Yvonne Lau, President of Mayway Herbs and Dr. Skye Sturgeon discuss Aging & Longevity! Aging brings changes, challenges, and new perspectives on what it means to live well. Yvonne and Skye reflect on independence, longevity, and the everyday experiences that shape our lives as we grow older.
Listen to the podcast, or read the transcript (below)!
Dr. Skye Sturgeon: What is the topic of today's chat?
Yvonne Lau: Longevity.
SS: So, we're talking about longevity, and I've been working on my genealogy. And I have identified my ancestors all the way back to the 1600s. And, the Sturgeon family, especially, were extremely long-lived. I had, a great-great-great-grandfather who lived to be 108, great-great-grandfather who lived to be 102.
YL: What!
SS: My father's father lived to be 94, my mother's father lived to be 101. So, you know, genetics, is one of the factors in longevity.
And so, what do we mean when we say longevity? And it turns out, really it's about a number. It's about the duration of one's life. And, somehow we have this value that we've assigned to longevity. I'm not sure why. Because it isn't like, as you get older, things get better. In fact, the truth of the matter is that we live in a world now where aging is medicalized. People spend most of their out-of-pocket money on medical care in the last 5 years of their life. And their out-of-pocket averages nearly $40,000, and can be more, can be $100,000, depending upon how much medical intervention you engage in during the last years of your life. And in many cases, you're adding duration, you're achieving some measure of longevity, but the quality of your life while you're spending that money may not be worth anything at all, except, you know, they say, well, one more time to hug my kids, or my grandkids, or whatever it is. And yes, there is that, but if you're not cognitively aware, if you're not healthy, if you can't really hold them, if you can't talk, if you're just bedridden, if you're on oxygen, or a respirator, or life support of some sort, then yeah, you've gotten a number.
The kind of factors that go into whether or not you achieve longevity. Have a lot to do with things that are completely out of your control, like genetics, if you have good genes, and there are actual biochemical or physical parameters of those genes that make them long-lived. But, it's also a lot of luck.
Well, accidents happen. People can be in a car accident, or, you know, any number of things can occur. You can fall off of a ladder that you shouldn't be on, and the next thing you know, you've broken your hip, the next thing you know, you have a clot, and the next thing you know, you're dead.
So, luck can play a role. But also access to medical care. Do you have and can you afford medical care? Can you actually avail medical care where you live? You know, and I think in our country, we spend a lot of money on medical care, but the statistics don't bear out that our medical care system is beneficial for people at any age, never mind the elderly.
My grandfather, on my father's side, was married 4 times. His wife, my actual grandmother, died, when my father was 1 year old, and she died from complications of her fourth pregnancy. The third woman he married, her name was Maude. I knew her as Grandma Maude. She was this amazing, accomplished mother and woman. She could cook, she could sew, she could keep house, she was sharp as a cookie, you know, she was a very smart woman, and she lived with my Aunt Thelma. And Grandma Maude, I was always just impressed with her, just like… I wish that she was my mom, you know? That's the kind of person she was. She was just there, very present, very smart. And she took care of us kids. And I went to visit, my Aunt Thelma one time, and she said, oh, mother is in a nursing home. Would you like to go visit her? And I said, well, yeah, of course. You know, so we went.
And it was a nice place, and there was this, like, glass in, you know, Florida room, or porch, or whatever you want to call it, with windows and everything, and Grandma Maude was in a wheelchair. And she was 82, something like that. But she was in a wheelchair, and she was tied to the wheelchair.
YL: Oh, no.
SS: And she was covered with these white blankets. And she was leaning over like this. [Leans forward in chair.] And drool was coming out of her mouth, and so, you know, my Aunt Thema would wipe that off. But she's just like kind of shaking, and kind of there, and I said hi, Grandma Maude, it's, you know, it's Bruce, and, you know. She doesn't know who I am. She doesn't even know who Thelma is, and she's lived with Thelma for 30 years. And, so she was there, she was alive, and she lived in that nursing home for 4 years before she died.
Well, a lot of people, this is, this is what they imagine their old age is going to be. Now, it turns out that not that many people actually wind up in that kind of a situation where you're basically just cared for in a facility where you can't take care of yourself. I think it's less than 5% of elderly people.
YL: Really? Wow! Yeah. So… so your… your 40,000 to 100,000, that is not about long-term care in a facility. That is purely medical expenses as we age.
SS: Yeah, why it's because as your body ages, it starts to break down. From the cellular level to the tissue level to the organ level, things start not working correctly. There's dysfunction that occurs, it accumulates, and you go in to see a doctor about it. You wind up getting, you know, lung problems, or kidney disease, or liver disease, or heart disease, you know, it's like, all these things start to build up. And you go to get help with it, and, then you wind up seeing specialists, because, GPs basically farm you out to different specialists. Now, the specialists, one office visit to a specialist could be $400 just for the office visit.
And Medicare might pay for part of it, but you're gonna have a deductible that you're going to have to meet, which could be $5,000, or you may have to make a co-pay. That copay could be $125 every time you go into the doctor. And then the medications that they have these days, the first-line therapies can be, oh my gosh, they can be hundreds of dollars a month just for one drug. And you may be on 6 or 8 different drugs. You know, you have hypertension, and you're on all your statin, and your beta blocker, and all these things, and these costs, they add up, and then anytime you go into a hospital, I mean, a hospital stay… going into the ER could be $2,000, and the per-day room charge is an enormous amount of money. And, yes, you may have some insurance coverage, yes, you may have Medicare, but usually your out-of-pocket expenses just really mount up at the end of life.
So, my view on it is, what can I do so that I can minimize that sort of exposure to stress, because I've had plenty of stress in my life already. Do I want to have the last years of my life to be stressful? And so I've been thinking about this, and I've also been talking to a lot of people. I wrote that first article on Longevity, TCM, and, the hallmarks of aging. I think there are 12 hallmarks of aging, which are literally ways of tracking what's happening in your body. They're not something that an average person cares about, or should care about, really, but … if you're being followed by a gerontologist, then they're tracking these hallmarks to see telomeres shortening, all the kinds of things that they track in order to determine what's happening through your body as you age.
And last year, I wrote an article on Aging and Cognitive Decline. I've been talking to people about it every week. I talk to practitioners who call in with questions from Mayway, and so then I ask them questions, too. And I've been talking to friends. A lot of my friends, it turns out, are my age, which I guess is probably pretty normal. And then even my relatives that I know well, like my cousins or family members that are also my age. So I'm asking them how they are doing, what are they doing, and are they taking care of themselves? And, some of them I've sent them my articles.
YL: Which were both great articles.
SS: It was good to write them because it was meaningful for me, too, okay? I decided it's not about longevity for me, but what is it that's important for me at this point in my life? And, this is my list, it's not for everybody. Not everybody would even be interested in some of the things I'm about to say, or maybe they would be. But one very important thing for me has always been independence.
I want to remain independent, and the idea of being in such a condition that I am dependent on other people to stay alive is not something I am particularly interested in, even though I realize at a certain point, that may be my fate. But I want to remain independent as long as possible.
YL: I actually have a question about that, Skye, because before, you were saying that maybe only about 5% of people end up in nursing homes? That seems like a very low number to me, at least based on relatives that are in those facilities. I don't know, maybe it's just the Bay Area?
SS: Yeah, surprise!
YL: Because that means 95% of people who are older are just staying in their homes, and they're able to live out their lives and die in their homes?
SS: Well, many do, and, and so a nursing home is one particular level of care. There's also extended care. There are communities that are all for elderly people. I don't know about in the Bay Area, but up here in the Seattle area, there are oh my gosh, I bet you there's 40 facilities that are only for seniors, and there are apartment buildings, and everybody in the apartment building is over 65.
YL: Not a traditional nursing home, but, like, an aging-in-place community kind of thing.
SS: Community. It's an elder community. Some of them have medical staff on site, okay? My grandfather, who lived to be 101, when he was 95, he and his wife, they moved into a facility that, if you can imagine, a building that has an inner courtyard But it's not an inner courtyard, it's a medical facility. And the outside are all apartments. So, he lived in an apartment, but there was a door in the apartment that went into the medical facility. I mean, I say medical facility, they also made meals for everybody in this facility.
So, your meals would be brought in to you, and you'd eat them in your apartment. And in his apartment, they had a bedroom, and they had a little living area, bathroom, and they had a kitchenette, and that was where he lived. And that's where his wife, my step-grandmother died was in that facility. And then he died in that facility, I think he was in there 3 years by himself. This is my mother's father. And he lived to be 101.
The one who was married 4 times, I think he lived to be 94. And, you know, interestingly, he had a home in Florida, and he drove between Cleveland, Ohio, and Florida every year until he was 90, and then he quit driving.
I've got some models in my mind of what it means to be independent, but that doesn't mean you don't avail yourself of what's around there. But there are different levels of facilities where people can find refuge. And nursing home is different than even a hospice which is a different way of dealing with end-of-life issues. You may be at home, and you wind up with terminal cancer. And you decide that you're not going to engage anymore, you're just going to accept that you are at the end of life. And maybe you go into hospice, and different hospice have different rules. But generally you might say you go in with your last 6 months or less. And in hospice, they only do palliative care. They don't do any intervention whatsoever. So, to me, I want to be independent as long as possible. The other thing is that, for me, it's very important to remain mobile. I don't want to be bedridden.
I have a high school friend who has now had both of her knees replaced, and she now has an artificial hip. And, she is on the waiting list for a kidney transplant. She spends almost her entire day in a recliner chair. And, in order to go from her bedroom to her recliner chair, she has to use a walker. She is mostly immobile, even though she's had all these joint replacements. So, mobility is very important to me. I don't use a cane, I don't want to use a cane. I have stairs in my home, I'm able to walk up and down the stairs, and I walk up and down my stairs for exercise, just to maintain my ability to do that. You know, I use the handrail, sure, but I make sure that I can go up and down the stairs without fear of falling or losing my balance.
YL: But your friend that had the hip and both knees replaced, my understanding is that as far as surgeries go, that's the highest payoff in terms of quality of life that you're supposed to get back. And yet, I'm kind of surprised to hear how infirm she still is. So, the surgeries only took care of some of the pain, basically, because it's not like she really got her mobility back.
SS: That's exactly right. That's exactly why she did it, because of the pain. She did have every surgery which improved her mobility. She would gain the ability to walk for months. She'd be doing rehab, and then she would injure the other knee, and had several surgeries on her knees before she had the replacement. So the last knee surgery was 2 years ago, and about a year ago, she had a hip replacement. And then the last time I talked to her was, I don't know, 6 weeks ago? She says the hip replacement was great, along with the two knees, she was able to go around, she went to her granddaughter's christening. But now she says, I can hardly get out of my chair. And one of the reasons she can hardly get out of her chair after I talked to her about it is that she never did any exercise.
YL: Right, I was gonna say that because with the stuff fixed, you would think it's just a matter of rebuilding the strength in those…
SS: It is, and that's why you do the physical therapy, that's why you do the rehab, but, for her, it was really a matter of getting around the house, and I said, do you ever go for a walk? She says, oh my god, no. Why would I go for a walk? I said, well, just to get outside, just to be out in the sunshine and listen to the birds, or what have you. And she says, I don't really enjoy that, I'd rather watch TV.
YL: Well, there we go.
SS: Besides mobility, I want to have a sense of vitality, and I want to feel like I'm alive. I don't want to feel like life is over.
I had a patient one time, he was a young man, he was 36 or 38 years old. He came in to me, and he had just received a diagnosis of a terminal liver disease, and they gave him 5 months to live. And he was extremely depressed. He had just gotten married. And he says, I can't believe I'm 36 years old, and I'm dying.
And I said, so right now, what are you doing? He says, well, you know, I'm going into the hospital twice a week. I visit my doctor, go to the hospital, you know, they take water out of my abdomen, they run a bunch of tests, and I said, but what are you doing? Are you busy dying, or are you busy living? And no one had ever posed that to him, and he had never considered it. That at this moment, he wasn't quite dead yet. And that he could still be alive while he was alive.
I really liked this guy, I loved his wife, and I just basically said to them, they should be living their life while they can. And I said, what is it you want to do with your life? What have you always wanted? What's on your bucket list? Well, he said, this may sound funny, I was living in North Carolina at the time. He said, I've always wanted to go to Hialeah and go to the racetrack and bet on the horses. And I said, what's stopping you? He said, you know, I have all these appointments with my doctors, and I said, listen, they've already given you a terminal diagnosis. Right? They're not going to do anything for you except monitor where you're at and how you're progressing to the end game. I said, forget it. Don't go to the doctor. Take a week off. Take two weeks off. Go to Florida. So they did. They went to Florida, and in Florida, his wife became pregnant, and so she wound up having a baby. And I'm happy to report that with my Chinese herbs that I was giving him, he did not die of liver cancer within the 6 months that they said. He lived for two and a half more years and he died of septicemia from where he had a shunt in his abdomen that they would draw water out. He got a staph infection and died of a staph infection. He did not die of liver cancer. So, you know, being vital and being alive and remembering that I am alive in the moment, and what can I do to celebrate that? And have some meaning to my life. This is important to me.
YL: I would think, especially after COVID, that's when it really hit home for me. Because anything can happen, obviously, and my thinking was not to put off bucket list things, you know?
SS: Yeah, why wait on that? Do them now, while you can, while you're thinking about it. Why not? What else are you missing in your life? Is one's life all about accomplishing something? And if you've accomplished that, do you have to find another thing to accomplish? When do you actually get to live? And I say, the time to live is now, and to make sure that you take that in, and you're grateful to be alive in this moment. We don't know what's going to happen after we die, we have no idea whatsoever. But it seems like life is worth living, and so while you're alive, to be alive, to make sure that you're vital, and you're taking care of yourself, and that you are able to be present. Which, to me, it goes into the other value that I am seeking to maintain, which is having good cognition, being aware, being self-aware, developing self-awareness. It's the reason I meditate every day. It teaches you to habituate self-awareness.
All of us have a voice in our head. I say we have two voices in our head. I liken it to watching sports on television. One guy is doing the play-by-play. He's describing what's happening, you know, so you've got this voice in your head, kind of noting what's going on and everything. And then there's another voice in your head, and he's the color commentator. And what he does is he explains what's happening, and why it's happening this way, and what their strategy is. And so you've got these voices in your head, but the question I have then is: Who's listening to this? Who is the observer? Who is listening to these voices? And what meditation teaches you is to be able to return to that place of cognition where you are aware that you're observing. You're aware that you're listening. You're aware of what's going on around you, and to make sure that is sharp.
I've been somebody who was given a gift. When I was 10 years old. My stepfather gave me the gift of 18 volumes of the Compton's Encyclopedia. And I read all 18 volumes, cover to cover. I just could not be satisfied. I just wanted to know what was the next topic? And learning and just taking in information. I'm a curious person, I'm really interested in learning about new things. And my goodness, the more I have learned, the more I realize how vast the amount of information out there is that I don't know, that I can actually learn something more about.
Recently, I learned about Indonesia. I don't know about the geography of Indonesia. Who cares? But I found it interesting, because Indonesia is a very populous country, and I think, if I recall correctly, it's a country that is based on 17,000 islands. So, it's populous and very diverse, and there are parts of Indonesia that are almost uninhabited, because they're thick, deep jungle, and so on like that.
I'm always looking for that. I'm always wanting to make sure that my mind is sharp. One of my friends that I talked to recently, her husband died about 2 years ago. They were married for 40 years, and I asked her how she was doing. She says, well, I'm doing okay. but just don't ask me what I had for lunch yesterday.
YL: Oh, no.
SS: And I'm like, what do you mean? And she says, if you were to quiz me on it, I couldn't tell you. I don't remember. I don't remember what I had for lunch or dinner, or breakfast yesterday, or last week. If I don't write things down in my daily calendar, I just forget everything, moment to moment. And I'm like, well, that's not so bad that you're living moment to moment, but I would also want to have my faculties about me. I think memory is something that is helpful in certain circumstances, and sometimes, you know, all we are as a personality is a collection of stories that we have. And if you don't remember those stories, you can lose track of who you are. So, I engage in various activities to keep my cognitive ability, and I go into that in the article, and maybe if I have time, I can even remember some of the things that I said.
Another thing that I value right now in my life is quality of life. I have found myself withdrawing, and I guess I didn't realize this, because I have taken steps to overcome it my entire life, but I am really introverted. And I am a person who has done public speaking, I've been elected to office, I've had all these leadership roles in my life. I don't mind standing up in front of people and giving an extemporaneous speech. But it's not my real orientation. I am really more of an introvert, but I want to have the quality of life that makes life enjoyable and interesting.
I like cooking, I like cooking food, and enjoying that, and I like doing things, going out on hikes, or bike rides, going to the beach, having friends, you know, just having a quality of life. What I found myself withdrawing from is television. I almost can't stand to have the television on in my house. And I'm also finding the same thing with social media. It's really trying to sell you stuff all the time. I mean, there's some interesting stuff on it, and you know, I have some connection with, I don't know if it's real. There are virtual friends that you have, but I've just found myself withdrawing from all of that, and I wind up taking up objects.
I play my violin every day. Am I a musician? I am not, okay? I am someone who is trying to teach my brain something that it has no connection to, or never has had any connection to. But I am learning, and I am improving, and I am enjoying it. I'm enjoying the fact that I can make something close to music. I can make sounds out of my violin that are not offensive at this point. There's a lot of self-awareness that's required to play a musical instrument. You've got to coordinate your hands, one hand is doing one thing, one hand is doing the other thing, and you've got to listen. So you're engaging all these different things, and all these things promote cognition, and for me, it improves my quality of life. So that's what's part of it.
YL: So you're talking about quality of life, and you've embraced your introversion, basically? When you were starting, I thought you meant that you needed to work harder to be extroverted so that you would have a more social life, you know? But it sounds like just kind of embrace your nature is what you're defining quality of life to be?
SS: Yeah, I've always been interested in quality over quantity. And quality to me is engaging in things that have meaning to me, support me, and nourish me, okay? That's what I mean by having quality.
For instance, I am on a campaign to eliminate as much PFAS out of my diet and out of my environment as I possibly can. I just learned my favorite kind of butter - the paper wrappers are coated with PFAS. Because the PFAS are attracted to oils, and that's why wrapping butter in wrappers that contain PFAS is terrible, because it is definitely transferred into the butter, the forever chemicals that are in there.
And the other thing that I'm doing to improve my quality of life is I'm eliminating plastic wherever possible, especially from my kitchen. So, I have two cutting boards, one for vegetables and one for meat. Well, the one for meat was plastic. Well, it's gone. I now have a titanium cutting board for meats. I got rid of all my utensils that were plastic, you know, things like this. And this is all about improving the quality of my life, because I'm pretty sure that a part of many of the modern diseases that we're dealing with right now have to do with chemistry. Better living through chemistry. It turns out that, yeah, we have more abundance, but it's at the cost of our health. And I'm convinced that this is the case, and it's too late. I mean, I'm not going to reverse this, but if I'm going for longevity, I want to eliminate those things that I know are detrimental to my well-being and to my quality of life.
And the final thing on my list that I'm really after is harmony. You and I have had conversations about yin and yang, and about the Tao, and about harmony, and how to find harmony. And it's the reason that I do all the things that I do is to find some kind of acceptance of the way things are. In Buddhism, there are three poisons. There's, ignorance of the true nature of being, there is greed, wanting things more than what you have, wanting things other than what you have, and then there is having likes and dislikes. Because we make judgments about things, and we want this, we don't want this, and harmony is living with and accepting everything.
I've got a bumper sticker that my daughter gave to me on my refrigerator that says, everything will be alright when you're all right with everything. And so, to me, this is harmony. I heard a talk by Joseph Campbell, a famous mythologist, and his interview with Bill Moyers. His series of interviews with Moyers. And he says, no one's life turns out the way they expected. And I found this very profound and very helpful for my own understanding. And I would say that up until recently, this was a complaint of mine, that I had goals, I had plans, I had big plans in my life, and life did not turn out the way I expected. On the one hand, this is an opportunity to become very depressed. It's like, oh, it's so sad, I had all these great plans, I was gonna do this and such and all this, and… and it didn't happen!
And on the other hand, no one's life turns out the way they expected, because we can't predict the future, and we don't control all the factors that occur to us in our life, challenges that come up, and the missed opportunities. Sometimes we don't even get the opportunity. You know, we have good luck, bad luck, who knows? And so you just have to accept things as they are. And this is harmony. This, to me, is very important to be at peace with whatever is, because you don't really get to choose, you're not in control. And, can you adapt, and can you roll with it, and, you know, be grateful for what you have, because we're so rich?
Oh, yeah. I have a roof over my head, it's a comfortable temperature where I am, I've got food in my kitchen, I have a nice bed to sleep in. I'm just so lucky, so grateful to have what I have, and that is enough if I can be self-aware, and I can notice that and not expect things to be different. And to lament that they aren't different. They are what they are, and it's not so bad if I can be in harmony with them.
YL: You know, we tend to be dissatisfied, but when we put it into perspective, we're not fleeing war, we're not being evacuated from a home that's flooding, we don't worry that our children are gonna die of malnutrition or disease. Unfortunately, it could be easily preventable, and so there's just so many things to be grateful for. So it just seems very ungracious to not acknowledge that, and to just live your life that way.
SS: Well, it's disturbing of your Shen. To not be grateful. That's what knocks you off-center, is not appreciating what is. And wanting it to be different. Buddha said that, life is unsatisfactory. If you look at it that way, and the cause of this dissatisfaction is the desire for things to be different than what they are, so that's the cause of our suffering is that we want things to be different rather than what they are. I have a book in the other room, I bought it for my grandkids. I had it with my daughter. I first was introduced to it 30, 35 years ago. And the name of the book, it's about a grandfather and his grandkids, and they're running around and everything, and they're complaining about I fell down and I hurt my knee. And his response in the title of the book was Could be worse.
YL: Yeah.
SS: Could be worse. Not too far from where I am. Today they're predicting the smoke is going to return here. You know, the mountains are on fire. And there is a record heat in the southeast right now, and the southwest, all the reservoirs are at the lowest level in history. We could be in Gaza, we could be in Ukraine, we could be, in Iran. Things could be so much worse, so…
YL: We don't even need to be in a war-torn country, you know? I mean, there's just so many levels of suffering, and I always say to my kids, no matter how you feel, you live the lifestyle of a one-percenter, if we're talking about the rest of the world. You know, yes, you don't live the 1%-er life in America, but you definitely live the 1%-er life on the planet, so be grateful.
SS: There's this kind of a meme going around called, that's a First World Problem.
YL: Yes. So, when you were querying the practitioners or your family and friends about their viewpoint of longevity, was it the same as yours? Was it about the length of their lifespan, and did they have the same attitude about living?
SS: Well, in fact… If I have to summarize my discussions with many of these people is that I was being annoying by even asking these questions. One thing I got from practitioners was that their patients don't do what they tell them to do. They give them all this good advice. One practitioner said she photocopied my article on cognition, and gave it to some of her patients, but then she quit doing that because they would look at her like she had 3 heads. She was like, how am I supposed to do this stuff? I don't have time for that. And I have one friend that I've been treating off and on for 15 years. I was talking to him the other day about plastics, and how he needed to get the plastics out of his kitchen. And I was telling him he needed to pay attention to eating more fiber, okay? I said, have you been doing those psyllium husks like I told you to do? I love this. This is a great quote. It was very meaningful to me. He said, you know, just because you told me to do something doesn't mean I'm gonna do it. He said, you gave me good advice. but that doesn't mean I'm gonna do it, does it? I'm like, I guess, yeah, why not? He said, you know, you understand how old I am. I think he's 80 now. He said, I'm too old to learn new things. You told me I should be cooking my own meals. He said, I don't like to cook. I never learned to cook. How am I gonna learn to cook at 80 years old? He said, I don't have time for that, and I don't have the money. What you're talking about, he says, you're talking about getting rid of all my Teflon pans. He says, you understand, I have a whole set of Teflon pans. Every pan I have has a Teflon and a nonstick coating. He said, I can't get rid of all my pans, that would cost me hundreds of dollars. I'm like, yeah, I guess it would. And he says, you know, you want me to redo my whole kitchen? I can't do that, I can't afford it. At this point, I'm on a fixed income. How am I going to afford all these great ideas that you have? And he said, besides that, it takes effort.
YL: It takes effort. Yeah, it does take effort.
SS: Yeah, he said, you don't just do it once, do you? You gotta do it every day. And remember you told me that I need to be getting out and walking? I said, yeah, I remember telling you to walk to the mailbox and back. And he said, I did, , I did that for a few days. Then the next day, he said, I didn't feel like it. I was tired! And then he said, after a while, it's been 2 weeks since I walked all the way out to the end of my driveway. He says, you have to build these habits, and you've got to, like, practice and do them over and over and over again until they become, you know, that becomes your habit, is you do these things, it takes a lot of effort, and a lot of, like, self-awareness, and you've got to remind yourself. It'd be helpful if I had somebody to do it with. He lives alone as well. And it's like, you know, yeah, I understand. So the practitioners, they're frustrated because the patients don't hear. Oh, I took your herbs for a week, but I didn't like the way they tasted, so I quit taking them. And were they helping? Yeah, they seemed to be helping, he said, but, you know, I just didn't feel like fooling with it.
YL: Well, I guess unless people are in major pain or some other motivating factor, it's hard to change habits.
SS: It's hard to change. And what motivates you to change your habit? First of all, I would say that it has to come from within.
YL: Absolutely.
SS: One of my teachers, Byron Katie, says there's a word for, getting your spouse to change his habits. She said that word is hopeless. Because unless he wants to change his habits, he's not going to do it. You know, he might do it for a while, he might do it half-heartedly, but he's not going to do it because you want him to, or because you tell him to. And so this is something, as practitioners, we have to know, is that we can't be attached to outcomes. We just have to make assessments and offer our help, and people either accept our help and our advice, or they don't.
And same with my friends, you know? I want all my friends to be around when I'm 95 years old. That's not likely going to happen, and I'll have to accept that as being the part of my harmony if I reach that point. But I believe in making an effort, I always have, and I think that was inculcated in me from a very young age. And so, I'm lucky, I guess, in that way. Or because I make an effort, I have burned myself out, and I have taken on more than I could handle my whole life, and that's caused a lot of stress, and that's why I have hypertension. You know, there's consequences to doing things, and there's consequences to not doing things, so…
YL: Well, we just have to find that balance, don't we? I mean, you have genetics on your side, so maybe more time than most to change, or to adapt.
SS: This is true, and it depends on what you value, you know? I've always been a cook. And the reason I was always a cook is because after my father died, my mom checked out. And… she didn't cook. Yeah. So, I wound up making myself meals when I'm 10 years old, you know? I'm learning how to cook pork chops, and heat up a can of green beans, and, you know, make potatoes. I learned how to do those things, and that's a part of my independence. I cook for myself, and I rarely would go out to a restaurant or get takeout, because I don't talk about quality of life, I don't think those provide you with quality of food. I believe it appeals to your taste, which is craving, salty and sweet and fat. And these things are fine, a certain amount, but only in moderation. If you overeat those kinds of things, they're going to cause deleterious health effects. So I'd rather be in control of what I put into my body, and I try to, you know, figure out what's quality.
YL: I guess we've touched on a lot of things, and then for the scientific aspects and the TCM aspects, you know, you have great articles, so people can read about that. I'm not sure what else we want to say about that? I mean, because a lot of it is personal, right? And a lot of it is philosophical. I guess it also depends on your means, like… you can make conscious, intentional decisions in the way you live your life, like no PFAS, for example, right? You can decide how much exercise you're gonna do, and push yourself to do it, regardless of how you're feeling.
SS: Number one thing is exercise. Because as we age, our bodies shrink. And the kind of things that shrink, though, are lean muscle. And our lean muscle is the engine of our metabolism. It's what drives everything, because that's what's producing the ATPs, the muscles are producing ATPs, and providing, just, the structure of the body, holding us… I mean, the bones are our frame, but the muscles actually go into mobility, they go into sense of vitality, and the lean muscle is the number one way that you can maintain your weight. Because, maintaining a healthy weight, you should actually lose weight as you get older. And that is one of the keys to longevity, is actually losing weight.
I've been doing intermittent fasting. Which is nothing magical about it, except that the way our bodies have evolved as humans is that we would normally experience a period of restricted calories. Or famine. In the late winter, early spring, before the new crops came out, there were food shortages, and so we've adopted this ability to add weight when we needed it by feasting. That's what Thanksgiving was about, or all the festivals would occur in the fall, harvest festivals. You would eat, and you would put on weight, and when there was plenty, you would add a little weight, but you would lose it every year.
And we don't do that. We don't really challenge our bodies in that way, and if we do, we become hungry, and we eat, and we have these set points that our body wants to maintain, because there's this fear that, you know, that's in our DNA that we're gonna starve to death. And so, we've become a country of obese people. So, exercise is the number one thing you can do to… and all the studies point this out.
And the number 2 thing that you should do to make sure that you're going to be long-lived is to sleep. Most people do not sleep anywhere near enough, and the quality of sleep that they get is not sufficient. You can't make up sleep on the weekends, you can't party on Saturday night and, you know, sleep in on Sunday morning and expect there to be health involved in this, or longevity. You're not giving your body what it needs, and what it needs sleep for is to recover, to reset, to reharmonize. You go into the parasympathetic state during sleep, and that's when recovery and rest and repair occurs.
So, if you have an inflammatory process going on in your body, you have some chronic disease, like diabetes, you're not getting adequate sleep, you're not giving your body a chance to remove that inflammation, or not a sufficient chance. And therefore, the inflammation builds rather than becomes less.
YL: How much sleep do we need, though? What's adequate? Because it depends on the quality of sleep, some people wake up 2 or 3 times in the night, and other people can sleep 5 or 6 hours without waking at all.
SS: And either one of those can cause deleterious effects. If you're awakening many times during the night, you're probably not really going into deep sleep. Deep sleep occurs early on, usually in your sleep cycle. You might have 2 episodes of deep sleep a night, and it might only be 10 minutes long, or 5 minutes long.
And then REM sleep occurs in 90-minute cycles. You might have three 90-minute cycles, or four 90-minute cycles during a night's sleep. REM sleep is where the body is recovering, and during deep sleep is where the mind is recovering. And if you're not including those things, then you need to take a look at how you might achieve that. And there's sleep hygiene that you can engage in that can help.
But a lot of the modern drugs that people take are known to disrupt sleep. So, for instance, very common medication for heart patients who have hypertension is they get a beta blocker. Well, a beta blocker is going to disrupt your sleep. You're gonna wake up many, many times during the night because of the beta blocker. There's ways of overcoming this, but on the other hand, it's the medications that we take, you have to look at what the side effects are, and oftentimes insomnia, which covers a lot of ground for sleep disturbance, is in there.
But, you know, all the studies show that you should be getting at least 6 and up to 8 hours of sleep every night. And it takes effort to get that, especially if you're waking up a lot, or if you're doing things that disrupt sleep. Like, drinking alcohol in the evening. The alcohol is a toxin that is removed from your body at a certain rate per hour. So what happens is, if you drink alcohol, then the effects of the alcohol and the removal taking place winds up occurring in the middle of the night. And your body, which has been sedated by the alcohol, wakes up. So many people that are waking up at 2 o'clock in the morning or 3 o'clock in the morning, if they've been drinking wine, 2 or 3 glasses of wine with dinner, that's what's happening, is the alcohol is wearing off, and that wakes them up.
The other thing is consuming caffeine, you know, there's a reason that teatime was at 4 o'clock. Because at 4 o'clock, it's okay to have caffeine, but you really shouldn't have any caffeine after that time, because of its effect on sleep. It will cause you not to be able to fall asleep. In fact, one of the leading causes of the inability to fall asleep is consuming caffeine, and of course, caffeine is in a lot of products.
And then, the third thing to pay attention to is nutrition and diet. And this is an area of neglect for most people. We've already mentioned the PFAS that we wind up consuming, but the other thing that goes on is these microplastics are now found in the bloodstream of every human adult where they investigate. They find microplastics in the bloodstream. So, you can say, well, maybe they're inert. But it's also quite possible that the immune system is going to recognize this foreign thing in the blood as not being a part of the human being. And it's going to have a reaction to it, and one of the major things that the immune system does is it causes inflammation. Because the inflammation, these chemical messengers that get put out by our T cells, recruit other cells whose job it is to deal with the inflammation and to repair any damage. So, if you're constantly being assaulted by microplastics, then you are in a constant state of low intensity inflammation.
The other thing that is going on in this country, and this has to do with quality and quality of life, in my opinion, is that so many aspects of our life now are all about profit and making money. And so, when it comes to food, food is not produced in order to provide nutrition to people. Food is produced in order to make money.
So, food winds up getting processed. There's a lot of talk these days about ultra-processed foods, and, you know, everybody processes food. If you cook, you're processing food. But there's a world of difference.
I recently posted on my Facebook page the thing I've gotten the most attention, of anything I've ever posted. It was about baking bread and the bread that I bake. It is nowhere near what the bread is that you buy in the grocery store. All of them, every single brand is ultra-processed. That bread is made within 2 or 3 hours, they've made bread. When I make my sourdough bread, it takes 24 to 36 hours to make that bread, because it has to ferment. You don't speed it up, you don't add dough conditioners, you don't add emulsifiers, you don't add chemicals to prevent spoilage, and all this other stuff. And so many of the things that we eat today, it's ultra-processed, and this is something that, if you think about it, you could eliminate it, and it probably would have a positive benefit on your health.
To me it’s also about pursuing a hobby. Using my mind, doing things that I've never done before. And, I went to school. King Author has an extension school about 45 minutes away from me. I've taken three classes from them to improve my baking skills. So, it's a way of engaging and having a hobby that also serves my health.
YL: That's fantastic. I love hearing about your bread baking.
SS: I like making things from scratch. In other words, I source the ingredients and I make it myself. Just like I made the Chen Pi with organic tangerines, and I now have 3-year Chen Pi in my pantry and it smells just fantastic. And there's a certain amount of satisfaction and pride that you get. Made it myself, made it from scratch. And I like making my meals exactly the same way. You know, it takes more time. But, it turns out you have more time than you imagine if you were to put it to use.
YL: It's like, you're doing all the pioneer woman kind of things,you're making your own bread and pasta from scratch, and making your own red wine vinegar from scratch.
SS: Well, this is what people did. I mean, my grandparents and my great-grandparents… one of the things that I've discovered in exploring my genealogy is that when my family migrated from Scotland, they first went to Pennsylvania. Because William Penn said, we're gonna have a place for people to have their own land, and they're gonna have religious freedom. And we're gonna live in peace. They were pioneers! And they were all farmers, because that's all you needed to do. You needed to farm in order to live. And they did all of these things, you know. I mean, some of the things we don't even think about. They made vinegar, they tanned their own leather, they cut down trees, they did their own sawing and everything, and they built buildings and furniture. You know, we've lost all these skills, but they're very human, and to me, they're enjoyable because it represents a different orientation towards being alive that I find fulfilling.
YL: Well, you know, it's great because you get to choose to do it, Skye. You know, recently there's been a remake of Little House on the Prairie on TV. One of my favorite childhood books. I was watching it, and you get the sense of how hard life was at the same time, right? And when you think about the modern conveniences we have, like washing machines, we're just lucky that we get to choose the things we want to do, versus having to slaughter or farm for example, and make bacon, and things like that, you know, to survive.
SS: Right, it's true, and along with that, things are no longer difficult to be alive, are they?
YL: Right.
SS: I don't know, the people I talk to, they have a lot to complain about.
YL: Maybe they just have too much time on their hands.
SS: Well, they have a lot of time on their hands that they spend in dubious ways, frankly. We've created a society where a large part of our mental activity is oriented towards entertainment.
YL: Yeah, I agree.
SS: You know, I am addicted to looking at my newsfeed every morning, which I'm considering stopping. Because, these are somebody else's problems, they're not really my problems. But one of the things I'm noticing in my newsfeed is that there are a lot of stories or articles or videos now about the Seattle Seahawks. Which, you may not know, living in the Bay Area and being contaminated by the 49ers that Seattle won the Super Bowl last year. So, there is this whole orientation now of ginning everybody up, revving up everybody's energy about the Seahawks. And we started the preseason games, and they're making these changes in the personnel, and, we've got a new cornerback, and all this kind of stuff, and I'm like this is just feeding this entertainment aspect of how we occupy our minds. This is the nature of the society we live in. Where we have this abundance. But what does this abundance cost us in terms of the quality of our lives?
So, that's why it's important to me, to focus, I am trying to see into the darkness of the future. Right. Which, as it turns out, I'm not able to do. Now, AI may be able to do that, because it's going to have all the intelligence of all the world. And it's going to be able to build on that. Who knows? On the other hand, I can't. I can't see that future, and if I contemplate that future, the future is out of my control. I just wish that I could say, no, stop! That's not within my power. So, what is within my power? And this is where coming back around. Because I go down that rabbit hole, I get… I get despair, you know, we're doomed, you know?
On the other hand, right now, in this moment, everything is okay. I can accept life as it is right now. So, it turns out that if I check in, if I set my alarm for 5 minutes from now, what time will it be then? It'll be now. So, it's always now, so if I stay in the now, I'm okay if I can manage to accept things as they are, no matter what they are, because who knows? You just never know. But in the meantime, right now, everything is okay, it's more or less okay, and that's where I try to live. I try to make my quality of life in this moment the best that I can, and I'm willing to make a certain amount of effort. Am I willing to do everything? Turns out I'm not. Because in some ways, what enlightenment means is to be here now, and moment to moment, just like this. That's what we do.
YL: Secret to Longevity then, Skye. It's living in the now, and doing what you can, or as much as you want, at least.
SS: Yeah, and that's my advice, and that's what I try to do, because we don't know, and since we don't know, what do we have, we have this. And so, this turns out to be a lot, and I'm grateful for that, and that's my secret to longevity. That's how I've made it here so far.
YL: Well, I'm grateful for you, Skye, and grateful for the now. Well, the conversation we've had that is no longer the now. Yeah, I really appreciate you.
SS: Well, I appreciate you, and just the opportunity that we have to be, and I think we're… there is an idea in Buddhism called, right livelihood. And, I'm not sure I know what it means, but to me, what we engage in as purveyors of Chinese herbs, is on that list of right livelihood.
YL: Totally.
SS: Because, the reason we're doing it… we're not doing it to become billionaires, because I've been watching you a long time, and you're not a billionaire. But we're doing it because we think it helps people. And there's a positive in that, and we do it with, integrity and quality, and, you know, these are things that you can only wish that you were able to adhere to, so I thank you for providing that place for us, and for your family to... You know, I'm not sure you made this conscious decision to go here, but you did, and you're maintaining, so that's a lot.
YL: I'm happy to be here.
