Introducing The Pounce Pot
5 Essential Actions for Vibrant Longevity and Active Pro-Aging
You’ve found The Pounce Pot! Welcome!
There’s certainly a lot to talk about (like what’s a pounce pot?!), so let’s begin with three very important statements:
You belong here.
You are welcome here.
You are valued here.
YOU are the reason The Pounce Pot exists.
I wanted to say that right up front. If there is any doubt in your mind, let me reassure you that you are the reason The Pounce Pot exists.
How Can You Benefit?
From my extensive research, I’ve determined that current practices around gerontology can be efficiently categorized into five related areas of common goals. These are common ideas that are essential for our journey toward intentional and positive aging,
But hold on…. Not just toward longevity—toward vibrant longevity.
And not just toward aging—toward an active pro-aging attitude.
What do these terms actually mean? Let’s take a closer look.
Age and Aging Explained
Age is just a number, of course. Do you ever think to yourself when you’re looking in the mirror: Gosh, I’m 57, but I sure feel like I’m about 12!
I sure do, just about every day!
What age do you feel INSIDE?
While age is subjective, personal, and literally just a number, aging is an observable, scientific process described quite bluntly as the “progressive loss of physiological integrity, leading to impaired function and increased vulnerability to death.”
Thank you, dear scientists, for that reality check.
Life Expectancy and Longevity Defined
The average age that you normally reach in your part of the world is your life expectancy. All creatures have life expectancies, from the aquatic mayfly, who only lives for one day, and thus has the shortest life expectancy of any creature in the world, to the mighty (and also aquatic) glass sponge whose life expectancy reaches upwards to 15,000 years! On the land, giant tortoises average about 150 years.
It doesn’t take long to discover that life expectancies in humans vary dramatically across the world, from a high of about 85.6 years in Hong Kong to a distressing low of only about 54.6 years in Nigeria. In the United States, life expectancy is around 77 years old for men and about 82 for women. (We’re ranked 48th in the world, by the way. More on that later…)
The Average Lifespan of Mammals
There’s an important distinction between lifespan and healthspan.
Longevity, on the other hand, describes the ability to live past and well beyond your life expectancy.
We can assume that longevity is not a topic of everyday discussion in many parts of the world where citizens are in survival mode. Where living through the night and waking up the next morning is a blessing.
Here in North America, however, we have come to actually expect longevity. We aren’t subjected to war, fatal infectious disease, or famine. We expect to live long lives well past the average.
Unfortunately, aging past our expected average lifespan often comes with the unintended consequence of exorbitant long-term health care bills and an extended lifespan without life.
Hopefully, we can agree, therefore, that it’s not simply longevity we’d like to achieve. It’s vibrant longevity: a life that extends past the average, yes, but with energy and enthusiasm. With joy, not dread. With good health and a strong mind. With a long healthspan.
It’s not simply longevity we’d like to achieve. It’s VIBRANT longevity!
So what can we do to not just live longer, but live longer with this good health, energy, positivity, and enthusiasm? To enjoy this gift we’ve been given of even just the possibility of longevity, and furthermore, of vibrant longevity and a long healthspan.
The Pounce Pot five essential actions are going to help us all answer this question.
What Does "Pro-Aging" Really Mean?
Clearly, we are all going to experience aging. According to research, aging begins to show up in our bodies at age 20. TWENTY!
The media takes full advantage of this fact, pushing anti-aging messages to us 24/7. Studies have shown that boys and girls as young as six (and even younger according to other researchers), adopt anti-aging attitudes. Indeed, social media and advertisements contribute greatly to the negative stereotypes that surround aging. It’s no wonder our society is so against aging.
But let’s consider another term, a more positive and gentler term. What if we shifted our anti-aging attitudes and adopted a pro-aging stance?
Shifting your mindset to thinking about aging as something that’s positive, natural, and something to look forward to (in other words, adopting a pro-aging philosophy) actually helps and increases our longevity.
According to Yale University researchers, people “who reported more positive self perceptions of aging demonstrated significantly longer survival than those who reported more negative self perceptions of aging.”
In fact, “longer survival” ended up being 7 ½ years longer! That’s worth exploring more deeply, don’t you agree? Just the title of an article published in the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology might encourage you: “Longevity increased by positive self-perceptions of aging.”
Think about it.
Your longevity can be increased up to 7 ½ years just by thinking positively about it!
Your longevity can be increased up to 7 1/2 years just by thinking positively about it!
I don’t know about you, but I think that’s worth working on! Let’s do it! Let’s adopt the philosophy of pro-aging!
First, let’s keep digging deeper into the facts. In the meantime, we can commit together to a more positive and grateful mindset towards aging.
Are you ready to make a change?
Can we turn our dread for getting old into what author Lucinda Shirley calls “growing” old instead?
She explains in her 2024 memoir, Shaking Off Gravity, that to “‘get old’ is a passive thing that we allow time, social constructs, marketing companies, people we know and people we don’t know—to define us and the way we live our lives.”
Growing older, on the other hand, is “an active process—a mindful, living-in-the-moment, wide-open, funny, interesting, delightful, and rewarding time.”
Note her use of the phrase “an active process.”
Are you passively allowing yourself to get old? Are you going to fight against your age and keep trying to battle it with all of those negative anti-aging messages driving you?
Or do you want to actively pro-age, embracing every encouraging step that current research tells us we can take right now?
Can we feel grateful for the gift of our aging? To “celebrate every morning” when you “wake up on this side of the dirt,” as my 81-year-old gym buddy tells me every day when we greet each other in passing by the weights.
Are you willing to take personal responsibility for your aging process and your attitude toward your age?
No one other than YOU, not even your doctor, can get inside of your head and control your thoughts, emotions, and actions.
The steps you take on your journey toward vibrant longevity is up to YOU and only YOU.
If you’d like to explore these actions, I’m going to dive into them with you right here at The Pounce Pot. We’re going to power up our future self with current knowledge together.
Beyond Genetics: The Essential 5 Actions
Okay, now that we’ve defined vibrant longevity and active pro-aging, let’s talk about these actions that we need to adopt.
Although stone-faced in their facts, researchers can also help us understand another important fact—an encouraging one! Only 10 percent, 15 percent max, of our aging is influenced by our genes! Some studies, like this one published in the journal “Genetics,” go even lower, determining that genes only account for 7 percent.
That means that up to 93 percent (93%!) of our aging is influenced, not just passively through genetic pre-destiny, but actively through our lifestyle, thoughts, and environment!
That is worth repeating: We are MOSTLY (as much as 93 percent!) in control of the factors that contribute to our aging process.
It’s these factors that I have made it my mission here at The Pounce Pot to understand and condense in order to make them easier to learn and put into daily practice—for all of us.
As a former anti-submarine warfare officer, I spent years tracking down enemy submarines from the depths of the Atlantic Ocean.
Drawing on my decades of experience in strategic planning, rapid data analysis, problem-solving with meaningful insights, publishing, and teaching, I’ve traded in hunting for submarines for tracking down the current and scientifically-backed research that forms the foundation of The Pounce Pot.
Think of it like a giant Venn diagram. Dozens of research institutes and organizations have all published their own guidelines for aging. You’ve seen many of them, I’m sure.
Programs such as:
Stanford University's Lifestyle Medicine Pillars
The Blue Zones
Harvard Health Longevity Tips
Mayo Clinic Healthy Aging Tips
American Heart Association's Go Red for Women
World Health Organization (WHO) Active Aging
And Influencer/Doctors such as:
Because you can actively influence each of these five categories (unlike your DNA, which you have zero control over), these will be five areas for you to personally take responsibility.
Where these (and many others) intersect in the middle is the point that interests me. Furthermore, I wanted to know if longevity doctors, university research teams, brain health experts (such as Alzheimer researchers), and health organizations around the world actually agree with each other in some or all areas.
Are there common ideas on which they ALL agree?
While genetic gerontology advances the study of how our genes affect our aging, it’s the numerous factors within the “93 percent” that we can control that have been intensely publicized in the media from these for-profit and nonprofit organizations, doctors, researchers, and experts worldwide.
Each has named their recommendations for healthy aging. Their unique plans are called programs such as:
And so many more
Their research focus varies from nutrition-based to socially-based; however, most all information regardless of its focus, fits together quite nicely into the following five categories:
Cognitive Enhancements
Social Connections
Physiological Processes
Nourishment
Fitness
Because you can actively influence each of these five categories (unlike your DNA, which you have zero control over), these will be five areas for you to personally take responsibility.
Shifting into Action Toward Vibrant Longevity and Active Pro-Aging
In order to tackle these groups in more actionable terms, I’ve shifted the five categories into actionable initiatives: “The Five Essential Actions.” That title is not winning any creativity prizes; it’s simply logical and easy to remember!
These five essential actions form the foundation of The Pounce Pot:
Boost Your Brain
Connect & Thrive
Harness Hidden Powers
Fuel Your Journey
Stay Active
These five essential actions are the “pounce” —the grit—that are going to help us celebrate, not dread, aging.
These Five Essential Actions are the “pounce”—the grit— that are going to help us celebrate, not dread, aging.
With these Essential Five Actions, you and our growing team and community, are going to successfully navigate—the best we can with all of our talents and available tools—the oceans of information and disinformation that flood our lives daily.
To Wrap it Up
This post has defined several important terms: age, life expectancy, longevity, vibrant longevity, and pro-aging. It’s also defined our mission and our five essential actions which form the foundation of the way we organize our information.
In future posts, we’ll examine the approaches and recommendations of major institutes on aging, how their advice compares and how it differs—and how it all fits into our Five Essential Actions.
Our newsletter, The Pounce, is coming soon! Be sure to sign up below so you can receive the latest healthspan news each week and get quick tips on how you can apply it to your five essential actions:
Boost Your Brain
Connect & Thrive
Harness Hidden Powers
Fuel Your Journey
Stay Active
Keep reading on the Pounce Pot Post to explore these concepts and more!
Which sections did you find the most useful? I would love to hear from you, learn from your stories, and share in your experiences as we take this journey together. You can read more about me here, and I’ll look forward to learning more about you, too.
Hey, if you’re a writer like me, I’d love hear from you.
Finally, I’d like to introduce you to our Pounce Pot team. Welcome to the community!
