You will live another 55 years and die at age 86.
I know that you are 31 years old.
Bold prediction? It’s not. If I’m right, it’s a guess and coincidence. Odds are that you are a different age. And will not die at 86.
Guessing when we will die.
If we ever think about it, we have a general idea of how long we will live. Yet, it’s really an ideal, philosophically speaking, an age at which we’d be ok with passing, kickin’ the bucket, pushing up daisies, becoming worm food. This guess is our own special algorithm.
An algorithm which is the function of knowing how long family members lived, and counting years we’ve boozed, exercised and puffed cancer sticks. Even today, those fancy 23andmeDNA kits tell us genetic risk factors linked to early death, cancer, and age-related diseases (like dementia). Adding more information to our algorithm.
23andmerubs me the wrong way. Just ask my wife. It’s a nice idea but it draws artificial boundaries on what your ancestry is (Spanish by way of Germany) and what my ancestry is (English by way of European western conquest with a little bit of Indiana tossed in there…whose ancestors were German by the way of Greece). If we really want to get scientific about it, then let’s just say we’re all humans that descended from Africa. And at what point does risk factor A become more significant in culture B than culture C?!?! Ugh! That’s a blog for another day.
Our ideas, ideals, and philosophy.
We assemble our aging algorithm like a transformer, and think, “Oh, I’ll live to at least 90…after all, my pappy smoked like a chimney and never exercised. No cancer in my family. And, I’m ‘active’ and feel great, so let’s tack on another two years.”
“That’s it. I plan to die at 92 years old. I’m not sure what the journey will be on the way there, but 92 years on mother earth seems like good timing!”
Essentially, we are creating, splicing together, and borrowing longevity rules to create our own mortality formula, which looks like:
You+ your genes+ family member information + your behavior= year of death
Eek. Getting a little morbid here. Stay with me. Discussing mortality is important considering we engage in LOTS and LOTS and LOTS and LOTS and LOTS and LOTS and LOTS of behavior before we die.
One way to guide this large swath of behavior is to follow research.
After all, we want to know how to behave for most of our lives, to delay our death as much as possible.
Research is good, but this is real life.
Research concerns itself with comparing environment A to environment B. We live in environment C which makes interpreting any research hard when we are more concerned with these day-to-day questions:
- How much should I run?
- How often should I lift?
- Is Yoga an absolute must?
- Which foods are no bueno?
- Should I let my kids play football this year?
Simple decisions. Simple behavior change strategies. Simple things to live a happy and healthier life.
Living Long Versus Living Well
Quantity of Life Studies Go Like This
Experts give us rules and make recommendations based on how long groups of individuals live. They want to know which genes, behaviors, and environments affect our longevity. Count up those variables and figure out the risk (i.e., the risk of dying early).
That’s it. That’s the research.
These three steps are oversimplified, but most research goes like this:
- Step 1: Researchers follow two groups of people:
- Group A – exercises
- Group B – does not exercise
- Step 2: After a set period (say 10 years), researchers measure something
- The measure – Counting how many people are still alive in each group
- Step 3: Run fancy statistics, figure out if a difference exists, and explain why
- The difference – more people are alive in Group A after 10 years than Group B
- Fancy Interpretation – exercising helps you live longer (by reducing your risk of heart attack)
It’s all about death certificates.
It is easy for researchers to measure quantity of life. Pick your groups. Then, count death certificates, insert fancy statistics and interpret the results.
For those of us that take research to heart or want to stay up on the latest and greatest expert guidance, then each study like this modifies our mortality formula just a little bit more.
“I’m like Group A, let’s tack on another 5 years to my life.”
Quantity of Life: An Application
Physical activity rules come from studies that describe how much Group A outlived Group B.
Take 10,000 steps every day!
Why? Because people in Group A took many more steps on average than people in Group B.
Ok? Because people in Group B died off more often than people in Group A.
Ah-ha! Taking fewer steps is associated with a shorter lifespan. I got it now.
It is not about X more years on Earth
We will never know many more years that YOU will live because you are taking those 10,000 or more steps per day. Technically, the best we can say is that you are no longer in high-risk Group B AND that you have an X% decrease risk of some ailment(like heart disease).
This is a minor detail, but you never get to know how many years you are adding to your life. Rather, you get to know how many years you may be removed from your life.
We’re all playing a giant game of risk.
It’s an odds game.
Odds are that you when you smoke, you get lung cancer 99.99% of the time.
Odds are that when you sit all day, that your risk of colon cancer increases by 15%
Odds are that when you take 10,000 steps or more every day, that you risk of heart attack decreases by 20%
These percentages are examples. They may be wrong. The smoking one is definitely right. The number doesn’t really matter because it can never be fact-checked. Again, at what point how do these odds map on from research?
Yet, it is difficult to measure quality of life, the part of our life that are most concerned with.
What would you begin to measure? Happiness? Ability to work? Large social circles? Wonderful life partner?
What is quality of life?
As I’ve looked at this health research over the past 6 years, the hidden theme is quantity of life.t is much easier to capture than quality of life. We learn how long people lived, not so much how well they lived.
This group of people did that thing differently from the other group, and they lived longer.
People like Dwight live longer than people like Jim because they drink beet juice, follow all farm equipment safety protocols, and keep their minds going with never-ending arguments over the smallest office squabble.
For my money, quality of life outweighs quantity or life any day, because quality of life is MOST concerned with:
- How well am I doing right now?
- How well am I going to be able to help my wife with the grocery shopping?
- Can I wake up and put my pants on by myself?
- Is it a possibility that I can chase my toddler today?
All of these activities are quality of life measures. Taken further, we want to maintain the ability to participate in these activities for as long as possible.
That’s quality of life!
Quality of life from research
One quality of life measure is called “compression of morbidity”, which is how many symptoms (e.g., heart attack, emphysema, cancer) someone experienced in the last couple years of life as opposed to over their lifespan (Fries, 2005). Essentially, do these symptoms occur all at once or throughout your entire life? Are the symptoms “compressed” so to speak?
For example, Geraldine catches cancer at 50 and suffers for the next 35 years before she dies at 85. Claudio catches cancer at 85 and suffers the same symptoms as Geraldine, but he dies only after 2 years at 87. In this case, Claudio’s symptoms were “compressed” in a shorter timeframe when compared to Geraldine. We can say that Claudio had a higher quality of life because he only suffered for 2 years instead of 35. By studying “compression of morbidity”, we can better describe how long the crappy part of life is.
So, our lives, and quality of life for that matter, strike a balance. We want to live a fairly long life, but while maintaining as much quality as possible.
As a coach and practitioner, I am not working with clients in a hospital, running medical tests for them, and referencing symptoms in textbooks. But, I have to be concerned with quality of life instead of quantity of life because I will never know how long my clients will live. Sorry clients.
Determining Quality of Life as a coach
The best that I can do is ensure behavior moves in the right direction towards outcomes that are associated with an increased quantity of life. Why? Because, in turn, quality of life typically improves too.
In the real world, measuring quality of life is challenging because the measures are often anecdotal and unexpected. They are ripple effects of focused behavior change effort on quantity of life research methods (taking more steps).
I’ve been fortunate to have success in my early coaching career on quality of life metrics like:
- Tina became no longer diagnosed with pre-diabetes (Case Study 5)
- Emma’s running program became more efficient (Case Study 4)
- Bella’s husband gave her a compliment and her daughter began exercising more (Case Study 3)
- Oscar was less out of breath when helping wife with chores (Case Study 2)
- Ashley reduced sugary soft drink consumption (Case Study 1)
What’s the point of this quantity/quality post?
This blog started as a 512-word outpouring of thought food which expanded to 1792 words as I dug into the material over two weeks of editing. These ideas took longer explore and describe. And that’s the point, everything, anymore, should be about quality and not quantity.
No magic mortality formula exists.
Hopefully, I’ve curated this blog to make quality points: most research stems from quantity of life, but we really care about the quality of our lives.
That’s the mismatch. The challenge is to give enough behavior to quantitative-based findings that leads to a more fulfilling and higher quality of life.
Keep moving,
Nick
Reference
Fries J. F. (2005). The compression of morbidity. 1983. The Milbank quarterly, 83(4), 801–823. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0009.2005.00401.x
