Fire Up at 55 Plus

How old are you? Easy question. But here’s a more interesting one: How old do you feel today? Researchers call the difference between those two numbers your subjective age—and a growing body of research suggests that the age you feel is connected to how you function, how you handle stress, and even long-term health outcomes.

In Part Four of our Well-Intentioned Aging series, today we move from Dr. Becca Levy’s age ...

In the last episode, Yale researcher Dr. Becca Levy showed us that what we believe about aging shapes how we age. But that raises an uncomfortable question: Where did those beliefs come from?

Enter Ashton Applewhite — author, activist, and one of the most fearless voices in the fight against ageism. For more than 15 years, she's done one thing exceptionally well: pulled the assumptions about aging out of the cultural wallpaper...

Last episode I promised you we'd start meeting the people behind this research on aging and belief. Today I'm keeping that promise. Her name is Dr. Becca Levy — she's spent more than three decades at Yale studying something she calls “age beliefs,” and her findings are some of the most talked-about in the entire field of aging research. Today we dig into her work: what she's found, how she found it, and why a bran...

What if some of what we believe about getting older simply isn’t true? … If the truth revealed enables you to do more with this very day?  I’ve been deep into the latest research on aging, and a lot of what I’ve discovered has stopped me in my tracks. Not because it promises some fantasy of staying young, but because it challenges what we’ve been taught to expect from our later years. Today we se...

Today with me, you’ll revisit an episode about change, for overall transformation and from morning to night, during just one day. This is Laurie, sharing this broadcast again for two reasons: The first, not surprising, is that weight loss continues to be a high priority for many midlife-plus women. It’s something they’ve carried since grade school. Now layered upon thoughts of “Is it too late?” along w...

Three weeks ago, this series opened with a 70-year-old woman walking down a sidewalk, obviously confident: head up and moving with purpose. Our simple, immediate thought was “I hope that's me someday."

We've since spent two full episodes proving that isn't wishful thinking. It's buildable.

Today, we close the loop. Because there's one organ we've only mentioned in passing so far, and it happens to be the one this entire series ...

Last week I told you why walking has quietly become one of the most important habits for lifelong independence. Today we go straight to your brain. New research shows that every walk you take feeds the part of your brain responsible for memory, guards against cognitive decline, and sharpens creative thinking. And the unsung hero behind it isn't your brain at all — it's a muscle almost nobody thinks about: your calf.

Scientists...

Have you ever watched someone in their eighties or nineties walking down the sidewalk — head up, shoulders back, moving with purpose, maybe even carrying their own grocery bag — and thought, I hope that's me someday? There's something about that kind of walk that tells you everything about a person's quality of life, in about three seconds. It says: I'm still independent. I'm still capable. Nobody is walking me anywhere...

For your ultimate real self-care, today I share new, promising research to allay skin cancer concerns for those who need it most as we age. It is hopeful news, but it is not a routine vaccine, not a sunscreen replacement, and not a cure-all for sun damage. 

Because this episode airs July 30, just as many of you are packing for final sunny vacations in August, I bring the science back down to daily life: prevention, early detect...

In Episodes 153 and 154 you discovered tools that reveal how your mind works, how your strengths show up for others, and what's standing in your way. This week, Laurie closes the trilogy with a tool unlike anything else: The Being Profile, the world's first ontological assessment (and yes, she defines that word!). It doesn't ask what you do. It doesn't ask about your personality type. It asks who you are being — right now, in...

In last week's episode, you met CliftonStrengths — the tool, the mirror that reveals how your mind naturally works. This week, Laurie goes deeper, introducing two more tools that complete a very different part of your picture: First, StandOut, the assessment from Marcus Buckingham — co-creator of that Clifton StrengthsFinder you just discovered — and then, the new Midlife Clarity Assessment, built specifically for...

In this episode, Laurie asks this one powerful question that can uncover talents, gifts, and possibilities you’ve been overlooking for years: What if everyone around you can see your strengths more clearly than you can?

Through real-life examples and practical reflection questions, you’ll learn how your untapped strengths may hold the key to greater purpose, fulfillment, and direction in your second act. The clues are al...

Over two past episodes we discovered the often-overlooked slice of the Baby Boom generation, the “Generation Jones” women born from about 1954 to 1965 who were too young to be flower children but old enough to watch a cultural revolution happen and inherit its unfinished business. Gen Jones women arrived just in time to be handed new expectations without being given new support systems to match. And the whiplash—b...

Today we follow up on last week’s … well, more “serious” episode, with some fast fun facts and nostalgia for Generation Jones women.

Remember metal lunchboxes, three TV channels, Pong, cassette tapes, feathered hair, The Brady Bunch, Star Wars, the mall, and memorizing phone numbers? But beneath the humor is a deeper story. Generation Jones grew up between worlds—old enough to remember rotary phones an...

Generation Jones … who me? We absorbed 1960s idealism as children. We watched Kennedy, King, and the moon landing on fuzzy televisions. We were told the world was going to be amazing. And then we grew up and got Watergate, stagflation, the AIDS crisis, and a job market that told us pensions were a thing of the past, so …

Hard-working. Adaptable. We're the women of Generation Jones. Baby boomers who moved beyond, and we...

This is a summer episode — and I meant it to be a short one. Not because the topic is small, but because I think the best things we can do for ourselves are usually pretty simple. So today, I have done the research so you don't have to. I have verified what matters, I have sorted out what doesn't, and I'm going to give you a few easy takeaways you can actually use — whether you're hearing this on a walk, in the car, or ...

Here's something nobody tells you: feeling anxious about money is not a flaw. It's information. The worry isn’t the problem. The avoidance is.

The sneaky thing that happens when we feel that anxiety — we avoid. We don't open the statement. We change the subject. We tell ourselves we'll deal with it later. And honestly? That avoidance feels like relief in the moment. Except it's not. Because the thing you're avoiding does...

Picture this: It’s late June. The grass is cut. The paper plates are stacked. Someone has already asked you three times what you’re bringing. The cousins are pinging the group chat. The grandchildren are being promised a good time by people who will not be managing the logistics.And you are standing in your kitchen at 7 a.m., already tired. Today we dig into the foundation of family gatherings and why it calls us to ear...

So, a midlife life coach walks into a bar … actually, a vegan restaurant, and the transformational story ends in her happily-ever-after reinvention. OK that’s it, nada mas … zero … zip … that’s all I’m explaining here. To connect the scattered dots you’re just going to have to listen!

Juliet’s School of Possibilities, by Laura Vanderkam, at amazon or audible: https://a.co/d/7...