HOW TO STAY WELL INDOORS

By world’s leading anti-ageing expert

FRUSTRATED at the idea of being stuck indoors for 12 weeks? Concerned about the days stretching ahead without seeing friends, family or doing your usual hobbies? You’re far from alone.

But, argues Muir Gray, a consultant in public health and professor of primary healthcare, not only is staying in safer but it also offers an opportunity to, rethink, reboot and reset.

Starting on Monday, the Irish Daily Mail brings you an exclusive series of pullouts that will help to provide a structure to your day, and will also put you on the path to create a healthier life for you to enjoy in the years to come.

Here Muir explains his advice and why he knows it works.

AT 75, my life is about as busy as it has been for the past 50 years. Although I did leave my longterm job at 65 I don’t really believe in retirement, except to create opportunities for younger people, so I carried on pursuing my two main missions.

The first of these is trying to enable governments to provide better value healthcare. As for the second, for 50 years I have been trying to help people live longer better by giving them the right knowledge.

Active as I am, I’m also someone with long-term health conditions. I have chronic bronchitis, most likely a legacy from growing up in the black fogs of Glasgow with my wonderful parents for whom, like many of their generation, a packet of Player’s cigarettes was never far away.

The other condition is heart disease, and six years ago I had a stent fitted following a heart attack. Because of my age and medical background, it’s been recommended that I, and hundreds of thousands of others, spend the next 12 weeks confined to home and have minimal contact with others.

It’s not the first time in my life that people have been encouraged to socially distance themselves for health reasons. Growing up in Glasgow in the Fifties I remember the polio epidemics, summers spent in fear of contracting this devastating virus before a vaccination was found.

In fact, I am sure I had it in 1951; I remember lying in front of a fire my mother had lit feeling unwell and when I went back out to play, I found that one of my closest playmates had died of the disease.

Just, as then, when we were urged to stay away from swimming pools and crowded places, now, we members of the same generation, again need to keep a safe distance from others.

OF COURSE, like so many other over 70s in a similar situation, it is a challenge to have my normally active life constrained.

While staying at home will reduce the likelihood of contracting Covid-19, I am concerned how inactivity and reduced social contact will impair our physical and mental fitness. It could affect how clearly we think and how well we feel in ourselves.

Fortunately, thanks to all the research I’ve become aware of as director of my company, The Optimal Ageing Programme, and as the author of books on the prevention of issues we once blamed on ageing, I know there are plenty of steps we can take to prevent the harmful effects of this period of physical isolation and relative inactivity.

In fact, we could look at it as a 12-week stay in a health farm, removed from the pressures of daily life — whether that’s caring for grandchildren, work or juggling volunteering commitments — which will give us all a rare time to rethink how we plan to live the next 10, 20 or 30 years.

It is very important to regard this 12-week spell in quarantine as an opportunity rather than as a jail sentence. This is a chance to change the way we behave, not only to reduce the risk of Covid19, but also the risk of dementia and frailty in the future. In the past ten years, we have learned that the process of ageing is not the main cause of the problems we face as we live longer, and we can delay or prevent the conditions we tend to fear most.

These problems shorten what we call ‘healthspan’ and increase the time we spend receiving social care, meaning reduced quality of life and more pressure on family and public resources.

To live longer better we need to change gear and the 12 weeks away from the hurly burly of the supermarket, the workplace, the bridge club, the bingo club and the grandchildren offers not a reason for sadness, but a gift of time. Today, and over five days next week, I’ll be helping you with ways to exercise the body and brain, to build physical strength and agility, mental acuity and encourage a sense of positivity and calm that will help you cope better with this unsettling time.

Still not convinced? Let me explain some of the background about the ageing process, and some of the myths that still surround it.

THE AGEING MYTH

TOO many people, young and old, still assume that everything that happens to people as they live longer is the result of the biological process of ageing. The good news is that this is not the case.

We now know that ageing by itself does not cause major problems until the 90s. You only have to look at the Queen or David Attenborough to see that even then many nonagenarians are still active.

You need a bit of luck to avoid the diseases we cannot prevent such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s,

but ageing alone is not the main problem. It’s other issues such as loss of mental and physical fitness and a negative mindset about your age and capabilities.

Never mind the search for the elixir of life, in which hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested, what people want is to live longer better.

Fortunately, there is now scientific evidence that we can achieve this. And over the next week I’ll be giving you the knowledge to put it into practice.

What’s important to remember is that this knowledge can still be applied even if you are spending three months at home.

KEEP CONNECTED

IN THE Seventies, research highlighted the fact that isolation was one technique used to break the will of young prisoners in wartime, but many older people were isolated for the same length of time.

Our brain alone does not nourish our mind, interaction with other people is vital. Obviously face-to

face contact will be very limited in the months to come.

While it’s not possible for everyone over 70 to be online, if you do have access to the internet then now is the time to embrace it, and the opportunities it offers for interaction, learning and communication.

Whether that’s learning a new skill, joining a virtual book club or listening to an online concert. Even if you aren’t online, you still have the telephone.

WORK ON FITNESS

LOSS of fitness is more of an issue than the passing of the years. While professional sports men and sports women notice that their fitness really starts to drop off around the age of 40 — as Roger Federer and Serena Williams are finding out in their late 30s — most of us start to decline much earlier.

In fact, many people start declining from their early 20s, not because of ageing but because of modern lifestyles. This is when they get their first job and car. The car, the computer and the desk job have all combined to create an environment in which we lose fitness progressively and this not only reduces our physical abilities, it makes us even more susceptible to other challenges such as weight gain and heart disease.

For years we have assumed that fitness was relevant only to athletes, but it is clear now that the longer you live the more important fitness becomes, in part because loss of fitness affects the brain and the mind as well as the body.

Inactivity increases anxiety and can also lead to depression.

Some studies suggest that regular aerobic exercise may boost the area of the brain associated with verbal memory and learning.

Exercise may also stimulate the growth of new blood vessels in the brain as well as new brain cells.

Of course, now we’re confined to home our ability to stay fit is more limited — as gyms and fitness centres have all been closed. But,

as I’ll be showing you next week, it is still possible to maintain fitness and activity at home.

This is important because we also fail to appreciate that the effects of disease are often greatly complicated by accelerated loss of fitness.

This is not so much because of the direct effects of the disease, but because the onset of the disease makes other people want to do something for the affected person.

STRUGGLING IS GOOD

CHILDREN in mid-life often find it difficult to observe a parent struggling to reach the shops, and so they rush to arrange delivery of food to the parent’s home.

They fail to recognise that ‘struggling’ is what’s called ‘training’ when they go to the gym, and that by removing the training effect of going to the shops they accelerate a decline in ability.

For those of us who will have to spend the next 12 weeks at home, food delivery will most likely be a necessity. The struggle will be a different one. However, nurturing a ‘can do’ attitude and making efforts not to give up activity at home will have a similar impact.

That might be physical activity or learning something new or even just being creative with your dinner menu and cooking it from scratch rather than resorting to ready meals.

These all contribute to a sense of what you can do rather than what you can’t.

AVOID AGEISM TRAP

WHILE the over-70s are a key group who are being encouraged to stay at home right now, I would urge you not to give into feelings that you are being written off as ‘past it’.

In fact, a positive attitude is key to staying youthful, and I’ll be showing you ways to retrain your brain to nurture a sense of optimism about yourself.

In any case, sweeping generalisations about ‘the elderly’, which I think is a terrible term, have to be taken with great caution.

People aged 70 differ from one another in many ways more than they resemble others of the same age. Remember, the way age limits are set is often arbitrary.

The pension age, for example, is chosen by actuaries on the basis of the sums they have done to ensure that the pension fund does not go bust because people live longer than expected. There’s no rule that says the moment you hit that age you are not capable of working.

Too many people have the wrong belief that people over 60 can’t get stronger, more supple or improve the way their brain works.

There’s a common attitude that there is no point in encouraging people over 60 to try new activities. It is up to us, the older generation, to change these beliefs and attitudes — and this is something I’ll also show you how to achieve.

MUIR GRAY is the author of Sod Seventy: The Guide To Living Well, published by Bloomsbury at €16.99.