First and foremost, take control of what you can control, start with the behaviors in the pillars of health and wellness; emotional and behavioral health, exercise, nutrition, relationship health, and self-care. Identify good habits and behaviors and eliminate bad ones. Treat health like the limited commodity it is.

People face different situations at different ages and require different frameworks to take control and help themselves. If you're searching for strategies to minimize your health costs while and access resources that can help you stay healthy, click here for strategies . Also, if you are checking in or providing support for an older parent, you may want to look at strategies and resources that might help them.

If you’re an Empty Nester or Pre-retirement, you have a better opportunity to pass along health and genetic information for your children than any generation before. Genetic tests are one part, but there is a more important part. Parents of a minor today, can download, print out, and/or assemble all their own and their child’s records. These are records your child might need 40 +/- years later to inform a diagnosis or make a targeted treatment possible. In the (not distant) past local doctors kept paper records in their offices. That worked then, but not now. However, virtually all doctors and a myriad of specialist’s records are digitized and increasingly transportable. A parent can meld information that goes their portals and systems into a file for their children with much less effort than before. Compiling a multi-generational medical and genetic histories is far more powerful than a birth and death record in a family bible.