101-year-old working woman, who lives alone in New York, shares 3 tips to live longer, healthier, and happier, and none is about fitness

A 101-year-old woman in New York is still working a weekly job, living alone, and outpacing people decades younger when it comes to staying sharp. According to a report by TODAY.com, Eileen Lavine credits her long, active life to three habits, and not one of them involves exercise. Old age is usually pictured as a slow fade, naps, forgetfulness, fewer plans on the calendar. Lavine's routine, however, tells a very different story. At an age when many people struggle to recall what they ate for breakfast, she is still copy-editing professional publications, working through a stack of newsletters, and keeping a social calendar packed enough to tire out younger relatives. Her core belief, per the report: a mind kept busy ages very differently from a body left idle.

Tip 1: Exercise The Mind, Not The Body

Lavine no longer swims and gets around with a walker these days. She doesn't hide this. But she's just as quick to point out where she still holds an edge.

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Her mornings reportedly run like clockwork: Raisin Bran and coffee, then a cover-to-cover read of two daily newspapers, followed by that week's New Yorker and its crossword. By the time most people are starting their workday, she has already gone through a pile of newsletters and opened tabs for a couple of investigative and media outlets. Evenings belong to game shows, with "Jeopardy!" a long-running family tradition.

Tip 2: Keep Doing Work That Feels Useful

Lavine's career has rarely followed a conventional timeline, the report noted. She finished high school and left New York for college in Wisconsin at just 16, years ahead of her classmates. On campus, she wrote for the student paper and became the first woman to serve a full term as its editor. A journalism master's from Columbia followed, along with stints in France, Jamaica, Haiti and the Dominican Republic before she eventually settled into newspaper work, a stretch at The New York Times, public relations and radio.

In 1962, she and seven others each contributed fifty dollars to start a company called Information Services, offering writing and editing help to nonprofits that couldn't afford full-time staff for it. That company shut down long ago, but her editing work hasn't. Per the report, she has been a senior editor at Moment, a magazine on Jewish life, since 2008, logging on for a video call every Wednesday to proofread the latest issue.

Tip 3: Never Let The Social Calendar Go Empty

At 32, not long after moving into a Greenwich Village basement apartment, Lavine met her husband Richard, a lawyer and musician, according to the report. They raised two children together. After his death in 2014, she kept up their weekly card-game tradition, hosting a rotating group of neighbours for bridge in her own apartment.

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These days, Thursday nights are for poker. Her children visit in the afternoons for a British spy series, always slotted in after "Jeopardy!"

In her memoir, written at 97 and titled "A Medley of Extemporanea," Lavine summed up her outlook in five words: "I've never really felt lonely!"