How to Stay Capable as You Age

How to stay capable as you age is about aging with a focused and strategic approach. What do you still want to be doing at 80 and beyond? When you know with certainty what you want to be capable of doing, you have something worth training for.

Mindset

The people who disrupt the idea that aging equates to a shrinking life have adopted a lifestyle beginning with a growth mindset.

Research suggests that people’s beliefs about aging can affect how they fare as they get older. For example, those who viewed aging as a welcomed journey were more likely to show improvement in cognitive skills and walking speed. Others who held onto a more negative mindset about aging tended to see a decline in these skills.

The encouraging finding is that many older adults still have room for improvement. Our beliefs about aging can change! The right mindset can open doors we might have previously assumed are closed.

The right mindset is the foundation that supports the entire edifice of staying capable as we age.

Chronological and Biological Aging

Chronological age—the number on the calendar—advances automatically. Every year we add one. As the saying goes, age is just a number. But the capacity we bring to that age varies. Biological aging is a dynamic reality, and our daily lives influence it.

Inactivity, poor nutrition, and irregular sleep can work against us. Exercise, nutrient-dense whole foods, and religious sleep patterns can help us preserve or regain function. The decline that we face as we age is not entirely predetermined.

Chronological age advances regardless. Functional capacity responds to what we do. It isn’t an exact mirror image of biological age, but it is the part we experience when we carry a pack, climb stairs, or get up from the floor.

Making the effort to stay functional and independent sounds simple. Simple sounding but challenging to do. The tendency to avoid exertion is so common one could say it is human nature at work. Indeed, all organisms incorporate routines to conserve energy. Raptors spend a large part of their day roosting. Vultures avoid excessive exertion by riding thermal currents while searching for food. Humans, too, conserve energy. Food was often hard to get for our ancestors. They had reason to avoid unnecessary effort. But no matter how much one rested, movement was also built into primitive living. They had to move to live, eat, and thrive. Much of that need has been removed from modern life. Don’t berate yourself for wanting to relax. Begin to nudge yourself into movement mode. Bit by bit, do it for yourself.

Our bodies respond to activity and movement. We are descendants of foragers, hunter-gatherers whose lives required endurance, lifting and carrying, and living and working in groups. That’s our lineage.

To earn a living as a hunter-gatherer, you walked and foraged, carrying babies, tools and food. Movement was part of the work of living. In modern life, we have to make room for it deliberately.

Hunters and gatherers didn’t exercise. They moved because they had to. To our detriment, we have culturalized activity out of our existence. We cannot wait for cultural innovations with easy on-ramps to movement. Our own, grass roots, boots on the ground efforts matter. We make it happen.

The Biology of Aging

A strategy toward remaining capable must include what we are up against, the landscape of aging. Researchers describe interconnected biological changes as the Hallmarks of Aging. Here are five areas that help explain why our daily choices matter.

Remember, we don’t need to master the biology. We need enough understanding to see where our efforts can make a difference.

Epigenetic Alterations—mechanisms that control gene expression undergo profound changes without altering the underlying DNA sequence.
Involuntary loss of muscle—mitochondrial dysfunction and energy depletion
Chronic inflammation—drives chronic disease, pain, and suffering
Senescent cells—a “zombie” attack at the cellular level (inflammaging)
NAD and sirtuins—cellular systems involved in energy, maintenance and repair

Epigenetic Alterations

Life can be explained as a highly complex interplay between cellular machinery and information stored in the genome (DNA) and epigenome, often described as biological hardware and software. Even a basic understanding of your epigenome can help you make more intentional choices about how you live. The software—the human epigenome—is classic biology, adaptive and responsive to input. It helps regulate how your DNA is used. Your daily activity is part of that input.

In Young Forever, functional medicine physician Mark Hyman describes the chronic diseases we face as we age as coding problems. He emphasizes the epigenome: how genes are regulated and expressed. Other biological processes also matter, but one key mechanism is DNA methylation.

The methylation process is complex, sensitive, and dynamic. Methylation patterns change over time, and researchers use some of those patterns to estimate biological age.

Methylation requires enzymes described in the journal Gene as writers, readers, and erasers.

Food supplies nutrients involved in methylation, including folate (vitamin B9), vitamin B12, choline, methionine, and betaine. We also have variations in our genes that affect how we process nutrients. That’s one reason I believe in individualized nutrition through experimentation and experience.

Every day inputs matter—food, movement, exercise or inertia, stress, loneliness, and relationships. How you live is the marinade that your genes bathe in. Aging researcher David Sinclair describes aging in terms of a loss of epigenetic information. As we gain understanding of biology and the aging body, it gives us reason to strategically pay attention to how we live.

Involuntary Loss of Muscle

We involuntarily lose muscle mass at a rate of 3–10 percent per decade after about age twenty-five, and this decline is progressive, increasing with each decade. This phenomenon poses the most critical threat to daily functioning. Posture, mobility, energy levels, and overall physiology are inextricably tied to muscles. The biggest threat to aging with strength and vigor is the loss of muscle, especially type-2 fast-twitch fibers—the ones that give us locomotion, strength, sturdiness, and coordination. For active adults, outdoor types who demand more strength, more agility, and more stamina, muscle loss is unacceptable.

This process begins so gradually—and at such a small scale—that we don’t notice it until function has changed. Part of the story involves the quality and quantity of mitochondria, tiny organelles that power our cells. That’s the trickle of decline that is so infinitesimal we overlook its impact. Make no mistake, Nature’s power is consistency. The aging process accumulates through incessant minutiae, around-the-clock biological aging.

Mitochondria are essential for energy production. Found in most cells, they are especially important in energy-demanding tissues, including the eyes, heart, and muscle. Their decline is a major reason muscle health involves more than what we see in the mirror.

Inactivity exacerbates mitochondrion decline in quality and quantity. But in contrast, research suggests that when demand increases through exercise, they become larger and more numerous. A vigorous, long-term exercise habit has the potential to narrow many differences between young and older individuals. Indeed, researchers have found “robust improvement in skeletal muscle mitochondrial content and function in elderly men and women in response to an achievable program of moderate-intensity physical activity.” Exercise is also known to confer growth, healing, and repair benefits to non-muscle tissue. We run out of words trying to describe in totality the body’s miraculous response to exercise.

Research suggests it is possible to take back some of those car-to-office-to-couch years. Still, it’s impossible to overstate the need to address muscle loss. Its detriments can progress out of sight until, one day, a knee or an ankle gives out—or you fall and face a long recovery. The CDC has called falls among adults aged 65 and older “common, costly, and preventable.”

Muscles support and stabilize our joints. Less strength can make everyday movements harder and leave us less steady. The loss may appear minute and insignificant, but the weakening is steady, relentless, and compounds over time.

Muscle loss is more than mere lethargy and dullness; it has deep and wide downstream implications. For example, a progressive increase in fat mass and other consequential changes in body composition. It is associated with an increased incidence of insulin resistance in the elderly. Furthermore, bone density decreases, and joint stiffness increases. The cumulative effect of muscle loss can bring about unseen vulnerabilities and implications. But you have agency—the power to push back and rebuild capacity—right here and now.

Chronic Inflammation

As you may know, inflammation comes in two types. Acute inflammation is a natural healing response to injury, illness, or germs. It promotes healing and then subsides. Chronic inflammation, on the other hand, persists like an internal, smoldering fire, fueling cascading decline. When immune cells are triggered to respond to damage from internal or external stimuli, they secrete pro-inflammatory chemicals (cytokines) along with other signaling molecules. It’s the body’s reaction to “bad actor” cells, removing them and initiating repair. But when this response becomes dysfunctional, it persists far beyond what benefits our health. Chronic inflammation damages tissues and organs. It contributes to diseases such as arthritis, high blood pressure, stroke, heart disease, asthma, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and cancer.

The list is long. That is why chronic inflammation keeps appearing in discussions of aging. It connects conditions and problems that we might think are separate.

A question you can ask right now, standing in your own kitchen, is: Do I have pain-free mobility? Pain isn’t a test for inflammation, but it is information worth paying attention to.

Too often, we accept muscle aches, body stiffness, and joint pain as unavoidable parts of getting older. Aging does not mean surrendering to pain. It is time to update both our thinking and our lifestyle—and get help to understand pain that persists and what we can do about it.

Senescence

Senescent cells are cells that have stopped dividing. Some linger and release inflammatory factors that affect nearby cells. These “zombie cells” help explain how trouble in one part of our bodily ecosystem can spread beyond it.

A vicious cycle can follow. Senescent cells contribute to inflammation, and inflammation can encourage further senescence. You’ll see the term “inflammaging” used for chronic inflammation associated with aging.

The factors secreted by senescent cells are known as the senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP). Changes in immune function can make clearing these cells more difficult. The details are complex, but the connection is familiar: weakening one system can place a greater burden on another. Furthermore, chronic systemic inflammation can cause pain and is linked to arthritis.

Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide (NAD)

Please bear with me—this one isn’t as complicated as it looks. I wouldn’t burden you with biochemical names and processes if they weren’t important for your health and independence. All you need to remember is that NAD is a crucial coenzyme for over 500 chemical reactions in the body, and many of those reactions dull due to the decline of NAD.

NAD works with signaling proteins at the apex of cellular activity. Sirtuins are a family of specialized signaling proteins that regulate survival, health, fitness, and the body’s natural demolition, cleanup, recycling, healing, and infrastructure-building systems. They mute inflammation, boost mitochondrial production, and fight muscle loss. Sirtuins require the coenzyme NAD for activity. As we are learning, biological aging may dampen NAD production, and cause sirtuin activity to taper.

This is another piece of the aging puzzle, and another reason researchers are interested in how exercise and lifestyle can help us age better.

One exercise study found that older participants could restore skeletal muscle NAMPT to levels observed in young individuals. NAMPT is an enzyme involved in recycling components used to make NAD. Not proof that whole-body NAD returned to youthful levels, but movement in a positive direction.

That is enough biology for now. These processes overlap and interact. What we can internalize is that your choices often affect more than one at a time. What matters most about this landscape is what you do next.

Signal and Story

Aging is not a predetermined downhill slide. It’s more of a calling. And you have a say in how your aging plays out. When you notice a change, head’s up—it’s your warning—a shot across the bow. The thing to know is before it becomes a prediction about your future, it is information.

This is where signal and story come into play.

The signal is the change that you notice. Maybe you get news from a medical professional that things are changing. Maybe you are just sapped of energy.

The story follows with your interpretation.

How you interpret the signal can influence what you do next. The danger is that a small change or one piece of information can swell to a conceptual catastrophe. Your mind takes over and creates an imagined future. The picture usually isn’t good.

Use your awareness. Respond to the signal. Examine the story that comes afterward. Pause from your busy and distracted life to recognizethe difference. See the story for what it is and respond to the signal. That little progression creates room for a different response.

And in that space, you realize you have a choice. What matters more than anything else is what you do next. That’s agency—your capacity to recognize, choose, and act. Agency means noticing what is happening, seeing clearly where your energy should go—what matters—and taking action.

The human capacity for agency is always there, sometimes latent, hidden or obscured, or under-used. It is strengthened through use and it grows through use.

Notice. Pause and calm yourself. Recognize reality. You question, “What is happening to my body? I can’t do what I used to do. I’m stiff and sore all the time. This is what aging is: all downhill.”

Separate. Stiffness, pain, and lack of energy are information. “This is what aging is, all downhill” is a story. We know the signal is real. We question whether the story is accurate and warranted.

Envision. Return to that opening question: What do you still want to be doing at 80 and beyond? You have something worth training for.

Choose. Consider, given what matters to you and what is actually true, what is your influence? Agency is not control. It is choosing within the circumstances out of our control.

Act. You have discovered something worth improving your lifestyle for. When you act—exercise, improve nutrition, make time for recovery—you give yourself an opportunity to build capacity.

Experience. You carry the pack further. Get up from the floor without using your hands. You play longer with your grandchildren. You experience the evidence.

Recognize. Now you recognize, “I did that.” And you say to yourself, “If I influenced that, what else is possible? What have my previous assumptions kept me from doing, enjoying?”

Evidence. Agency grows and expands through evidence. The evidence you experience doesn’t just improve your functional capacity; it improves your belief system, your mindset.

The process of agency is nuanced and fluid. It requires more discernment than dogged determination. To see with clarity, to know what matters and what doesn’t, and how to improve. Others can guide you, but they cannot do the practicing for you. There is simply no better use of your senior wisdom, your senior intellect.

It is not motivation. Motivation says: “I really should exercise because I’m getting older.”

Agency says: “I know what I want to remain capable of doing; I recognize my circumstances and know that my actions influence what is possible, and I’m choosing accordingly.”

Exercise

Start with movement. Aerobic exercise and resistance training do different jobs, and both belong in a life built around staying capable.

Aging researcher and author David Sinclair emphasizes that our genes did not evolve in a pampered and comfortable environment. Exercise gives us a way to bring manageable physical challenges back into modern life.

Aerobic endurance is how long you can sustain an activity. To build it, spend time moving at a steady, manageable effort—run, walk, hike, bike, swim, stair-step, row, or ruck. You cruise. Slow, consistent exercise—over weeks, months, and years—gives your body repeated opportunities to adapt. Speed is not the point. The habit, and the time you can sustain it, matters. Athletes use a great deal of easier aerobic training to build their endurance. You are working toward health and fitness. You’re in good company.

You will hear this easier training called zone-2, although training systems define their zones slightly differentl. For a practical starting point, the CDC describes moderate effort as being able to talk but not sing. A heart-rate monitor can help you watch your effort. It’s like your car’s tachometer. The “RPMs” are analogous to your heart rate. It’s a reassuring tool that also serves to motivate because it’s fun and rewarding to watch and document your efforts in real time. But a formula such as 220 minus your age is only an estimate of maximum heart rate; it cannot give you an exact personal training zone.

Once you have developed a solid base, you may want to add harder efforts to work on aerobic capacity—the maximum amount of oxygen your body can use during intense exercise. Connection and experience—being in touch with your body—help you get a feel for what you can do.

Those track and field athletes whom you see dramatically speed up near the finish line are completely in touch with their bodies. They have spent years getting to know intimately what their bodies are telling them in real time. They know how much they have in reserve, and they have developed the comfort of pushing themselves to the limit. It is like any creative endeavor: an artist, a writer, or an accomplished musician. They make it look effortless. The point is, you can develop this kind of connection and knowing too. It takes time, effort, and commitment. But it is also exciting to imagine that this is possible for you.

Intervals alternate harder efforts with easier recovery. They give you a different challenge from steady cruising. The effort and duration need to suit your current capacity; there is no requirement to sprint flat out.

We have the capacity for endurance and bursts of speed. It is exciting to rediscover some of that range. But begin with the body you have today. If you have been inactive or have health concerns, get professional advice before adding vigorous exercise. At the very least, get a professional, medically supervised treadmill stress test.

Aerobic activity, writes John J. Ratey, MD, can transform the body and the mind. “Exercise is the single most powerful tool you have to optimize your brain function.”

Resistance Training

Debate abounds over aerobics or resistance exercises. The answer is yes, both. Endurance alone does not give us all the strength and power we need. In Young Forever, Mark Hyman acknowledges his own blind spot: “I didn’t start doing weight training until I was 60 years old because I told myself that biking, tennis, and yoga were good enough. I was wrong.”

We are all wrong at times. Awareness, self-examination, and openness are the keys to developing new sets of eyes that help us grow and improve. This is all part of embracing the capacity we have for better aging.

A friend from a running club, fictitiously named Alex, is a seasoned marathoner who runs exclusively and has built the endurance to run for hours. My ‘lungs on legs’ friend suffered a fractured ankle stepping off a curb. Shocked. Alex wailed, “it was a low curb. There was no twisting or slipping, just a normal, maybe 5-inch step, and I went down. I’m only 66. What’s up with that? How can that be?”

Luckily, through our running club, we found a sports medicine doctor who knew (and cared) about prevention as much as diagnosis and treatment. He prescribed X-rays and a bone density scan, but he also offered a detailed analysis of ‘why’ this had happened, as well as how to heal, rebuild, and come back from it even stronger.

The sports medicine doctor’s findings: “You fell because your ankle and foot are weak areas. Your foot is a maze of tiny stress fractures (cracks) from extensive running. The good news is that your level of aerobic capacity and endurance will help you come back. It literally saves you from the decline that stems from idleness. A few months off from running should not be a problem. But your fractured ankle is a sign of what’s going on throughout your body, a harbinger, if you will.

Your weak type-2 muscles led to ‘loosey-goosey’ ankle joints and a decline in balance so nuanced, you probably didn’t feel it. Stepping off a curb and hurting your ankle is common, even for runners in their sixties. That’s because we all begin to lose muscle at around age thirty. The only way to address the problem is through resistance training.

I recommend you work with a physical therapist for 6-8 weeks. They will guide you with exercises that help the damaged soft tissue—muscles, ligaments, and tendons—rebuild. For the long-term, you need to incorporate resistance training into your running. That means after you recover with the physical therapist, work with a trainer to strengthen all of your muscles, upper and lower body.

A trainer will emphasize strength and power-building moves, especially in the lower body. They will help you re-build type-2 muscle while boosting proprioception and coordination. Resistance training is a win-win-win. In the process of muscle development, you will offset age-related decline by building new muscle and bone. Your trainer will guide you in additional balance exercises. If you commit to resistance and balance exercises long-term, you will build the capacity to continue running into your later decades.”

My friend’s experience speaks directly to the debate around aerobics versus resistance exercises. Endurance is valuable. It is equally valuable to have the strength and balance to stay on your feet.

The decline of type-2 muscles is one of the most critical factors in aging. They require our specific attention, as these ‘power’ muscles seem to decline more rapidly than type-1. This loss erodes function and physical capacity and increases the probability of falling.

Muscle loss can affect activities of daily living (ADL). When moving becomes a painful, stiff struggle, it’s too much effort, and the ensuing idleness exacerbates other conditions, including more rapid muscle loss; think, ‘snowball effect.’

Resistance training gives us a direct way to work on strength. Heavy weight is not required to begin. Body weight can provide resistance, and the work can be adapted as you gain capacity.

Two or three days a week can be a workable resistance-training routine, with recovery between sessions that work the same muscles. If you have limited experience, work with a trainer until you nail down how hard to push, what the best techniques are, and which exercises work which muscles. Include balance work, too. Staying upright on your feet as you age requires a deliberate effort.

Resistance training conditions, burns fat, and builds muscle. In the process, through a complex series of chemical and hormonal activity, you offset age-related bone loss and even potentially build bone. You don’t have to be an athlete or have skill or experience in sports. Anyone at any level can reap the benefits of resistance training.

Not everything that counts can be counted. Resistance training confers benefits to non-muscle tissue and systems. It can enhance joint health and positively affect metabolic health by improving insulin sensitivity and glucose metabolism. It may help reduce the risk of chronic conditions such as heart disease and diabetes.

Nutrition: Your Body Responds to Every Morsel

The human body possesses complex, highly sensitive nutrient-sensing systems. Your biology never sleeps. It is constantly rebuilding, rewiring, adapting, and healing—looking for signals about what pathways to turn on or off based, in part, on input from you.

Every morsel you ingest stimulates a response that influences the body’s internal environment.

You’ve likely heard that a plant-rich diet is good for you. We are only beginning to understand why. Plants contain thousands of natural compounds that interact with human biology. Some create a mild stress—a hormetic response—that appears to trigger cellular protection, repair, and rebuilding.

One interesting family of compounds under investigation is senolytics, substances being studied for their potential to help the body deal with senescent, or “zombie,” cells. These cells accumulate with age and contribute to inflammation. Compounds being studied include fisetin, found in strawberries and apples; quercetin in onions, apples, berries, and citrus; luteolin in vegetables and berries; and curcumin in turmeric.

I wouldn’t call strawberries an anti-aging drug. I would say that plants could have a chemical influence on our health far greater than we once appreciated.

More than 26,000 biomolecules have been identified in plants, and the health effects of most remain poorly understood. The Periodic Table of Food Initiative is working to map this largely unexplored chemistry. We know a great deal about calories, protein, vitamins, and minerals. We still know surprisingly little about how food works as medicine.

Whole foods remain the place to start. Supplements can have a role, but don’t confuse slick marketing with evidence or FDA approval.

Your Body, the Ecosystem

My work as a wildlife biologist centered on habitat—wetlands, salt marshes, forests, and prairies. Healthy habitats contribute upward to the health and resilience of the entire ecosystem.

A vigorous ecosystem can withstand a storm, flood, drought, or die-off. It adapts and rebuilds.

But weaken a habitat and pathogens get an opening. A drought-stressed forest becomes more vulnerable to beetles and disease. A damaged wetland is more susceptible to invasive species and further decline.

That’s how Nature works. Humans are no different.

Your body is an ecosystem. Its habitats include your muscles, organs, nervous system, gut, tendons, immune system, and countless interacting biological processes. Building health means maintaining the integrity of those systems—not merely suppressing symptoms when something hurts.

Relieving pain matters. So does understanding why it exists. Restoring a natural system usually requires improving the conditions that allowed it to deteriorate. Human health works much the same way.

Everything you eat and drink—and much of what you do or don’t do—changes the internal environment in which your cells operate. Metabolites, hormones, proteins, insulin, enzymes, coenzymes, and other chemicals course through your blood. It is quite literally a chemical bath.

And like any ecosystem, nothing happens in isolation.

One of the clearest examples is the gut. Our modern diet tends to be calorie-dense, heavily processed, and low in fiber. But fiber is food for many of the microbes living in our intestinal tract. Without enough of it, we change what can thrive there and which metabolites those microbes produce.

Build Health from the Gut Outward

The gut contains trillions of microorganisms. Together they form a miniecosystem inside the larger human ecosystem, influencing immunity, metabolism, and inflammation. Imagine the potential internal well-being that could come from feeding that ecosystem well.

A diverse diet of unprocessed, fiber-rich whole foods—largely plants—provides raw material that gut microbes transform into metabolites. Those compounds, in turn, interact with immune, metabolic, and inflammatory pathways throughout the body.

This is why dietary diversity matters. Healthy ecosystems tend to be diverse. The same pattern appears in the microbiome: greater microbial richness is generally associated with health, while loss of diversity appears in many disease states.

We don’t need to understand every organism or chemical reaction to benefit from the principle.

Improving those conditions is the aim. As Mark Hyman likes to say, “There are ingredients to health and impediments to health.”

Feed your ecosystem. Eat a wide variety of vegetables, fruits, legumes, nuts, seeds, herbs, spices, and other minimally processed foods. Give your microbes something useful to work with.

The opposite pattern—the highly processed Western diet, rich in sugar and saturated fat and poor in plant fiber—is associated with metabolic disease, chronic inflammation, and unfavorable changes in gut microbiota.

Nutrition, then, is more than fuel and far more than calories. It builds habitats. It is one of the most persistent inputs shaping the internal ecosystem you carry around every day.

Improve the environment, and you give the body a better opportunity to do what living systems have always done: repair, adapt, and build resilience.

Considering Fasting

Using your knowledge of the body’s highly sensitive nutrient-sensing systems, eat and hydrate yourself strategically. And consider the timing of meals as well as what is on the plate.

Fasting is in our lineage. We evolved through periods of scarcity. That is part of what makes it interesting to aging researchers. But an ancestral connection alone does not tell us what is best for an older adult trying to preserve muscle.

Time-restricted eating limits food to a daily window. It can be one way to reduce excess intake, but it is an option to consider individually. If you are interested, discuss it with someone who understands your health, medications, and nutritional needs. That is particularly important if you take insulin or certain other diabetes medications. Losing muscle while trying to improve health would work against the purpose of this article and your better aging efforts.

For this Cornerstone, the priority is eating in a way that supports the life you want to keep living. The details of fasting deserve their own discussion.

Recovery

Effort needs recovery. To be fully awake, energized, and excited for each day depends in part on adequate sleep. Just one night without it can leave you feeling overly tired, less productive, and more prone to mistakes the next day.

Sleep feeds the necessity to rebuild, recover, and renormalize from the multitude of events of the day. If your sleep patterns are off, you will struggle (perhaps unknowingly). Sleep deprivation is a known performance killer. And that does not just mean in athletics or the office. Sleep is infinitely complex (and not well understood) and masterfully entangled with interrelated molecular processes. Mistimed sleep or sleep deprivation leads to altered cellular communication. Signaling proteins, coenzymes, necessary synthesis, and processes are disrupted. We must build lifestyle strategies to optimize our sleep, especially as we age.

In the book Why We Sleep, author and researcher Matthew Walker, PhD writes, “There does not seem to be one major organ within our body, or process within the brain that isn’t optimally enhanced by sleep (and detrimentally impaired when we don’t get enough).” For serious issues like sleep apnea, accumulated sleep debt, or long-term sleep deprivation, seek professional help.

To thrive, we need to make room for that recovery. Exercise and good nutritional practices can support sleep, but they do not guarantee it. For best practices and developing healthy sleep habits and environments, find a source of guidelines that resonates with you. MedlinePlus, from the National Library of Medicine, is a good reference.

Quality of Life

All this effort serves a larger purpose: quality of life. Healthspan is usually defined as the time we are free from disability and disease. But that definition doesn’t capture everything that matters to me. Disease can be present, and you can still have a vital and robust quality of life—including me.

Physical ability, cognitive function, and emotional wellness all matter. We have spent a good deal of time on physical ability. The same active life can also give us opportunities to think, care, and connect.

The ideal is to pay attention before those capacities begin waning. And if something has already changed, there is still reason to stay involved.

Cognitive changes may show up as a slower, less sharp you. You lose your place in conversations, forget the point you were making. Persistent changes deserve attention. They don’t have to dominate your story. Remember, what you do next is paramount.

Participating in sports, the Senior Olympics, outdoor pursuits like hiking, camping, backpacking, or fly-fishing gives you something to work toward. You use your head as well as your body. John Ratey, a psychiatrist who writes about exercise and the brain, makes a strong case for staying active. This is another reason to see exercise as more than a way to build muscle.

Exercise, connection, community, along with new, different, or novel experiences, demand more from the brain. Ratey describes brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a protein involved in brain function and plasticity, as “Miracle-Gro” for the brain. We don’t need to remember the initials to recognize the value of exercise, connection, and involvement, the tried and true.

Any active life cultivates cognitive function like a real-life jigsaw puzzle. You don’t have the box with the completed picture, so you figure it out by creating your own picture a little at a time. That’s part of what makes the success of planning for a competition, a hike, any outing exhilarating. You don’t know how you will do, what to expect, but you put all the pieces together without a reference photo.

And that experience requires new thinking and new approaches each time out. As the ancient philosopher Heraclitus reminds us, “No man ever steps in the same river twice.” The cognitive offering of an active and engaged life involves your whole self; engaged in creative planning, complex problem-solving, memory, and even physically training for the event.

You are stimulating mental growth by figuring things out before you step foot in the activity. The anticipation, planning, and unknown is invigorating. If you are outdoors, you are embedded in the best Nature has to offer. Embracing the challenge, you continuously seek improvement to evolve and do better with each event.

Emotional health deserves our attention, too. This one is not age-dependent. You can suffer emotionally at any age. As a teenager, after the sudden death of my father, I struggled. I didn’t want to talk, see, or be near anyone. I didn’t want to wake up. But gradually, pulling myself through the fog and mud each day helped me start to care. In a sense, I found a flashlight (caring) to see through the daily fog. When you care, you get involved. When you get involved, you commit. Through commitment, you build connections, relationships, and friendships. That’s why it broke my heart to see my other senior friends (fishing and outdoor buddies) decline so quickly and prematurely. After I lost my dad, they gave me a reason to trudge through the mud of each day. Later, and to a lesser extent, I struggled emotionally while navigating life and trying to create a plan to push back against aging, decline, and disease. I cared, perhaps to a fault. Stumbled for sure, but I kept climbing and didn’t quit.

The connections you can make from joining outdoor clubs, fishing clubs, or trail clubs are emotionally soothing. The details are hard to put into words. Time vaporizes in activities or outdoors with others. Flowing water, boulders, and shades of green that would create awe in any artist. It’s the disconnect that makes you feel connected. You feel at once overwhelmed with tranquility and pumped with adrenaline. A primeval connection to Nature is palpable, and the child you are at essence comes to the surface.

From our days as hunter-gatherers, we are social. Foraging and chasing down big game was a group effort. Isolation is strongly associated with poor physical and mental health. Get involved, be a joiner—fly-fishing clubs are always seeking new members. Embrace community; volunteer. Do what’s comfortable for you, but do something to stay connected to people and community.

The Practice

As you bring agency to your aging, an important consideration is, how much protein do you actually need to feed muscle-building?

A general rule of thumb is to use your body weight (in pounds) times 0.36 (for the lower end) and 0.45 (for the higher end) and the resulting number would be grams of protein per day. For example, a 110-pound woman would need right around 45 grams of protein per day.

If you are someone with a high level of activity or an athlete, you should increase your protein consumption. But the increase isn’t quite as much as people often think. It might be an additional 50 percent from that baseline calculation.

That same 110-pound female, if she was an athlete, could add an additional 20-25 grams of protein to her diet. If you’re someone who regularly does intense workouts and your goal is to build muscle or get toned, you would fit in that same category.

Don’t ignore salad as a part of your protein. Adding things like chickpeas or chicken can increase protein to a respectable 25 grams.

Remember, you don’t think your way into agency. With only a fragment of what is possible, you act, experiment, and see the evidence. Then that fragment begins to build. Greater agency produces more strategic and intentional behavior.

You don’t merely have agency; you exercise it. That is how you become an active participant in your own aging.