When you ask the average person what is the secret for a long and healthy life, you will get responses similar to those like “You must eat healthy food”, or “You must stop smoking if you want to live a hundred years”, or “You must sleep and exercise more”.
While this is all good advice, it’s surprisingly a wrong answer when it comes to reaching 100 years of life. Well, if it’s not about food, sleep and exercise – what could be the factor that will help us to blow that 100th candy from the cake?
Well, as the latest scientific research shows us, there are two key factors to living a long and healthy but also a happy life. It’s a stress-free mind and enjoying life and being alive!
Scientists speak with 100-year-old people all over the world. Some of them live in a mountain, far from civilization. Others live in cities with millions of people. One of them eats healthy food but the other prefers to eat a kilo of chocolate in a week. Some of them drink just water while others drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes.
The only common things between those people are stress-free minds and enjoying life and being alive! The secret formula is to enjoy “little” and “normal” things like hanging out with your friends, spending time with your children or watching a sunrise while you drink your morning coffee!
What is the science behind this conclusion
I don’t doubt that for some of you this conclusion can sound impossible. Happiness and the love to be alive can be more important factors for our overall health than eating healthy food, sleeping and exercising. And how would someone who smokes cigarettes regularly or eats a kilogram of chocolate per week live a hundred years?
Actually, it’s very simple!
New scientific research shows that the number one factor for ninety percent of disease is not food or bad lifestyle, but stress. When your body is under constant psychological and physical stress, your body starts to produce chemicals that start to eat your body – literally. When you are under stress, those poisonous chemicals flow through your body, damaging cells and organs which later on lead to their improper function and as the end result, disease starts to occur. Those chemicals are actually so powerful that they are in second place by strength, right after snake poison. So, next time when you feel stressed, stop and think: are there some situations worth worrying about?
Learn to recognize real problems
Usually, people are nervous and irritated by things that they can’t change or avoid. Learn to distinguish real problems from those that aren’t. For example, if you become nervous each time you deal with tough clients, you will get nothing but more stress about something that you can’t change. There are eight billion people in the world, and you can’t change them.
On the other hand, if you have real problems with colleagues at your workplace, try to solve them. It’s better to argue about something once and make the situation clear, rather than every day having those little arguments and fights with your colleagues that will bring you nothing but more daily stressful situations.
If you don’t like your job, that is a real problem. But rather than just be irritated and stressed as you must go somewhere for eight hours each day but you don’t like it, try to think more productively. Think about what you would love to do and how to get there.
Fabric of stress
Watching television is good when you want to entertain yourself or inform yourself about things in your city, country or world. But spending too much time watching the news about the wars, economic crisis, car accidents and earthquakes will just make you miserable and stressed.
Is that worth your time and nerves? I don’t think so. Try to fulfill your time with things you like and that will make you happy. That brings me to the second part of this question.
How does positive thinking help you to live longer?
As I mentioned above, when you are under stress, your body starts to produce chemicals that affect your body like a poison. Stress chemicals kill every cell and destroy your body. On the other hand, if you feel happy your body starts to produce hormones of happiness like serotonin and dopamine. Those hormones have an effect like a cure to your body. When you are exposed to those hormones, they make you feel happy and they regenerate every cell in your body.
When your body cells are regenerated, your body functions better and your organs are in balance. That’s why you should try to be happy and enjoy the little things as much as possible.
If you succeed, you are one step closer to your 100th birthday!
Habits and food play a second role here
Although it sounds contradictory to everything they taught us, food and our bad habits play a second role in achieving your 100th birthday. It’s because our body has a powerful system to fight against unhealthy food and bad habits.
If you eat chocolate, your digestive tract will separate it in two parts. Food particles that are useful will transfer in blood to spread into your body and be used by your cells together with the oxygen, so your body will be maintained with enough energy to sustain a day and regenerate itself. Those particles that aren’t good for your body will be sent out through different ways and our body will stay healthy.
The same goes for cigarettes. Truthfully, cigarettes are poison for our body. But the truth is that poisons are not as dangerous as the media represents us. Even more precisely, tobacco itself isn’t as dangerous as other chemicals that companies put inside the cigarettes. Yet, remember that there’s a group of people all around the world of all ages that smoke cigarettes of all kinds and do not have cancer. There’s no rule about it, and at the end of the day everything comes with a person.
If cigarettes were that dangerous as it’s presented to us, each person that consumes cigarettes would die of lung cancer. But in reality it’s not happening. Some of them who smoke get lung cancer, others do not. Some people that do not smoke get lung cancer, and some do not. There are no rules.
Of course, this is not an excuse to start smoking, but it’s a good example of how everything is relative and it’s about each individual. You must know yourself very well, which brings me to the next point of this blog.
Know your genetics!
As I said, it’s all about us as individuals. If your body is optimally healthy, you can smoke cigarettes, drink Coca-Cola and live for one century. On the other hand, if you know that you have a weak lung, you don’t smoke two packs of cigarettes per day. Perhaps, It would be good that you don’t smoke at all!
If you have slow metabolism and your body’s regeneration process is damaged, you should sleep as much as possible. Eight to nine hours of sleeping will be good for you as during the sleep our whole body rests and gets time to regenerate itself. Of course, someone who has a fast metabolism and whose body has a good regeneration process can sleep a few hours less, but it would be good if that person had a quality sleep, too.
Older people need less sleep
Wrong! As I said, sleeping is the time when our body regenerates itself and rest a bit. In general, when people are young, they are healthy and their body needs a lot of time to regenerate, so we sleep from eight to ten hours. People who don’t sleep risk having a bed regeneration process which will put their bodies into disbalance, which will lead to improper organ functions and diseases. Older people, some even in their young ages, sleep less as their body is already damaged. If you sleep less it means your body does not finish the regeneration process properly. You always need regeneration, no matter if you are eight or eighty years old. The more you sleep, the more you regenerate and the longer you live!
A perfect environment for long and healthy living
As we saw, it doesn’t matter if you live in big cities, towns, villages or mountains – it all comes to your life approach and your genetics. But, there is another sort of environment that is important for your life! It’s people that surround you the most of the time – your family!
Family is the most important environment for our lives. We all need to live in peace with people that love us. If you live in a bad marriage or spend time with people that you don’t truly care about you will feel unsatisfied and less happy. This will not contribute to your longevity of life.
That’s why you must be with a partner you love, have a good relationship with your kids, friends, parents, and even your dog.
Conclusion
This is the scientific and philosophical approach that stands by the latest research on living 100 years of life. It’s good to know how we can live longer, and we could try to achieve this goal but what is most important is how we live. We never know when our life will end, as it’s not in our hands. But the way we live definitely is! So, one of the most important things we can do is to make this life better by living it in a better way! Much happier and healthier!
And the recipe is the same: be surrounded by the people you love, the things you like, with a positive mind and love for life.
Sending you best wishes for your future 100th birthday,
your Environment magazine!
