09/30/2025
Peter Attia, MD is a physician who wrote a book called “Outlive”. I have read snippets of the book. In a nutshell, the book talks about ways in which we can increase our healthspan which is living a longer, stronger, happier life. Often we talk about lifespan which is just living longer, regardless of how healthy or active we are.
Along with the book, he writes short emails talk about tactics or strategies to improving one’s
life. I wanted to share with you one that I found interesting. In it, he talks about paying close attention to our emotional health. Emotional health refers to recognizing, understanding,
managing and expressing emotions. His takeaway was “What good is living longer if you’re not happy”.
Our emotional health and the quality of our relationships are intimately connected. Our negative
or positive emotions impact those people in our lives- what are we sending out? Strong, loving,
healthy relationships are the number one predictor of longevity.
Overall emotional health can be difficult to quantify or measure as we are all different but he
had 2 questions that we can ask ourselves that can help us track our emotional health are:
1. On average, how do I feel?
2. On average, how do I make the people around me feel?
“On average” is the key. We all have bad days when we feel angry, frustrated, jealous or some other negative emotion but noticing if those types of feelings are much more frequent then we may need to do some work, or see someone to discuss this. Yoga can help us and we have talked about ways to cultivate joy and happiness in our lives.
Unlike our physical health and well-being, as we age our emotional health does not need to
decline. In fact, with practice we may even be able to improve it. So check in and see how you
are doing. I think we would all agree that it would be nice to live a long life and be as happy as
possible along the way:)
