00:00
Support comes from WISE, the smart way to sendmoney around the world.
Your life is global. Your money should be too.
Some providers promise no fees on overseastransfers,
but extra costs often hide in bloated exchangerates.
Choose WISE. You can send money overseas foreducation,
or spend in over 40 currencies while traveling.
Get the exchange rate that you'd usually see onGoogle.
Plus, count on 24-7 customer support.
Be smart. Get WISE. Visit WISE.com. T's and C'sapply.
I did the five habits.
All five?
All five for seven days.
And?
I took the stairs. I carried the shopping.
I sat on the floor with my nephew.
I ate things my grandmother would recognize.
I went to bed at the same time every night,including Saturday.
That is an excellent week!
It was a perfect week.
So why do you look like that?
Because on Thursday evening I was standing in thekitchen,
eating a plate of lentils, feeling extremelyhealthy.
And?
And a voice in my head said,
And all of this is for what, exactly?
Do you know what that question is?
Tell me it is not a problem.
It is not a problem. It is habit number six.
Welcome to your English Toolbox,
the podcast that trains your English while youlive your real life.
I am Martin.
And I am Julia.
This is the second half of our bonus conversation.
Ten habits of people who live to a hundred.
Last time, the first five.
The body.
Movement, muscle, food, sleep, and twosubtractions.
And today, the other five.
The ones that live in your mind.
And one of them, we promised you,
you are doing right now while you listen.
So habit six, have a reason to get up in themorning.
And I want to be careful with this one,
because it sounds like a poster in an office.
It does. So let us make it concrete.
In Okinawa, in Japan, there is a word people usefor it.
Aikigai.
And in Nikoia, in Costa Rica, they say Plan deVida.
Two places 10,000 kilometers apart,
two different languages and the same idea.
A reason to get up.
In interviews and accounts from communities knownfor healthy aging,
older people are often asked what gives them areason to get up in the morning.
And the striking thing is not always the answers.
It is how quickly some people answer.
No thinking, no searching, they know.
03:00
And what are the answers?
Almost never enormous.
To teach my great-granddaughter to fish.
To keep the garden alive.
To open the shop.
Because people expect the shop to be open.
So it is not a mission.
It is not a mission.
It is something that is waiting for you tomorrow.
And what if somebody listening has no idea whattheirs is?
Then the question is too big and we should make itsmaller.
Do not ask, what is my purpose?
Ask, what am I looking forward to this week?
And if the answer is nothing, that is not apersonal failure.
That is information.
It means something needs to go in the calendar.
To downshift.
It is what you do in a car when you go down agear.
Less speed, more control.
In many communities studied for healthy aging,
daily life includes some kind of regular pause orslower ritual.
Not a holiday wants us here? Something regular?
A walk at the same time.
A nap.
Half an hour in the garden.
A coffee that you actually sit down for.
Praying, if you pray.
The point is not what it is.
The point is that stress is not something youremove from your life.
It is something you unload regularly.
Like taking the rubbish out? If you do itregularly, it is nothing.
If you do it once a month, you have a problem inyour kitchen.
Now, I have a question and I want an honestanswer.
Oh no.
What is your daily downshift?
Well, in the evening I sit on the sofa.
Go on.
And I look at my phone.
And is that resting?
It feels like resting.
Martin.
Fine, no.
What are you actually doing?
I am reading about a war.
Then I am comparing three washing machines I donot need.
Then I am reading an argument between twostrangers about a football match I did not watch.
So your rest is the news, shopping, and a fight.
When you say it out loud, it sounds like unpaidwork.
It is unpaid work. You have clocked in forsomebody else's stress.
And the test is simple.
After 20 minutes of it, do you feel lighter orheavier?
If you feel heavier, it was not rest.
It was just sitting down while working.
Habit eight.
Keep learning something hard.
And this is the one I have been waiting for.
Your brain is not a box that fills up.
It is a living network that can keep adapting whenyou challenge it.
06:04
Researchers use the term cognitive reserve for thebrain's ability to cope with change or damage.
Challenging learning may help support it,
although scientists are still working out exactlyhow much late-life language learning contributes.
So how do you keep challenging that network?
Not only with puzzles that you are already goodat.
With something genuinely difficult that you arebad at in public.
Something that makes you feel stupid for a while.
Something that makes you feel stupid for a while.
Learning an instrument, learning to dance,
taking up chess at 60,
or
or
say it
or learning a language as an adult.
Which is what you are doing right now in yourkitchen with your headphones on.
Following a conversation in a second language asksyour brain to do several things at once.
You are holding the sound, finding the meaning,
predicting the next word, and trying not totranslate everything.
And you thought this was a podcast aboutrelationships and healthy habits.
You are doing habit number 8 while we explainhabit number 8.
Nobody told you it was on the list.
Nobody tells anybody.
And I want to say one more thing about thisbecause it matters.
Go on.
The difficulty is not necessarily a sign that itis going badly.
It can be the sign that you are working at theedge of what you can do.
Habit 9.
Belong to something that meets regularly.
And notice how specific that is.
Very specific.
Not have friends, not be sociable.
Belong to something with a calendar.
In Okinawa, there is a tradition of small mutualsupport groups.
They are called moai.
Some begin early in life and continue for decades,
offering social, practical, and sometimesfinancial support.
Through jobs, marriages, illnesses, moneyproblems, all of it.
And most of us will never have exactly that.
But we can have the small version.
The choir on Tuesdays.
The five-a-side football on Thursdays.
The class, the walking group, the church, the bookclub that never reads the book.
And this connects to something we said in thesecond episode of the series.
The third place.
Not home, not work.
The place where the same faces appear again andagain.
09:01
And the calendar does the work, not yourpersonality.
That is the liberating part.
You do not have to be charming.
You have to keep turning up.
Support comes from WISE, the smart way to sendmoney around the world.
Your life is global. Your money should be too.
Some providers promise no fees on overseastransfers,
but extra costs often hide in bloated exchangerates.
Choose WISE.
You can send money overseas for education,
or spend in over 40 currencies while traveling.
Get the exchange rate that you'd usually see onGoogle.
Plus, count on 24-7 customer support.
Be smart. Get WISE.
Visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply.
And Habit 10.
Habit 10 is the one at the top of the list.
Put your people first.
And if you have listened to this series, youalready know why.
Because an 80-year study followed 724 people from1938,
and one of its clearest midlife patterns
was that relationship satisfaction predicted laterhealth remarkably well.
Even more clearly than cholesterol did in thatcomparison.
So Habit 10 is not a nice ending.
It is number one, and everything else is built onit.
Which means you can do the other nine perfectlyand still live badly.
You can be the healthiest, lonely person in thecemetery.
I want you to meet Dorothy.
Please.
Dorothy is 88.
She lives in Bristol, and her husband died 11years ago.
Tuesday, she sings in a choir.
Thursday, she reads stories to small children inthe public library.
Sunday, she phones her sister, who is 91,
and who she argues with every single week.
Monday evening, Italian class.
She started Italian at 88?
She started at 84.
And she is terrible.
She says the teacher is very patient, andeverybody claps when she gets a verb right.
And that is Habit 8.
That is Habit 8, and she thinks it is justMondays.
So that is purpose, learning, belonging.
And every single day, at 4 o'clock, she sits inthe garden for one hour and does nothing.
The downshift.
The downshift.
And when people ask her what her secret is, shelaughs at them.
What does she say?
She says, I have things on Tuesdays.
That might be the best sentence in this entireseries.
I have things on Tuesdays.
12:00
Not I have a philosophy, not I have a plan.
I have things on Tuesdays.
Right, three sentences.
Listen, and repeat in the pause.
Sentence 1, for purpose, and it is a betterquestion than how are you.
What are you looking forward to this week?
Sentence 2, for learning, I have taken upsomething new.
I am terrible at it.
Sentence 3, for belonging, and it is only fourwords.
Same time next week?
All three again.
What are you looking forward to this week?
I have taken up something new.
I am terrible at it.
Same time next week?
To take up something means to start a new activityor hobby.
And notice that the second sentence is not anapology.
It is an invitation.
People often warm to somebody who admits they arebad at something.
And sentence 3 is four words that create a ritualout of nothing.
Same time next week.
It is how a stranger becomes a Tuesday.
And our sentence of the day.
Ready.
A long life is not the goal, a full one is.
A long life is not the goal, a full one is.
One more time with us.
A long life is not the goal, a full one is.
So, ten habits.
In thirty seconds.
One, move all day, not for an hour.
Two, keep your muscle.
Three, eat mostly plants and stop a little early.
Four, protect your sleep.
Five, do not smoke and be honest about alcohol.
Six, have a reason to get up.
Seven, downshift every day.
Eight, keep learning something hard.
Nine, belong to something that meets regularly.
And ten, put your people first.
And if you put them in order of importance.
Number ten goes to the top.
Which is where we started at the beginning of thisseries.
Now, your task and it is the last one.
Do not do ten things.
Choose one.
One habit this week, small enough to beembarrassing.
One flight of stairs.
One Tuesday with something in it.
One phone call instead of a like.
15:01
And that is how this actually happens.
Not with a new life.
With a better Tuesday.
So that is the end of How to Live a Good Life.
Six conversations.
Four about the people.
Two about the body and the mind.
And after all of it, an 80-year study, 123,000people,
and a woman in Bristol who sings on Tuesdays,
the answer has not changed once.
It is people.
It was always people.
And if somebody came into your mind while you werelistening.
You know what to do.
Everything from this episode, the transcript,vocabulary and practice,
and the complete six-part series is waiting foryou at yourenglishtoolbox.com.
You can listen and read without registering.
And a free student account gives you thedownloadable PDFs, flashcards and progress tools.
Thank you for spending this time with us.
It has been a real pleasure.
Now go and put something in the diary.
See you in the next one.
