The Blue Zones
For years, a few places — Okinawa, Sardinia, Ikaria — were held up as ‘Blue Zones,’ where people supposedly lived extraordinarily long, and a tidy list of nine shared habits was drawn from them. Recent research has cast real doubt on the longevity statistics. But the habits themselves remain some of the most sensible advice for a good life ever written down.
The nine habits worth keeping
Stripped of the hype, the list reads like plain wisdom: move naturally through your day; have a sense of purpose; build in real ways to unwind; eat mostly plants and stop at about eighty-percent full; put family first; belong to a community; and surround yourself with good people who lift you. None of it is a fad. Almost all of it is free.
The part that didn't hold up
Here is where staying current matters. In 2024, the demographer Saul Newman won an Ig Nobel Prize for showing that the Blue Zones' extreme-longevity claims rest on shaky data — missing birth records, pension fraud, figures that don't survive scrutiny. Okinawans, it turns out, eat among the fewest vegetables in Japan. So take the ‘live to 100’ promise with real salt. Keep the habits because they make life better — not because a statistic says they add decades.
One habit that has aged badly
The old list also included ‘a little wine, daily.’ That one hasn't survived the newer science — the current guidance is that less alcohol is always better (more on that here). Everything else, though, is still worth building a life around.
My grandmother Angelina lived to ninety-six, singing the whole way — certain the secret was simply not sweating the small stuff and living in the moment. The longevity data may be messy. That part never was.
When the mind needs somewhere to land
Everything in this wing points, in the end, to the same place — the breath, and the nervous system beneath it. It is why I built SOVA: a quiet companion for the moments in between.
- Today — a daily practice that aligns you before the day pulls you a dozen directions.
- Companion — a place to process any feeling, even the happy ones.
- Pages — a soft place to set your thoughts down and out of your head.
- The House — rooms of calm to step into, whenever you need one.