"I Am 95, After All”

About 7 years ago I was in Home Depot, wandering the lumber aisle.

I noticed an older guy a few feet away carefully measuring boards for what looked like a home project.

An employee walked over and asked if he'd like some help loading the lumber into his car.

Without missing a beat, the man said, "That would be great. I am 95, after all."

He said it almost cheerfully, like a fact he was proud of rather than an excuse.

It stuck with me to this day. Here was a 95-year-old still out running his own errands, measuring his own lumber, planning his own project — and the story he told himself about his age was simply "I'm 95, so I'll take the help with the heavy stuff."

Not "I'm too old for this."

Not "my body is falling apart."

Just a clear-eyed, matter-of-fact acceptance that let him keep doing the thing he wanted to do.

That got me thinking about how we judge our own health. A lot of us measure it relatively — against how we felt last year, or last month, or during a bad stretch — rather than against some absolute standard.

"I feel great" often really means "I feel better than I did when my back was out" or "better than when I had the flu." We mistake relief from a low point for actual good health. It's a comforting story, but it can also let us settle for a baseline that's lower than what's possible.

The research on this is more interesting than you'd expect. Ellen Langer's famous "counterclockwise" study put a group of elderly men in a retreat staged to look and feel like 1959, and asked them to live as though they were actually younger.

After just one week, they showed measurable improvements in hearing, memory, dexterity, grip strength, and even appeared physically younger to outside observers.

Nothing about their bodies had changed except the story they were living inside.

This isn't just feel-good psychology. Researchers studying critically ill patients have found that pessimistic prognoses can become self-fulfilling: when doctors predict a poor outcome, that prediction sometimes shapes the treatment decisions that follow, which then produces the poor outcome.

Meanwhile, cancer patients with higher optimism and self-efficacy report meaningfully lower psychological distress, and better distress management is linked to better outcomes overall.

The placebo effect works on the same principle. When your brain expects relief, it can release real opioids, dopamine, and other neurochemicals that produce real physiological effects.

And this happens even in cases where people are told outright they're taking a placebo.

Expectation itself is doing biological work, not just providing a mental boost.

None of this means willpower cures disease, and I'm not suggesting you ignore real symptoms or skip the doctor. But it does suggest expectations are not passive — they're an active ingredient in how your health actually unfolds.

A few things worth trying: get an honest baseline instead of a relative one — a real checkup with real numbers, not just "better than last year." Strive to put your markers in the ‘optimal range’.

Discuss the lab results with a doctor you trust. They will know what consitutes ‘optimal’ and how to arrive there.

Watch the story you tell yourself about age and limitation, and notice when "I'm getting older" quietly becomes "so I should expect less of my body."

When you get a diagnosis or prognosis, ask your doctor directly what's driving it and what's still possible — not to be in denial, but because how you carry that information can shape what happens next.

Be more like the 95-year-old measuring his own lumber.