A new season began on the Labour Day long weekend. While it marks the anniversary of my giving birth to an entirely new human in my family decades ago, it is also a chance to give new life to my current priorities. My hope with each long weekend is to “reset.” I often buy a new notebook, crack it open, date the page, and underline a heading. It’s a typical ritual initiating a reset. It’s a gift to have three unscheduled days. Yet, between the recreation and catch-up time on the home front, I feel compelled to reflect and plan, as if the universe is going to audit my use of a Monday off.
This time I fell into a piece of research (well — research-adjacent; more on that in a minute) that made bold claims about our bodies and how it is not simply biological ageing they respond to. It is signals. Our bodies respond to nine signals we’ve heard about in varied wellness contexts. It came from a social media post that felt kind of manufactured. I took it as an aggregate, and this is how the signals list was presented together:
- Purpose
- Mental effort
- Movement
- Sunlight
- Unresolved resentment
- Hydration
- Learning
- Quick fixes
- Wonder (The full list and explanations are found in part 1)
Our biology allegedly shuts things down when enough of those signals read “mission over” in each category. Again, this was attributed to a 100-year-old Japanese doctor. The claim made me suspicious, but I read on. The list and the face the post depicted were familiar. A face similar to a Harvard nutritionist I’ve seen on social posts, and content and a face reminiscent of the real-life 90+ year old Japanese doctor still working to the best of his ability. So, I paid attention to the research underneath, and it mostly checks out.
Of the nine, the one that actually stopped me in my tracks was the first. Isolation and loss of purpose. Stopping feeling useful shuts off the brain’s survival signals. I live alone on purpose, by choice, and mostly happily — but “mostly happily” is doing some quiet unlicensed work in that sentence, and a long weekend with no one to report to is exactly when it goes looking for a job to do. Hence the rituals I anticipate. Hence the notebook. My reset ritual, looked at honestly, is a purpose I manufacture on a three-day cycle because I don’t trust the ordinary Tuesdays to supply enough of it on their own. I need unhurried and unassigned time.
In a twist on the human comedy, I found out my act of self-renewal has a body of evidence behind it. A 2026 study published in Psychological Medicine titled “Purpose in life and mortality: A meta-analysis of the published literature led by Angelina R. Sutin. It drew on individual-participant data of nearly half a million folks, followed for up to 32 years in the USA, Europe and Asia.
The study found that a strong sense of purpose predicts about a 30% lower risk of dying earlier than a weak one. Of interest to me is that the effect holds regardless of retirement status. I guess purpose is not seen in occasional performance. It’s supposed to be structural. Mine currently shows up dressed for a holiday.
Even though in business I knew that structure and, in fact, systems, were the key to success, I didn’t always apply that knowledge consistently. Still, I don’t think the fix is to stop my resets. These repeated rituals are preparation for progress in life, like reps in a gym.
I tidy my space (we’ll give the word declutter the weekend off). I clean and clear counters for visual rest for my brain and, I suspect, mental sorting, too. I write on a new page in a new notebook and renew my pledge to purpose. Inevitably, my pen slips into the margins with notes on my other, often competing goals.
Those life goals exist in that list of nine, and I take side trips into them, diverting energy from any main focus I want to establish during my resets. I find that:
I learn something new when I’m between projects, and not in a steady rhythm.
I go outside more some weeks than others, depending on mood, rather than on any actual plan for my own vitamin D or a desire for grounding with my bare feet on grass or sand.
None of it is failure exactly. It’s closer to what the sarcopenia research (new concerns as a senior) says about (the big effort we all put in now to build a healthier body system) muscle, of all things. The lesson is that the body doesn’t object to only occasional effort; it objects to disuse, to long stretches where nothing asks anything of it. A three-day reset is a rep in the healthy living routine. It isn’t a program.
Work in Progress
So, this long weekend, instead of just clearing counters for a fresh start and underlining a heading on a new page, I’m going for something smaller and less romantic: picking one person to be reliably useful to, on a schedule, past Monday. Not a mission. Not a reinvention. And I’ll find my way to other efforts in time. Just a signal I’ll keep sending on the ordinary days too, so my biology stops waiting for the next holiday to hear from me.
Live well as you live to deadline.
For a note on each of the nine signals I dug into, click here.
