A little-known secret to staying healthy and living longer involves discarding your camera. A side benefit is that this action also increases your happiness and general sense of well-being. If your camera is built into your smart phone, a suitable alternative is to bury that feature so it is hard to find and access.
I must admit that I was surprised when I uncovered this marvel, placing it right alongside staying physically active, being involved with others in healthy social networks, and eating whole foods. I first got the idea to look into this phenomenon a few years ago, when I noticed that cameras seem to be proliferating at every interesting, significant event. Whether a concert, a sporting event, or even a beautiful day outdoors, I saw that most people had cameras out and were recording it. I noticed that this soon spread to food—whether restaurants, picnics, or elegant dinners—as more and more individuals took pictures of their food and uploaded them to social media.
In my work on the Longevity Project, which I have been doing now for more than 20 years, we have been studying over 1500 bright Americans who were first examined as children in the 1920s. They were followed for their whole lives, and we have evaluated how well they aged and how long they lived. We ask: who lives long, healthy, and thriving lives, and why? We then confirm the results by examining other studies. Many of the participants do indeed live very long, happy, healthy lives. I recently talked to one who is now 102. Yet the thrivers were not photographers.
YouTube reports that 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and over 6 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube! YouTube is only one of many sites to which people upload pictures and videos. Over 55 million Instagram photos are posted each day. And of course many pictures and videos that are taken are never uploaded at all.
Let us say that you use your camera for one hour a day on average. This is really not that much if you are taking pictures and videos of your child or your dog at play, the street performer, the concert in the park, the surfer, the skier, the party, the mall, the food, the sky, the amusement park, the fashion show, the Little League, the sorority, and on and on. Some days you may not take any pictures or videos, but other days you take many. Most people only have about three or four hours a day of free or flexible time (after sleeping, working, commuting, bathing, dressing, and so on). So an hour a day might be a quarter or a third of your available time. But the kicker really is the time you spend viewing your videos or pictures. If you video a two-hour concert, then you are likely to later view it, at least once. Or else why take the pictures? So, many people spend not only a significant chunk of their available time behind their cameras, but then spend at least that much time later, viewing what has been recorded.
Sometimes, the camera itself can diminish the experience. I prefer to concentrate on the events around me rather than squinting through a viewfinder or hiding behind my iPad. Even if your experience of the event was not diminished by recording it, you still give up the experiences of new events while reviewing the old events. Again, you spend at least as much time later, viewing what has been recorded.
In The Longevity Project and in other well-conducted scientific studies, the happiest, healthiest, and longest-living individuals tend to be those who are creating things, doing things with others, or helping others. (Productive work predicts good health; it is not "stressful.") As much as anyone, I love to look at the pictures hanging on my wall or on my desktop—pictures of loved ones or of scenes from a terrific vacation. But I learned from our studies of health and longevity that although the thrivers and survivors are indeed prudent and planning for the future, they are not recording half of their lives so they can spend the other half of their lives watching their recordings. With the camera off, life lived cannot only seem but also really be twice as long.
If you are interested, The Longevity Project was published in paperback edition by Plume (see http://www.howardsfriedman.com/longevityproject/ ) and is also available on Kindle and Nook. The book also contains self-assessment quizzes to help you figure your current trajectory.
Photo of MLB Network Ballpark Cam Yankee Stadium by Delaywaves) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-3.0), via Wikimedia Commons
Copyright © 2014 Howard S. Friedman, all rights reserved.