One of the measures of health & age is our ability to handle variability.
- How fast can you run
- How much can your lungs expand or contract
- What’s your peak heart rate output and what’s your resting heart rate
- How much can you lift
- How long can you jump
- How many floors can you climb by stairs & how fast can you do so
- How many new skills you can learn or how many puzzles can you solve
You & Your ex-classmate
In other words, age is not necessarily measured in years. It can also be measured in terms of your ability to manage variability that I am referring to above. For instance, between you and your ex classmate, you are much older if
- You have diabetes, or High Blood Pressure related issues, he doesn’t
- You are overweight, he’s not
- He can sprint, you’re complaining of some knee pain
- He takes stairs, you take elevator
- He can lift his wife in his arms, you can’t lift yours (ceteris paribus!)
You get my point…even if you and your ex-classmate are of the same age, by the count of years, you’re in many ways, way older than he is because of the lack of your ability to handle variation.
You and your younger self
Upto a certain age, say mid 20s, this capability to handle variability increases, then it flattens, and starts falling. Beyond an age, around 35 years, surely the capability of our body to manage variability gets into depreciating mode. This is evident from the typical career graph of an international sports person. A typical sports person bursts into an international scene in late teens, peaks during 20-25 years. From there on the sportsperson starts relying more on his/her experience rather than strength. Typically he/she retires in early 30s.
The Precipice of Accelerated Fragility
This capability to handle variation starts falling in the mid 30s, initially slowly. You may not even feel it that much. Just that the peak output is not as much as you would have in your mid 20s. Unfortunately, the curve falls exponentially in later stages of life. As you get older, the effect is more visible.
For instance, it may start by something very innocuous like not being able to leap like a frog, from one corner of a room to the opposite corner, or not being able to run full pelt, or not being able to jump two feet from the floor (both legs together, like Javed Miandad!). This looks innocuous to start with. However, what happens is that the reduced capacity gets locked in at lower and lower levels. At every failure you tend to give up trying, and every time you give up trying, you in a way give signal to the body that it’s okay to take it easy, and every time you send that message to the body, your capability to handle variability goes down even further. So, in effect, you get caught in a precipice of accelerated fragility.
The fall starts as a natural decline in the capacity to manage variability in the early 30s, if ignored soon does two things:
One, the new reduced level of fragility gets locked. This is like a Ratchet & Pinion Effect that I have tweeted about some time back.
Once this happens it is difficult to get back to previous higher levels. You get locked to a lower level of variability permanently. This phenomenon of locked fragility is instrumental in setting you on a precipice of faster decline in future.
Two, what starts with ignorance, soon degenerates into acceptance of this locked fragility. You resign to your lower level of capacity. This acceptance sets you onto a path of accelerated decadence.
Soon, you develop a sort of Learned Helplessness – a condition in which you suffer from a sense of powerlessness arising from persistent fall in your capacity to handle variability. By this stage, you are in a trap. You’re going downhill in a precipice. There is a ratchet & pinion at work, which locks your capacity at lower & lower level. You’ve given up hope. Result…
Eventually, you reach a stage when the body can’t even handle basic movements like standing on your own, sitting on the floor, walking straight & without support etc. My 72 year old aunty cannot even brush her teeth on her own. In the Caveman’s times, if you could not run fast enough, you were dead already. But, today, my aunty drags on her life, but lives a very poor & hopeless life. Modern medical science has kept her alive, but certainly not kicking!
What Can You Do To Prevent This Degeneration
Nothing actually, to some extent! This is a biological process and is inevitable. However, what we can do is delay the degeneration. What we can do is stay at a reasonably higher level of capability for as long as possible, and finally giving in but only at the fag end of the life.
The degeneration in the capability to handle variability is spontaneous and autopoietic; to impede it, calls for efforts!
Induce Variability
You need to induce variability yourself in various aspects of life – fitness, muscles, lung expansion, heart rate variability, eating or hunger and mental exercise etc. Do not ignore the falling capacity and certainly do not succumb to Learned Helplessness. The best way to impede the degeneration is by inducing variability from your end. Keep exploring your limits and in the process, even expanding them. This way, you keep your capacity to manage variability at elevated levels and do not let it fall off the precipice.
Here are a few illustrations…
Fitness – Enter Exercise. Exercise means to exert – vigour & intensity are integral to it. There is a typical evolutionary ‘Fight or Flight’ response associated with any challenge. The aim of the exercise is to simulate either of these. When you exercise, you imagine either being chased by a tiger or chasing a deer yourself. You put everything you have, to work for the next few seconds to survive the attack to accomplish the chase. Sprint, jump, duck, punch, squeeze, push, pull, lift, climb…do whatever it takes…and do all of this with full intensity. This pushes your body – muscles, lungs, heart and even mind to its limits. Notice that a mild stroll in the park, with a headphone, will neither protect you from the panther nor will it fetch the deer for your meal.
If you want to continue to brush your teeth by yourself at the age of 72, take your body to your current extremes with adequate frequency.
Hunger – Bring variability in eating too. Overeating and calorie overdose can be linked to fast ageing. Observe Intermittent Fasting. Keep an eating window and a fasting window and make it your daily lifestyle. This variability in eating brings along a whole lot of benefits. Please refer to the attached Twitter Thread for further reference.
Mental Exercise – Just like the body, push your mind also to its working limits. It is generally claimed and accepted that we are at our curious & learning best during the first five years of our lives. It is said that a child can easily learn five languages at one go. However, as we grow, we curtail putting our mind to work. Extend this to its logical extreme and you arrive at mind related diseases like Alzheimer’s. So, do not set your life on a monotonous path. Keep learning new skills, solving puzzles, playing chess, memory games, reading books, singing, new recipes, and that guitar hanging on the wall.
By inducing variations like these, you can keep yourself younger and fitter for longer periods of time. The last quarter of your life is not a punishment for you and your family. You give yourself a chance to enjoy the harvest of your toil in the first three quarters.
Remember this…if you give up on your body & brain, the body & brain give up on you!