Good morning.

How is your weekend going?

In today’s issue:

• One big thing. Do you remember the Presidential Fitness Test? What if there was one for relationships? 🏋️‍♀️

• You have to check this out. Real friends and super communicators. 🧑‍🤝‍🧑

• Tools & tech. Notebook LM. 📒

Settle in. Let’s dive in.

1️⃣ ONE BIG THING

Annual social fitness checkups.

I was damn good at the standing broad jump. 

Does that term bring back memories of 4^th grade? 

How about the shuttle run? Flexed-arm hang?

Yep, I’m digging up the sweaty ghosts of the Presidential Fitness Test, that annual gauntlet most of us in Gen X pulled, sprinted, and jumped our way through.

Did you know we have two Swiss mountain climbers to blame for this? In the early 1950s, the unsurprisingly named Hans Kraus and Bonnie Prudden created a fitness test and used little chocolates to bribe 4,000 American and 3,000 European kids to take it.

6 in 10 soft American kids failed the test, but only 1 in 10 strapping Swiss, Italian, and Austrian kids failed.

In their best Schwarzenegger accent, the Kraus-Prudden team held a press conference and declared, "Many youngsters today have no bodies." Sports Illustrated covered the presser, and Willie Mays attended. According to the internet, all of this is true.

Naturally, this alarmed then President Dwight Eisenhower. He broad-jumped into action, creating the President’s Council on Youth Fitness in 1956. They proceeded to develop a national fitness test that had absolutely nothing in common with the original Kraus-Prudden test.

The test launched by the former General was designed as a military training drill. For over 25 years, it included the softball throw—softballs being a kid-safe approximation of a grenade.

If you don’t remember any of this, you’re in luck. If your school submitted the fitness test results, as most did, all of your scores are on file in the Department of Health and Human Services archives. They have them all. Sweet.

A lifetime of fitness measurements.

The Presidential Fitness Test was abandoned in 2013. By that time, of course, America's youth were in better shape than any time in history. 👀

But regular physical fitness check-ins never really stopped. They shrunk to fit inside your iWatch.

Today, the best measures of overall fitness are resting heart rate, heart rate variability, muscle mass (as a proxy for strength), and VO2 max. (I'll return to these ideas in later issues of this newsletter.)

Beyond fitness measures, you probably also have annual physical checkups, including weigh-ins, blood draws, and EKGs with your doctor, scraping and polishing with your dentist, scans with your dermatologist, and more. Midlife really seems to require keeping MyChart in an always-open browser tab.

All of this makes good sense in the end because, as Peter Drucker said, "What gets measured gets managed." Except that Drucker never actually said this (but that is not today’s tangent).

Physical fitness is important for long-term health, so this nonstop measurement and these annual checkups… all make sense.

But is it the primary contributor to your longevity? No, it is not.

As you know from last week’s newsletter, the findings of the Harvard Study of Adult Development – the longest-running study of human life – compiled mountains of data and came to a single conclusion:

Good relationships are the single most important factor in living a happy and healthy life.

Not just happier, longer.

Julianne Holt-Lunstad’s analysis of over 300,000 people found that social connections increased the odds of surviving any given year by more than 50%. Conversely, individuals with the fewest ties had mortality rates 2.3 times (for men) to 2.8 times (for women) higher than those with the strongest connections.

I am repeating these stats from last week so I can ask you a question:

If we regularly (and rightly) track and assess our physical fitness, yet our social fitness has an equal or greater impact on our well-being and longevity, why don't we have any systems or metrics to assess the state of our relationships?

(And no… I don't believe our Gen X souls believe social media followers count.)

The social ostrich.

Here are two perspectives on why most of us (including me) rarely assess the state of our social fitness.

First, physical fitness feels more quantitative. Outside authority figures (doctors, etc.) deliver these health assessments. There is outside pressure to get annual checkups, and we trust our doctor’s recommendations for better health. “Reduce salt intake. Sleep more.”

There is no parallel outside pressure to do more than a cursory scan of the state of our social connections. There is no Fitbit for friends and no blood pressure cuff to test for emotional support. Thinking about social fitness is almost always an internal conversation.

That leads me to the second perspective: the psychological angle. Our friends down in the behavioral science lab coined the term the ostrich effect to describe what often happens while self-assessing our social fitness.

“The ostrich effect refers to people's reluctance to get feedback on their performance, even though that information would help them monitor their progress and successfully work towards their goals.” (The Decision Lab)

If you've been making a lot of purchases on your credit card, you might delay checking your monthly balance for just a few more days. It isn't really a problem until you look at the details.

As you know from my past newsletter, Rose-Colored Distortions, we are all biased toward positive information.

Taking honest stock of the state of our social connections is easy to avoid if we sense our social fitness checkup may deliver negative findings.

Assessing your social universe.

A more straightforward explanation of why you might avoid a social fitness test is… you aren't sure how to do one (this was me, for sure).

Robert Waldinger, M.D., and Marc Schulz, Ph.D., are here to help. They are the current leaders of the Harvard Study of Adult Development. They outline a simple approach to assessing social fitness in The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness.

Here's a simplified, three-step version of their recommendations:

Step 1

First, ask: Who is in my life?

To start, list the 10 people who populate the center of your social universe.

Step 2

Once you’ve got a good list of people, it’s time to ask: What is the character of these relationships?

The two key features of social connections are frequency (how often do you see someone) and quality (are these relationships energizing or draining).

“An energizing relationship enlivens and invigorates you, giving you a sense of connection and belonging that remains after the two of you part ways. It makes you feel better than you would feel if you were alone. A depleting relationship induces tension, frustration, or anxiety, making you feel worried or even demoralized. In some ways, it makes you feel less or more disconnected than you would feel if you were alone,” explain Waldinger And Schultz.

Use the chart below to plot where each of your relationships from Step 1 fits.

Step 3

What role do these relationships play in your life?

Waldinger and Schultz categorize the diversity of roles relationships play in your life as follows:

• Safety and Security: People who provide a sense of stability and support in crises, giving you courage and peace of mind.

• Learning and Growth: Those who encourage you to take risks, try new things, and pursue your goals.

• Emotional Closeness and Confiding: Trusted individuals you can be honest with, seek advice from, and rely on for emotional support.

• Identity Affirmation and Shared Experience: Long-standing connections that reinforce your sense of self and shared history.

• Romantic Intimacy (Love and Sex): Relationships that offer closeness, affection, and shared day-to-day joys or sorrows.

• Help—Informational and Practical: Go-to people to solve problems, offer expertise, or assist with tasks.

• Fun and Relaxation: Those who make you laugh, feel at ease, and bring enjoyment into your life.

Use the table below to populate the people you listed in Step 1. Place a plus (+) symbol in the appropriate columns if a relationship seems to add to that type of support in your life and a minus (-) symbol if a relationship lacks that type of support.

Think of this like an X-ray for your social life. Not every type of support will matter to you, but focus on the ones that do. If something feels off in your life, does it line up with any gaps? Maybe you have plenty of fun but no one to confide in—or vice versa.

Opening the door at the social fitness gym.

As I’ve thought about my own social universe, one question percolated to the top:

Is it too late to change?

My social habits are well-ingrained. I avoid talking to people next to me on airplanes, and my first impressions of new people I meet are often overly critical. I make more time for my own solo pursuits, sometimes leaving me too busy to invest in new relationships.

I’m 52. Can this old dog really learn the trick to meeting new dogs?

The Harvard study says yes—definitively.

As they tracked people throughout their lives, many did change. They started new romantic relationships, established new friendships, and rekindled old connections.

They did this in midlife, and they saw the happiness and longevity benefits as they aged.

A growth mindset is the foundation for bolstering your social fitness.

Consider the potential for change. Make President Eisenhower proud.

That’s it for today.

See you next Sunday.