Health policy expert: 'Wellness isn't what you should be using your mental powers on'

The "wellness industrial complex" gets it wrong in encouraging us to laser-focus on ticking the boxes of a healthy lifestyle without mentioning that we also need to keep social to be healthy, says Dr Ezekiel Emanuel, author of the best-seller Eat Your Ice Cream: Six Simple Rules for a Long and Healthy Life.

"Wellness, living a healthy life, should be just part of what you're doing. It's not the focus of your life. It's not what you should be paying attention to and using your mental powers on.

"What you eat, how you exercise, those should be sort of habitual, unconscious. You shouldn't really have to obsess about them, monitor them every minute. That's taking away from the core, the meat of life," he tells RNZ's Saturday Morning.

The trend of pursuing longevity "takes your eye off the real important ball", Emanuel says, which is to ask, what is a fulfilling life to you? And what are you filling your time with?

At a conference last year, seated next to the man most famously and expensively trying to live a long life, Bryan Johnson, he asked the tech entrepreneur, "So tell me, why do you want to live to 150?"

"Silence. He had no answer. Then he turned to the person next to me and said 'You know, I'm the most monitored person in human history'. That tells you everything. He doesn't know why he wants to live to 150."

Although more people are living into their 90s and 100s these days, Emanuel says, the outer limits of a human life - the late 110s - are not increasing.

If you've been around people in their 90s, he says, you can see that for most of us, there is at that point a "definite deterioration".

"People become slower. They almost all report less energy, less ability to focus. Even centenarians are almost all confined to a chair with very little motion. They're not travelling."

Apart from very rare exceptions, like Emanuel's "great hero" Benjamin Franklin, who invented bifocal spectacles at the age of 79, it's unusual for people to excel in intellectual creativity after the age of 75, he points out.

"Throughout human history, you can find about 10 or 15 of those kinds of people, so we have to be realistic about what to expect of life. We're not going to live to 120 and be active and creative."

One of his other issues with "wellness commentary" is its neglect in mentioning social relationships as "probably the most important factor in terms of wellness and longevity and happiness".

"If you're lonely, you don't have human connections, you're socially isolated, you have a much higher mortality rate."

This is just as true for introverts as it is for extroverts, he says, (and presumably otroverts, too).

"A lot of introverts will say, well, you know, 'It's too much energy, I'm fearful.' It turns out that when they act extroverted and make social connections, they actually are happier and feel better.

"I think one of the most important things people can do for their wellness is to talk to other people. Pick up that phone and call a relative, call a dear friend.

"Or if you happen to be at a restaurant alone, or on a train or a bus, talk to someone next to you.

"[You might think], 'Oh, they might think I'm intruding. Oh, they might think it'll be boring.' ... It turns out that is almost uniformly untrue.

"My suggestion is try it. What do you lose if they're hostile, if they're monosyllabic, and they don't really want to respond? Nothing. It's a good way to think about life."