Longevity – between self-optimisation and overdoing it

Maintaining a healthy lifestyle is certainly a good thing – but you shouldn’t go overboard with it either.

The day doesn’t start with coffee, but with numbers

Still in the semi-darkness, my hand reaches for my smartphone. Sleep score: 82. Not ideal. Deep sleep slightly below average. The app recommends going to bed earlier today. A glance at heart rate variability: slightly down. Perhaps stress. Or yesterday’s late dinner. In the bathroom comes the next check: weight, body fat, resting heart rate. In the kitchen, breakfast is already planned – oats, berries, nuts, all weighed out. No sugar, no deviation.

We all want to be healthy and live as long as possible. It’s always been that way. But it is only in recent years that this goal has been distilled into a media-friendly term: longevity. In the scientific sphere, this label encompasses research approaches that seek to understand the ageing process and identify the conditions for a long, healthy life (longevity research).

Outside research institutes, the buzzword ‘longevity’ encompasses various approaches and trends that claim to put scientific findings into practice: mostly, this involves aligning one’s individual lifestyle with the goal of a long life in the best possible health – through exercise and diet, discipline and supplements, doctor’s visits, asceticism and mindfulness.

The unspoken assumptions are often: if life is healthy, it is automatically long too. And if life is healthy and long, it is also good. Thus, the focus on optimising health appears as a kind of art of living, the meaning of which goes beyond merely keeping one’s own body healthy. Optimising health becomes a form of self-optimisation; a way of optimising one’s own life.

It is a good life, really. Disciplined, conscious, preventative. All in the service of health. And yet beneath the routines lies a quiet pressure: the feeling that every value could be better, every decision optimisable, every day a new opportunity – or a small oversight.

The fact that such an understanding of longevity contains inherent contradictions is not always considered: even a long life ends in illness (usually) and death (always). And health is generally not enough to make one feel that one’s own life is a good one. Nevertheless, we surely all want to hold on to the goal of a long life that is as healthy as possible. But how can this be achieved?

It may seem obvious that in a highly individualised society, people often imagine the path to a better and healthier life as a process of self-optimisation. How I live is primarily my own responsibility – it’s all about me. If I’m not happy with my current life, I have to improve it as best I can – I have to optimise it. Am I often tired, do I have back pain, do my trousers no longer fit? Then perhaps I’ll incorporate exercise into my daily routine, put different foods in my shopping trolley and work on my work-life balance. If I simply organise my daily life in the best possible way, the thinking goes, then good health will follow automatically.

When it comes to health, however, both aspects – the ‘self’ and the ‘optimising’ – are not entirely without their problems.

Self-healing powers? Where self-care reaches its limits

If one looks for the factors that enable a healthy old age, it is not just the long-term mindful and caring treatment of one’s own body that characterises the very elderly. The social environment plays at least as significant a role.

Working conditions that do not harm health; a secure livelihood; a stable network of contacts with family, friends and acquaintances; a purpose in life; an intact natural environment; quality standards for food – all these and many more are factors whose importance for health and life expectancy has long been recognised. Loneliness, for example, is now regarded as a significant health risk. The society in which we live; the world in which we find ourselves – these can cause lasting damage to our health and, at the same time, can only be influenced by us as individuals to a limited extent. Here, most people have little scope for personal improvement.

To put it bluntly: a single parent who is worn out juggling a demanding full-time job, childcare and further education cannot be saved from burnout by expensive dietary supplements. Preventive healthcare is therefore always a societal responsibility as well.

Optimisation? When prevention becomes a burden

But the very notion that health must be optimised also raises questions. It is no coincidence that the concept of optimisation has migrated from the fields of technology and economics into discussions about the good life. In those fields, processes are optimised to increase efficiency. Whether efficiency is a category by which a healthy life can be described, however, is open to doubt.

If the same kind of energy is applied to optimising health as to optimising work structures, then the same problem arises: stress. Excessive self-optimisation can lead to mental overload. Indeed, there is evidence that ambitious self-care can, in extreme cases, lead to obsessive-compulsive disorders. The term orthorexia, for example, refers to compulsive eating behaviour in which patients only want to consume 100% healthy food and weigh up the health benefits and drawbacks of the food on their plate with virtually every bite, which can lead to a severe eating disorder.

Amidst the vast array of health information available, of varying quality, people quickly lose their bearings, which can lead to feeling overwhelmed. Technical tracking of health data, for example via sensors in smartwatches, and constant self-monitoring can cause chronic stress. This is all the more true given that the correct interpretation of symptoms and findings requires prior knowledge that not everyone possesses.

In this way, individual strategies intended to improve health may, under certain circumstances, have the opposite effect to that intended. For example, a study as early as 2017 showed that the constant monitoring of one’s own sleep patterns using sleep trackers can actually provoke insomnia (orthosomnia).

Jan Gerber, director of the Paracelsus Recovery clinic in Switzerland, coined the term Longevity Fixation Syndrome to describe this counterproductive obsession with longevity and health. It describes a state in which every bodily signal is obsessively examined and treated – a stress-driven over-management of body and mind. Concern for one’s own health degenerates here into an excessive need for control, which may be fuelled by deep-seated fears. The psychological problems underlying this fixation on health are not triggered by the media coverage of the topic of ‘longevity’; they are already present beforehand. However, the cult of the body initially distracts from the real health risks posed by stress and anxiety – and can then exacerbate them. In Gerber’s words: ‘There is no longevity without mental health.’

Longevity – a misguided concept?

Viewing health as a project of self-optimisation is therefore not a good idea for various reasons. Is the approach of longevity as body management actually a misguided concept?

Insofar as the term conceals the goal of a healthy, long life, longevity remains a meaningful ideal if one strips it of popular misconceptions:

• Healthy ageing cannot be achieved as an individual life project. All health-related efforts must be embedded in an environment that makes them viable in the first place.
• Health is more than the absence of physical ailments; it has a mental and emotional component – which in turn affects the body.
• Nor should we forget: understood merely as ‘long life’, longevity is a rather meaningless goal, for even a long life can be an unhappy one.

Bearing all this in mind, taking personal care of one’s own body’s needs in everyday life remains the right approach.

Healthy ageing: How do you remain true to yourself?

In its “World Report on Ageing and Health”, the World Health Organisation paints a broader picture of healthy ageing. It defines healthy ageing as “the maintenance of functional capacity that enables well-being”. Health is understood here as a state that depends not only on physical, but also on psychological and social factors.

At its core, the aim is for people to remain true to themselves as they grow older and to continue doing what has been important to them in their lives so far. Medical healthcare is just one factor in this. Equally important is a social environment that promotes health and enables people to retain the ability to lead a daily life they find meaningful.

An effective healthcare system is irreplaceable. But this too could be part of longevity: working to build a good society, nurturing friendships, cultivating a desire to learn, and doing what you enjoy. You don’t even need a health app for that. Of course, you should still do a bit of exercise and eat healthily.

Text: Thorsten Kleinschmidt