What’s your life expectancy?

Active Seniors Dancing Together

Sometimes clients find it difficult seeing how much opportunity they have left in their lives. For example, someone at 50 might think their earning years are limited but we’ve seen time and time again people starting successful businesses, writing books, creating art and achieving other richly rewarding work well into their senior years. So when you think about your age and how much time you can reasonably expect to live, you might have more time and more opportunities than previously realised. Additionally, the older you are, the more wisdom you have because you’ve already had so many life lessons. This can be an edge or advantage that you didn’t have when you were younger.

125 years is currently considered the maximum life span humans can live.

Smoking, stress, obesity, and lack of exercise shorten life expectancy (Sigelman et al., 2022). According to a study by Reed & Dick (2003), genetic differences account for over 50% of differences in the ability to stay disease-free after the age of 69.

You can estimate how long you might live with this simple calculation:

Age Grand Parents Died + Age Parents Died = X / number of parents/grandparents

Here’s a hypothetical example:

Grandma 85

Grandma 50 (illness)

Grandfather 80

Grandfather 76

Father 46 (by accident)

Mother 82

total 373 / 5 =74.6

In this hypothetical life span calculation, I divided the total amount of years by the number of grandparents and parents that died (not by accident) to come up with an estimated life expectancy of 74.6 years.

So with this information, what changes might you make? Quit smoking, exercise more, work and stress less?

You can also use Dr Thomas Perls Living-to-100 Harvard-recognised Life Expectancy Calculator byclicking this link