WHOOP Podcast - The Myth of The Midlife Crisis: Regaining Control of Middlescence with Barbara Waxman

Episode Date: June 3, 2026

In this episode, Emily Capodilupo sits down with gerontologist, leadership coach, and author of The Middlescence Manifesto Barbara Waxman to explore the powerful idea of “middlescence” — a transformative stage of life between young and late adulthood. Together, they unpack why midlife isn’t a crisis, but an opportunity for reinvention, alignment, and growth. Listeners will learn how mindset, purpose, relationships, and joy directly impact an individual’s healthspan and longevity. Emily and Barbara share the best strategy to use wearable data as a tool for self-awareness rather than self-judgment. This conversation is full of practical insights on flourishing at every age, redefining success, and building a life that feels both healthy and deeply meaningful.(00:33) Intro to Barbara Waxman(01:00) What is Middlescence? How To Redefine Midlife(03:20) Addressing This New Life Stage & Creating Change(06:22) Coaching People Through Midlife(08:15) Debunking The Concept of the Midlife Crisis(09:57) Key Lifestyle Shifts From a Life Coach(12:23) 7 Lifestyle Levers: Where People Start To Prepare for Middlescence(17:21) Reframing Longevity: Live Better, Not Just Longer(19:37) How Barbara Uses WHOOP Data In Her Practice(25:54) Lifestyle Considerations For A Healthy Life Beyond Longevity & Healthspan(34:51) How People in Their 20s, 30s, 40s,and 50s Can Increase LongevityFollow Barbara Waxman:WebsiteLinkedInSupport the showFollow WHOOP:Sign up for WHOOP Advanced LabsTrial WHOOP for Freewww.whoop.comInstagramTikTokYouTubeXFacebookLinkedInFollow Will Ahmed:InstagramXLinkedInFollow Kristen Holmes:InstagramLinkedInFollow Emily Capodilupo:LinkedIn 

What's up, folks? If you care about health, performance, fitness, you may really enjoy getting a whoop. That's right. You can check out whoop at whoop.com. It measures everything around sleep, recovery, strain. And you can now sign up for free for 30 days. So you'll literally get a high performance wearable in the mail for free. Get to try it for 30 days, see whether you want to be a member. And that is just at whoop.com. Back to the guests. Hi, everybody. I am Emily Capitaluco, Senior Vice President of Research Algorithms and Data at Woop, and today I am joined by the incredible Barbara Waxman. Thanks for having me.

Thank you so much for being here. If you're not familiar, Barbara Waxman is a gerontologist, a leadership coach, a longevity advocate, the founder of the Odyssey Group, and she has done some really incredible work. She has popularized concepts such as middle lessons. So let's start there. What is middle lessons? Thanks for asking because so many people are in pain and suffering because when they reach midlife, they think, well, I've made it to the high point in everything goes down from here when actually

midlife, in fact, around the age of 47, that's one of the lowest points in terms of our happiness in life, according to the U-curve of happiness. And the reason that's the case is these are very fulfilling years. We're making our way in the world. We're proving ourselves. Some of us have families. So it's a hard slog, but these are fulfilling years. At a certain point, we start to feel like, you know what?

Not everything is perfect, but it's better than it could be, or it's better than the alternative. And we start to recognize that we're not going to live forever, even though we may live years and decades more. And we start to feel differently, kind of like adolescents, our friends. hormones change, our bodies morph, though this time not necessarily in ways that are so awesome, our relationships shift. There are more relationship transitions in midlife than any other time of life. And we have this identity questioning like adolescents who think, I'm not a little kid anymore,

but I'm not a grown up. We feel like I'm not so young anymore, but I'm certainly not old. So I took that idea and adolescence was only named as a life stage in the early 1900s by a psychologist named Stanley Hall. So what I did was I recognized the similarities and that with the extra 30 years we've added to life expectancy in the last decade or excuse me, the last century, don't show up so much at the end of our lives. We're not old for longer. The midlife period has expanded. And so like we have adolescence, we now have middle essence, which is adolescence with wisdom. I love that. And just so everybody knows how lucky they are to get to hear you on the podcast today. She literally wrote the book about this. This is the Middle Essence Manifesto. So thank you for sharing this with me.

And again, thank you for being here and sharing all your wisdom with all of our listeners. So I love kind of what you're talking about. So this idea that middle age is in a lot of ways a new phenomenon brought up. about by all of the advances in health span and lifespan and lifespan that have extended our life. And this is this weird period that we didn't really used to have. You were kind of young and then you died. And so you kind of were young and then you were old and this middle got extended a lot. What are some of the, you know, you touched upon like hormones and relationships changing and all of these things. But how do you have to address this group of people or this life, new life stage that didn't use to exist differently. What's special about it? What is so impactful about this

period is we start to care less about what other people think. So as much as I compare it to adolescence, adolescence is all about how do I measure up to other people. And then post-adolescence, young adulthood is how do I prove myself in the world? When we get to this middle essence phase, we start to feel like, you know what, I don't care so much what other people think. I need to find my truth, and I need to find out who am I after all this? Have I been living someone else's dreams? And many of us have been. Or many of us have had an underlying belief system that we get from our parents, typically,

that the decisions that seem so important in our 20s are supposed to last for the rest of our lives. I mean, can you imagine now every decision you made when you say just graduate from college is supposed to last? forever when you're living decades more and hopefully continuing to grow. So what's special about this phase, it's a reckoning. No doubt. It is a challenging period. But magic comes from that grist, from the working through the questions. And as long as we ask questions thoughtfully and give ourselves the time and space and support we need to answer them, then we create the space for real change and growth. Yeah, so I think it's so interesting what you're talking about, which is this idea that, like,

as you're living longer, you almost have time now for two lives, right? There's, like, all these decisions you make in your teens and 20s that put you on path one. And somewhere around age 50-ish, you've kind of peaked at those things. It also corresponds roughly to when, like, peak earnings tend to happen, and, you know, people kind of reach the peaks of their careers and all that kind of stuff. And then all of a sudden it's like the pressure is off to prove yourself. Often you've proven yourself. The kind of the pressure is off to raise a family while doing all of that. A lot of times that's happened if that's going to happen. And now you're sort of facing the other side of that and reevaluating what's important to me because that might have changed or that might not have changed, but you might actually finally feel like you're in a position to act in accordance with those values. And so this is where you come in and you coach people through this transition. So what does that look like? And who are you working with? Awesome. So let me first address this 50-ish time. Middle lessons begins

around the time and it changes for each one of us where we feel these internal changes. Some brought on by hormone shifts that happen for men as well as women, some by circumstance. but it's a period that goes anywhere from about 45 until our 60s or later. So it's not a short period of time. The way I coach people is what I call from the inside out. I give people as a coach the space that's safe to say, you can say anything here and you can leave here and say, I can't believe I said that I never want to hear myself say that again.

Or say, wow, I can't believe I gave it. voice to something that I feel. I work with people as a leadership coach, and that counts if you're leading yourself. If you feel like, I can't figure myself out. You're leading your company. You're leading your family. You're leading in a community where you're trying to create global change and all of the above. The older we get, the messier life gets. And fortunately, I love the mess. So I love to help people take complexity and then simplify it into its component parts so that we can work with it to recreate and integrate. Sometimes I call it integral coaching the whole for this next phase, which isn't forever, right? When we create a plan, it's for this chapter of our lives because we hopefully continue to grow.

I love that. And I know when you and I were talking prior to the podcast, you were talking about, right? This is the phase where midlife crises tend to happen and that you don't like that language and all the different work you're doing to rephrase that. So I wonder if you want to kind of touch on that. Yes, I love to talk about the myth of the midlife crisis. In fact, my first TED talk was called the myth of the midlife crisis. So the whole concept was written by a 47-year-old white man who actually studied composers of the 18th and 17th century. And so in their midlife, around their 30s, they freaked out and then they got really creative.

And that he wrote this paper in the 1950s and it didn't take. What happened was he talked about it again in the 1960s when Tang breakfast drink was popular. TV commercials were really coming on the scene. And advertisers who were gaining in influence and importance saw an opportunity because what do we know? fear cells, right? So if we talk to our reptilian brain, we always want to look for danger. It's how we're programmed as human beings. So we look for danger. A crisis is dangerous. A midlife crisis can be fixed. What can it be fixed with all kinds of things that... A motorcycle? A motorcycle, right? Harley Davidson recreated itself. So this idea of this midlife crisis is a myth, and in fact, it is a reckoning. It doesn't mean

it's a hard, not a hard time of life. But as I said earlier, out of challenge comes great change and opportunity. And everybody is going through this change and that it doesn't matter if you're thinking about coaching to lead yourself, your community team, kind of all those things. But typically, who are you working with and how are they finding you? Are they, quote unquote, in crisis or when are they coming to you? Mostly I work with people who have, various spheres of impact. So they're leading companies and they're leading their families and they're trying to lead themselves because I can only take on so many people. So they tend to be CEOs, C-suite leaders of companies. And when people have worked with me as an executive coach, they get

the life coaching kind of built in where we address all of these things. Now more people are finding me globally because I do more speaking all around the globe. And so I'm expanding my work and sphere through online tools and more webinars. And I work with a place called the Modern Elder Academy, M-E-A. I give workshops. So that's how most I can expand my offerings in different ways. As you're working with different people across the globe, what are the similarities that you're noticing?

And I'm curious just for everybody listening who doesn't have access to you as a one-on-one coach, what are some of the things they should be thinking about? I have a client in Sweden, a CEO of a company there, and our work is so similar, in fact, to the work I do with another CEO out of Detroit. Because the truth is, even though our cultures set us up differently, especially when it comes to communication and family patterns, our sense of self is amazingly consistent. And so what I work on with everyone, and there are people I work with who have stepped off sort of the career matrix, is figuring out who am I, what makes me feel most impactful, full of life and energized, and how do I want to deploy my gifts. So I'd say that's sort of the common theme. I'm very much interested in working with people who want to grow

and who want to make a difference for themselves and their communities because in my small way, that's how I feel like through others I can help make the world better. I love that. And for the people who are younger than what you're typically working with, which I think will be the bulk of the people listening, You know, you were talking about how at this midlife moment there's a kind of reckoning of who you are, what you're about, and a realignment of values. And I think that that's so beautiful. But what are the ways that people who are 2030, 40, so prior to that phase can learn from the work that you're doing with people a generation older and get that alignment sooner?

I have so much to say about this. Okay, where do I begin? So I had a client a few years ago who is in his 30s, and he said to me, Barb, why do you always say you work with adults, midlife, and better? So I do work with younger people, but since I can only work with so many, and I'm a gerontologist by training, I tend to work with people 40 and better. And the way he described to me, and it's accurate, is I'm a life stage expert. So I think most important is being age agnostic, is not thinking I'm a 20-something or 30-something or 40-et-et-et-cetera. It's where am I in my life and what does this stage look like to me?

And typically that's when people say, I don't know, Barb, can you help me? And yes, I can. So if we take age out of it where we say, what has your life experience to date informed you about who you are, it is amazing because I've worked with people who have never had significant challenges and they're in their 50s. I've worked with people in their 30s who have gone to hell and back. And so wherever you are, try to look at the story of your life. I love Simon Sinek's book, Find Your Why, and finding a partner to go through the exercises in that book is an excellent way to begin, to start to say, what drives me?

And when I start that from the inside out, what are the next steps for myself? And when we look at ourselves, the other thing I'll recommend at any age is to go online, it's free, and people can take the seven lifestyle levers assessment. Stanford University Lifestyle Medicine Program uses it. It's available for free on my website. And it is based on the American College of Lifestyle Medicine's Seven Pillars. I call it seven levers because we each get to pull the levers that are most meaningful to us. And there are five questions in each of the areas.

And you can use it as your own tool without a coach or coach. guide to say, where's the low-hanging fruit? Because that's the best place to start. To get some quick wins, to then recognize, okay, if I pull another lever, what's going to have the greatest impact? And that so much ties in with what I love about what you're doing with whoop and people being able to understand who am I, according to the data, and then recognize that is a tool to amplify who I want to be in the world. Yeah, I appreciate. I don't know, do want to double click on that. But before I do, what are the seven lovers?

It is movement, which is exercise. I call it nourishment, not just nutrition. Renewal, which is not just sleep. Purpose, relationships, cognition, being intellectually stimulated. And I say if you do those six, you get the seventh, more or less for free because the seventh is stress management. If you cover those six areas, your stress will be reduced. So those are the seven lifestyle lovers. Yeah, those are pretty important ones.

And I appreciate the shout out to Whoop. And since this is the Whoop podcast, I think just important for people to understand, right? Wearables a decade ago were very focused on looking at those things in really short-term ways, right? So like, how did you sleep last night? Okay, that's how tired or not you're going to be. Or, you know, how did you work out? Here's how recovered or underrecovered. It was very transactional.

It was very transactional. It was very short term. And I think there's been this really interesting trend, and a lot of it enabled by better technology in terms of processing large data sets. But this zoom out to understanding, right, that, you know, exercise isn't just about how fast will I be at my half marathon. It's also about this, like, holistic well-being and all the other ways that, you know, these things interact with each other and shape how you feel and how you show up in the world.

and all of those things. And so I think just it's been really fun to lead research at whoop, like across that transition where went from just trying to understand, okay, you woke up this morning, how hard is it safe or not safe to train today? To like the broader, okay, you're trying to train for a marathon in a couple months. How do I get you there? But now, you know, over the last couple years, our shift has been, you know, you want to be able, you have this goal in terms of how you want to live your life in your 80s and 90s and beyond,

or you have this sort of definition of health that you'd like to preserve, you know, for another 60 years. How do we train for that and how do we show up for that? And how do you all of a sudden think about in some ways the same behaviors, which is, you know, I try to go for a run a couple times a week, but with this very different end goal and sort of attitude and understanding of it. I love that you're doing that. And the way I like to think about it, that's a little bit counter.

not countercultural, but counter our medical model. And I've had some healthy conversations, dynamic conversations with some of the other speakers here. It is not about prevention. I don't, and none of us really live inspired to prevent things. I think we live and look at our health spans because we want to be undiminished over time. And I like what Rup is doing to help whether or not you call it out in that way, to help people understand, oh, I can be undiminished. HealthSpan is about maintaining and feeling, again, from the inside out, that I am in sync

with myself in powerful ways. And the more we can continue to let people understand that, I think more people will be open and feel free and comfortable and safe using the apps because there are so many people who don't use wearables as much they have them, but they don't use them because they feel like they're not adding up. And if there's a well-being component and this health span idea is adding that, I think that it'll inspire people. Yeah, I hope so. And I'm curious how you might think about using that data in your practice? I use it all the time. What does that look like? Well, the first part is assessing with people how much are they relying on data and how much are they

trusting themselves? Because we want a combination of the two. We want to know what the data is and then know what our sensibility is and take that combination and create a plan to put it to work for us. I also like to find out from people what kind of data is most impactful for them. So many people, especially in midlife, this accounts more for midlife, when people are going through significant hormonal changes, sleep patterns will be disturbed. So there are times where people say, I'm taking some time off from tracking my sleep so much because it's not serving me. I need to figure out the rest of the hormonal part and dial down on depending on the app to track that for me because I know for this time, not forever, for this phase, it's not serving.

So I'm going to dial up what kind of exercise is going to help me through this phase and really trust the data here. So I think the way I use it is having people, again, use it as a study of one. What parts work for you, when, how, how. put that to work and then revisit when you need to shift it. It's so interesting that you say that because on the one hand I totally get all of that. On the other hand, like, there's this funny phenomenon that really bugs me where it's like people don't like to use wearables when it's not going to be flattering. Why I push back on that is that that's often the moment where we can be the most helpful.

If your sleep is perfect every single night and all you did was get perfect. sleep scores, frankly, there's not much I can do for you, right? You've solved this problem or perfected this skill. And what I've noticed in my own data is that for the most part, when my sleep is sort of acutely worse, it's one of the most powerful signs that I've gotten out of balance, you know, and I'm deprioritizing myself for usually work and need to like to get that back. And so that weekly check-in of, wow, my sleep is bad, has been a really powerful trigger to realign. And so I really want people to not take the wearables off when they're going to be unflattering. Because who are you trying to impress?

Like, I promise nobody's looking at your data and judging and sort of saying, oh, it was, you know, random user in Ohio as, like, bad sleep scores. It's just about, this should be a relationship between you and yourself and would love. to encourage people not to hide from challenging truth. Push away. I love this. We are agreeing and there's a point of differentiation. What we're agreeing on is don't shy away from hard truths because we need to live in our discomfort zone. And so the message and the example you gave is perfect. Are you being honest about how much you're working and how that's impacting your sleep, for example.

That is not a time that I'm suggesting people dial down looking at their sleep data. And I'll go back to the hormone as an example. When you're going through a period of time, and it could be a few weeks, you're trying things out and you know it's going to take a few weeks to stabilize something new that you're trying, some protocol. During those few weeks, people are saying, is it working yet? Is it working yet? and mindset does have a direct impact on measurable changes in our physiology.

And we don't want it to be a confounding factor with the data. So there is a time and place to say, I'm making the two weeks part up. For two weeks, I'm going to give this new protocol a chance and I'm not going to track it so that my mindset is saying, this is working, I'm going to meditate on it, I'm going to feel like I'm flourishing. And then I'm going to go back and check and see what happens. When we check, when we're going through some new protocol, say, hormonally related, it does take some time. And I know from experience, qualitative data, and there's some quantitative studies, that people need some time to regulate and having a mindset that tells them, yeah, it's not working yet, at least slows down, if not Mr. X's.

the process. Okay, so that I do believe, and we actually have a feature where you can hide your scores temporarily if they're going to stress you out. And then once you get to the other side of whatever you didn't want to see them, you can, like all the data exists. So you can reveal it. So it's just like kind of. Because I'm not suggesting a long time. Yeah. I'm saying, and know the period of time. Say, this is a period of time. And then I love the fact you can go back and look at the trends. But while you know you're trending, sometimes it's really hard

and it isn't adding value to the shift you're trying to make. Yeah, I definitely hear the point around if it's going to stress you out or become like a weird self-fulfilling prophecy, you don't want to get in your way. I would also encourage people to not overthink it though.

And like it shouldn't stress you out. It should just be data. But I know that that's easier said than done. You're invited to join the wait list for WOOP Advanced Labs. Advanced Labs delivers clinician reviewed lab results right into your Woop app for the most complete view of your biomarkers and biometrics and the most comprehensive understanding of your health. Unlike other tests, WOOP integrates your lab results with your Woop data. See how your habits and behaviors influence your biomarkers and get clear

guidance on what to change to improve your results. To join the wait list, visit our website or the health tab in the Woop. You're here today for a conference on longevity and health span. And I think one thing that I've heard you say a couple times over the last two days that I think is really beautiful is that that's not the entire picture. And so would love for you to talk a little bit about the third span and how that shows up in your practice. Oh, thank you for asking that because, in fact, today it was the first time that I publicly called out that the way we typically think about and define longevity as lifespan, the sheer number of years we live, and health span, the number of disease diminished and functional years is not enough because the science, and there is hard science. around the idea of human flourishing. And I used the example in the talk of someone named Derek, who had shared all of his data with me, and he tracks everything. And when he was really trying to squeeze more performance out of his biology, particularly in the area of sleep and nutrition and exercise and cognition, he found that his health data and his well-being stuff, he found that his health data and his well-being

sensibility was declining. And the third span qualities, there are four elements to the third, I call it the third span of human flourishing as important as your V-O-2 max. And those are your mindset and the research shows I mentioned a study about hotel housekeepers who were told that everything they did as part of their work, vacuuming, changing beds, lifting things, qualified as the Surgeon General's recommendations for exercise, and after just four weeks, their health measurably improved. Whereas on the flip side, there was a longitudinal study following people over 21 years, and those people who didn't feel active enough, they could never really do enough that they thought they should do, had a 72% higher mortality risk. So mindset is

incredibly important. A sense of purpose and meaning. And when I talk about purpose, it's a little bit different than our American culture of the purpose of life is a life of purpose. I feel like that shuts people down. Purpose is made up of little P. Purpose. What is something small that I can do, have my daughter get up and have a wonderful day, and that will brighten my day? And big P. P. P. purpose is something like, I want to, if I were in your shoes, have whoop, help change people's live for the better around the world. We need both kinds. Little P. Purpose, those pieces serve as breadcrumbs toward the Big P. Purpose. So having that sensibility of meaning and purpose in our lives. Then the idea of relationships. So the quality of our relationships, and right here in

Boston, the Harvard study of adult development, which has been going on, it's on its third director because it's 86 years old, has found that the greatest predictor of health in later life is the quality of our relationships. So relationships are essential. And then the fourth element is joy. Joy matters. And when I finish the TED Talk, one of the final challenges to people is to count joy as a metric worth tracking. So the third span is a new addition to my work. So if we think of life, longevity, excuse me, as lifespan, health span, and the third span, we will live longer, better, and feel like our life is well-lived. You know, what I really love about this frame, well, so many things, but I think chief among them

is there is an opportunity when you just think about the health span, lifespan, lifespan, to almost obsess about it at the absence of joy, right? Like, you know, you get so obsessed with your step count and everything you eat being clean and all these things that you say no to, you know, that the fun girls night out because, you know, it doesn't fit your macros and doesn't, it's not consistent with keeping your bedtime on track and all these things. Out of your eating window. Right, it's out of your eating window. It's all these things. And, you know, Dr. Satchin Panda's been on the podcast and he will tell us about the

importance of the eating window. And I believe in all of that. But when you put joy on equal footing as sort of a third and equally valid thing, all of a sudden it doesn't say like, hey, ignore health span. It says that part of this broader thing is making sure that it's in balance and that you're not health spanning to the exclusion of, a life worth living. And, you know, I think very few people would want to like live forever but be the only one to do it, right? That would be incredibly lonely and all those things. And so how do you think about balancing that with, you know, yes, you want to maximize health, but two things. One, like, make sure there's a good life that you're maximizing. And two, that actually, and I sort of love all the mindset examples you brought, especially the study around just telling housekeepers that that work counts and is good for them, like improving their health. It's that joy actually is

health. It's not just like, let's make sure that, you know, when you're healthy, you're enjoying your health, but also that increasing your joy will increase your health. The point I like to make is that these are not soft, nice to have quality things. They're measurable multipliers of the efforts we're making in those other areas where we say, you know, most of the time I'm going to eat by 7 o'clock or what have you. And sometimes I'm not. Yeah. And I'm not going to die. And it empowers me to feel like I am controlling my life and my destiny. And that amplifies when you get up early to go for that run and you're a little more tired, you get buoyed by the fact, you know, last night was worth it. And tomorrow I'll go back to my regular practices. So these are multipliers

of all of the other efforts we're making around health span. And the research is supporting it because we are also seeing what's called well-being burnout, which I talked about as well. Yeah. And it's so funny. Like one of the things that I hear a lot from Woot members is they say things like, you ruined drinking for me. It's like such a common thing. You've really. ruin drinking, and I say, what do you mean? And then they tell me that, you know, if they drink, they get a red recovery score and they never realized how bad it was for them. And now they can't drink anymore without feeling badly. But another thing that we actually see in the data, which is really interesting, which is that for a lot of people who don't have, you know, any kind of alcohol use

disorders or anything like that, if they have just one drink, it is not good for their sleep, but it is very good for their recovery scores. And when we started to dig into it has actually, it's not because of the drinking, it's despite the drinking, but it's that what's going on on that like occasional drink that you have, say, one to three times a month. It's usually a special occasion. You're with friends. You're relaxed. You're doing something for you. You're not kind of, right, like obsessing about a prioritizing, optimizing tomorrow. And so then they get this really counterintuitive thing where it's like one drink is really good for your recovery score, you know, and obviously like more than that is bad. And the reality is still that

alcohol is poison. But, you know, when you wrap it in all these other good things that they kind of outshine and more than make up for those negative things. And so I think, like, not that I am trying to encourage anybody to drink, but I do think that it is important, you know, to think about how you can use this data to actually give yourself permission to understand that, like, you can take a break from being perfect and, you know, avoid wellness burnout and optimize for other things occasionally and that creating this balance is super important. And so I would say if tomorrow is your half marathon, probably don't drink. Like the data does not support that that alcohol is going to help you. If tomorrow is just a Sunday and you can sleep in and it doesn't matter and you don't need to

quote unquote perform in any sense of the word, maybe it's okay to not be perfect tonight. And sometimes that imperfection is worth it and good for you and does all these things. A couple of things that I would say as a shout out, particularly to people who are listening who are in their 20s and 30s in particular. From an adult developmental perspective, you're in a phase where there's something in you that is still in the proving stage. And whether you're proving to yourself, my data is good or proving to others because there tends to be a lot of comparison. And as I say, comparison is a joy thief, right? It doesn't serve us. Know yourself. And if you're thinking, oh, this data is stealing my joy, examine it. And think about what do I really care about and what makes me feel

best. And I think we're seeing it. I'm involved with a number of restaurants and we're seeing drinking amongst all ages going down. And it's not just because of wearables. It's also because people are recognizing they feel better when they don't drink or don't drink as much. And I'm not making this about drinking. I live in the Bay Area. I love a good glass of wine. But I'm definitely more conscious about when I'll make that choice. And I think that's a really healthy thing. You started to get into it. So as we wrap up, would love to just continue down this path of, for everybody listening, what are the handful of things that you would love for them to take away? One thing that I haven't brought up in all of the different talks today is the more we give of ourselves to our communities, the more we volunteer, the happier we will be.

It's kind of like the secret sauce. When people give, they almost often feel guilty like, I shouldn't feel this good. I don't know if you've ever had that experience giving to others. So one of the things I would say I would love for people to know because we're living in a time where people are lonelier, feeling more time starved, and giving and being a part of a community that in some way helps make the world a better place can be a small way in your community or if we're doing something for a neighbor. The research shows people feel more time, what's called time affluence when they're involved in giving. So one of the things I would say is do something small or large to give. Another is to say be in touch with yourself and your body, your mind, your gut sense, your intuition. Pull that together, whether it's through meditation or seeing a therapist or with a coach or talking to a close friend. And by the way, make sure you have quality relationships.

we know that adds not just the quality, but quantity to our lives. So give, know thyself, have quality relationships, and joy is a beautiful thing. Make sure you have that too. I love that. And, you know, I think there's something so beautiful about the call to action around giving. And I think so many people who, and you kind of touch on this, but so much. many people who make intentional space for that feel like they get more than they give. The world will be a better place. Well, thank you so, so much for bringing all this beauty and wisdom to the podcast

today. I think the work that you do is incredible and inspiring about the way you've taken midlife crisis and instead, you know, rebranded it as this opportunity or discovery of your true self and alignment. And I love hearing that you've gone from a lot of one-on-one coaching to webinars and more global events and kind of bringing your creativity and passion to this space through your book and through all these different things to a much broader audience and now today through the TED stage and very excited we're obviously going to link that in the show notes for this podcast so everybody can listen but thank you for for bringing all of this to the world thank you so much for having me I'm thrilled to launch this idea of the third span of longevity

here and to bring it into the world yeah thanks Thank you. If you enjoyed this episode of the WOOP podcast, please leave a rating or review. Check us out on social at Woop at Will Ahmed. If you have a question to answer it on the podcast, email us, podcast at Woop.com. Call us 508-443-4952. If you think about joining Woop, you can visit Woop.com. Sign up for a free 30-day trial membership.

New members to use the code Will, W-I-L-L, to get a $60 credit on W-W-A-Sestries when you enter the code at checkout. That's a wrap, folks. Thank you all for listening. you next week on the Woof podcast. As always, stay healthy and stay in the green.