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Today’s Health Upgrade

• The lower blood pressure Rx

• Fact or fiction: testosterone affects decision-making and aggression

• Adam’s Corner: Stand In The Doorway

Health
The Walking Sweet Spot For Lower Blood Pressure

If you’re trying to keep your blood pressure low, we recently discussed how wall sits are surprisingly effective. But that’s not the only exercise that works, and scientists now have a pretty good idea how much low-intensity movement you need to make a significant difference.

Research suggests that roughly 150 minutes of brisk walking a week could maximize the extent to which you can lower your blood pressure with lower-intensity exercise. 

Scientists analyzed 17 randomized trials of people with higher blood pressure to see how different amounts of movement affected their health. On average, brisk walking lowered systolic pressure (the top number) by nearly 7 points and diastolic pressure (the bottom number) by about 5 points. For context, researchers estimate a 5-point systolic drop is associated with roughly 13% lower risk of stroke.

When they modeled how much walking worked best, the benefit for systolic pressure peaked around 150 minutes a week. That’s not to say walking doesn’t have other benefits. But it just means more time doing less intense exercise doesn’t do more for your blood pressure

Walking seems to help by loosening stiff blood vessels and easing nervous system tension that keeps pressure elevated.

If you want a simple goal, aim for a brisk walk (a pace where you can talk) about four times a week, up to 40 minutes each. 

Fact or Fiction
Does Testosterone Lead To Reckless Thinking?

You've heard the theory, maybe used it as a punchline. Testosterone makes you more impulsive, floods your brain with confidence, and kills the ability to catch a bad decision before it happens. And that doesn’t even mention the most common belief about aggressiveness.

Scientists have tested the idea, and the answer is more interesting than the myth because testosterone does not influence mood or decision-making the way most people think. And it doesn’t create angry people.

The connection between testosterone and decision-making took off with one study about a decade ago. Men were given testosterone or a placebo, then took a short reasoning test built around trick questions. The testosterone group did worse, and the headlines exploded, turning one study into irrefutable fact. 

But it was refuted. Other labs ran the test three more times and came up empty. But the die was cast, and everyone remembered the first study.

Then something rare happened that we wish would happen more often in science: the scientists with opposing findings teamed up.

The original researcher and his critics designed one study together and tested 1,000 men. Every prediction was locked in before a single result was analyzed, which helped ensure that nobody could move the goalposts later.

Testosterone did not affect reasoning. It didn’t make men slower, faster, or worse. And a companion trial on the same men tested risk-taking, fairness, generosity, and competitiveness across nine separate measures. And once again, no difference.

When we looked at the studies, one finding jumped out. Both groups guessed they answered 5 of 7 questions correctly. In reality, on average, they only answered three of them. Testosterone or placebo, it wasn’t the hormones. Instead, it might be that men are overconfident. 

The study did have limits. Most notably, this isn't a study of anyone on TRT. It was a single dose in men between the ages of 18 and 45. However, longer trials suggest the same outcome. A 12-month study in older men and a 27-month study in more than 5,000 men both tested the impact of TRT on cognition and found no effect.

One more thing, because you're probably wondering: what about aggression? 

In a placebo-controlled trial, testosterone by itself did not make men more aggressive.

However, there was an exception: among men already high in dominance or low in self-control, researchers observed greater aggression. 

And a meta-analysis of 12 randomized steroid trials backed up that finding by observing a small bump in aggression men reported about themselves, but no bump in what observers actually watched them do.

So does testosterone make you aggressive? Not on its own, but maybe a little in men already wired that way. The hormone doesn't change your personality. At most, it turns up the volume on who you already are. 

Adam’s Corner
Stand In The Doorway

Two days ago, I heard my dad’s voice.

Not an easy feat because he’s been gone for three years.

There’s a set of audio files I recorded less than a month before he died. I made them because I knew that eventually I’d lose the sound of him. I was told that the face stays longer than the voice, so I hit record and asked him questions just to keep him talking.

After he first passed away, I listened to the recordings almost daily. I don’t play them as often now, but on July 21st, I find myself coming back to them. 

Normally when I think about my dad, it’s a mix of smiling about the moments we had, and being sad about everything he’s missing.

But this time of year, when I listen to the recordings, my brain goes somewhere different. For a moment, I stop focusing on how much I miss him, and start prosecuting the time I spent with him and the things I would do differently.

I couldn’t understand why the guilt showed up so intensely on this date and not the other 364.

But I think I finally figured it out.

The Memory Imbalance

On the anniversary of my dad’s death, I spend more time going back through the photos, videos, and those audio recordings. And when I do that, I think I subconsciously notice something about the archive that I finally realized this year.

It’s lopsided.

I have more of my father sick than I have of my father when he was healthy.

The three years he fought glioblastoma produced more pictures, more video, and more of his voice than the decades that came before them. I had more than 40 years with my father. At least 20 of them were when I had a mobile phone. Outside of a few saved voicemails, I have no intentional recordings of him from when he was healthy. The camera was in my pocket the entire time.

That’s the part that gets me. Not that I lost him, but that it took the impending reality of losing him to make me more present and capture more of his brilliance. 

Because once we knew he was sick, it was as if my brain changed, too. 

I can still see the day before his brain surgery. We spent hours at his home.

When it was finally time for me to go home, I stood in the doorway entrance of his home, looking back at him, and took it all in.

I knew after that day, nothing would be the same. My dad was sitting in his chair. I was standing in the doorway of his house. There was honestly nothing special about the moment. No big speech. But I was taking inventory of what he was wearing, how the light hit, the position of everyone else in the room, and every emotion I felt. My heart was heavy, but my dad just seemed light. The way he sat there like the surgery was a scheduling inconvenience. He never seemed to worry about his cancer until the very end. 

I wasn’t taking a picture. I was trying to store the room into my hardware.

It worked. Years later, I don’t have to close my eyes to get back there. I return to it on purpose. I’m standing in the doorway. My dad is at peace. And even in that moment of fear, it brings me so much joy.

And that’s what I’ve been thinking about all week: Why didn’t I do that more often? Why don’t any of us?

Presence costs nothing. It’s also the hardest thing for many of us to master. 

What’s Left Of Your Attention

A few months ago, I read something from Arthur Brooks. I remembered it the other day, and it helped me finally make sense of the emotions I feel around the anniversary of my dad’s final day. 

Brooks wrote that he’d always assumed he wasn’t a person who had many happy memories, and that it was just how he was built. Then he realized he had the science backward. 

Memory isn’t a personality trait. It’s what’s left over from your attention. The brain saves what you were fully there for, which is why time seems to stretch at a wedding, a birth, a car accident.

The reverse holds too. If you weren’t paying attention, your brain didn’t file it. The event happened, but you weren’t present, so it’s gone, almost as if it never happened.

That means most of life is not forgotten because something painful buried it. It’s gone because you weren’t truly in the moment.

And that made me think that before my dad got sick, maybe I was a guy with an attendance problem more than I’d like to admit.

And then, when the hourglass got flipped, I became the most attentive version of myself I have ever been. I saved everything. I’m grateful I did, but I’m mad at myself that it took a terminal illness to spark the change. 

I didn’t become present. I became scared, and presence was the side effect.

That’s what I want back. Not the archive. The instinct behind the archive, without the reason for it.

I am not you. And it’s possible you’re already doing this. I hope you are. But if not, it’s worth exploring where this lives in your own life.

These moments are everywhere. It’s the dinner where you were at the table but don’t remember anything that happened. The drive home when your kid told you something and you said “mm-hmm” without ever knowing what they were talking about. The days where you say “nothing happened,” which is not the same thing as a day when nothing was happening.

We tend to focus on the moments that clearly deserve to be remembered, for better or worse. And I’ve come to learn it’s better to take more time to create memories from moments that don’t “deserve it.”

Life and joy increase when we learn to appreciate and savor the ordinary moments. And not just say we enjoy them, but hunt for them. 

The home-cooked meal. The walk back from school. The ten minutes of chaos before your kid falls asleep. 

Treat it the way I treated that doorway, and take inventory.

I find myself doing this every night with my kids. Bedtimes with my 2 boys are still chaotic, and it’s one of my favorite times of the day. My daughter isn’t even two years old, and this is my third ride on the toddler train. But when it’s time for her to sleep, I’m fully in the moment, knowing damn well I want to be able to transport myself back to this moment when I’m 75 just as easily as when I’m 45. 

There are endless ways to do this. If your parents are still here, record their voice and lessons. Not just video of a birthday. Ask them something you already know the answer to and let them tell you the whole story anyway. Ask them things you’ve already wondered.

And don’t just limit it to your parents. Do it with friends and family, too. These intentional choices will matter more than anything else on your phone.

Listening back to the audio, I got to the question where I asked him what he wants me to remember most when he's gone. I'm glad I have his answer.

And I know it was heavily influenced by his cancer, and by then, his mind wasn't the same.

I wish I had asked him the same question when he was healthy.

I used to think I saved those last three years so I'd have something left of my dad after he was gone.

That's not quite it.

I have plenty from before he got sick. There are whole days I can still walk through. Those didn't survive by accident. They're with me because I was there, and that's the thing I need to remind myself every July when I put myself on trial. I wasn't absent for my father's life.

I just wasn't doing it often enough. And when I was, I didn't do enough to hold onto it.

It’s not just a matter of presence and absence. It’s also frequency and effort. Not much different than the gym. 

The last three years of my dad’s life weren't different because I showed up. They were different because I realized any moment was worth saving. 

Like standing in a doorway when nothing happens.

I don't think life asks you to become someone else. It asks for more of what you already do sometimes, in the moments you'd normally let pass. And there are far more of those left than you realize.

That's the trade we don’t discuss enough. You don't pay attention so you'll have the memory. You pay attention so you'll have the moment.

The memory is just the bonus. -AB

-Adam Bornstein is the co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of Arnold’s Pump Club

The Positive Corner of The Internet
About Arnold’s Pump Club Editorial Standards

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Publisher: Arnold Schwarzenegger​

Editors-in-chief: Adam Bornstein and Daniel Ketchell