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Someone needs to say it. Someone has to speak up in defense of being mid. I am a mid runner. Most of us are, as that is the definition of being mid. I work out every day, but I have a full-time job, two kids, a dog, and a spouse. I volunteer, and I have dinner with my parents. I’m aging. I’m not going to knock anyone’s socks off with a crazy 100-miler anytime soon.

So what do you do if you don’t want to collapse into a bag of dust, but you have no time or incentive to work with a personal trainer? One option is to do what Atlantic CEO and incredibly fast runner Nicholas Thompson does, and use a custom GPT. Or, you can use Google's new AI health Coach in the Fitbit app, which is a part of the $10/month Fitbit Premium service.

Per Google's instructions, I used Coach (which is in public preview—a beta, of sorts) for three weeks. I'm a coach for Girls on the Run at my daughter's school, where she has become running friends with a kid competing in the Junior Olympics. I made it my mission to beat two children in the November 5K—so, a 7:30 mile pace. I was feeling pretty good about it, actually, until multiple people told me that I should stop talking to a computer and that I need to talk to people in real life. First Things First

You can access Fitbit's Public Preview if you meet a few requirements—you have to be an active Fitbit Premium subscriber, have an Android phone running Android 11 or higher, be located in the US, and use English for both the Fitbit app and your phone. (You can check the full list of requirements here.)

You can also switch back and forth between Public Preview and the regular app version, which you might want to do because several important features are currently missing from the app version with Coach. For example, menstrual health logging and blood glucose logging are unavailable, as are Cardio Fitness scores and advanced running metrics for Pixel Watch 3 and 4 users.

I used the service with the Pixel Watch 4 on a Pixel 9. (Fitbit wants to make the experience available for iOS users soon.) I had a so-so experience with the Running Coach that Fitbit launched last year, but I was more optimistic about the health coach because it promises to be both more comprehensive and more flexible.

Many runners who are much smarter and more experienced than I am (please see the mid comment above) have noted that running requires being able to answer a lot of binary yes/no questions correctly. Can I do my long run on Saturday if I'm busy on Sunday? Should I run with a sniffle, or wait until I’m well? A little more guidance is always helpful. I answered a 10-minute questionnaire about my goals and what equipment I had available (Fitbit hopes to eventually be able to incorporate multimodal actions, like taking a video of gym equipment, and use AI to offer suggestions) and waited for results.

My first impressions were not promising. Coach seemed to think that I was at a work conference, which I was not, and I told it so. I didn’t mind, though, as it was easy enough to adjust treadmill runs and hotel room workouts to outdoor runs and easy weight-lifting sessions in front of the TV.

You can track live metrics via the Fitbit app, or you can just use your watch to track your workout and sync the completed workout to your program later. I really like this feature. A lot of people like live-tracking workouts; I find it stressful and not terribly accurate, especially since I do not run on a track and find getting exact time/distance intervals to be difficult while running around my neighborhood.

Also, Fitbit’s running workouts appear to loosely follow Zone 2 training, where you improve your cardio fitness by staying within 60 to 70 percent of your max heart rate for most of your training. God bless these people, but I’m a foot shorter than everyone who loves zone training, and I can spike my heart rate out of Zone 2 just by listening to Rihanna.

Again, I consulted Running Evolution coach Beth Baker, who suggested using other metrics like whether I can talk while running, looking at my VO2 Max, and tracking my recovery time after runs to see if my workouts were hard or easy enough. “I mean, I’m not a doctor, but that’s just common sense,” she said.

In my first week of training, I made the mistake of telling Coach that I was sick; it offered helpful advice that if my symptoms were above my neck, then I could keep working out. (I parroted this to my daughter when she tried to get out of going to school.) It also adjusted my workouts down to annoyingly slow 1.5-mile or 2-mile workouts and wouldn’t stop, even when I told Coach I wasn’t sick anymore.

The Fitbit team noted over email that in “the iterative Public Preview, we expect the coach to experience some trouble with memory expiration and persistence, which might cause some unexpected workout adjustments, and we are actively working on improving this.” I had to go back into the Coach Notes—where there’s a record of everything that I asked Coach—to delete any statements where I said I was not feeling well and restore my old fitness settings.

After several weeks of tinkering with Coach, I finally started to see results. Coach saw a pattern in that I like to go to a yoga class on Sundays and rock climbing on Wednesdays, and it seamlessly incorporated other types of workouts into my weekly plan.

As far as my lifting goes, I get recommended kettlebell swings and glute bridges a lot, which is great, since those are invaluable exercises for runners. That seems like a promising indication that Coach is drawing upon reliable information sources for recommendations. Google has partnered with NBA star Stephen Curry and other outside experts to keep Coach’s advice grounded in reality.

I did notice something strange, though. Coach asked me what had happened during my day to affect my sleep, and it was hard not to tell Coach about the different problems that might be affecting my health and willingness to work out. While Google does not use Fitbit data for advertising, I would still be wary of disclosing too much sensitive health information to a corporate entity that is not a doctor and not bound by HIPAA regulations.

My spouse and IRL friends started edging away when I mentioned conversations with Coach. I told my husband that I was asking Coach what I should eat for breakfast, and he looked at me askance. “Doesn't everyone know that you're supposed to eat carbs before and protein after?” he said, tentatively. When I told another friend that I’d asked Coach to help me work on my macros, he said, “Maybe you need to … start talking to more people.”

I discussed my AI-generated training plans with Baker, who had another suggestion. “There’s a sneaky way of getting faster, and that’s by running with people who are faster than you,” she said. “There’s a whole, weird feeling of barely hanging on when you’re running with somebody. You’re uncomfortable for the first month or so, but it works every time.”

A lot of people like running because you don’t have to make plans or schedule dates or tee times with anyone. You can just put on shoes and shorts, sprint out the door, and squeeze in a workout whenever you have a spare hour. But a big part of what motivates us to stick with exercise—of any kind—is being with each other. I started this project because I wanted to be able to keep up with my daughter and her friend. The faster I get, the more appealing it is to run with other people than with a computer program.

As satisfying as it is to link up those daily exercises and check in with Coach every day, I started to get the sensation that the real people in my life—the ones that I actually did yoga, rock climbing, and running with—were beginning to stage an intervention.

Other people might feel differently, especially if you’re super busy and just trying to squeeze a workout in. But there’s still value in getting real-time feedback from real people. Unlike a large language model, a friend can tell when you’re sick, or if you’re running at an easy conversational pace, or when you’re sucking wind. A real person can also tell you, gently, when you’re getting kind of weird because you’re mostly talking to a chatbot and you need to stop.

I’ve been able to spot AI generated content for over a decade. And now that ChatGPT has been so widespread for so long, almost everyone else can spot it too.

Especially if it contains a few chatbot-generated “human touch” tricks.

Look. I helped create this machine-mad-libs-monstrosity over 15 years ago when I co-invented a platform that wrote everything from millions of funny Yahoo Fantasy Football recaps every week to thousands of super-serious Associated Press financial articles every quarter.

I’ve been doing it so long, I can’t unsee it.

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Now, you probably already know at least a few of these tricks, which I’m going to lay out from most obvious to least obvious. My goal here is to let you know that these are things that everyone can spot.

Oh, and if you’re like me and you happen to still be brain-thinking and hand-writing everything like a fool, here’s some stuff you’re gonna want to start avoiding. First, My Take On Using ChatGPT

Go for it.

Yeah, I hate AI slop as much as you do, if not more. But I’m not going to judge someone for wanting to make their communications a little easier to generate.

I’ve already laid out a list of situations when using generative AI to write for you is problematic (eg. don’t use it to professionally describe an experience you didn’t have), but those scenarios are all outliers. And I’ve already advised that you should not be AI’s editor, but you should instead use it to spot check your original thoughts.

I’m also not someone who will correct someone’s grammar or phrasing or even spelling. First of all, my own isn’t perfect, sometimes on purpose.

More importantly, the writer might not be communicating in their first language, they may have a learning disability, or they might find communication stressful in general. Hell, they may not care enough about hurting my feelings in a comment section to take the time to re-read what they wrote before they hit send.

Like I said, no judgment. I’m just here to keep you from getting called out. ChatGPT Loves Quotes and Bullets and Em Dashes

Let’s start with the most obvious mistakes. This is the only one where I’m going to blame the writer and not the chatbot.

Folks, you’re getting lazy with the copy and paste out of your chatbot and into whatever you’re working on. I’m starting to see a lot of this in emails and in comments on my posts.

First up, sentences or even entire paragraphs that aren’t being quoted from elsewhere but are nonetheless embedded in quotation marks.

“This is not how you communicate an original thought.”

I know Claude does this a lot. It uses quotes for no good reason when making suggestions.

It also loves to shove items into an outline that don’t belong in an outline. Now, here’s where I start to get more upset at the chatbots. I love outlines. I have entire documents that are just 12-page outlines:

Bulleted items are always a useful crutch for communicating multiple ideas quickly
But not every idea needs to be broken out into a bulleted list 
And when you do it for no good reason, it’s obvious to the reader

And then the final obvious trick really gets my rage up—I love the em dash.

I think in meta, and I’m constantly using commas, em dashes, and short paragraphs to try to compress my active brain into something the reader can follow along with. Em dashes are for addressing adjacent thoughts—not continuous thoughts, that’s where you use a comma.

Note to my editor: That last sentence is written that way on purpose. It might even be grammatically correct. I don’t even know anymore. It’s Not Just This, It’s That

Before mobile maps, my Dad used to give me driving directions and always slip in advice like, “If you get to the 7-Eleven, you’ve gone too far.”

And I was always like, “Yo Dad, can you just give me the right directions?”

ChatGPT and the other chatbots love to tell you what things are not, for no other reason than to, ironically, sound less like ChatGPT.

“It’s not just a football game, it’s a battle to determine which team has spent their money the most efficiently.”

“She doesn’t just paint pictures, she infuses the canvas with love.”

“You’re not reading this post, you’re being educated and entertained.”

Whatever. So quick check. If the left side is unnecessary, or the right side is silly, or both, that’s a pretty solid giveaway.

But, like, three or four times over the last two weeks, I’ve felt compelled to change something I’ve written, not because it was unnecessary or silly, I do plenty of that, but because what I needed to say came off sounding like “not this but that.”

Shoot. Here’s one from yesterday. “I’m not upset about this. This isn’t a rant. It’s just simple economics.”

It’s an easy trap to fall into, and it’s irritating that it’s bumping up against actual technique. But I’m not going to change what I write. To me that’s the worst part about generative AI—in my book—not that humans won’t be able to recognize ChatGPT, but that they will recognize it and they’ll accept it.

There. I think I just did it again. The Rule of Threes

This is where I really start to get furious. Man, I invented the rule of threes. And also exaggerated claims. Like I also invented the question mark.

The rule of threes is when you use three items to make a point in a sentence, or when you use three bulleted items in a list, or when you use three sentences in a paragraph.

Like that.

I love the rule of threes, especially comedically, because it gives me room for setup, then I can hit a timing beat, then I can subvert the reader’s expectations in a way that might make them laugh.

I’m not taking this out of my toolkit and you shouldn’t either. Like all of these tricks, it’s what the chatbots use to try to be more human. Just make sure your text isn’t overusing the rule. No Chaos

A good way to make sure your writing isn’t mistaken for ChatGPT is banana clown hot pot throw pillow.

Look, a lot of people will tell you that a good way to spot ChatGPT is if there is nothing personal in the text (Dad, directions, 7-Eleven) but I hope I’m not the first to tell you that all the chatbots are happy to make up some personal shit without you even asking for it.

But… all human writing has some butterfly effect to it. If there is no personality, no chaos in the writing—and if you read enough you can sense even the slightest hint of randomness that occurs when the synapses are firing in the actual human brain—then you’ve got yourself a chatbot author there, my friend.

In fact, the sterility of the writing is the trick that’s probably the least obvious, because generative AI is great, perfect even, for getting information across efficiently. It’s what it’s good at, and what it most often should be used for, no matter how many “human touches” it can muster up. It Doesn’t… Say Anything

This column was written to expose the five most obvious “human touch” tricks ChatGPT uses that most humans have mostly figured out. And I wanted to add my own experience and opinion—as someone who stands on both sides of the AI battle line—to give you a sense of why this is important, for both proponents and opponents of AI-assisted communication.

I hope I’ve done that. And I hope I’ve pushed the argument forward.

A bot-written post would have skipped that second part, for the most part. Because it has no experience and opinion. It has chunks and embeddings of what’s already been said.

There are plenty of times in this chaotic and busy world when using ChatGPT to get some communication slapped together makes perfect sense. But unless you’re comfortable with the receiver of said communication hearing “Hey. I put zero thought into this,” then you’re going to want to take some care to at least cover your tracks.

And it’s only going to get harder to do that. This was a difficult text for me to write, because I constantly had to check myself to make sure I wasn’t leaning too hard into my own habits—which can be just as lazy as firing up ChatGPT. And in that, I probably took away a little something from how this column hits you.

AI is an evolution of existing technology and processing, and as I’ve said many times, it’s a lot like spreadsheets. Being totally against generative AI to do communication is like being totally against spreadsheets to do math.

And while I’ll always commit to never use it for a column like this (or any of the other reasons I put forth in the column I linked at the top), I’m not going to judge, or ban, or boycott the technology. That would be shortsighted, and I’m still like 20 years away from telling all technology to eff off.

I just implore you, be human. Always use as much care as you can whenever you communicate. You’ll be better off for it, and so will the humans you’re communicating with.

AI is often sold as the ultimate productivity hack. Just imagine: the report you dreaded writing, drafted in seconds. The spreadsheet you didn’t want to touch, analyzed instantly. The code that once took you days, generated before lunch. For professionals who already struggle with overwhelm and the daily battle to manage their time, AI feels like salvation.

At Lifehack Method, where we help clients master time management and build systems for living fulfilling, balanced lives, we see this every day. People are desperate for tools that promise to take the weight off their shoulders. AI seems like the next logical step in that search. There’s no denying the dopamine hit of a blank page suddenly filling with words or lines of code. AI gives the illusion of acceleration, and in the moment, that feels like productivity. You’re doing something, and the grind of starting from scratch is gone.

But there’s a problem: faster doesn’t always mean more productive, and saved time doesn’t always translate into better outcomes. The real test of productivity isn’t how quickly you start, but whether you finish with work that’s accurate, useful, and aligned with your goals. That’s where cracks begin to show. AI can make you feel productive without actually being productive

A recent MIT study found that 95 percent of generative AI pilots in companies produced little to no measurable impact on profit and loss, despite $30–40 billion in enterprise investment, because “most GenAI systems do not retain feedback, adapt to context, or improve over time.” In other words, the time people think they’re saving isn’t translating into organizational productivity.

A similar story shows up among software developers in a recent controlled study. After trying AI coding assistants, developers estimated they experienced 10–30 percent productivity gains. But in actuality, experienced coders took 19 percent longer when using AI tools on codebases they knew well. They not only lost time in practice—they walked away convinced they’d saved it. That’s a dangerous mismatch.

McKinsey’s research adds nuance: AI can indeed help with repetitive or “shallow work” tasks like painstakingly referencing large documents or analyzing invoices. But the productivity boost shrinks when tasks are complex or require deep, sustained attention. In other words, AI may help you clear the easy stuff off your plate, but it’s harder to get it to do the work that really moves the needle.

Why is that? The 90 percent mirage

Here’s the paradox of AI: it often gets you 90 percent of the way there, which feels like a huge time savings. But that last 10 percent—checking for errors, refining details, making sure it actually works—can eat up as much time as you saved. The most common mistake is assuming 90 percent is good enough and shipping it.

Jeff Escalante is an engineering director at Clerk, puts it bluntly: “Anything that you ask it to do, it will more than likely end up making one or more mistakes in what it puts out. Whether that’s fabricating statistics, or making up things that are not real . . . or writing code that just doesn’t work,” he says. “It’s something that is really cool and really interesting to use, but also is something that you have to know you can’t trust and can’t rely on. It needs to be reviewed by an expert before you take what it puts out and deliver it, [especially if] it’s sensitive or important.”

His advice? Treat AI like an intern: great for low-level work, occasionally useful when given training, but absolutely not someone you’d send into a client meeting unsupervised. And if you’re hoping eventually it’ll be foolproof, think again.

Jeff Smith, PhD is the founder of QuantumIOT and a serial technology entrepreneur. He says it’s important to think of the AI as an assistant because “it still makes mistakes and it will make mistakes for a long time. It’s probabilistic, not deterministic.”

If you’re a domain expert, you can spot and fix that last 10 percent. If you’re not, you risk handing off work that looks polished but is quietly broken. That means wasted time correcting mistakes—or worse, reputational damage. Many ambitious employees eager to “level up” with AI end up doing the opposite: walking into client pitches with beautiful decks full of hallucinated insights and an action plan that doesn’t match the Statement of Work.

So should we throw AI out the window? Not exactly. But definitely stop treating it like a self-driving car and more like a stick shift: powerful, but only if you actually know how to drive. How to use AI without losing control of your time

The most productive people don’t hand over the keys to AI. They stay in the driver’s seat. Here are a few rules emerging from early research and expert guidance:

Be the subject matter expert. If you don’t know what “excellent” looks like, AI can lead you astray. The time you save drafting could vanish in endless rounds of corrections.
Use AI as a draft partner, not a finisher. The sweet spot is breaking inertia—helping you brainstorm, sketch a structure, or generate a starting point. Iterative prompting is the key to better AI outputs, but the final say will always belong to you.
Automate the shallow, protect the deep. Let AI knock out routine, low-value work—summaries, boilerplate, admin, certain emails. Guard your deep-work hours for the kind of thinking that actually moves the needle. Real productivity isn’t about speed; it’s about aligning time with your top priorities.
Track actual outcomes. Don’t confuse the feeling of speed with actual results. Measure it. Did the AI really shave an hour off your workflow—or just generate more drafts to wade through?

And keep some perspective: we’re still in the early-adopter stage. As Smith puts it, “It’ll be a bit of a rocky road [but] there’s tons of great tools that are going to come your way.” Productivity is still human business

At its best, AI helps remove the drudge work that crowds our days, giving us more room to think, plan, and focus on what matters. At its worst, it tricks us into mistaking busywork for progress.

AI won’t manage your time for you. It won’t choose your priorities or tell you which meetings to skip. That discipline—of mastering your schedule, focusing on high-leverage work, and knowing where your energy should go—still rests on human shoulders. Once that foundation is in place, AI can be a powerful ally. Without it, AI risks amplifying the chaos.

AI is a fast, powerful, occasionally unreliable tool. But like any tool, it only works if you wield it with intention. You’re still the driver. AI can help you go faster, but only if you know where you want to go.

By Carey Bentley

Your sofa should be roughly two-thirds the length of your rug.

LaRae Quy stood at the top of a diving board several feet above the water. Quy, a new FBI recruit going through her academy training, just stared at the swimming pool below.

The assignment was clear: She was to jump into the pool, armed with an M-16 rifle, and swim from one end of the pool to the other.

There were only two problems:

Quy had just discovered she was afraid of heights.
She didn’t know how to swim.

As she stood there in front of her fellow students and trainers, a question kept going through her head:

Can I do this?

Needing to think fast, Quy shifted the question—and her perspective—with one word:

How can I do this?

That simple tweak empowered Quy. She informed her training officer she was unable to swim, and he promptly gave her a life vest. (Turns out the aim of the challenge wasn’t seeing how well cadets could swim, rather, how they dealt with challenging circumstances.) She then overcame her fear, took the leap, and somehow completed the test.

“I’m a big believer in reframing and positive thinking,” Quy told me in an interview. “Giving up wasn’t an option. And this lesson continued to help me in 24 years at the FBI.”

Why is this simple question so valuable? And how can you use it to overcome your “impossible” challenges? Let’s break it down. (Sign up here for my free email course on emotional intelligence.) A hack taken from neuroscience

Quy explained to my why she finds this question so valuable, and it has to do with the way our brains process emotions.

“I learned this later, but our first response to any situation is emotional,” Quy told me. “Our limbic brain is small, but powerful. And left on its own, it just spins out of control when we’re confronted with something scary. Then we find ourselves reacting and being driven by our emotions.”

“Focusing on ‘how can I’ helps me to come up with a plan that assures that little emotional part of our brain that I’m on it, so I can get it under control.”

This lesson helped Quy again some time later when she had to make her first arrest. Quy and her training agent received a tip that a wanted and potentially violent criminal had been spotted at a local bar, and they decided to make a car arrest.

After tailing the car for a bit, both Quy’s car and the suspects pulled up to a stoplight. Sitting in the passenger seat, Quy looked over and saw a huge man behind the steering wheel. The backup that was supposed to accompany them had gotten lost in traffic.

“In that instant, I knew I had to be the one to make that arrest,” Quy told me.

Quickly and decisively, Quy pulled off her FBI raid jacket, pulled her sweater down over her gun, and got out of the car. She walked over to his window, knocked, and motioned that the driver should roll down his window.

“Then I pulled my gun and I said, ‘FBI, you’re under arrest!’”

The SWAT team arrived soon after and fortunately the suspect was apprehended without issue. But it was all possible because of quick thinking on Quy’s part—thinking that focused not on whether or not she could handle on the task at hand, but how she was going to handle it.

“Change the mindset, change the behavior, change the outcome,” Quy said. That’s what I learned over all those years in the FBI.” Using ‘how can I’ in the workplace

How can you leverage this question to overcome your “impossible” challenges?

Let’s say you’re a solopreneur who’s barely surviving the hamster wheel of content creation. Instead of asking yourself whether you can keep this up, ask yourself: How can I repurpose content or streamline processes to make this more manageable?

If you’re working in a saturated niche, don’t ask whether or not you can grow your audience. Instead, ask yourself how you can set yourself apart. What unique audience can you serve, or angle can you speak from, that allows you to resonate?

Or, maybe your company has found success, and you’ve started to scale. You’re dealing with a bigger team and more customers. Instead of asking if you can manage this, ask how you’re going manage it. This can help you identify the people, systems, and other help you need.

The key, whatever “impossible” challenge you’re facing, is to change “Can I?” to “How can I?” If you do, you’ll change your mindset, change your behavior, and change your outcome—while building the mental toughness and confidence to do whatever you set your mind to do.

Most people say they want to live to a ripe old age. But that isn’t really true. What people really want is to live to a ripe, old age in good mental and physical health. Some of us actually get to live this dream. These folks are known as “superagers” and they make it well into their 80s not just in decent physical shape, but also with minds at least as sharp as people 30 years younger.

How do they manage it? That’s the question Northwestern University researchers have been aiming to answer with a 25-year long study. It examined the brains and lifestyles of almost 300 superagers.

As you’d expect, a quarter century of data shows it really helps to be born with lucky biology. The neuroscientists found a number of physical differences between the brains of superagers and the average person. There isn’t much non-scientists can do with that information. We have to make the most of the brains bequeathed to us by our DNA.

Luckily, the researchers also discovered one big difference in behavior sets apart superagers who are still going strong into their 80s and beyond. It’s something any of us can adopt in our own lives.

Superagers’ brains are different

When you scan or posthumously autopsy the brains of superagers, they look different than average brains, according to Sandra Weintraub, a Northwestern psychology professor involved in the study. Normal brains generally show some accumulation of the plaques and protein tangles that are characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease. Superagers’ brains are largely free of them.

The study also revealed that while the outer layer of the brain, known as the cortex, tends to thin out as we age, it stays thick in superagers. They also have a different mix of cell types in their brain.

“Our findings show that exceptional memory in old age is not only possible but is linked to a distinct neurobiological profile. This opens the door to new interventions aimed at preserving brain health well into the later decades of life,” Weintraub commented to Northwestern Now.

That’s of huge interest in scientists looking for treatments that can help us stay healthier longer. Weintraub calls the findings ““earth-shattering for us.” But for those of us without medical degrees, there’s little we can do with this information. You can’t vacuum rogue proteins out of your brain or plump its cortex. (Though other studies do suggest sleep helps to wash proteins and other gunk out of your brain, so maybe don’t skimp on shuteye.) And so are their social lives

Further complicating those looking for an easy takeaway from the research, the superagers also didn’t have a lot of lifestyle factors in common. Some were athletes. Others, confirmed loafers. Some drank. Others smoked. They ate different things and kept different habits. But there was one big exception. Superagers, it turns out, tend to be incredibly social.

“The group was particularly sociable and relished extracurricular activities. Compared to their cognitively average, same-aged peers, they rated their relationships with others more positively. Similarly, on a self-reported questionnaire of personality traits they tended to endorse high levels of extraversion,” the researchers reported in recent paper published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia. Want to be a superager? Focus on your relationships

This might come as a surprise to laypeople who think aging well is all about HIIT workouts and plentiful kale. But it likely isn’t a huge shock to other scientists. The Harvard Study of Adult Development has been minutely tracking the lives of some 724 original participants (and now some of their descendants) since 1938.

It discovered the biggest predictor of a long, healthy life isn’t biological. It’s social. The better the quality of your relationships, the more likely you are to age well. And while you have only indirect influence on things like your cholesterol level and brain health, you are directly in control of your social life.

It’s something we can and should prioritize, according to study director Robert Waldinger. “We think of physical fitness as a practice, as something we do to maintain our bodies. Our social life is a living system, and it needs maintenance too,” hetold the Harvard Gazette.

The effects of keeping up your social ties aren’t minor. Neuroscientist Bryan James, author of another study on aging and social contact summed up his findings this way: “Social activity is associated with a decreased risk of developing dementia and mild cognitive impairment, and that the least socially active older adults developed dementia an average of five years before the most socially active.”

Keeping up with friends helps with healthy aging. But so does keeping up with learning. Research has shown a strong link between keeping your brain active and maintaining cognitive performance deep into your later years. One study found that just joining a class to learn a new skill or hobby improved brain performance as if subjects were 30 years younger. Another one, done at Stanford, found no cognitive decline at all until retirement and beyond if you stay mentally active. Are you getting your 5-3-1?

All of which suggests that staying social and mentally engaged is one of the most impactful moves you can make if you dream of becoming a superager yourself. The basic takeaway when it comes to mental function and aging is, use it or lose it.

But experts have offered more detailed guidance too. Harvard-trained social scientist and author Kasley Killam, for instance, has suggested the “5–3–1 rule:”

Spend time with five different people a week. This could be anyone from your gym buddy or book club bestie to the person the next pew over at church.
Nurture three close relationships. Equally important is maintaining tighter bonds with three of the people closest to you, usually family and dear friends.
Aim for one hour of social interaction a day. “That doesn’t have to be all at once. It could be 10 minutes here, 10 minutes there,” Killam explained to Business Insider. You can also combine social time with other activities, walking the dog with a neighbor, say. 

Even just chatting on the phone can have more of an impact than many people suspect. “According to a recent study in the U.S., talking on the phone for 10 minutes two to five times a week significantly lowered people’s levels of loneliness, depression, and anxiety,” Killam reports in Psychology Today. Change what you can influence

The bad news from science is that superagers really are different physically. Their brains have biological quirks that help them stay sharp longer. There’s no way, unfortunately, to borrow that magic. But there is something else that sets superagers apart which you can steal.

It’s not a diet or exercise plan. It’s a love for getting out and seeing other people and learning new things. It turns out the more you maintain your social connections and mental stimuli, the more likely you are to get just not more years. But more healthy, active, and sharp years.

“Aging’s all right,” the late President George H.W. Bush once said. “Better than the alternative.”

But what’s even better than “better than the alternative?” Realizing that as you get older you actually do get better — at least in some ways — and that there’s scientific research to back up that notion.

The latest example comes from the journal Intelligence, in which psychologists Gilles E. Gignac, of the University of Western Australia, and Marcin Zajenkowski of the University of Warsaw in Poland, say they’ve determined that “for many of us, overall psychological functioning actually peaks between ages 55 and 60.” ‘Peak performance’

Gignac and Zajenkowski compiled results from 10 existing studies — including data a total of 321,661 people — and quantified and standardized them.

Their goal was to identify 16 “well-established psychological traits” that they could measure and assign scores to — things that “represent enduring characteristics rather than temporary states, have well-documented age trajectories, and are known to predict real-world performance,” as Gignac explained in an accompanying article.

Among them were core cognitive abilities, along with “the so-called ‘big five’ personality traits – extraversion, emotional stability, conscientiousness, openness to experience, and agreeableness.”

Reviewing all the other studies, they concluded that people reach their peak in many of these key traits later in life than some might suspect.

Overall, they suggest that “peak performance” and “overall mental functioning” generally occurs for most people somewhere between ages 55 and 60, when you combine measures of both cognitive and personality traits. ‘High levels of functioning’

The researchers found that different abilities peak at different ages:

Early to mid-20s: peak for fluid intelligence (reasoning, memory, and processing speed).
Age 60: moral reasoning
Mid-60s: crystallized intelligence (vocabulary, knowledge).
Age 65: conscientiousness
Age 65: financial literacy
Age 75: emotional stability
Into the 80s: “capacity to resist cognitive biases.”

Of course, physical peak occurs much earlier.

I’ve finally admitted to myself that I’ll probably never beat some of my PRs from the early 2000s — although in practice many people who make healthier choices later life do wind up in better physical shape than they were personally at earlier ages.

“It should be emphasized that not all individuals experience cognitive or personality change at the same rate or magnitude,” Gignac and Zajenkowski wrote in the study. “Longitudinal research shows substantial variability in aging trajectories, with some people maintaining high levels of functioning well into late life.” George H.W. Bush was right

Still, Charles Darwin was 50 before he published “On the Origin of Species,” Beethoven was 53 — and deaf — when he premiered his Ninth Symphony.

Ray Kroc was 52 when he met the McDonald brothers and began building the fast-food empire. Sam Walton opened the first Walmart at 44. Vera Wang became a fashion designer at 40.

Come to think of it, I was in my 40s before I started writing for Inc.com—a milestone that changed my career trajectory in retrospect.

Gignac’s conclusion?

“History is full of people who reached their greatest breakthroughs well past what society often labels as ‘peak age,'” he wrote. “Perhaps it’s time we stopped treating midlife as a countdown and started recognising it as a peak.”

Better than the alternative.

Some of my best ideas come to me when I’m exercising.

At least I think they’re some of my best ideas; by the time I actually get a chance to write them down, I’ve often forgotten them. While you could argue that something I was unable to remember for an hour or so can’t be that great, still: we’ve all had things we wanted to remember, but couldn’t.

So what can you do if you need to remember something important? Most memory-improvement techniques — like mnemonics, chunking, and building memory palaces — involve a fair amount of effort.

But these simple strategies to improve your short-term memory and recall require almost no effort — and very little time.

1. Say it out loud.

We’ve all been around people who repeat things they’re learning out loud. Or just mouth the words. They look a little odd: smart people just file knowledge away. They don’t have to talk to themselves.

Actually, smart people do talk to themselves.

A study published Learning, Memory, and Cognition found that saying words out loud — or just mouthing them — makes them more distinctive by separating them from all the other words you’re thinking. In short, saying words out loud makes them different.

Which makes them more memorable.

So go ahead. When you need to remember something, say it aloud. Or mouth it to yourself.

Your cerebral cortex will thank you for it.

2. Predict whether you will actually remember.

Sounds odd, I know. But a study published in the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology shows the simple act of asking yourself whether you will remember something significantly improves the odds that you will remember, in some cases by as much as 50 percent.

That’s especially true for remembering things you want to do. Psychologists call them prospective memories: remembering to perform a planned action, or recall a planned intention, at some point in the future. Like remembering to praise an employee, email a customer, or implement a schedule change.

Why this works is somewhat unclear. Maybe the act of predicting is a little like testing yourself; research shows that quizzing yourself is an extremely effective way to speed up the learning process. What is clear is that the act helps your hippocampus better form and index those episodic memories for later access.

So if you want to remember to do something in the future, take a second and predict whether you will remember.

Science says that act alone makes it more likely you will.

3. Rehearse for 40 seconds

Memory consolidation is the process of transforming temporary memories into more stable, long-lasting memories. Even though the process of memory consolidation can be sped up, still: Storing a memory in a lasting way takes time.

One way to increase the odds is to rehearse whatever you want to remember for 40 seconds. A study published in The Journal of Neuroscience found that a brief period of rehearsal — like replaying an event in your mind, going over what someone said in a meeting, or mentally mapping out a series of steps — makes it significantly more likely that you will remember what you rehearsed.

As the researchers write, that “brief period of rehearsal has a huge effect on our ability to remember complex, lifelike events over periods of one to two weeks. We have also linked this rehearsal effect to processing in a particular part of the brain: the posterior cingulate.”

Which should be long enough for you to actually do something with whatever you hope to remember.

4. Close your eyes for 2 minutes.

A study published in Nature Reviews Psychology found that “… even two minutes of rest with your eyes closed can improve memory, perhaps to the same degree as a full night of sleep.”

Psychologists call it “offline waking rest.” In its purest form, offline waking rest can be closing your eyes and zoning out for a couple of minutes. But offline waking rest can also be daydreaming. Mind-wandering. Meditating. Basically turning your mind off for a minute or two.

While mentally disconnecting doesn’t sound productive, when it comes to remembering more, it is: without those intermittent periods of lack of focus, memory consolidation doesn’t occur nearly as efficiently.

So go ahead and zone out for a couple minutes. As the researchers write, “Moments of unoccupied rest should be recognized as a critical contributor to human waking cognitive functions rather than a waste of time.”

Can’t beat that.