Be careful what you ask for this Christmas...
Do you know what "Gift" means in German?
Dr Ciara Vizzard ribbed me for saying I’m here for a good time rather than a long one on our podcast recording this week.
As a specialist in geriatric care and the first person I met on the London open mic scene when I moved there in March 2019, I appreciated her response from a professional and personal standpoint.
If YouTube’s not your speed, you can also find episode 29 on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
It’s a cliché, sure, but have you actually considered how terrible your life would be if you lived forever without living well?
In Greek mythology, Tithonus, a mortal, fell in love with a goddess, Eos, who asked Zeus to grant her human lover eternal life…but forgot to ask for his eternal youth.
So Tithonus aged. And aged. And kept on aging.
He withered, weakened, lost his mind, until eventually he was transformed into a cicada, trapped in a body that wouldn’t die but couldn’t truly live.
Tennyson captured Tithonus’ plight perfectly: “The woods decay, the woods decay and fall… Me only cruel immortality consumes.”
Immortality without quality of life isn’t a gift
Episode 29 of Fitness & Thinking with Dr Ciara, circles this same territory from a different angle. We talked about what people get wrong about aging – the assumptions that become self-fulfilling, the gap between how older people feel and how they’re treated, and the single most important thing for maintaining independence (spoiler: it’s not what you think).
But the conversation kept returning to one central question: what does it mean to age well?
Not just to live long, but to live well.
During the conversation, I reached for a study whose details I couldn’t quite remember but I can detail for you here: researchers at Stanford (Alia Crum and Bradley Turnwald, published in the peer-reviewed journal, Nature Human Behaviour, 2018) tested whether what people believed about their genes could override their actual biology. They took 223 participants, genotyped them for genes associated with exercise capacity and obesity, then lied to half of them about the results.
Some people with good genes were told they had poor ones. Some with poor genes were told they had protective ones. They then tested everyone again looking specifically at treadmill performance and fullness hormones after a meal.
The results: people who were told they had protective genes performed better, regardless of what their actual DNA said. Lung capacity improved. Satiety hormones increased 2.5 times after the same meal. In some cases, the effect of simply believing you had good genes was larger than the actual genetic differences between people.
Subtle foreshadowing: It’s the inverse of Scrooge.
Where defensiveness and withdrawal narrow your world until you’re barely living, belief in capacity could expand it. What you’re told about yourself – what you come to believe about yourself – doesn’t just influence how you feel. It changes how your body functions.
Ciara described how in her field and experience, loneliness functions as a genuine health crisis, not just a social inconvenience. People who lose their social world often see a parallel drop-off in their physical health. In her time she’s seen people fall through the gaps of ologies – thinking on cardiology, dermatology, gastroenterology – often missing the fact that much of their declines might stem from living by themselves, maybe only having a care-worker visit them in a day to help them with a meal or basic hygiene.
And it’s not just social connection that matters: it’s what you believe about yourself.
The Stanford study proves it: when you’re told you’re limited, your body responds as if you are. When you’re told you’re capable, you become more capable – measurably, physiologically.
Which brings us to Scrooge.
Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is as good an ode as any on living well and living for now
He wrote it as a social critique, a story about what happens when someone cuts themselves off from the world and hardens against it.
Scrooge wasn’t always miserable. As a young man, he was idealistic, in love, had friends. But life ground him down. His father was cold. His fiancée, Belle, left him because he chose security over love. His business partner, Marley, died. Every loss reinforced the same lesson: it’s safer not to care.
So he stopped caring.
He built walls. Dismissed his nephew’s invitations, sneered at charity, hoarded wealth as protection. By the time we meet him, he’s blockaded himself into complete isolation.
He’s not evil. He’s defended. And his defensiveness creates the very loneliness he feared.
This pattern is everywhere.
You get injured and your body, which always worked, suddenly doesn’t. So you pull back from the gym, from sports, from activities that once defined you. At first it’s temporary, but months pass. You stop trying because trying reminds you of what you’ve lost. The defence becomes the prison.
Or you’re made redundant. You had a role, a routine, colleagues, purpose. Then it’s gone. You withdraw. Stop networking, stop applying, stop showing up. You tell yourself the world doesn’t want you, so why bother?
Or you lose a friend or two – not through conflict, just time and circumstance. You drift apart. You think about reaching out, but it’s been so long it feels awkward. Easier not to. You tell yourself if they wanted to talk, they’d call. Both of you are waiting. The gap widens.
Loss, pain, withdrawal, hardening, more loss. The defence mechanism becomes the problem.
The ghosts in A Christmas Carol don’t fix Scrooge’s losses. Belle doesn’t come back. Marley’s still dead. But they show him he’s still alive. Still capable of connection. Still able to choose differently. The transformation isn’t about undoing the past – it’s about refusing to let the past dictate the future.
When Scrooge wakes up on Christmas morning, he realises it’s not too late. That’s the hope. Not that everything gets fixed, but that you’re not locked in.
So what does this mean practically?
In the podcast, Ciara talked about the physical and social things that matter: not smoking, limiting alcohol, pursuing strength training alongside regular steps and staying connected to people and community, namely through things like social meals.
These aren’t optional: movement and independence are intertwined. Loneliness kills.
But there’s a mental dimension too that we touch on and I’ve expanded here – practices that keep you engaged rather than withdrawn:
Learning a language
Not to fluency, not for any practical reason necessarily, just for the cognitive load. Your brain works differently when it’s grappling with new grammar, new sounds, new ways of structuring thought. It’s neuroplasticity in action. I’ve been learning Spanish this year – sometimes badly, often inconsistently – but the act of trying has helped me see and be in the world in invaluable and sometimes incalculably different ways.
Picking up a hobby
Does it need to be something you can get better at, or do crosswords count? Research suggests novelty and challenge matter more than repetition. Learning piano engages the brain differently than doing the same Wordle pattern every morning. But crosswords aren’t useless – they’re just less potent. The key seems to be whether you’re being stretched or just going through motions.
Gratitude, prayer, reflection
Not as productivity hacks, but as ways of reorienting yourself toward the world rather than retreating from it. These practices – whether religious, secular, structured, informal – are the opposite of Scrooge’s withdrawal. They’re acts of staying present, and, personally, anecdotally, I think my systemic level of inflammation and general sense of stress, along with my ability to be genuinely grateful for things has only increased by following the practice I describe in the final third of the episode.
Creatine
Emerging research suggests cognitive benefits beyond the physical. It’s not a magic bullet, but it’s accessible, evidence-based, and worth considering.
None of this guarantees you’ll live to 90 with perfect health. You can do everything “right” and still face decline, loss, pain. But that’s not the point.
The point is that you’re not condemned to keep living in reaction to what’s happened.
Learning a language at 60, picking up weights after an injury, reaching out to someone you haven’t spoken to in years – these aren’t about optimisation. They’re about refusing to let fear or defensiveness have the last word.
Tithonus was cursed to live forever without living well.
Scrooge chose to stop living even though he was alive.
The difference is choice.
You can’t control everything that happens to your body or your life. But you can control whether you stay engaged with it. Whether you keep learning, moving, connecting, trying.
Are you wishing or manifesting?
By all means, you can think that everything will be fine.
But what if you had more of a hand in making that happen?
What if – like those people who “beat the odds”, whether that’s with cancer, or at work, or at play – you do the things that support the outcome/s you want?
You want to have a good day today, so you ring your best friend, you make yourself a nice breakfast, you put a wash on and get some steps in, you book a cinema ticket or make a restaurant reservation, you dress well for you and no-one else, you make time to read, you do what you can today rather than everything you think you ought to do.
I know a lot of people who work hard for their luck – sometimes I even feel like one of them.
Scrooge spent decades building walls. In one night – really, in one choice – he started dismantling them. It wasn’t comfortable but it wasn’t really difficult for him either. It just needed the intent and the action.
However you spend the holidays
I trust that you’re taking time for you when you can, and when you have to see the in-laws, or put up with the kids, or wrap the presents, or overcook the roast, that, maybe, actually, this go round, you choose to commit to the moment you’re in. That, in fact, you choose to contribute to all of these moments and, in so doing, maybe light up someone else’s day.
I don’t find this time of year easy.
For me it’s a lot of loss – of people I loved and wished I’d gotten to know better – and it’s a sense of isolation – ironically, I felt more connected in Indonesia in 2024 than I did at home in 2023 – but I always smile when I see Scrooge, and think that the days will get longer again, and, with the new year, there’ll be tens maybe hundreds of people I could potentially help through their Blue Mondays because I’ve gotten through so many of mine and put the qualifications and results on top.
I have lost but I am not lost.
Nor am I those losses.
I feel them, but I’m not them.
Sometimes it just takes a breath and a look around to realise that everything that was and everything that is yet to be are simply ghosts relative to everything that is here for us right now.
So here’s to us, with love
J x