Having a kid (might) make you live longer

Emmanuel Stamatakis studied 25,000 people who do no formal exercise at all, and found that three or four minutes a day of short, hard, incidental movement was associated with a ~40% lower risk of death.¹ And the examples in the paper were simply walking uphill or running after a bus. Not a $200/month gym membership or personal trainer and supplements or etc.

This week, he added on that even for people with under 5,000 step counts a day, if they picked up their pace for just 30 minutes, it was associated with a ~30% lower mortality.²

So I guess, in short, since I am a father with a toddler and literally constantly running around that I should be able to live longer now, right?

The challenge (as any parent knows) is that you literally feel like you’re kind of on a treadmill towards the opposite — constantly tired, no time to do anything (much less exercise), while prioritizing family and work.

Before the kid, we got a dog, and that one makes sense to support the research (and there’s plenty that goes along showing having a dog can increase both quality of life and longevity).³

And a Swedish study found that in 3.4 million adults where owning a dog for people living alone also had roughly a third lower mortality rate.⁴

So we’ll see if this compounds or not — only time will tell.

All I know is that I’m tired constantly but eternally grateful, and those two things even if they don’t mean any direct correlative numbers towards living longer means I’m still living my best life.