Look at your hands. They’re one of the best predictors to tell you that you’ve been aging. Forget the wrinkles in the face, your hands tell a better story.
They’ve onced looked young and tense, am I right? Right now the skin may feel a little bit loose. Your bones might be popping out stronger than they have popped out just two years ago. The point is: Aging is everywhere and it happens rapidly. But there’s a way we might be able to slow down the process of it.
The True Cause Of Aging
‘Not dying’, is on the bucket list of Bill Gates. According to a Reddit response of him, this billionaire truly wants to rewrite the rules of nature. But aging is a very complex topic.
What differentiates living organisms from dead things, is that living organism are able to adapt to stresses. Your muscles will get stronger if you exercise with a dumbbell. Your muscles are getting damaged, repaired and then improved. Throw a dumbbell at a rock and the rock will be shattered. Permanently.
But here’s the thing: To adapt to certain stresses, your cells in your body need to divide. But: Your cells in your body can only divide a certain amount of time. Once your cells have divided themselves one time too often, they automatically go into programmed cell death. This is a defense mechanism of your body, the more times your cells are copying themselves, the more likely an error will occur. If an error occurs in cell division, it can lead to cancer.
The accumulation of dead cells in a certain tissue results in aging.
How to Prevent Aging
There’s a way that you can minimize the accumulation of the dead cells in your body though. With lifestyle changes you can slow down the division of your cells and minimize the probability of errors occuring in the process.
Pay Attention To Your Nutrition
Have you ever heard of antioxidants? These components of a food can help reduce the stresses that your cells face.
Plants contain 64 times more antioxidants than animal products. The plant group that has the most antioxidants are berries. But also beverages like green tea and coffee can give you a temporary spike in your cell defense system.
Start To Exercise
Exercising makes you look younger. There’s no science needed here, it’s what we realize on a daily basis.
Doing a workout is a short term stress situation for your body, but it makes him stronger in the long run. Especially beneficial in living a healthy life is cardiovascular training. Cardio, such as running, reduces the likelihood of heart disease, our leading cause of death.
Meditate Daily
This one might be a tip that you’re not aware of. Our life is busy. Often we forget to live in the moment and worry about the future or feel guilty about the past. This creates stress and leads to cell death.
Take some time out of your day where you simply focus on your breath, it could only be 5 minutes. In fact I used a checklist and started with 2 minutes each day and afterwards slowly increased the time.
Improve Your Sleep Quality
Last week I slept an average of 5 hours. There was a little bit more stress in my life than I’m used to deal with. This forced me to go to sleep later and wake up earlier, plus completely neglecting my sleep quality. I feel ten years older just after surviving this one, crazy week.
Sleep is a way your body can shut down and repair itself. The shutting of process is crucial for your immune system, which is responsible or your health and beauty.
Where To Start
I often talk about being in an upward and downward spiral in your life. Good actions often bring other good actions with them and vice versa. If you’re eating healthier your sleep quality and exercise level will also improve. If you sleep poorly your exercise level and nutrition will also likely plummet. Your habits are interconnected with each other.
What you need to do now is have a close look at your habits. Which one of these four pillars to prevent aging you could start with:
- Nutrition
- Exercising
- Meditation
- Sleep
Pick the one you have the most improvement potential and then start from there. Do everything to get better at that one pillar, without neglecting the other ones. Shortly after improving that one pillar you will notice, that all the other three will also be improved. Congratulations, you’re in an upward spiral now.
To see me further elaborate about this topic, in animated video format, click here: Youtube HD – How Not To Age
Featured photo credit: Pixabay via pixabay.com
