Aging

The traits of suc­cess­ful peo­ple is a sub­ject that has intrigued us since at least the 1930s. That was the era when Dale Carnegie founded self-improvement indus­try (which now worth $11 Bil­lion per year in the US alone); it was also in the late 1930s that a group of social sci­en­tists qui­etly began the ambi­tious Grant study explor­ing the lives of 268 Harvard-educated men.

Sixty years later (the study still going strong) they have basi­cally given up hope of dis­cov­er­ing the secret recipe of great­ness which they were after. (They also didn’t achieve their other lofty aim of eas­ing “the dishar­mony of the world at large.”) How­ever, they have at least iden­ti­fied seven pri­mary fac­tors that pre­dict healthy (phys­i­cal and psy­cho­log­i­cal) liv­ing and aging. They are: get­ting an edu­ca­tion; hav­ing a sta­ble mar­riage; not smok­ing; employ­ing “mature adap­ta­tions;” not abus­ing alco­hol;  hav­ing some exer­cise and main­tain­ing a healthy weight.

All of these strike me as sur­pris­ingly sim­ple, straight-forward and action­able rec­om­men­da­tions –all but the one. Chal­leng­ing is the con­cept of “adap­ta­tions,” which the study has explored. Adap­ta­tions are the defence mech­a­nisms that peo­ple use to respond psy­cho­log­i­cally to chal­lenges in life:

Vail­lant explains defenses as the men­tal equiv­a­lent of a basic bio­log­i­cal process. When we cut our­selves, for exam­ple, our blood clots—a swift and invol­un­tary response that main­tains home­osta­sis. Sim­i­larly, when we encounter a chal­lenge large or small—a mother’s death or a bro­ken shoelace—our defenses float us through the emo­tional swamp. And just as clot­ting can save us from bleed­ing to death—or plug a coro­nary artery and lead to a heart attack—defenses can spell our redemp­tion or ruin. […]

The health­i­est, or “mature,” adap­ta­tions include altru­ism, humor, antic­i­pa­tion (look­ing ahead and plan­ning for future dis­com­fort), sup­pres­sion (a con­scious deci­sion to post­pone atten­tion to an impulse or con­flict, to be addressed in good time), and sub­li­ma­tion (find­ing out­lets for feel­ings, like putting aggres­sion into sport, or lust into courtship). (The Atlantic arti­cle is avail­able here.)

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