Welcome to the happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. Hopefully most of us listening to this happiness podcast will grow into old age or some of the

listeners may be already in their twilight years of living and if you've been around enough older people, you'll know there can be quite discrepancies between how people age. Some people age very gracefully, very slowly, and are often quite vigorous until the last few days of their life.

Others unfortunately age much more quickly with a lot more wear and tear and when they get to the last years of their life, there are a lot of challenges and it's hard.

Now there'll be exceptions for anything I say right now, but most of us realize that if we do certain things, it's hard on our bodies.

And if we do other things, it's pretty good for our bodies.

Smoking, heavy drinking, drugs, those tend to be quite hard on our bodies, but things like exercise,

eating well, and keeping our stress down tend to be pretty good for our bodies.

But what we may not always notice is that for most of us, not all, but for most

of us. When we were born, there was someone there, hopefully our mom, or even our dad, that loved us and deeply was grateful for us

being alive and then we get into school and we get a little bit older and we have

friends and we go through the primary and secondary days of school we all do and

we just know these people and we all are kind of on the same page in that we were

born and probably someone perhaps a lot of people, really loved us.

But then we go through life, particularly the early age is up to say when we finish high school,

and there's challenges for some of us and sometimes they're

quite daunting challenges. And it's really at our teen years where we're at a crossroads.

If we've had challenges or if we haven't had challenges, we are at a crossroads because at that point, we begin to make choices for ourselves.

And those choices have consequences.

Because for many of us, up to that point, we didn't have a lot of choices.

We didn't choose our parents.

We didn't choose the environment we grew up in.

We didn't choose our genetics that we were given and because of these different

...