Neha Pathak, MD, FACP, DipABLM: Welcome to the WebMD Health Discovered podcast. I'm Dr Neha Pathak, WebMD's Chief Physician Editor for Health and Lifestyle Medicine. Today, we're focusing on health and wellness in midlife. For anyone listening who's either in or approaching their 40s, you may have noticed some subtle health shifts. I know I certainly have.

Maybe the habits that worked effortlessly in our 20s and 30s suddenly seem like they've stopped working. It might feel like our sleep schedule has changed or our energy levels are fluctuating. And no matter how many supplements that other people are recommending or wellness trends that we've tried, we can't quite get back to feeling like ourselves.

Or maybe you've been raising kids, working tirelessly in your career, and caring for aging parents, taking care of everyone else on your list but putting your own health last for so long. If you answered yes or nodded along with anything I've just mentioned, you've probably also quietly stopped asking what you actually need.

Today, we're cutting through the noise, the social media health hacks, all the gimmicks, and the overwhelming amount of conflicting information and advice to talk about what wellness in our 40s actually looks like and what the science really says matters most at this stage in our lives. We'll talk about how our relationship with exercise, sleep, nutrition, and stress needs to evolve in this decade because some of those hacks that worked for us in our 20s and 30s—or some of the "just pushing through it"—doesn't really work for us once we get into our 40s and 50s.

We'll also talk about prevention and screening in a way that sets you up for the long haul and how to build a wellness foundation that isn't about chasing a new trend every year. We're talking about becoming the healthiest, most vital version of yourself for decades to come. So not just treating the you today, but thinking about what the you 20 or 30 years from now needs to stay as vibrant and active as you envision.

Because taking care of ourselves is the most important investment we'll ever make. But first, let me introduce my guest, Dr Susan Hardwick-Smith.

Dr Susan is a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist and certified menopause practitioner. She's founder of Complete Midlife Wellness Center in Houston and host of the YouTube channel and podcast named Empowering Midlife Wellness.

She's been named a Texas Super Doctor for 19 consecutive years, making her part of the Texas Super Doctors Hall of Fame, a Rice University-trained life and leadership coach, mom of three young adults, and a multi-time Ironman triathlete.

Welcome to the WebMD Health Discovered podcast, Dr Susan.

Susan Hardwick-Smith, MD: Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

Pathak: Well, I am so excited to pick your brain and to learn all things wellness as we get into our 40s and beyond. I'd love to ask about your own health discovery, whether it's in your research or work with patients, your communication with a broad audience. What questions or issues are you most excited to tackle?

Hardwick-Smith: Well, I practiced general OB-GYN for decades, and then when I went through menopause myself earlier than expected—I was in my mid-40s—I realized that I knew absolutely nothing about this. And we're coming out of a time where doctors just were simply not trained about what happens to women in our 40s as we approach menopause.

And so I became very passionate about that initially to help myself. As a result of that, I retired from general OB-GYN and decided to focus solely on menopause, perimenopause, and helping women to understand that. And that is really a leading edge in medicine, as you know. It is starting to be a very broad conversation, thank goodness, now about this really important time in life because if we can catch women in their 40s before they get sick...

You know, I was trained to treat sick patients, so I would say, "You seem fine. Come back when you're sicker," which is a very backwards way to approach keeping people well. So now I love catching women in their 40s before they're sick and heading that off before it even starts because we can pick up markers early and then discuss what's going to happen.

It's like Christmas in Texas. You are gonna go through menopause, so we can plan for it and then avoid the things that'll kill us: diabetes, heart disease, neurologic decline, many cancers, so many things. So that's really where my passion lies, is in keeping women well instead of treating them when they're sick.

Pathak: So let's take a step back and help us define what that period of wellness means. How do you define wellness for someone who's in their 40s?

Hardwick-Smith: Well, for someone at any age, many of us look at what I call buckets of health. You know, in my practice, we divide it into, loosely, the whole person, right? So I'm looking at not only menopausal optimization, but nutrition, exercise, sleep, relationships, emotional wellness, even play and fun and spiritual wellness—the whole everything, all of you.

So if I'm just checking a set of labs and looking for things that fall outside what the lab considers to be abnormal, which we can talk about—that's a whole different subject—really looking at what's optimal, having a different conversation about forget the normal ranges as the lab describes. Let's look at what's really optimal for you to make the most out of each one of those, what I call buckets of health. And each one of them is important.

Not just your labs or not just your period—everything.

Pathak: I love that. So how do you counsel differently, explain the concept of wellness and changes that may be coming? How is that different for someone that you're talking to when they're in their 20s and 30s versus when they have now entered their 40s?

Hardwick-Smith: You know, 20s and 30s, as you remember, was all about fertility, getting pregnant, not getting pregnant, all the issues to do with that, and other things that frankly become less important as we get older. For example, cervical cancer. You might know the American College of OB-GYN now only recommends cervical cancer screening every five years if you're over 30.

Some things become less important as we get out of that phase of fertility, and now we're looking more toward menopause, planning for the hormone change that we already know is inevitable, and then planning for our older decades too. I talk to patients about planning for your best elder day.

Let's imagine your best elder day when you're 90, and everybody has a similar view that I've talked to. She's healthy. She's surrounded by friends. She's mobile. She's certainly not in the hospital. So in order to get to that, we need to look at our body composition and not only our lab work but hormone optimization, the whole shebang, everything.

So I'm really talking to patients about, yes, let's feel good now—very, very important—and simultaneously, let's plan for how to make decisions that optimize becoming the best 80-year-old. My 20-year-olds are not interested in thinking about being 80, but about 40 is a good time to start thinking about aging. It's happening, so let's be very honest about it.

Pathak: So let's dig deeply into some of those daily habits, lifestyle changes that bring us to perform the act of wellness so that we can experience well-being as we age. So I know social media often highlights daily wellness habits: walks, weightlifting, supplements, early bedtimes. You mentioned each of these buckets is important in their own right.

So please help us talk through some of these buckets as you describe them and where we see meaningful benefits for people, particularly as they enter their 40s.

Hardwick-Smith: So I like to think of it this way: there's so many gimmicks and so much information if you are looking anywhere on social media that it can be paralyzing. Okay, a different thing every week, and how am I supposed to do all these things? Eighty percent, let's say, is basic. So first, get the low-hanging fruit. You know the saying, "Don't step over a dollar to get to a penny."

If you're not optimizing your nutrition and exercise and basic sleep hygiene, for example, it doesn't matter if you take ashwagandha and rhodiola and wear a weighted vest. It just doesn't matter. That's what I would put in the 15% to 20% of fun stuff you can do once you've mastered the 80%. The great majority of wellness is very squarely sitting in nutrition and exercise and sleep.

If we can just master those, and not with anything fancy, just basic stuff you already know. Now, here's something I know about your listeners, because they're the same as my patients. They know this stuff already. I don't need to tell your listeners what eating healthy is. I know they already know. Now, they may not be doing it, but I find it's not a knowledge gap at this point because there's so much information.

It's more of a moving from knowing to doing. So yes, I know that eating protein and minimizing processed food and doing some cardio and lifting weights is good. So why am I not doing it if I'm not? So I get very much into just finding our reason that resonates. For me, one of my reasons that resonates is what we talked about.

I look at my mom and don't want to go there. So that's very motivating for me to stick to my healthy nutrition and exercise, because I want to. So it's not because Dr Susan's telling me to eat this awful food and go to the gym. I joyfully go willingly because it's helping to create my best elder day. So flipping that around so that patients can take accountability for wanting to be healthy, and frankly, then it becomes somewhat easy.

But stick to the 80%. You know, once you've mastered those, you and I, if we have an obese diabetic patient who's got hyperlipidemia and smoking, it doesn't matter if she's taking vitamins or wearing the latest gadget. Let's get the basics first, right? And then you can play in the fun stuff if you want to.

I really encourage patients not to be attracted by the shiny next thing. Just stick to the stuff you already know. You already know what to do. Just trust your heart and do it.

Pathak: You know, I love that you're saying that because I'm thinking about myself as well, because I think as healthcare professionals, as doctors, we're probably in the office saying a lot of these things that people know and that we know, and we may not be doing it ourselves because... And I love what you said about identifying your barriers and then your reasons for why you'd want to change.

I'd love for you to kind of talk us through some of the barriers that you're seeing come up for patients.

Hardwick-Smith: You know, our minds are very stuck on old habits, and this just makes us human. There's no judgment. You and I admit we have the same things, where our minds all pretty much come stock issue when we're born, right? With this tendency to hang on to things that feel comfortable, even when we know they're no longer serving us.

So I think just asking those questions, and yes, the number of shiny objects that will distract us are infinite at this point. So sticking to what we already know is right, it really requires, for me, just a coming back to, like, a meditation practice. Like, okay, I just went off down a rabbit hole looking on Instagram about the latest whatever.

Okay, no, let's just come back to the most important nutritional piece of information that is arguably backed by science for those of us who are over 40, which is making sure we're getting enough protein, because one of the primary, or maybe the primary, issues that we face as we age is muscle loss and then associated osteopenia.

And so hence why it's important to eat protein, which clearly is what we need to maintain and build muscle, and do some resistance training. So then eating protein and lifting weights isn't a terrible restrictive punishment. It's like, okay, this is what my body needs, so I'm feeding my best elder day. I'm providing nutrition for this beautiful body to grow into the healthiest version of myself, because isn't that a kind, nice, wonderful thing to do?

Rather than this awful restrictive thing. And so, for me, and I teach my patients the same, it's just, okay, I went down a little rabbit hole here. That's okay. Permission to stop, come back to what I already know. Anyone who has any kind of meditation practice is familiar with that—going off on a train and then, oh, here I am down the track, come back.

So just a daily coming back to what are my basics here. For me personally, if I eat 120 grams of protein a day, everything else is fine. I really don't worry about the details of the other stuff. And if I do my 30 minutes of strength training three times a week and get my cardio in because I want to, everything else kind of works out.

That's my 80%. Then if I feel well and I'm eating well and minimizing alcohol, I will sleep well. It all just rolls downhill. Once you've got the basics, truly the other stuff just kind of starts falling into place. But like you said, if we're running around trying to eat some kind of weird, wacky food or eating stuff out of a box or the next whatever came in the mail, it's so distracting.

We can't focus on what we know is right, and we get stuck, and then it feels overwhelming. And when I feel stuck and overwhelmed, I want to eat ice cream and drink wine. I don't want to do the things that I know are right. So it's just recognizing how these habits are no longer serving us and deciding to fall in love with something better.

I love that it's not gutting through it so much as, "Oh, okay, this is not serving me. Now I'm going to fall in love with something better." Eating healthy food, exercising. Okay, that feels good.

Yeah, that feels good. I'm going to do it again because it feels good. It's a practice. It's literally practice. Do it again, do it again.

Pathak: I love what you're saying, and I think that any time you want to prioritize something that feels good, that you know is good for you, and that you want to do, you end up making time for it in your calendar. So I think that's the number one thing that I find for myself and for patients and friends that I talk to, is that if this is something that you want to do, it can't be something that you just hope will make its way into your day.

You have to put it on your calendar, and that means you have to put the grocery shopping into your calendar. So break it down into small steps that you can actually accomplish. So I'd like to talk then about the exercise piece, because you talked about the nutrition piece and how you really kind of focus on optimizing your protein, your healthy protein, and everything else on your plate is going to fall into place.

How do you think about that with regard to exercise? How much time should we be putting onto our calendar, and what activities should we be thinking about doing for that 80%?

Hardwick-Smith: So the best kind of exercise is the kind that you will do consistently and enjoy. If anyone suggests that there's one exercise program that everybody should do, I disagree. You might not like that. Now, I think we know, to optimize health in the areas that we discussed, particularly maintaining muscle and even growing some more bone health, and we know how that improves a lot of things, including reduction of dementia.

I mean, exercise has so many trickle-down effects for our best elder day, not only feeling good right now. So some type of combination of cardiovascular exercise, obviously getting our heart rate up, and some type of lifting heavy something. Now, that might be going to the gym and lifting weights, or it might be doing something different because if you hate going to the gym, then we need to find something different.

You know, maybe you're carrying two grocery bags around the house for 20 minutes or walking up and down the stairs with them, or make it up, but something that's carrying heavy things and something that's getting your heart rate up as much as you can. So when I tell a patient, "You need to do 30 minutes three times a week," well, maybe she can do 10 minutes twice a week, and that is a lot better than nothing.

I really encourage patients not to get stuck on, "Oh, I can't, I can't do 30 minutes three times a week, so I'm just not gonna do anything." Anything is better than nothing, and moving toward something like 30 minutes three times a week of resistance training is where studies have shown that things start to really create benefit.

But do whatever you will do with consistency and with some type of joy because nobody wants to do things they hate. We're trying to also maximize our fun and enjoyment bucket here. So I love exercise that can fill multiple buckets. So if I do something personally, if I do something social—this is just me, I'm an extrovert.

If I go to spin class where I have friends and I've paid for it in terms of accountability, I'm gonna be much more likely to continue to do that because it's filling my friendship bucket, my emotional wellness. It's not just, ugh, exercise.

Pathak: Yeah. I love what you said because I certainly, as I was reading your bio and recognizing that I was going to be talking to a triathlete today, I know in my mind I was like, "That's something that I will never achieve." So it's really where we're starting. So for me, it's taking that walk that's one mile with a friend or two friends so that we have the social connection.

We're doing what we can do in our sort of physical capability. Talk to us a little bit about what we know when it comes to sleep, and how does that change in our 40s? So some of us might be having perimenopausal symptoms, maybe hot flashes, maybe more difficulty sleeping. So what are your recommendations when it comes to sleep?

Hardwick-Smith: Well, sleep disruption is pretty universal during the transition toward menopause as our hormones change. So I have not met a woman, or rarely, who did not have some pretty significant sleep disruption. So just knowing that that can happen.

Now, we've often come out of a time perhaps where we've had children that have been disruptive to our sleep, to say the least, and now we're going into another phase where hormones can be disruptive just when our kids are old enough to not wake us up, right?

Or we have a snoring husband or other things like that. So over the course of aging, we, just as a function of aging, have less deep sleep and REM sleep, which are the two most important types for cellular repair. So anything that increases deep sleep is really important, reduces dementia and other diseases.

So we've gotta just take that a little bit more seriously, like things like getting rid of alcohol before bed—we all know, right? Getting our phone out of the room and not scrolling right before bed.

But we still do it. So time to just buckle up and ask some questions like, why am I still doing this thing that I know is disrupting my sleep? Drinking alcohol, looking at my phone, whatever it is, when I know that that's going to cause me health consequences down the road. About 40 is when I started realizing that this life is not gonna be forever.

I need to start thinking about this seriously.

Pathak: What is your message around caffeine and sugar?

Hardwick-Smith: Well, the two biggest sleep disruptors that we consume are alcohol and caffeine. And no judgment, I've done this. When we're in perimenopause and we can't sleep, commonly we'll have a glass or two of wine to try to help us go to sleep, which flat out doesn't work because it disrupts sleep markedly, and then the next day we're really exhausted, so we'll drink a bunch of caffeine.

And the half-life of caffeine is actually quite long. If you drink caffeine after noon, a significant amount of it will still be in your bloodstream at bedtime. So if you're struggling sleeping, I drink coffee, I love it, but I really do personally have to stop it by about 10:00 AM, otherwise there'll be significant amounts of it still in my bloodstream at bedtime.

So if we can get into a cycle where we're sleeping better and we're not using caffeine as a medication to help us to function, enjoying a nice cup of coffee, sure, I love that. I still enjoy a glass of wine too, don't get me wrong, but really making sure it's at least a couple of hours before bedtime and no more than one.

And I do it now because I want to, 'cause if I do more than that, it will mess up my sleep, and then I don't enjoy my day the next day as much. So how many times do we need to learn that lesson? We know this, right? So at some point, okay, let's stop doing the thing that isn't serving us.

And in our 40s, if we don't, the price tag starts going up because now we're going to increase our chance of dying from something preventable.

Pathak: So much of what we've talked about up until now are things, as you said, we all know, or most of us already know, that these are the healthful behaviors and that there are some behaviors that are more maladaptive, that are not serving us anymore.

But there are often mental and emotional reasons that we kind of do some of these things that are maladaptive. So how do you talk to your patients about improving their mental and emotional health so that they can make some of these healthier decisions?

Hardwick-Smith: Well, your emotional health is one of my buckets. It might be the most important one because until we've reached a place of being able to really... I'm not saying we can control our mind. I mean, that is a big—we can't. But to just see these behaviors for what they are, which are no longer serving us.

Like if a certain behavior that's wanting me to feel good right now, like eating a donut and drinking a bottle of wine, I can now see that that is a part of me that's trying to help me to feel better. It's quite sweet and innocent, but I can look at that now and say, "You know what? This is no longer helping me.

Thank you for suggesting that I have a donut and a bottle of wine, but I know where that's gonna lead, and I don't want to go there."

So it's really just an awareness of the voices in our head. If we can hear them and sort of listen to them before we act out on the "go eat the donut," there's a chance to stop and have a different conversation that's a bit more mature 'cause we're not 10 years old anymore, right?

We're actually the grown-up in this human parts system who can stop and say, "You know, thanks a lot for that advice, but I don't— that's not a path I wanna go anymore, and I'm gonna choose a different action."

And so it just takes a moment to stop and see the inside of your mind. So I have a very important meditation practice, and I use parts of it to teach patients through coaching in my medical practice how to do that. And I'm by no means perfect, but it really is just stopping and listening to those thoughts and not jumping on board with them, but just saying, "Okay, I hear what you're saying.

Pull into Shipley's and order a box of donuts. Thank you for suggesting that. I'm actually not going to do that today."

And then it can become quite comical to talk about it that way, you know? We all have these internal voices, and which one are we gonna align with?

Pathak: I love that. And I think it kind of gets back to the whole concept in meditation of just really, as an observer, watch your thoughts, listen to them. You can play with them, you can talk to them. You don't have to necessarily act on them.

Hardwick-Smith: So we've talked a lot about the lifestyles, the behavior changes, the things that we have control of in our day-to-day life, and these are daily habits that we really need to think about incorporating.

Pathak: But talk to us a little bit about that interface with our health professional. What are some of the checkups, screenings that, when we're in our 40s, we should be prioritizing and reaching out to our healthcare professionals to make sure that we get these things done?

Hardwick-Smith: Well, I don't wanna sound pessimistic, but the reality is that most healthcare professionals who are working in the traditional model have very little time, five to 10 minutes, and typically require an illness diagnosis to even pay for the visit. So it's very, very challenging.

Some people have the resources to work outside of the insurance model with doctors like me, and I realize that's not available to everybody. So in the traditional context, we need to advocate for ourselves. I mean, if you got 10 minutes, go in there with a list, and you sort of have to be pushy and demanding.

I ask my patients to do a pretty comprehensive set of lab work when they're about 40, and very important, if you're still having periods, you need to have that drawn when you're on your menstrual cycle if you're checking any kind of hormones. So one of the biggest things that happens that goes wrong is if doctors check hormones at a random time of the menstrual cycle, we're really not gonna be able to interpret those results, and patients might be told, "Oh, your hormones look fine," when actually they're not.

So, get your blood drawn during your menstrual cycle, and there's a short list of things that I think are very important to draw that many doctors don't, like fasting insulin and ApoB at least once in your life, and Lp(a). We check ferritin, frequently low in patients who are not anemic and still feel terrible.

Detailed thyroid, like look at your free T3 and T4, not just TSH. I could give a longer list, but certainly the hormones estradiol and follicle-stimulating hormone will give you an indication of if you've started entering perimenopause, but only if it's drawn during your menstrual cycle. So these are things that might not be offered to you.

You might have to ask for them or go to Any Lab Now or order them on your own. But frankly, I missed so many things because I didn't check those things, so I missed finding patients who were insulin resistant that were not gonna flag on a typical A1C measurement for diabetes, or somebody with a subtle or genetic hyperlipidemia issue that we could have missed, or other things like that, that just get missed on traditional testing.

So being an advocate and asking for more, 'cause you do deserve more, and it's hard to get unless you're very organized and maybe even a little bit demanding, which that's not what women were taught to do, but we kinda have to if we wanna get as much as we can out of that visit.

Pathak: So talk a little bit about the social connection piece that you were talking about. So that can sometimes be a double-edged sword, no? So we're thinking about work, family, responsibilities toward caring for our children, our parents. That is all part of social connection, but that can also come with its own set of demands.

So how do you talk to your patients about balancing what they're doing in the social connection bucket?

Hardwick-Smith: Well, first, just recognize it's really hard. I mean, it can be, depending on your situation. I remember a decade ago, I had three little children and was running a busy practice and had an elderly mom, and it can feel a bit too much. So did I have time to be reaching out to make new friends during that phase?

Not really. But making sure, as much as I could, I'm very glad that I did at least keep those connections. A lot of my patients find when they come out of those years of having children, they've lost connection with all of their friends, or maybe the only connection they have is with their spouse, if they have one, and then when we get divorced often, now we lose that too.

So it can be a time of intense loneliness for a lot of people, even if we are in a family, just feeling like we're not being seen. So, I mean, we don't wanna give you a whole more list of things to do, right? You got enough things to do. But just giving a moment to keep in touch with friends.

I mean, same-sex friendships, to me, are the most important thing to maintain, and I've been much better at that lately, 'cause it's so important, especially as we get older, to have a network of, in my opinion, same-sex friends or non-romantic friends. Just friends, people you can share with, and as you get into perimenopause, people you can talk to so that you don't feel, "Oh my gosh, I thought it was just me.

I thought something was wrong with me. You have that too? Wow, okay, now I don't feel so isolated or weird or bad." Because we can feel like something's wrong with me. It does feel like something's wrong with me. I'll tell you, perimenopause felt like that for me. But being able to talk to other people who had similar experiences was such a relief.

Like, oh my gosh, thank goodness. And I'm a doctor, but still having someone validate that you're not crazy and, "I share this with you," is so important. And then as we get older and our kids go, you know, empty nest, you gotta have people around you. I went through that a few years ago. It's so vital to be around other people who know what that's like. Healthy, connected relationships are related to longevity.

I mean, this is not just because it feels good. Also, it makes you live longer. So lots of all the good things.

Pathak: So I'd love to end our time together. This has just been such an impactful conversation, by just handing the floor to you and asking you to speak directly to our audience and give us some examples of how someone can start making some of these changes in their daily life.

Hardwick-Smith: Well, if you're a woman in your 40s, or really any age, but we're talking primarily about midlife women's health today, it is this fantastic opportunity to make decisions that will dramatically change not only your own health and happiness, but those around you. So, not all of you are mothers, but those of you who are, that really was important to appeal to myself about how my actions are gonna affect my children as they age, and I don't want them to have to take care of me if they don't have to.

So making these decisions important, not in a terrible punitive way, but in a way that just elevates it higher than it was before when you could get around to it sometime later. Like, let's make ourselves important enough to get around to it now. Like, this is your life, right? Don't try to fit these healthy habits into your otherwise incongruous life, like going to church for 30 minutes on Sunday and then being a bad person the rest of the week.

No, this actually is your life, so these healthy habits become your life rather than things I need to do in amongst my life that I don't otherwise find as healthy. It's just reframing it, and we were not trained to think that we were worth it, so I think the last thing I'll say is I understand why that decision's hard.

The patients that I have who struggle to make healthy decisions, at some level, have been taught they're not worth it. They're busy taking care of other people. What if you were worth it? Like, if you are the most important person in this whole conversation, you are worth it, so you would take care of that person like it was your most precious Ferrari, right?

You'd put oil in it. You would clean it. You would take care of it. You would zip it around the track because you care about it. So we need to care about ourselves like we're our most precious possession, 'cause we are.

Pathak: I love that. It just resonates so much, and it's sort of like, what wouldn't you do for your child if you have one? You should think of yourself in that same category.

Hardwick-Smith: That's absolutely right. You are a good, kind, generous person. You take care of everybody else. Would you treat anybody else this way, whatever that is that you're doing? Probably not, you wouldn't.

Pathak: Well, I wanna thank you so much for your time and for this conversation today. And I am looking forward to implementing some of these changes in my own life.

Hardwick-Smith: Well, it's such a pleasure.

Pathak: I'd like to close the episode with my three key takeaways. First, every single day we're bombarded on social media with myths, misinformation, gimmicks, and health hacks. And if it's not social media, it's maybe people that we know, people that we're talking to in our communities. But really, it all comes down to the basics.

If you're not optimizing your nutrition, sleep, and exercise, it doesn't matter if you take the newest supplement or wear a weighted vest. Address the low-hanging fruit in health and wellness first, and use that as a foundation to build on instead of trying something new every week. Because we know the great majority of wellness and well-being is very squarely sitting in nutrition, exercise, and sleep.

So, as Dr Susan said, it's all things we already know, and now it's time to actually do those things. That should be the core.

Second, speaking of building a strong wellness foundation, priorities change throughout our lifespan, but a great way to build a foundation for setting wellness goals is to imagine your best elder day when you're 90, and I loved that tip.

This starts with identifying what your ideal life would look like at that age, socially, physically, and emotionally. Your wellness plans should include decisions that optimize your path to becoming the best 80- to 90-year-old that you can envision.

Finally, I bet most of us who struggle to make healthy decisions spend most of our time making great healthy decisions for other people in our lives. Because we feel like that's the most important thing, and we're invested in their health and happiness.

But we cannot pour from an empty cup. Maybe it's time to ask ourselves if we believe we're worth it. The message I wanna leave you with, and the one I'm taking home, is that we need to care for ourselves as if we were the most important person or precious possession that we have, because we are.

To find out more information about Dr Susan and staying well in your 40s to 50s, make sure to check out our show notes. Thank you so much for listening. Please take a moment to follow, rate, and review this podcast on your favorite listening platform.

If you'd like to send me an email about topics you're interested in or questions for future guests, please send me a note at [email protected].

This is Dr Neha Pathak for the WebMD Health Discovered podcast.