The impact of emotional health on longevity, self-audit strategies, improving well-being, and more | Paul Conti, M.D.

**Peter Attia, MD** (0:11)
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My guest this week is Paul Conti. This may be a familiar name to many of you, as Paul has been on multiple times and was one of our first guests way back in September 2018, back on episode 15 Paul is a practicing psychiatrist and author of Trauma, the Invisible Epidemic, How Trauma Works and How We Can Heal From It. He's a graduate of Stanford University School of Medicine, and he completed his psychiatric training at both Stanford and Harvard where he was appointed chief resident. He then served on the medical faculty before moving to Portland and founding Pacific Premier Group, a practice focusing on addressing mental health from a trauma-based perspective. In this episode, we speak about emotional health and its relationship to lifespan and health span. Through this, we try to look at the various ways listeners can take an audit of their internal and emotional health, knowing that this is one compartment of health span for which we don't have biomarkers and for which we don't expect an inevitable decline as we age. We cover how emotional health can also increase with age, what drives people and their motivations, happiness and satisfaction as it relates to material possessions, the connection between physical and emotional health, negative self-talk, accepting death and more. We end this conversation speaking about how people can take a first step in improving their emotional health and what people can look for in a therapist if they deem it necessary. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Paul Conti.
Paul, so great to see you again. It's never frequent enough.

**Paul Conti, M.D.** (2:44)
I agree. Thank you.

**Peter Attia, MD** (2:46)
So, I don't know, somehow the evolution of my thinking on longevity, I feel more and more drawn to healthspan over lifespan. And again, not that these are ever mutually exclusive. They're not. And virtually without exception, anything that's enhancing healthspan is enhancing lifespan. I think it's just a question of focus. And I think when you focus more of your energy on healthspan, you're getting a lot of those lifespan benefits for free.
And you can clearly do a lot of the one-off stuff that is purely lifespan related, like managing your APOB and cancer screening and things like that.
But it's this focus on cognitive health and physical health that get you so much of that lifespan benefit. And of course, you're enjoying the quality of your life.
Those two decline quite predictably. And so really what we're trying to do as we age is delay the rate of decline.
But then there's this third component of health span, which is emotional health, which is what obviously we're gonna speak about in great detail. And what I tell people and what I tell myself when I'm feeling a little depressed about aging is that the thing we have going for us is that's the one that doesn't have to get worse with age.
Everything else gets worse with age. You can do quite a bit to mitigate that and reduce the magnitude of the negative derivative, but you're not making it a positive derivative. But this doesn't have to be true for emotional health. I wanna ask you just to start, in your experience working with people, is that what you see? Do you see that people generally become happier, more satisfied as they age? Do you think that's the exception? Is it the rule? And I guess as a follow up to that, how deliberate does one need to be about emotional health to ensure that you can reap what I just said, which is, hey, you could actually be on an increasing curve of emotional health as you age.

**Paul Conti, M.D.** (4:43)
I think unfortunately, emotional health often declines as people get older. That is sort of the rule, but it doesn't have to be. I think that that can be the exception, and emotional health can improve throughout the lifespan.