“If you asked anyone on the street what they needed to do to age well, they’d probably be able to say the right things. If you asked them if they were actually doing it, that’s a whole different story.”
That’s the take of Kay Van Norman. She’s the founder of Brilliant Aging, an organization that helps individuals embrace an active lifestyle as they get older. Few people understand how the public approaches aging and brain health as well as Kay does. So we asked Synaptitude’s founder, Dr. Max Cynader, to sit down with Kay for a chat.
Synaptitude, as you know, is in the healthy brain and aging business. Giving people the information they need to improve their brain health is one of the most important things that we do. As Kay points out, there needs to be a big shift in the public’s understanding and behaviours in this area. Most people know they should take action but just don’t.
The stats show what’s at stake for society. For example, the Canadian Institute of Health Information reports that per capita health spending for individuals aged between one and fourteen was $1,423 in 2016. For those over eighty years of age, the corresponding figure was $21,150. If we were able to keep people healthier into old age, the disparity between those two figures would drop significantly.
The Different Steps of Behaviour Change
Kay believes that figuring out how to help people change their habits as they age is the biggest challenge. She points out that, as a society, “we have all kinds of programmes and all kinds of information focused on healthy aging.” As we approach old age, many of us enter what Kay calls a “contemplation stage,” in which “an individual might be thinking about brain health or physical health.”
In Kay’s experience, although people coming to the end of middle age often say to themselves, “I know I should be doing some physical activity. I’ve heard I should be doing some stuff for my brain,” many of them are then at a loss as to what to do next. They find it difficult to enter what Kay calls the “preparation stage” in the journey towards healthy brain aging.
“The preparation stage,” Kay says, “is where people are actually looking for information: What is available? What is best for me? What do the experts say?” The problem is that many of us do not go beyond contemplation, let alone beyond preparation—especially when it comes to brain health.
If people do not ask those questions and find answers to them, they never enter the phase that comes after it. That’s the “action stage,” when individuals actually take the classes and do the exercises that will allow their brains to stay healthy as they go through their senior years.
In part, Kay believes that there is a struggle to make the jumps from contemplation to preparation and from preparation to action because the healthcare system has “just assumed everybody was in the action phase and just started offering programmes.”
Kay continues, “It’s important to have little bite-sized pieces of information to help move people from contemplation into the action stage. That’s played out over and over again in all the work that I’ve done.’’
At Synaptitude, we can’t agree more with Kay. Everyone knows that they should be taking preventative action for their health, but our healthcare system is designed to deal with immediate health problems and crises. That’s why we have connected with other thinkers like Kay who have spent their careers working on ways to improve the system.
Where you can learn more about Kay’s work at Brilliant Aging and Synaptitude
If you’re interested in finding out more about Kay’s work—we especially recommend her Brilliant Aging Membership series, which is being used in many senior-living communities—click here. You’ll find tons of resources developed over the past twenty years to help people move from contemplating healthy-aging activities to actually doing them regularly.
If you would like to get a baseline of your or someone you love’s brain health, try the Synaptitude lifestyle assessment (it’s free!). Our team of neuroscientists has built this easy-to-use tool to help you to identify where to adopt new behaviours that have the greatest impact on brain health.