At early morning hours, testosterone levels is at its peak. Exercise, fasting, nutrition and less stress are healthier choices when balancing your hormones and for a healthier adrenal glands.

• The number of testosterone prescriptions have tripled over the past decade, causing researchers to sound the alarm that men may be abusing the hormone
• The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has suggested that testosterone products should carry a warning label indicating a heightened risk for blood clots
• Testosterone should only be given to men with persistent symptoms and unequivocally low testosterone levels, a condition known as hypogonadism
• If you’re under the age of 45 and have erectile dysfunction, it would be wise to test your testosterone between 8-11 am for the most accurate measurement, as this is when your testosterone tends to peak
• If you’re older than 45 and have erectile dysfunction, you can do the test anytime before 2 pm without misleading results, as recent research shows the testosterone cycle gets blunted with age

There’s a fair amount of controversy on the subject of testosterone replacement therapy. Some of the evidence suggests it may cause worrisome side effects (especially if you’re not actually deficient), including:

Nine More Ways to Naturally Increase Your Testosterone Levels

While I believe high intensity interval training is one of the most potent ways to optimize your natural hormone production, it’s certainly not the only way. The following strategies are also known to be quite effective:

For Most Men, Testosterone Replacement Is Unnecessary

I know first-hand that low testosterone is not an automatic outcome of aging, provided you incorporate certain lifestyle strategies that can naturally boost your testosterone levels. High intensity interval exercises get top billing among them, but your diet is also an important factor, and certain supplements can be helpful adjuncts.

These strategies are part and parcel of an overall healthy lifestyle, so they also automatically reduce your risk of most chronic disease, including heart disease, which just so happens to be an adverse side effect of testosterone replacement therapy. For most men, the risks simply outweigh the benefits of testosterone therapy, and you’re far more likely to achieve optimal health by addressing lifestyle factors that brought on the symptoms of hormone dysfunction in the first place.

For most people, psychological well-being increases later in life, following a well-known U-shaped curve: people report less satisfaction in midlife and more at either end of the age spectrum. Paradoxically, though, suicide rates also rise sharply. Older white men, like Joseph Goeke, are particularly at risk.

Among Americans of all ages, 12.4 per 100,000 take their own lives each year, according to 2010 statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But among those over 65, the official number is 14.9, and suicide may be under-reported. Because of the stigma, “coroners will go to great lengths to call it something else,” said Patrick Arbore, founder and director of the Center for Elderly Suicide Prevention in San Francisco. “If it’s an overdose, they can call it an accident.”

Though suicides among older people have declined in recent decades, most likely as a result of improved screening and treatment for depression, they remain disturbingly high among men. Suicides by women decline after age 60, but the rate among men keeps climbing. Elderly white men have the highest rate: 29 per 100,000 over all, and more than 47 per 100,000 among those over age 85.

Why are suicide rates so high among seniors? We know that while older people make fewer suicide attempts than the young, they are far more likely to die from them, in part because they rely primarily on guns. “Younger people have more physical resilience and use less lethal means,” said Dr. Yeates Conwell, a psychiatrist at the University of Rochester Medical Center who has studied late-life suicide.

Moreover, depression is behind a majority of suicide attempts, and “a lot of older people have problems asking for help,” Mr. Arbore said. Depression can involve different symptoms in older patients, and “men are good at masking it, because we’ve been conditioned to believe it’s not O.K. to express emotional pain.”

Beyond mental illness, researchers have identified a cluster of other risk factors in late-life suicide, including physical illness and pain, the inability to function in daily life, fear of becoming a burden and social disconnection. “Things that remove older people from their social groups — bereavement, retirement, isolation — leave them vulnerable,” Dr. Conwell said.

Knowing that some readers here have announced that they want to end their lives if (or before) they are suffering, seeing that as an exercise of personal autonomy rather than mental illness, I asked both experts if they thought suicide could ever be a rational act. If life loses pleasure and meaning, with or without a terminal disease, can suicide be a legitimate response?

Both said, cautiously, that in certain situations, after a great deal of discussion and consideration, it could be — but that’s rarely what occurs.

“The proportion of older people who take their lives without a diagnosable mental illness is very, very small,” Dr. Conwell said. Because elderly suicide is generally a result of multiple factors — physical illness and depression and a recent loss, say — “if you change one of those parameters, it may tip the balance in favor of finding solutions that help you want to live.”

At the Center for Elderly Suicide Prevention, staff and volunteers handle 3,000 calls a month to the “friendship line” (a name deemed more acceptable to seniors than “suicide hotline”). They also place 3,500 outgoing calls to people considered isolated or otherwise at risk.

“We believe connections are what bind us to life,” Mr. Arbore said. “Just having the opportunity to talk might shift their view of the end, temporarily. It might not have to happen today.”

Such opportunities to talk, in ways tailored to older adults, should be more widely available than they are. (One resource is the Veterans Affairs Department’s Veterans Crisis Line.) Instead, the task of trying to recognize elderly depression and encourage treatment falls largely to primary care physicians and, of course, to family members, who should always take suicidal talk seriously. When a depressed and hopeless relative commits suicide, the family must cope not only with grief but often with guilt and unanswered questions.

“I’ve gone through years of being angry — ‘He chickened out, he bailed,’ ” Ms. Goeke said. “I’m someone who needs information to feel better. What did I miss? What was really going on?”

She joined the first eight-week support group for suicide survivors that Mr. Arbore’s center established. “I understand it better now,” she said of her father’s death, “but it makes me both furious and agonized that he was in such despair.” It also makes her determined “to go forward and really, really live.”

Now 60 and teaching music and movement in the Bay Area, Ms. Goeke takes particular pleasure in working with students in their 70s, 80s and 90s. “They tell me they’re happier now,” she said. “It’s exciting to be around older adults who are growing and healing.”

————-

For compassionate caregivers in the bay area, contact Motherhealth Inc 501c3, 408-854-1883 , motherhealth@gmail.com

• Here are the 10 antithetical traits often present in creative people that are integrated with each other in a dialectical tension.

  1. Creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but they’re also often quiet and at rest. They work long hours, with great concentration, while projecting an aura of freshness and enthusiasm. This suggests a superior physical endowment, a genetic advantage. Yet it is surprising how often individuals who in their seventies and eighties exude energy and health remember childhoods plagued by illness. It seems that their energy is internally generated, due more to their focused minds than to the superiority of their genes.

     This does not mean that creative people are hyperactive, always “on.” In fact, they rest often and sleep a lot. The important thing is that they control their energy; it’s not ruled by the calendar, the dock, an external schedule. When necessary, they can focus it like a laser beam; when not, creative types immediately recharge their batteries. They consider the rhythm of activity followed by idleness or reflection very important for the success of their work. This is not a bio-rhythm inherited with their genes; it was learned by trial and error as a strategy for achieving their goals.

     One manifestation of energy is sexuality. Creative people are paradoxical in this respect also. They seem to have quite a strong dose of eros, or generalized libidinal energy, which some express directly into sexuality. At the same time, a certain spartan celibacy is also a part of their makeup; continence tends to accompany superior achievement. Without eros, it would be difficult to take life on with vigor; without restraint, the energy could easily dissipate.

  2. Creative people tend to be smart yet naive at the same time. How smart they actually are is open to question. It is probably true that what psychologists call the “g factor,” meaning a core of general intelligence, is high among people who make important creative contributions.

  3. The earliest longitudinal study of superior mental abilities, initiated at Stanford University by the psychologist Lewis Terman in 1921, shows rather conclusively that children with very high IQs do well in life, but after a certain point IQ does not seem to be correlated any longer with superior performance in real life. Later studies suggest that the cutoff point is around 120; it might be difficult to do creative work with a lower IQ, but an IQ beyond 120 does not necessarily imply higher creativity.

     Another way of expressing this dialectic is the contrasting poles of wisdom and childishness. As Howard Gardner remarked in his study of the major creative geniuses of this century, a certain immaturity, both emotional and mental, can go hand in hand with deepest insights. Mozart comes immediately to mind.

     Furthermore, people who bring about an acceptable novelty in a domain seem able to use well two opposite ways of thinking: the convergent and the divergent. Convergent thinking is measured by IQ tests, and it involves solving well-defined, rational problems that have one correct answer. Divergent thinking leads to no agreed-upon solution. It involves fluency, or the ability to generate a great quantity of ideas; flexibility, or the ability to switch from one perspective to another; and originality in picking unusual associations of ideas. These are the dimensions of thinking that most creativity tests measure and that most workshops try to enhance.

     Yet there remains the nagging suspicion that at the highest levels of creative achievement the generation of novelty is not the main issue. People often claimed to have had only two or three good ideas in their entire career, but each idea was so generative that it kept them busy for a lifetime of testing, filling out, elaborating, and applying.

  4. • Divergent thinking is not much use without the ability to tell a good idea from a bad one, and this selectivity involves convergent thinking.
     • Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility. There is no question that a playfully light attitude is typical of creative individuals. But this playfulness doesn’t go very far without its antithesis, a quality of doggedness, endurance, perseverance.

       Nina Holton, whose playfully wild germs of ideas are the genesis of her sculpture, is very firm about the importance of hard work: “Tell anybody you’re a sculptor and they’ll say, ‘Oh, how exciting, how wonderful.’ And I tend to say, ‘What’s so wonderful?’ It’s like being a mason, or a carpenter, half the time. But they don’t wish to hear that because they really only imagine the first part, the exciting part. But, as Khrushchev once said, that doesn’t fry pancakes, you see. That germ of an idea does not make a sculpture which stands up. It just sits there. So the next stage is the hard work. Can you really translate it into a piece of sculpture?”

       Jacob Rabinow, an electrical engineer, uses an interesting mental technique to slow himself down when work on an invention requires more endurance than intuition: “When I have a job that takes a lot of effort, slowly, I pretend I’m in jail. If I’m in jail, time is of no consequence. In other words, if it takes a week to cut this, it’ll take a week. What else have I got to do? I’m going to be here for twenty years. See? This is a kind of mental trick. Otherwise you say, ‘My God, it’s not working,’ and then you make mistakes. My way, you say time is of absolutely no consequence.”

     • • Despite the carefree air that many creative people affect, most of them work late into the night and persist when less driven individuals would not. Vasari wrote in 1550 that when Renaissance painter Paolo Uccello was working out the laws of visual perspective, he would walk back and forth all night, muttering to himself: “What a beautiful thing is this perspective!” while his wife called him back to bed with no success.
       • Creative people alternate between imagination and fantasy, and a rooted sense of reality. Great art and great science involve a leap of imagination into a world that is different from the present. The rest of society often views these new ideas as fantasies without relevance to current reality. And they are right. But the whole point of art and science is to go beyond what we now consider real and create a new reality. At the same time, this “escape” is not into a never-never land. What makes a novel idea creative is that once we see it, sooner or later we recognize that, strange as it is, it is true.

         Most of us assume that artists—musicians, writers, poets, painters—are strong on the fantasy side, whereas scientists, politicians, and businesspeople are realists. This may be true in terms of day-to-day routine activities. But when a person begins to work creatively, all bets are off.

1. Creative people tend to be both extroverted and introverted. We’re usually one or the other, either preferring to be in the thick of crowds or sitting on the sidelines and observing the passing show. In fact, in psychological research, extroversion and introversion are considered the most stable personality traits that differentiate people from each other and that can be reliably measured. Creative individuals, on the other hand, seem to exhibit both traits simultaneously.
2. Creative people are humble and proud at the same time. It is remarkable to meet a famous person who you expect to be arrogant or supercilious, only to encounter self-deprecation and shyness instead. Yet there are good reasons why this should be so. These individuals are well aware that they stand, in Newton’s words, “on the shoulders of giants.” Their respect for the area in which they work makes them aware of the long line of previous contributions to it, putting their own in perspective. They’re also aware of the role that luck played in their own achievements. And they’re usually so focused on future projects and current challenges that past accomplishments, no matter how outstanding, are no longer very interesting to them. At the same time, they know that in comparison with others, they have accomplished a great deal. And this knowledge provides a sense of security, even pride.
3. Creative people, to an extent, escape rigid gender role stereotyping. When tests of masculinity/femininity are given to young people, over and over one finds that creative and talented girls are more dominant and tough than other girls, and creative boys are more sensitive and less aggressive than their male peers.
4. This tendency toward androgyny is sometimes understood in purely sexual terms, and therefore it gets confused with homosexuality. But psychological androgyny is a much wider concept referring to a person’s ability to be at the same time aggressive and nurturant, sensitive and rigid, dominant and submissive, regardless of gender. A psychologically androgynous person in effect doubles his or her repertoire of responses. Creative individuals are more likely to have not only the strengths of their own gender but those of the other one, too.
5. Creative people are both rebellious and conservative. It is impossible to be creative without having first internalized an area of culture. So it’s difficult to see how a person can be creative without being both traditional and conservative and at the same time rebellious and iconoclastic. Being only traditional leaves an area unchanged; constantly taking chances without regard to what has been valued in the past rarely leads to novelty that is accepted as an improvement. The artist Eva Zeisel, who says that the folk tradition in which she works is “her home,” nevertheless produces ceramics that were recognized by the Museum of Modern Art as masterpieces of contemporary design. This is what she says about innovation for its own sake:
6. “This idea to create something is not my aim. To be different is a negative motive, and no creative thought or created thing grows out of a negative impulse. A negative impulse is always frustrating. And to be different means ‘not like this’ and ‘not like that.’ And the ‘not like’—that’s why postmodernism, with the prefix of ‘post,’ couldn’t work. No negative impulse can work, can produce any happy creation. Only a positive one.”
7. But the willingness to take risks, to break with the safety of tradition, is also necessary. The economist George Stigler is very emphatic in this regard: “I’d say one of the most common failures of able people is a lack of nerve. They’ll play safe games. In innovation, you have to play a less safe game, if it’s going to be interesting. It’s not predictable that it’ll go well.”
8. Most creative people are very passionate about their work, yet they can be extremely objective about it as well. Without the passion, we soon lose interest in a difficult task. Yet without being objective about it, our work is not very good and lacks credibility. Here is how the historian Natalie Davis puts it:

   “I think it is very important to find a way to be detached from what you write, so that you can’t be so identified with your work that you can’t accept criticism and response, and that is the danger of having as much affect as I do. But I am aware of that and of when I think it is particularly important to detach oneself from the work, and that is something where age really does help.”

9. Creative people’s openness and sensitivity often exposes them to suffering and pain, yet also to a great deal of enjoyment. Most would agree with Rabinow’s words: “Inventors have a low threshold of pain. Things bother them.” A badly designed machine causes pain to an inventive engineer, just as the creative writer is hurt when reading bad prose.

   Being alone at the forefront of a discipline also leaves you exposed and vulnerable. Eminence invites criticism and often vicious attacks. When an artist has invested years in making a sculpture, or a scientist in developing a theory, it is devastating if nobody cares.

1. Deep interest and involvement in obscure subjects often goes unrewarded, or even brings on ridicule. Divergent thinking is often perceived as deviant by the majority, and so the creative person may feel isolated and misunderstood.
2. Perhaps the most difficult thing for creative individuals to bear is the sense of loss and emptiness they experience when, for some reason, they cannot work. This is especially painful when a person feels his or her creativity drying out.
3. Yet when a person is working in the area of his of her expertise, worries and cares fall away, replaced by a sense of bliss. Perhaps the most important quality, the one that is most consistently present in all creative individuals, is the ability to enjoy the process of creation for its own sake. Without this trait, poets would give up striving for perfection and would write commercial jingles, economists would work for banks where they would earn at least twice as much as they do at universities, and physicists would stop doing basic research and join industrial laboratories where the conditions are better and the expectations more predictable.

• From Creativity: The Work and Lives of 91 Eminent People, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, published by HarperCollins,

Williams’ publicist has said he had recently fought severe depression. Williams himself had occasionally spoken about his struggles (“Do I get sad? Oh yeah. Does it hit me hard? Oh yeah,” he told Terry Gross in 2006) and funneled his fights with alcoholism and addiction into his act. He largely won his battles with substance abuse except for several relapses quickly followed by rehab, including a stint at Hazelden in Minnesota last month. His widow, Susan Schneider, added Thursday that Williams also was suffering from the early stages of Parkinson’s disease.

Those factors — along with his heart surgery several years ago — offer a slightly deeper understanding of Williams’ mental state in recent days and weeks. But his death also reinforces the long-held stereotype of the sad clown, the tortured funnyman.

Comedian Jim Norton responded to Williams’ death with an essay titled “Why the Funniest People Are Sometimes the Saddest” in which he noted that in his 25 years of performing stand-up, he knew eight comics who killed themselves.

“When I find a comedian I admire, my first thing is: What’s wrong with this person?” Norton says. “Guys that I’ve admired the most always had that cloud. And it wasn’t a purposeful or a pseudo-artist thing. It was a real thing that they were constantly combating. It was kind of a way to keep sadness or depression off of you, to be funny.”

Particularly since the likes of Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor made stand-up into a more personal kind of truth-telling, many comedians have been drawn to the profession as a means for catharsis. Comedian Tig Notaro pushed stand-up perhaps further in this direction than ever before in a famous set in 2012. Days after being diagnosed with breast cancer, she hit the stage: “Hello. I have cancer. How are you?”

Nowhere has the intersection between comedy and psychological pain been more thoroughly plumbed than on Marc Maron’s podcast, which Maron began after he had suicidal thoughts. In lengthy, candid interviews with fellow comics, Maron has explored the often-troubled psychology that drives people to bare themselves before crowds night after night, feeding off the laughter.

Maron’s conversation with Williams from 2010 is one of his most naked interviews. In it, Williams called stand-up “the one salvation” and commented: “How insecure are we, how desperately insecure that (it) made us do this for a living?” He even riffed on his suicidal urges, doing a two-man routine between himself and his consciousness. Replaying the episode this week, Maron reflected: “He was a person with his own problems that he carried with him. And I think part of his genius came from the struggle with those problems.”

Studies have shown a correlation between creative minds and such problems. Nancy Andreasen, a leading neuroscientist and psychologist, co-wrote the first empirical study that proved the increased likelihood of mood disorder in creative people.

“There really is no question that there’s a statistical correlation of mental illness in highly creative people,” said Andreasen, who chairs psychiatry at the University of Iowa. She stressed, though, that mental illness is usually treatable — “It’s not a lifetime sentence,” she said — and that treatment “does not diminish their creativity.”

“The great misfortune is that mental illness is still so stigmatized,” said Andreasen, lamenting the lack of care for the mentally ill. “This probably could have been prevented, and it’s a terrible misfortune that it wasn’t.”

A recent study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry found that comedians are both highly extroverted and highly introverted and that they even show lower levels of traits associated with psychosis.

“Humor often requires the ability to ‘think outside the box’ or see unusual connections where others don’t, and this reflects, in a more muted form, the thought process and pattern seen in psychosis,” Victoria Ando said in an email.

But depression also doesn’t care what you do for a living. It can strike anyone, any time, regardless of success, income or fame. In “The Noonday Demon,” an award-winning, multi-disciplinarian “atlas” of depression, author Andrew Solomon wrote that his own depression hit hardest when his life was most in order: “All the excuses for despair had been used up,” he wrote.

Solomon says he hopes Williams’ tragic end serves as a “wake-up call.”

“We have to recognize that if you have depression and enormous wealth and success, the love of most of the people in America — you can have all of those things and still be subject to the ravages of depression,” Solomon said. “The tragedy is that he didn’t have any place to turn.”

Improv and sketch comic Chris Gethard has been particularly vocal about his own struggles with depression with the hope of helping others. Following Williams’ death, he posted a picture of himself taken after an earlier day spent crying in bed, labeling it: “This is the face of my mental illness.”

“All kinds of people get depressed — comedians just happen to be people that professionally deal with the manipulation of happiness, laughter and other positive emotions, so maybe it stands out more or gets more pronounced,” Gethard said.

Perhaps Williams’ death shouldn’t just be added to the sad list of comics who died too young, like John Belushi or Chris Farley, but should be taken as a lesson by the rest of us, the ones in the audience below the floor lights, that we should listen just as keenly to Williams in death as we did to him from the stage.

“It is our hope in the wake of Robin’s tragic passing that others will find the strength to seek the care and support they need to treat whatever battles they are facing,” said Schneider, Williams’ widow, “so they may feel less afraid.”

A practical advice on money and health from 40-70 yrs of age

If the learning and dependent phase is from 0-25 yrs of age, 30-40 yrs of age is the working and building a family phase, the 40-70 yrs of age is the accumulation to build wealth stage and the last stage is the 70-120 yrs of age, the yearning age (wishing to be back to youth and start saving early and making less mistakes in finances and health).

What would be your advice on health and money to the younger generation, now that you are between 40-70 yrs of age?

What lessons would you impart to save our younger generation from the mistakes you made?

Would you tell them to buy a house as their first investment at the third year of their first job?

Would you advice them to buy stocks or index funds?

Would you advice them to use credit cards in everything?

Would you advice them to learn how to be a business man and build a career or business based on their passion and beliefs?

Would you advice them to see take care of their choices in food, lifestyle and material things that may contribute to the toxicity of their body and the environment?

Would your advice them to choose the right college degree and job?

Please share your ten cents and email them to motherhealth@gmail.com and put anonymous if you wanted to. Some of your answers will be included in an ebook. Please suggest a title for the ebook. The one advice our 40-70 year olds have on health and money.

Clubalthea Wealth Management LLC, founding members needed.

Dear All,

I would like to invite you all to form a company in the bay area who will serve the needs of its members and circles in the area of finance, wealth management, business coaching , health and life insurance, senior long term care, and finance and health education.

Anyone wants to volunteer their office space is welcome. Our first goal is on health and finance education.

We will ensure our members needs and wants in areas of finance and health are met first.

We welcome licensed insurance agents, CPA, estate planners, lawyers, and other business professionals who are leaving the high tech industry and wanting to pursue a business where their talents are rewarded and appreciated.

Please email Connie Dello Buono at motherhealth@gmail.com for your interests and what you can bring to the organization and your vision. 408-854-1883

Smoothie for losing weight, controlling sugar and preparing for fasting.