How to age quickly, badly

Let’s say, for some perverse reason, you wanted to organize your life to accelerate the aging process, to do everything you could to promote early chronic illness and set yourself up for low energy, foggy thinking, dark moods, disability, a night stand crammed with medicine bottles and, oh yeah, premature death.

Here’s what you would do: Get yourself incarcerated.

In prison you will eat poorly. (This, for example, is the Federal Bureau of Prison’s Certified Food menu offering for breakfast: “pkg grits, 3 slices bread, skim milk, 2 pkg jelly, 2 margarine.”) Ramen with crushed potato chips and mystery meat is purported to be dinner favorite.
You will have limited opportunities to be physically active.
You will have limited access to the outdoors (and none to nature).
You will live in a high-stress environment over which you have no control.
You will have limited, truncated or nonexistent relationships with family.
You will lack the opportunity to be alone (except if being punished).
You will have poor sleep hygiene.
You will lack meaningful work.

(Prior to this age-accelerating experience, you will have lived the first few decades of your life with little or no health care, and the chances are decent that you would have already significantly impaired your health with a substance abuse problem.)

People in prison are categorized by the system as “old” at age 50 – or sometimes 55. However old they are chronologically, research suggests that they are, due to incarceration, an average of 10 years older biologically. These “old” inmates suffer from the chronic conditions of unhealthy aging: arthritis, hypertension, ulcers, diabetes and heart disease. Also hep C, cancer, early dementia. According to research conducted by Jonathan Turley, a law professor and director of the Project for Older Prisoners, an “elderly” prisoner will experience an average of 3 chronic illnesses during his or her time behind bars. Not surprisingly, medical expenses for older prisoners are between 3 and 9 times higher than for other prisoners.

We know what ages us, what makes us sick, what robs us of vitality. Unlike those in prison, we are free to make good choices every day. What choices did you make today?