Live longer: avoid stress

The original discussion was about "blue zones" a decade ago. At that time I missed it. Now there is some Medium post on the subject (We’ve Known How to Combat Dementia For Years — We’re Just Not Listening).

Some extracts:

In 2010, researchers concluded that chronic stress significantly increased women’s likelihood of developing dementia. In 2013, researchers found that chronic stress quickens the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. In 2017, a meta-analysis pointed to stress as a likely contributor to dementia. In 2017, another study successfully used measures of stress to predict dementia onset.

In 2009, Dan Buettner published his book, The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest, which covered the lifestyle of a collection of communities across the globe with especially long life expectancies. In addition to longer life, these communities have significantly reduced rates of depression, dementia, cancer, and heart disease. Buettner’s book became a bestseller and was quickly followed by a series of books on how to live like a member of the blue zones. The blue zone people became a cultural phenomenon. They were the key to living longer, and we wanted to mimic them — almost.

Two years after The Blue Zones, a group of researchers at the University of Athens published a study on the sociodemographics and lifestyles of these people. While diet, sleep, and other healthy habits contributed to their longevity, the study concluded that long life in the blue zone is a product of regular socializing, a sense of purpose, and low-stress levels as much as it is a product of physical health.

The lifestyle of the blue zone people vastly differs from the rat race culture pervasive in Western society. They live simply and emphasize community. In fact, microbiologist and health coach P.D. Mangan points out that “the factor that unites all of these [blue zone people] is either being less touched by modernity, or actively rejecting it.”

internal family systems therapy (IFS)

On Medium I found some nice post about internal family systems therapy (IFS), a kind of therapy developed by Richard C. Schwartz.

It took a long time for Schwartz to break out of family systems orthodoxy and ask his patients about their interior lives. What he noticed in their responses was a surprising echo of the conflicted interpersonal relationships he had been trained for: They tended to talk colloquially about warring “parts” of them. One part of them wanted to be skinny; another part didn’t care what people thought. One part felt shy and introverted; another part liked parties. One part sometimes seized control and ate and ate in a numb haze; a colder, more punitive part then took over and made them purge.

Schwartz found that one after another of his patients were able to identify regular voices in their heads that got into repetitive arguments with each other, often just below the level of language. At first, Schwartz was alarmed. He almost wondered if he was seeing undiagnosed dissociative identity disorder. But the symptoms didn’t quite add up. For those with DID, the switch between “alters” meant a discontinuity in consciousness and memory, but switches between “parts” were usually more subtle than that. As one early patient put it, “In the course of 10 minutes I go from being a professional who has it all together, to a scared, insecure child, to a raging bitch, to an unfeeling, single-minded eating machine.” Was it possible that parts were just a normal part of conscious experience — that everyone had parts?

Schwartz spent a while looking inside himself. Sure enough, his own inner conflicts separated out into distinct perspectives which voiced coherent points of view. In stressful situations, one or another of them would often hijack his consciousness to impose its own distorted perspective on the world, a process Schwartz came to call “blending.” It seemed that Schwartz himself, like his patients, had parts. He considered coining a technical name for them, but eventually decided “parts” worked just fine.


How to deal with those parts?

He soon learned that [] parts tended to be trapped in desperate situations they had encountered years before, using strategies to cope which had long since ceased to be adaptive. Schwartz got to know anxious achiever parts and depressed caregiver parts, super-efficient manager parts and flirtatious social butterfly parts, five-year-old parts which covered up pain with temper tantrums and 40-year-old parts which covered it up with drinking, parts which had never gotten over a small playground slight from a friend and parts which were trapped in horrifying scenes of child abuse or of war.

To this day, when a young therapist attending one of Schwartz’s workshops comes up to the mic to ask whether a suicidal part is just seeking attention or a comedic part is covering for shame, the answer Schwartz generally gives is, “You’d have to ask it,” invariably provoking a wave of nervous laughter from the room at his failure yet again to act like a guru.

Eventually, Schwartz did come up with names for the most common roles he saw parts taking on in their relationships with each other. Parts that he called protectors used a vast array of coping strategies, sometimes very extreme ones, to manage the emotional pain of deeply buried parts that Schwartz called exiles. Exiles were often very young and lived in a nightmarish limbo, interpreting even minor adult pain through the lens of the childhood memories they were trapped in. Because they were so vulnerable, exiles were hard to access. You had to go through protectors to get to them, and protectors could be tough customers. To speak to a seven-year-old exile carrying the pain of a father’s abusive criticism, for example, you might have to reckon with a blustering 40-year-old protector of a different exile who thought the seven-year-old was just as much of a pussy as his father used to call him — and that you were too, for taking his concerns seriously.

Luckily, it turned out there was an easier way of negotiating with protectors than having patients blend with them. If a patient simply closed their eyes and asked a part to “step back” a pace, they could often get enough emotional distance from it to speak for the part rather than from the part: “My defensive part is jumping up and down with rage that you would say something like that,” rather than “fuck you.” In this unblended state, the patient could ask questions of the part, listen to it, even bargain with it. If the part felt that its concerns were being taken seriously, it was often willing to step aside completely for a while, entering a visualized “waiting room” with the door closed behind it so that the patient could begin work on whatever part came up next.


When all parts step aside what is left is the Self:

If a patient got all their parts to step aside, protectors and exiles alike, something curious happened. They entered a state of mind far clearer and more joyful than any they seemed able to maintain in day-to-day life: calm, confident, curious, compassionate.

“What part is this?” Schwartz asked, amazed, the first few times it happened. He always got the same answer: “This doesn’t feel like a part. It just feels like myself.”

So Schwartz decided to call it Self: a unified mode of consciousness that seemed to lie just beneath all the sound and fury of parts, surprisingly reminiscent of the clear mental waters that Buddhists sought with mindfulness meditation.

There are other therapies that work with parts:

The Italian Freudian analyst Roberto Assagioli called them “subpersonalities” and developed a psychoanalytic school of thought known as psychosynthesis at the beginning of the 20th century that sought to integrate them into a harmonious whole. Half a century later, husband-and-wife team John and Helen Watkins developed ego-state therapy in the United States with different terminology but much the same goal.

 Patients can find IFS therapists in all 50 U.S. states through the IFS Institute’s online directory or on Psychology Today. Many have also done “parts work” on their own using psychologist Jay Earley’s popular guide Self-Therapy.

The old have a good memory too

The NY Times has an article by a neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin "Everyone Knows Memory Fails as You Age. But Everyone Is Wrong" that claims that the idea that when you get old you forget more is wrong. Yes, there are illnesses like Alzheimer that seriously affect memory. But often we fool ourselves by attributing forgetfulness of the young to irresponsibility, lack of sleep or stress and blaming the same happening to the old on dementia. If you leave people with Alzheimer illnesses aside memory sees only a very minor reduction. And the minor loss in speed can at least partially be explained by the fact that the memory is fuller. Some aspects of memory actually get better as we age. For instance, our ability to extract patterns, regularities and to make accurate predictions improves over time because we’ve had more experience. (This is why computers need to be shown tens of thousands of pictures of traffic lights or cats in order to be able to recognize them). If you’re going to get an X-ray, you want a 70-year-old radiologist reading it, not a 30-year-old one.