observation and wonder why behavioral science is not taught in every high school and college. Some acupuncturists, chiropractors, naturopaths, and MDs often don’t instruct their clients in healthy habits and then almost never teach them how to set up a new habit using behavioral science. Cognitive Behavioral Therapists and other forms of behavioral therapists seem to be the only ones who are armed with the simple tools to identify, form, and then solidify healthy habits that benefit their clients. As the author of two books, I realized people liked to read my books on the Chakras and healing foods. They were inspiring, readers told me, but I wondered if anyone changed that much from reading them. On the other hand, books can make an impact when the author purposefully encourages habit change in the form of simple daily lifestyle practices that don’t even take much time to perform.

When I joined the Yogahealer online community, I found myself able to integrate at least two habits that I had tried to change for at least a decade or so before meeting her. Cate Stillman and Yogahealer helped groups from all over the world shift their bedtimes, eat less meat, and to get up and get out and exercise. There is so much more to her habit-changing courses, and I, along with a team of editors and administrators, now run her health coaching blog at www.yogahealthcoaching.com.

One of the reasons I began studying Yoga Health Coaching with Cate resulted from a study that I worked on in 2010, when I was a yoga instructor for the PRYMS (Practicing Restorative Yoga for Metabolic Syndrome) study. This NIH-funded research study examined the effects of restorative yoga versus stretching in patients with Metabolic Syndrome, which is a cluster of symptoms that are an indicator that you are highly likely to get Type 2 diabetes. The lead researcher on the PRYSMS study, Dr. Alka Kanaya, gathered participants for our first class and orientation where she took some time to explain the study. This would be a year of restorative yoga for everyone and the study participants were required to engage in a home practice. As an instructor, I had to be sure my students were participating and do as much as I could to get everyone on board. During the orientation, Dr. Kanaya mentioned a previous study that she directed, The Live Well, Be Well study, which compared two groups. One group was waitlisted, while the other group received healthy lifestyle counseling, primarily by phone. After a year, many in the counseling group had made small, yet important reductions in risks for Type 2 diabetes. Why weren’t interventions like this widely implemented, I wondered. As a yoga teacher, I felt I could make a significant difference in the lives of my students simply by counseling them on optimal health habits or setting up habits that I could ask them to perform. These initial thoughts led me to pursue “health coaching” as something valuable to offer as a health professional.

A simple phone call had such great benefits. What could similar health interventions do for yoga students? What if all we did was ask one question of our students per week about their health?

In studying Yoga Health Coaching, I learned about books and courses that explained the behavioral science and neuroscience behind habits. In yoga and holistic healing communities, many people rely on going to get help from a doctor or a practitioner. This works well when you are sick or not feeling well. However, there is much you can do to bolster health before you get ill. In Japan, preventative medicine is the model of care and it is no accident that the country has the highest life expectancy in the world. Preventative medicine or lifestyle medicine means integrating healthy daily and seasonal habits into your life. Understanding the connection between daily habits and preventative medicine deserves much more attention in western medicine and in many holistic practices. When you are sick, it is important to check with a doctor. However, cultivating healthy habits needs to be discussed more often by yoga teachers, acupuncturists, medical doctors, and the like. The assumption that change is too difficult for most people needs to change. Health coaches are trained to help people effectively change habits and enhance lifestyle choices for optimum health.

Body Thrive

Yoga Health Coaching was founded by Cate Stillman as a way to help yoga students and people interested in a holistic lifestyle optimize habits based on Ayurveda and yoga. She wrote the book Body Thrive, Uplevel Your Body and Your Life with 10 Habits from Ayurveda and Yoga. Body Thrive, which applies the most essential teachings of Ayurveda into a modern life by decoding the teachings into habits. Ayurveda is the perennial body-wisdom tradition that co-arose with yoga, the path of awakened living. The book describes a curriculum that every person can learn as a child, master as an adult, and refine as an elder for their body to thrive. The habits described in Body Thrive are simple and have been demonstrated to increase healthspan and lifespan, habits such as going to bed early, eating a hearty midday meal, exercising, eating more plants, and giving yourself regular oil massages, known as abyhanga in Sanskrit. To find a Yoga Health Coach to work with or for more information on Yoga Health Coaching visit https://yogahealthcoaching.com/find-a-coach/ to learn to put habits into place.

Twenty Years Younger

Jon Butcher, founder of multiple companies, including Lifebook and a Mindvalley Academy class, “Turn Your Life into a Living Masterpiece,” credits daily habits and purpose with helping him and his wife to look twenty years younger than their biological age. “The key is the habits that you put in place and then being true to those habits. And the way that you are going to get that done is to have a strong purpose and that’s what it always comes down to.” Jon Butcher didn’t set out to look twenty to thirty years younger than his age, yet his habits set him up for the life he leads today, teaching others in how to transform their health, have more joy, and have solid relationships, along with aging well. He gives classes at www.mindvalleyacademy.com.

Habit Guidelines

Start small. Stanford behavioral scientist B. J. Fogg has branded the practice of starting new habits small as “tiny habits.” Watch his popular YouTube video, “Tiny Habits.” When we start small, we make change doable. We can use the small steps to create momentum. As a Yoga Health Coach, I have seen the opposite happen so often. People want big changes very quickly. They are so sick of their current situation; they want out immediately. Or sometimes it’s the “Dream Big” syndrome gone horribly wrong. It’s like creating a dramatic, bad break-up with their unhealthy habit. Instead, things can be much easier and healthier. And those sudden abrupt break-ups seem to almost always lead to the rebound effect. As the person finds that their big dramatic change doesn’t work, it confirms negative thinking. Often the client decides to go back to the old relationship with their unhealthy habit. They seem to believe that they really can’t change after all. I have seen this pattern of self-sabotage in myself and in others over and over. It is what has made me so committed to small, focused, doable, incremental changes.

Another habit-changing concept called kaizen comes from a Japanese word that means, “small, continuous improvements.” Kaizen was adapted by Japanese businesses which needed to rebuild and restructure following the chaos and destruction that had occurred during World War II. Kaizen can be applied to habit change in thinking about the smallest tiny improvement that can be made. I have often noticed my health coaching clients wanting to change too much, too soon. This behavior creates a self-defeating loop. When a person wants to change a habit and then thinks about taking too big of a step in that shift, when it doesn’t work, the person trying to change often gives up and believes that changing is futile. An example would be going to bed earlier. A futile step would be to try to change one’s bedtime by one or two hours. While this may occasionally work for some people, most will fail and then give up. Instead of small steps, the person may consider the experiences as cement for their theory that they are a “night owl.” Branding oneself a night owl instead of making smaller steps towards an earlier bedtime is not helpful. A kaizen step towards a new bedtime would be to set bedtime back fifteen minutes for an entire week, then increasing the earlier bedtime to thirty minutes earlier than the previous bedtime on the second week. In this scenario, it would take a month to shift bedtime by one hour. Kaizen has been proven over and over in studies, and I have seen it work as an effective and simple strategy in my coaching clients.

Habits and patterns are like roads that we have carved out in our life. The big habits may be like paved freeways, creating shortcuts or fast ways of doing things. Our habits may be useful and serve us in many ways. It’s important to be able to objectify our habits. I like to think of my habits as roads. When a habit is brand new, it’s like an off-road trail. I am walking or in an off-road vehicle. Change is scary. New territories are novel and intimidating. I am very present in my emotions on the new road. I may want to give up. Eventually, I cut a trail. Sometimes I pave it and make it real, as in, “I will do this every day for the rest of my life.” Other times my habits may have been great superhighways in my twenties, thirties, or forties, yet as the years roll by, I realize that maybe I need to take a train or walk or dismantle that superhighway. Maybe the destination doesn’t appeal to me anymore, or I don’t need to go so fast. Maybe I can take a bullet train instead. I think you are getting it now. As we age, it is so easy to look back and be supercritical. Why did I do that for so many years? Or I have messed myself up? In this book, we are learning that we can cut new trails and pave new habitual roads. No looking back. No, rather, I mean: look back and appreciate the journey. After all, there have been people that have lived to be 100 who smoked, drank, and swore all their lives. There is no right way. There is only your way and the Wild West of the rest of your beautiful and precious life. Your life is a work of art. How will you live it?

Dinacharya

Dinacharya means “daily routine.” In Ayurveda, synchronizing daily activities with daily cycles is one of the most important ways to support health. Western medicine has finally begun to understand the importance of the synchronization of human physiology with daily cycles, especially the rising and setting of the sun. Dinacharya includes activities such as waking time, elimination, hygiene, self-massage, bathing, meditation, study, work, and sleep.

Science has validated that within our brain, we have a master clock that regulates biological processes. Eating and sleeping at the wrong times can throw off this clock and cause chronodisruption. Other, secondary cellular clocks can be found in the liver, pancreas, and other organs. Chronodisruption or disconnection from the natural rhythms of daytime and nighttime has been linked to cognitive decline, diabetes, obesity, substance abuse, heart disease, and some cancers. In 2017, three researchers were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for understanding and explaining the role of circadian rhythm in health and in treating disease. Scientific American declared that circadian medicine “may revolutionize medicine as we know it.”

Traditional Dinacharya

Morning:

•Wake before sunrise

•Scrape Tongue

•Brush Teeth / Wash Face

•Eliminate bowels

•Practice Yoga 15–30 minutes

•Shower/Bathe

Evening:

•Eat dinner early

•Meditate or practice gentle yoga

•Go to bed by 10 p.m.

Vata

As we grow old, we start to enter the Vata stage of life. Vata means air and ether combined. The Vata stage of life can be an inspiring, creative, and productive stage of life because life is about balance. Habits are grounding and earthy, and become more beneficial to our health as we age. As we age, we need habits more than ever. According to Ayurveda, habits contribute more to the energy of earth and provide stability that attracts healthy aging and creativity, joy.

According to Ayurveda, when we have a structure of daily and even seasonal habits, one can grow old with ease and grace. In many Super Ager cultures such as the village of Ogimi, healthy habits are an integral part of life and aging. If you don’t belong to a community that supports habits, consider finding a health coach or group that will support you in healthy habit change.

–PRACTICE PLAN–

Familiarize yourself with habit change.

Read

•Force of Habit by Tasmin Astor, PhD

•The Power of Habit by Charles Duhig

•The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod

•Body Thrive, Uplevel Your Body and Your Life with 10 Habits from Yoga and Ayurveda, by Cate Stillman

•Mindset by Carol Dweck

•The Neuroscience of Change: A Compassion Based Program for Personal Transformation, by Kelly McGonigal

•B. J Fogg’s website, resources, classes, and tools on habit change at www.tinyhabits.com

•For Elise’s courses on habit change, Super Aging, and Yoga Health Coaching, visit www.elisemariecollins.com

Daily Habits

Grab your journal and write about your own daily habits. Ask the following questions.

1.Do I like my habits?

2.What do I want to change?

3.What have been my past experiences with changing my habits?

4.How can I get really good at changing my own daily, weekly, and monthly habits?

Form a Healthy Habit Support Group

Cate Stillman has an outline for a book group to follow her book Body Thrive. Consider forming your own healthy habit meetup, book club, or group. You can meet at a local library, community center, or yoga studio. It doesn’t have to cost money to change your habits, and finding a group is the single most powerful tool for habit change for those of us who have grown up in communities where healthy aging is not modeled by those around us.

Start Small

What habit do you want to change? Pick one, then take the smallest baby step: pick something that is so easy you can’t possibly fail. Maybe you want to quit eating desserts. Your habit could be take one full inhale and exhale before you eat a dessert. Or your habit could be to begin exercising in the morning. Start with a walk around the block, or ten jumping jacks. Make it so easy you can’t say no.