You Won't Take Care of Your Body Until You Believe You Are Worth It" | Dr. Arnold Gilberg | #158

**Vonda Wright** (0:00)
Can I say your age? You're 80 years old. At 80, you feel 40

**Arnold Gilberg** (0:03)
I'm not 80 I'm 89
I'm turning 90 in six months.

**Vonda Wright** (0:08)
That's even better. Today, I have a very exciting guest, Dr. Arnold Gilberg, who is an MD, PhD, and has been a practicing psychiatrist for more than 60 years.

**Arnold Gilberg** (0:18)
As you age, there are losses that you sustain in your life. At the same time, when you live longer, you have more experiences and more experiences to share with other people. If you didn't learn to be engaged when you were 20, it's okay if that happens when you're 80

**Vonda Wright** (0:37)
Being a doctor means so much to me. The deep empathy that you develop from the privilege of getting to be with people in the most painful parts of their life. Like who else, besides a minister or a rabbi, gets to be with people in their most vulnerable places?

**Arnold Gilberg** (0:53)
The first thing you have to do is forgive yourself. Whatever you've done today is good enough. Don't have remorse for the day. If you feel remorse, try to excuse yourself from it and change your way.

**Vonda Wright** (1:08)
Is there a key to happiness?

**Arnold Gilberg** (1:11)
No one can be happy all the time. Happiness is a roller coaster.

**Vonda Wright** (1:20)
So today I have a very exciting guest, Dr. Arnold Gilberg, who is an MD, PhD, and has been a practicing psychiatrist for more than 60 years. On top of his academic accolades, he is one of the people trained by one of the original doctors trained by Sigmund Freud himself. So this is an amazing career. Three reasons I'm excited to talk to you. Number two is, as I just explained to you, your daughter Suzanne and I have become great friends working within the menopause and really bringing our perspectives together. And she is delightful. But I'm also excited to talk to you because I think we share a philosophy on aging because there is a myth in this country that aging is an inevitable decline from vitality to frailty, and that there's nothing we can do about it. But I have never believed that. And I think it comes from being raised in a household where, you know, my father, who is 86, has been running since before I can even remember and continues to live that vital life, as does my mother. And I know that's something you share with them.
As I was preparing for this, I must have read somewhere, or maybe Suzanne told me, that you have verbalized that at 80, you feel 40 and have...

**Arnold Gilberg** (2:45)
I'm not 80 I'm 89
I'm turning 90 in six months.

**Vonda Wright** (2:50)
That's even better, that at 89, you internally feel the vibrancy as you describe it, as you did when you were 40 And I want to talk about that because it's a mental attitude. It's a physical achievement.
How have you approached living a long and prosperous life?

**Arnold Gilberg** (3:09)
Well, first of all, I want to thank you for the opportunity to be on your show.
And secondly, in terms of the question that you asked, I've been a big believer in mind-body concepts my entire life. And so, the mind and body are tied together. And my ability to still be generating all kinds of new concepts comes from that place.

**Vonda Wright** (3:42)
So, in order to continue growing and building, is it a curiosity? Is that one of the keys? Have you continued to write, like physically write? What are the tools that you have used to keep your mind connected to your body and therefore responsive to one another?

**Arnold Gilberg** (4:02)
Well, you used a very important word, curious. I think that for most people who want to be more or less super-agers, they have to continue with their curiosity because curiosity leads to new engagements, new opportunities, and so your aging years become minimized by your curiosity.

**Vonda Wright** (4:36)
You know, one of the things that is reported about a lot is how our world shrinks as we age. We have fewer friends. We live in... we travel less. But do you think that the ability to keep an expanded worldview, an expanded group of people you interact with has to do with curiosity?

**Arnold Gilberg** (4:58)
It does. But aging has also some other consequences.
The fact is that as you age, there are losses that you sustain in your life. But at the same time, when you live longer, you have more experiences and more experiences to share with other people. So there's a mind-body concept that allows us to evolve as people with our own aging.