Healthspan: Why Knowing What to Do Is Only Half the Battle

Buenos dias from an unseasonably cool and cloudy Costa Rica! People here for a week’s vacation are disappointed, but when you’re here for three months, it’s a nice change of pace.

You know, they say the best investment you can make at midlife is not in your 401(k), it’s in extending your healthspan, or health life expectancy.

So this week we’re taking a break from the business-building advice to turn the mic over to Samantha Clark (yes, my better half) to explore your health in an actionable way.

Brian

The signs are all there.

Your knees grind a bit when going down a steep decline. Your back is a little stiff when rolling out of bed in the morning… or the middle of the night.

But there are also times you’re shocked to be considered “middle-aged.” I mean, that’s what your parents were for most of your life, not you.

Then a downhill walk reminds you.

Really, the problem is not getting older (well, not totally). It’s aging like the average American, in which case the math is not on your side.

Our average lifespan may sit at an all-time high of 79 years, but the more important statistic is that the typical American spends their “golden years” managing chronic disease.

That means significant health decline starts around age 66. For Gen X, that’s closer than we’d like to think.

Plus, given that lifespan is an average that is dragged down by those who die much younger, that further means some are spending 20-25 years or more in poor health.

And yet, here’s the paradox: Nearly everyone knows what to do.

The information is everywhere. We know we should exercise. We know we should eat real food and avoid processed junk. We know sleep matters. But only a tiny fraction of people — around 1.5% according to recent research — actually engage in all the proven behaviors that add healthy years to life.

Why do we do this?

Laziness? Lack of willpower? A homosapien-specific character flaw? No, it’s what behavioral scientists call the knowledge-action gap, and understanding why it exists is the first step to closing it.

The Brain’s Shortcut System

The gap between knowing and doing isn’t because we have insufficient information.

It’s the result of cognitive biases, the mental shortcuts that helped our ancestors survive in the savanna but now work against us in a world where the biggest threats are slow, cumulative, and invisible.

What’s more likely to move you to act:

I might get diabetes in 20 years.

or:

The doctor just told me my A1C is in the prediabetic range.

We respond to concrete information. But future health consequences are inherently abstract. They don’t activate our emotional systems the way immediate threats do. This temporal discounting makes us value immediate enjoyment (that glazed donut) over a theoretical, and distant, (diabetes) diagnosis.

The availability heuristic compounds this. If a risk hasn’t touched us directly — through something like a friend’s diagnosis or a parent’s illness — we discount it further.

We also have an annoying habit of thinking we’re the exception to the rule, that “it won’t happen to me.” This optimism bias can especially take hold when there’s no damage feedback. And let’s be honest, most of the dangerous stuff is silent: You don’t feel plaque forming in your arteries or a creeping increase in blood sugar.

And since we can’t feel it, we keep doing the same things we always did. That preference for things to stay the same is status quo bias. Changing behavior requires effort now for a distant, uncertain payoff, so we stick with current habits even when we know they’re harmful. Until the chest pain hits. Or a scan shows something alarming.

Our brains dislike anxiety, so these cognitive biases shield us from constantly worrying about distant threats. That may have served us well in a bygone era, but now, these protective mechanisms make modern health threats far more likely to materialize.

Why Your 50s Are the Strategic Healthspan Stage

Midlife — particularly your 50s — is the optimal stage for interventions to extend healthspan. You’ve lived enough to see where mistaken thinking resulted in problems, but you’re young enough that change still yields massive returns.

By 50, you’ve accumulated enough personal data to see patterns. You remember feeling better when you were active. You can trace the pounds that crept on and the energy that’s declined. You now have 30 years of evidence from your own life.

This might be the most underrated advantage of middle age. You’ve learned through frustrating experience that there are no shortcuts, anything “quick” is temporary, and real change is boring, gradual, and requires systems, not motivation. You’re FINALLY ready to hear “walk 30 minutes daily for the rest of your life” instead of “lose 20 pounds in six weeks.” You know there are no magic bullets.

And then there’s the reality of what’s happening around you. Friends are getting chronic diseases, and parents are declining or gone. Or maybe you’ve had your own warning shot of borderline blood pressure or a prediabetes diagnosis. Abstract statistics are now becoming vivid, specific current events.

This is the rare moment when the availability heuristic activates without requiring a full crisis.

The beautiful thing is compound returns on investing work here, too. If you’re 50 and make changes now, you have potentially 30-40 years to benefit. But unlike at 25, the window feels finite enough to create urgency. You can no longer say “I’ll start later.”

But the flip side of the investment calculus is also true. Every decade you wait, you lose both time and capacity. At 40, you might have 40+ quality years ahead. At 60, maybe 20-25. At 70, the interventions that would have been easy at 50 require heroic effort.

8 Tools to Close the Knowledge-Action Gap

Everyone knows what to do, but the actual doing requires tools that work with your psychology, not against it. Here are some to help move you to action:

1. Pre-commitment Devices

Remove future choice: Auto-schedule workouts. Keep zero junk food in the house. Use apps that lock you out of social media. This works because you make the decision once, when motivation is high, rather than relying on dwindling stores of willpower later. You are Ulysses, tying yourself to the mast.

2. If-Then Plans

“If it’s 7 am on a weekday, then I’m at the gym.” Or, Sundays are for meal-prepping. This strategy is also helpful in bypassing the willpower battle, because the if-then structure removes moment-to-moment decision-making. Research shows that it roughly doubles follow-through rates.

3. Habit Stacking