When we discuss health, we can have very different thoughts on what the actual end goal is. There are generally two camps here, there are those that focus on increasing lifespan, and there are those that focus on increasing healthspan. Now, these two camps do often overlap, but they can be quite distinct in their approaches due to their differences in end goal.

 

So what is healthspan and what is lifespan? What is the difference?

Lifespan is the one that people think of most often when people discuss longevity. Lifespan is the basically the absolute quantity of your life, usually measured in years. People who want to improve lifespan look to research to see if any daily habits, diets or supplements lead to people living longer. The goal of someone interested in lifespan may be to live to 100 years of age. You might think this is a great goal to have, and it certainly is. But do you want to live to 100, even if you don’t have a high quality of life?

 

This is where healthspan comes in. Healthspan is not just a measure of the years of your life, it is often described as the amount of life in your years. People concerned with increasing healthspan, don’t necessarily care about increasing the number of years of their life (although that is often a secondary goal), they care about being able to enjoy the years that they do live, and not being debilitated by pain, chronic disease or general infirmity as they age.

 

The Holy Grail is finding an approach that leads to increases in lifespan and healthspan. So you can live longer, and have vitality through those years. 

 

While a lot of this stuff is genetically determined, you can still do some things to improve your vitality and potentially increase your time on earth.

 

The five pillars we tend to focus on are:

We can get very granular on each of those, and we often do on the podcast, but right now, I just want you to think about your own life practices. How would you score yourself out of 5 on each of these areas?

 

25 would be a perfect score, and anything below 15 probably means you aren’t doing too well overall. Below 10 and you probably are at increased risk for poorer health outcomes.

 

Using this system, you can also identify where you need to do more work to improve both your healthspan and potentially your lifespan. Of course, this is a subjective rating scale, so there is some amount of grey area here. So lets just cover some very quick points about each pillar, so you have an idea of what better practices look like.

 

The target here is generally 7-9 hours per night, with regular sleep and wake times across the week. Ideally, you want to wake up feeling well rested most mornings.

 

Stress is an unavoidable part of life, but that doesn’t mean it should be all consuming. You should have stress management practices that allow you to not feel overwhelmed by stress, and there should be at least some activities in your life where you feel stress reduction. A good proxy for this is asking yourself what hobbies you engage in, outside of the gym, or that involve alcohol. People often think you have to be doing hours of meditation per week, when in reality, just engaging in a hobby you enjoy can be incredibly stress reducing.

 

Good nutrition generally means a calorie appropriate diet, with sufficient protein, and lots of fruits and vegetables. There are, of course, so many other things we can focus on here, but if you eat like the previous statement, you are probably doing quite well with nutrition.

 

We generally have a bias for resistance training and aerobic training, but once you are following the general exercise targets set by government and NGOs like the WHO, you are doing quite well (further details can be found here). If you are only doing aerobic training or only doing resistance training, then it may make sense to change some aspects of your training. While you may be getting sufficient hours of training, you may be missing out on beneficial adaptations that lead to better healthspan and lifespan.

 

This is the one that people often neglect the most. Your psychological and emotional health must be in a good place to even want to live your life. Humans are hyper-social creatures, and if you don’t feel connected to society, ill health generally results. We generally use the framework of thinking of ways of improving your connections with your family and friends, your community, your country and then the broader world, and in that order. For you to be in good psycho-social health, you have to feel like you are a meaningful part of your family and friend group, and the broader community.

 

Sports and other organisations can be really helpful for this, because they tend to ensure that people are meaningfully connecting to others throughout the week. If you sit at home all day working from home, then you sit in front of the TV afterwards, this is usually a recipe for issues down the line. Good psycho-social health is often neglected, and if you are being honest with your scoring, most people probably score a little lower on this pillar than they should.

 

There are a million and one little practices and specifics we could discuss here, but right now, I just want you to start thinking about how you are doing and where you can improve. You may realise that you have been investing a lot of time into improving your nutrition or exercise, and you have allowed your sleep to deteriorate and your meaningful social connections each week are now very low. If you can identify these things ahead of time, then you can do something about them and actually create a plan of action to improve your healthspan and/or lifespan.