As Hope entered her 50s, though, something clicked in her, and she felt somehow replenished.

“When I was young,” she says, speaking by phone from her office at a small college in upstate New York, “I used to drive like an old lady. I drive faster now. I don’t worry so much about what other people think. I speak my mind. I don’t know if it was anything in particular. It was just a gradual awakening after I turned 50.”

She compares her age to her favorite season, autumn. “It’s when the trees are full of color and have their most extreme beauty, just before winter,” she says. “That’s the same season for being in your 50s.”

Two years ago, Hope got engaged. But she doesn’t attribute happiness to late love. Rather, she attributes late love to happiness. In a sense, time wedged an opening—like a stream of water cracking open a big boulder—that made it possible for someone to come into her life.

Hope’s growing happiness may be more the rule than an exception, with a number of recent reports suggesting that just when people start needing glasses to read a restaurant menu, life begins to come into clearer focus.

Most recently there was the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, a survey of 1.2 million Americans between 18 and 85, as well as a separate Gallup poll of 340,000. Both surveys produced similar findings—that people’s sense of well-being follows a U-shaped trend, starting high in youth, dipping in one’s 30s and 40s, hitting a low point at 50, then beginning to gather momentum.

“We don’t know why well-being seems to rise with age,” says Nikki Duggan, Healthways’ director of operations and analytics. “Though one trend we see is that over time people feel more respected.”

Other factors, say experts, may be that over time people become more realistic about their expectations, more accepting about what they have or haven’t achieved, and more resilient when things don’t pan out. For many, there’s a growing appreciation of life that may be missing in the years of striving and stress typical of one’s 30s and 40s.

The topic of happiness has blossomed into an industry—from the positive psychology movement to new ways of approaching mental health treatment to happiness skill-building to a book-publishing niche that has almost become its own genre. There are international conferences that look at what happiness means to business and to national and global economics; the south Asian kingdom of Bhutan has a Gross National Happiness Index; Britain recently started a project to measure the national GWB, or general well-being, and this year, Australia hosted the 5th annual World Happiness Forum.

Happiness is particularly relevant in the U.S., which was, after all, the first country to make the happiness of its citizens part of its core mission, starting with the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson substituted what must have seemed an ethereal notion, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” for a more common phrase of the time, “life, liberty and property.” The ideal of happiness was truly radical at a time when humans were generally presumed to be subjects whose sole purpose was to serve the state and its rulers.

The topic is no less important now than it was then, but the recent efforts to compare the relative happiness of the different ages is more relevant than ever: It is projected that life expectancy in the U.S. will rise to 79.5 years by 2020. According to the 2010 census, 40.3 million Americans, 13 percent of the population, are 65 or older. That number is expected to reach 72 million by 2030 and more than double to 89 million, 20 percent of the population, by 2050.

To be sure, happiness is an elusive topic, a vague term for something we seek without necessarily having a definite idea of what it is we’re after.

llustrations by Koren Shadmi.

“There’s a lot of confusion between happiness and pleasure,” says Matthieu Ricard, author of Why Meditate? Working With Thoughts and Emotions and the French translator for the Dalai Lama. “Happiness is about well-being, a sense of fulfillment. That’s different from how happiness is promoted—it’s all about do this or use that and you’ll find happiness. That is more of a recipe for exhaustion than flourishing. It has to be more a way of being than a momentary pleasant stage. In that sense, pleasure can contribute to happiness, but it can also undermine it, if, for example, it becomes a destructive obsession.”

Many experts prefer the term “well-being” because it describes an overall condition rather than a fleeting feeling of pleasure. Martin Seligman, the University of Pennsylvania psychologist whom many regard as the father of positive psychology, called his latest book Flourish, and introduced an acronym, PERMA, to describe the elements of well-being: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment.

The recent studies suggest that as people age they get better at all of the above. Reported in a series of graphs, Gallup-Healthways’ survey showed that as the years go by Americans are more satisfied and feel more respected at work. They smoke less and eat a healthier diet. Older Americans worry less and are less sad and depressed than people in other age groups, and that trend rises into their 60s despite less robust physical health.

“As you age, you realize that you can be happy in the present,” says Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage. “You don’t have to wait until you achieve something more. It’s something you cultivate in the present by connecting to social support networks and paying attention to what’s happening in your life right now.”

Another factor may be the ability to bounce back from adversity or just to keep things in perspective.

“My sense is that unless people change their attitudes and behavior, they remain with the optimal levels of happiness they have,” Achor says. “But what they do gain over time is resilience. They can experience stress and failure and find they’re able to overcome.”

The flip side of the age issue is that unhappiness—a deep, fundamental sense that life has gone off the rails—is occurring at younger ages, with depression occurring earlier than in the past. The mean onset of depression diagnoses in the 1970s was 29. In 2006, it was 14.5. Achor blames technology for this phenomenon. He describes what has happened to modern citizens as a “connection paradox” caused by the urgency to be always linked up and wired in. You can’t be happy if you’re compulsively trying to connect because of a feeling—or fear—of being disconnected or disengaged.

“People are doing too many things,” Achor says. “They’re stressed, running after everything possible. Their brains, even in down moments, are not down. They’re connected to virtual worlds and multitasking. But what we know from research is that the more personal projects a person has on their plate, the more their brain’s resources are spread out, and they don’t get to enjoy them. The more multi-tasking we do, the less happy we are.”

Focus and self-discipline improve with age, and there may be some advantage for people who didn’t grow up mesmerized and conditioned by omnipresent flashing screens, say the experts.

Age, especially for people who have enjoyed a moderate level of success, may also ease the disappointment of youthful high hopes of fame and fortune.

For Roger Stewart, now retired, contentment came from accepting that what he had achieved in his career—a highly rewarding post as an executive editor at a big-city newspaper—was more than adequate professionally, even though he’d started in journalism with the goal of becoming well-known on a national scale.

“When I was in my 30s, I remember listening to an older man I looked up to who was a professor of philosophy, saying, ‘Hey, there are certain stars in the world of philosophy, and I know now I’m never going to be one of them, but I’m comfortable with who I am,’” Roger recalls. “I remember feeling shocked by that. How could he accept being anything but number one? Today, I get it. Making it to the so-called ‘top of your profession’ is not the key to happiness.”

“As you get older, your outlook certainly does change,” says Hope Ferguson, the communications specialist. A number of factors come into play, and one of the biggest is the inescapable experience of living through enough triumphs and setbacks to put things in perspective. “You see the passage of time. You’ve lost people. You see that life has an end, and that makes you want to seize the moment.”

None other than Aristotle asserted that happiness is the goal of goals. But, in researching The Longevity Project: Surprising Discoveries for Health and Long Life from the Landmark Eight-Decade Study, Howard S. Friedman, a psychology professor at the University of California, Riverside, came to the conclusion that perhaps happiness ought not to be a goal at all.

Friedman wasn’t even looking at happiness per se. Rather he was analyzing factors that influence longevity. What he found was that “certain behaviors that resulted in happiness also added to people’s longevity.”

In other words, there’s a correlation between happiness and health, and therefore lifespan. But what’s unique about Friedman’s discovery is that “happiness was really just a byproduct of certain habits” rather than an end in itself. For this reason, Friedman doesn’t believe in the happiness skill-building exercises advocated by many positive psychologists because those habits are not sustainable over time and, more important, because they are less vital than the basic healthy habits that we all know are good for us.

“The pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of doing meaningful things,” Friedman says. “Happy people have certain behaviors. They’re active, they’re socially engaged, they have good relationships and are involved in their communities. They’re absorbed by their work and careers. If they want to do something, they don’t worry that it’s going to take too much effort or be too stressful. They’re persistent. They’re not impulsive. They don’t drink too much. They’re not attracted by destructive relationships. They’re not vain or self-centered. What we found is that happiness is what you get when you live a thriving life.”

Out of Friedman’s research comes a word of warning to those who are happy now, and a word of encouragement to those who are still reaching for it: People who have good habits can lose them and people who don’t can get them.

Even though happiness may naturally rise in one’s 50s—a reward for a life well lived—each of us has to keep earning that reward at every age.

The Pursuit of Happiness The Saturday Evening Post

Howard Wiener

Spring Hill, Florida

The Long Stretch The Saturday Evening Post

Now the 11th  generation of Americans has been born; now it is starting through the fundamental phases of life. Each phase prepares for the next: The love the infant learns in his mother’s arms helps him become a loving child; puppy love introduces the adolescent to a deeper kind. So natural is the process that we assume it, yet often the transitions are difficult. Many of us falter, even fail. But just as every failure spreads to affect other lives, so does every success, and there is in fact much love in this land. On these pages are seven glimpses of today’s Americans as, in their own manner, they obey the ancient urges to share the prime intimacies of life and to send posterity into the future they will never see.

View the 1966 photo gallery.

The Seven Ages of Love The Saturday Evening Post

Familiarity has brought
An end to everything I fear.
I am more moved by honesty
Than by a sneer.

So having skirted sand and swamp
And having tasted briny sea,
I walk the firmer pathways of
Maturity.

And past the little hills of hate,
Beyond the little fence of fright,
I see so infinite a view
They kept from sight.

Published in The Saturday Evening Post, September 12, 1953.

Song upon Maturity The Saturday Evening Post

While most of the article seemed to be aimed at a bored upper class who needed things to do to fill their time, it was relatively harmless until the section on sexual liberation. Since when did it become acceptable in a family magazine to promote sex as nothing more than one more feel good activity? Would you want your daughter or granddaughter reading this article? And how would you explain that what you had been teaching her no longer applied after a certain age?

Lest you think that I am someone who really needs “to get a life,” that is not my problem. While my age designates me as a senior, I am an artist, musician, still work full time running a business of over 34 years, have a very active social life, and do prison ministry in my spare time. I’m not going to ask you to cancel my subscription, but I do ask that you pay a little more attention to what you print.

Lyn
Fairfax, Virginia

Too Much Freedom The Saturday Evening Post

Who do you visit when seeking medical attention or annual checkups?

If you are older, would you prefer seeing a geriatrician or general practitioner? Please explain.

For health information from the American Geriatrics Society Foundation, visit www.healthinaging.org.

Geriatrician or General Practitioner? The Saturday Evening Post

While vitamins can’t cure age-related macular degeneration (AMD), research suggests that eating plenty of fish, green leafy vegetables, and fruits may delay its progression and preserve vision. See below for a list of potentially sight-saving nutrients in foods and supplements.

Most people with macular degeneration have the “dry” form of the disease. It is characterized by the gradual breakdown of cells in the macula, the part of the eye responsible for detailed vision. In “wet” AMD, abnormal blood vessels damage the macula—disrupting vision in the process. Laser and drug therapies to eliminate the extra vessels may allow patients to see more clearly.

Periodic dilated eye exams help ophthalmologists and their patients monitor symptoms and make treatment decisions. Getting regular exercise, maintaining normal blood pressure and weight, and not smoking are also important. In the future, scientists hope that advances with stem cells and genes will prevent or cure the disease.

Data from the Age-Related Eye Disease Study show that taking the following supplements reduced the risk of vision loss in some people with intermediate or advanced AMD:

• 500 mg vitamin C
• 400 IU vitamin E
• 15 mg beta carotene
• 80 mg zinc (as zinc oxide)
• 2 mg copper (as cupric oxide)

More recent studies show that adding lutein and zeaxanthin to the diet may also reduce the risk of developing advanced AMD. These carotenoids are found in the macula. Food sources include Brussels sprouts, spinach, broccoli, kale, and greens.

Medical Mailbox supplements the advice of your healthcare provider, whom you should consult for personal medical problems.

Aging Eyes The Saturday Evening Post

The traditional focus of the medical community’s antiaging campaign has been on the treatment and prevention of chronic disease thought to be an intrinsic part of growing old. The reasoning was clear: Since heart disease and cancer alone accounted for more than 50 percent of all deaths associated with old age, it seemed logical to assume that preventing killer diseases would result in us all living longer—a lot longer.

As it turns out, this isn’t what happens. As devastating as these diseases are, wiping them out only increases average life expectancy by about 91⁄2 years—not the projected 30 to 40. Why? Because something else takes their place.

To add serious years to your life—and life to your years—you have to slow your rate of aging on the cellular level. And you can do just that by taking advantage of recent scientific insights. By learning about the roles of mitochondria, sirtuin, and nitric oxide in the body, you’ll be able to apply these remarkable discoveries to your own life. Death is a destination we all reach some day. But how long the trip takes and how bumpy the ride is, to a surprisingly large degree, up to you.

Despite recent headlines heralding the discovery of the so-called “death gene,” you are not genetically programmed to die. Not even close. Your genes do play an important role in the aging process, just not the one most originally thought. Here’s how it all works.

The Stingy Gene

It’s easy to think that your genes insure a long and healthy life. This is true—but only up to a point. Since the fate of the human race depends on passing along our precious genes, it’s not surprising that genes call the shots. And just like the lucky fox picked to develop the rules for efficient henhouse operation, the gene stacks the deck in its favor.

Genes manage your body much like you manage your household. However, genes are more concerned with energy than dollars. And energy, like money, is always in short supply. Budgets must be established, priorities set. In short, your genes function like bookkeepers focused on three key biological budget categories:

1. Reproductive Expenses: Reproductive expenses include the energy cost of giving birth and breastfeeding, as well as the energy associated with dating, courting, mating, worrying, and chasing after the kids.
2. Maintenance Expenses: Think of maintenance as overhead—the cost of keeping the lights on. Maintenance expenses include the energy cost of being alive, which covers the processing of food, air, and other inputs. Maintenance also involves all the cost involved in fighting off infection, healing wounds, mending broken bones, or repairing damaged DNA.
3. Growth Expenses: Growth expenses include the energy required to increase body size—in length, height, and weight.

The gene knows that the time and energy you use for one purpose limit the resources available for others. For example, energy spent fighting off infection or battling cancer means fewer resources available for reproduction. While it would seem to make perfect sense to spend whatever is necessary to maintain your health, the gene is sympathetic to this view only up to a point. The gene is all for prompt and complete payment of growth and maintenance bills, as long as they are in service of your reproductive mission and never come at the cost of reduced reproductive potential (budget priority #1).

While the gene always earns a perfect credit rating score when it comes to paying reproductive expenses, there are always a reasonable number of repair and maintenance bills that are past due. Several bills will go unpaid altogether. It’s not that there isn’t enough “cash” to pay the outstanding balances; it’s just that the gene is worried there may not be enough left over to cover all reproductive expenses. The miserly gene knows when you are young and healthy, a few past-due repair and maintenance bills won’t impact your ability to produce healthy children. However, over time, the reproductive version of robbing Peter to pay Paul begins to take a toll on your health.

Aging: The Price We Pay for Reproducing

The gradual accumulation of unrepaired damage is the essence of aging. Like water dripping constantly on stone, little by little our bodies become worn down; we become frail. This is why eliminating cancer and heart disease have such a modest impact on longevity. In a weakened state, it’s just a matter of time before something—whether it’s the flu or a fall down the stairs—breaks the camel’s back for good. So aging is the result of a trade-off. The gene-directed preferential payment of reproductive expenses means that there will be insufficient funds to cover all repair and maintenance cost.

What is a cell to do?

Now that you understand the game, you can see two ways to slow the aging process:

• Decrease the Damage Rate, so that existing repair budgets will be sufficient; and/or
• Increase the Repair Rate by diverting resources away from reproduction into maintenance and repair.

As it turns out, the only scientifically proven method to consistently slow the rate of aging and dramatically increase lifespan, Caloric Restriction, works by both decreasing damage and enhancing repair mechanisms.

Calories Down, Longevity Up

Over the past few years we’ve learned that reducing the number of calories available to laboratory animals significantly increases lifespan. Calorie restriction (CR) may cause genes to redirect spending away from reproduction toward maintenance and repair. As the theory goes, the gene interprets the severe caloric cutback as a sign of a harsh unforgiving environment—one in which the probability of survival of a newborn is low. So low, in fact, that the parent may also be in jeopardy. In an act that only looks magnanimous, the gene decides that it is in its best interest to shut down reproductive activities to plow all available resources into helping the prospective future parent survive until tough times pass. At that time, investments in reproduction are more likely to pay dividends.

If calorie restriction extends lifespan by increasing maintenance, you would see evidence of reproductive cutbacks and increased activity in repair and maintenance processes. That is exactly what scientists found. First, scientists noticed the CR animals had become sterile. They also found that in as little as eight weeks, CR animals had significantly higher levels of DNA repair mechanisms. Also, antioxidant levels inside cells were significantly higher in the CR animals. The natural antioxidants in your cells are scavenging free radicals before they do damage to cells. The net result of these and other mechanisms is that a roughly 40 percent cut in calories causes a corresponding increase in lifespan by around the same 40 percent. Coincidence? Not likely.

Scientists now have a plausible explanation of how CR actually works at a mechanistic level. It centers around a special kind of protein called sirtuin. Calorie restriction activates sirtuin, which in turn allows your cells to function properly even if they have minor damage.

Will You Actually Live Longer, or Will It Just Seem Longer?

Although there is some anecdotal evidence that a 40 percent calorie-restricted diet improves lifespan in humans, not many of us could succeed with this choice. We may live longer, but the quality of that life may not be worth living, which is why scientists are so excited about the prospects of drugs that mimic calorie restriction. Resveratrol, an active ingredient found in grapes used to make red wine, is a CR mimic that has generated enormous attention. Although early results are promising, it may be five years to decades before drugs such as resveratrol are available.

What are you supposed to do in the meantime?

While there may not be a fountain-of-youth, antiaging silver bullet on the immediate horizon, that’s not to say you can’t take significant steps to slow your rate of aging. Get a do-over and add significant years to your life and life to your years by following an antiaging to-do list: Increasing your body’s Repair Rate and/or decreasing the Damage Rate. And guess what? When the rate of damage equals the rate of repair, aging seems to stop.

Here’s what to do:

Decrease the Damage Rate

Start taking key substances that increase antioxidant levels in your cells. Oxidants, or free radicals, are toxic byproducts of the body’s energy factories—the mitochondria—that power our cells. These oxidants are indoor body pollutants that have been implicated in a wide variety of age-related diseases and conditions, including arthritis, heart disease, and cancer. Free radicals extract a particularly heavy toll in our brains since cognitive activities account for almost 25 percent of the body’s energy production. This is why some researchers view Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative disorders as the inevitable cost of simply being alive. So much for the bad news.

Here’s our list of some nutrients shown to limit the damage caused by free radicals inside your cells:

Bioflavinoids: anthocyanins (blue-black fruits), and citrus bioflavinoids (lemons, oranges, grape-fruits, etc.)

Carotenoids: Alpha- and beta-carotene (red, yellow, and orange fruits and vegetables), lycopene (red fruits and vegetables)

• Green tea
• DHA (an omega-3 fatty acid that is an active component of fish oil)
• Minerals: Magnesium and selenium
• Vitamins and Cofactors: B3, B5, D,and coenzyme Q10

Increase the Repair Rate

Lose Some Waist. Most of us couldn’t stomach the 40 percent reduction in calories that has been shown to increase lifespan. Fortunately, just cutting back 15 percent gets you almost as much of an antiaging benefit. This is why you can incorporate this approach instead of the tougher 25 percent reduction often used by calorie-restriction advocates.

Get some rest: Most of us don’t get enough sleep, and people who sleep fewer than six hours a night have a 50 percent increased risk of viral infections and increased risk of heart disease and stroke. Plus, your native growth hormone increases naturally with seven hours of sleep. To up the odds for a full night’s rest—in addition to obvious options such as no TV, laptops, or lights—try sleeping in the nude (it’ll make you cooler); find a quiet environment or add some white noise; and invest in a comfortable mattress that does not trap heat. Over half of poor sleepers improve adequately with these simple steps.

Start taking omega-3 fatty acids/DHA: The compounds have been shown to deliver antiaging benefits to the heart, brain, and immune system. One of the big reasons why: the fats help relax your arteries to improve blood flow (nasty fats like trans fats make your arteries spasm, and thus promote dangerous inflammation). You can get the good forms of fish oil through certain types of fish and walnuts, as well as through fish oil supplements or the pure DHA form from algae. If going the supplement route, aim daily for two grams of general omega-3 fats or 600 mg of the pure DHA variety.

Take a deep breath: Deep-breathing exercises drag nitric oxide from your sinuses to the lungs, which dilate the capillary beds and improve the efficiency of breathing. Perhaps that’s why diaphragmatic belly breathing is the foundation of Eastern meditation and is a powerful stress-mitigating tool that no one even realizes you are using.

The powerhouse of cells, mitochondria create energy needed for cellular processes, as well as toxic byproducts implicated in a variety of age-related diseases, including arthritis, heart disease, and cancer.

Specific recommendations and daily dosage

Vitamins:
A: 2,500 IU is all you need, and
more than 3,500 IU is too much
B1 (thiamin): 25 mg
B2 (riboflavin): 25 mg
B3 (niacin): at least 100 mg
B5 (pantothenic acid): 300 mg
B6 (pyridoxine): 4 mg
B9 (folic acid or folate): 400 mcg
B12 (cyanocobalamin): 800 mcg
Biotin: 300 mcg
C: 800 mg or 50 mg twice a day if taking a statin drug because vitamin C competes with statins and reduces their efficacy when taken in higher doses
D: 1,000 IU if under sixty, 1,200 if sixty or older
E: 400 IU in the form of mixed tocopherols (100 IU from sup-plements if taking a statin)

Minerals:
Calcium: 1,600 mg for women, 1,200 mg for men (including from dietary sources)
Magnesium: 400 mg
Selenium: 200 mcg
Zinc: 15 mg

Surprising Truth about Aging The Saturday Evening Post