“More than half of what we do in the day we do it on autopilot.” Immediately, the phrase resonates, because it questions: who might say, in the midst of the hustle and bustle typical of an intense country like Argentina; plus the new scenario left by the pandemic, that he is absolutely aware of everything he does from the moment he wakes up until he goes to sleep? How to achieve that long-awaited well-being to the extent of each one’s possibilities?
“Many of the challenges that we have today involve ‘fixing the engine of an airplane in mid-flight’ because nothing we are experiencing is unprecedented, and therefore we navigate without maps,” explains Sebastián Campanario, author of the sentence that opens this note and the book The Future of Wellness. Ideas, habits and innovation to live longer and better (Sudamericana), which tries to answer this and other similar questions. “Well-being is a territory that encompasses a multiplicity of dimensions, and therefore the most interesting thing arises when medical knowledge intersects with that of mental health, new therapies, complexity, entrepreneurship and even creativity and climate change. . It is, then, a territory of complex systems”, adds the journalist and graduate in Economics.
“Much of the wellness battle is won in the field of habit formation, because ‘automatic pilot’ is more than 50% of the decisions we make every day. Former point guard of the golden generation of basketball, Juan Ignacio “Pepe” Sánchez, is a fan of the new science of habits to achieve a healthier life. It tells how, like a financial investment, healthy habits have ‘compound interest’ (the sooner you start, the better) or how sometimes we get immobilized by a fallacy of binary thinking: either we are super athletes or we are a disaster, when in fact, any drop of healthy behavior adds up and is very valuable”, he says.
Is the concern regarding living better – rather than more – prior to the pandemic or did it arise with the confinement and the latent possibility of losing one’s life? “Both things: it was always important but it is much more post-pandemic. With the pandemic of the last three years, the great stories of innovation were associated with the health sector (the unprecedented speed with which vaccines were manufactured and distributed, the disruption caused by messenger RNA technology from Pfizer and Moderna, etc. ). We all had friends or relatives who had a bad time with covid, and that made us more aware of our fragility, and therefore there is a new assessment of well-being, “says Campanario.
The use of technology, fitness and body care, nutrition are some of those key aspects. But for the author, there are “new topics but also broken down taboos.” Only the sleep industry – Campanario cites “rings and other devices to measure how well we sleep, personalized mattresses and even ice creams to rest better” – moves some US$ 500 million a year. And products that until recently were considered addictive and dangerous drugs (cannabis, psychedelics) now add new authorizations every week from governments in different countries to be used in the field of mental health.
Goals. With limited time and sometimes scarce resources, how can wellness be found in the daily grind? “With countless new things, from the very simple, such as drinking more water, meditating even for a few minutes, moving, cultivating social relationships or learning for a lifetime. All of this has a huge impact on our physical and emotional well-being. The good thing is that much of what ‘we don’t know that we don’t know’ in terms of well-being is already available to make us feel better: we are not talking regarding advances in the coming decades, they are within our reach today”, says Campanario.
Although science has not yet been able to make progress to break the record of 122 years of life for a French citizen, the novelty is that there are many more people aged 80, 90 or older with physical and cognitive fullness than until not long ago. it lasted ten or twenty years less, explains the promoter. “Today there are dozens of start-ups dedicated specifically to attacking the problem of aging. Living more decades ceased to be a conversation between eccentric scientists and became part of an achievable frontier in the medium term”.
So, are there chances to get better at old age? “Of course. The sooner you begin to cultivate different habits, the better, but doing something is much better than nothing”, reassures Campanario. “And there is also a positive net value in embarking on this agenda: at some point in the next few years there will be really substantial changes in several of the factors that are now causes of death (such as cancer), and then it is convenient to arrive in good shape at that stage. Woody Allen once said: ‘I missed the sexual revolution by two months’: I wouldn’t want to miss the ‘longevity escape velocity’ moment for a short time”, he muses.
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