Notes I have carried on my PDA or in my Franklin planner for years: Living with a full heart

The Harvard study found these four attributes vital to successful aging:

1. Orientation toward the future. The ability to anticipate, to plan, and to hope.
2. Gratitude, forgiveness, and optimism. We need to see the glass as half-full, not half-empty.
3. Empathy. The ability to imagine the world as it seems to the other person.
4. The ability to reach out. “We should want to do things with people, not to people or ruminate about what they do things to us,” says Dr. George E. Valiant. In other words, we need to “leave the screen door unlatched.”

Seven Keys to Aging Well
1. Not smoking, or quitting early.
2. The ability to take life’s ups and downs in stride, keep your sense of humor, give something of yourself to others, make friends who are younger than you, learn new things and have fun.
3. Absence of alcohol abuse.
4. Healthy weight.
5. A solid marriage. Happy-Well people were six times more likely to be in good marriages than were the Sad-Sick.
6. Physical activity.
7. Years of education.

People who had four or more of these seven factors at age 50 were one-third less likely to be dead by 80. People who had three or fewer of these factors at 50, even though they were in good physical shape, were three times as likely to die during the following 30 years.
____________________