Unless you’re biohacker Bryan Johnson, you probably don’t think that you’ll become immortal, destroy aging, and live forever. What you can do, realistically, is embrace healthy habits so that you prevent problems, reduce the risk of disease, extend your lifespan, and increase the number of years that you can live a high-quality life.
The longer you live and the more energy you have, the more you can focus on the most important things: spending time with your loved ones, creating things, traveling, petting cats and dogs, eating delicious food, binge-watching silly TV shows, and taking guilt-free naps on cozy weekend afternoons, just to name a few of our favorites.
In practice, healthy living means focusing on the essentials: getting regular exercise, maintaining a balanced, nutritious diet, getting good sleep, staying well hydrated, and investing in positive relationships. Things like meditation and spending time in nature are also great for you.
Meanwhile, avoid corrosive stress, ultra-processed foods, smoking, alcohol, social isolation, excessive screen time, and a sedentary lifestyle.
On average, it takes roughly 2 months to form a habit. That being said, the amount of time to turn a behavior into something automatic varies a lot depending on the complexity of the task, your environment, and your personal strengths and weaknesses. Regularly going to the gym or eating healthy will strain you far more than flossing every day or washing your hands more regularly.
Broadly speaking, the more consistently you can repeat the behavior over and over again, the better.
From our experience, it’s also best to focus on changing one behavior at a time and making adjustments incrementally. Nothing demotivates you quicker than realizing you’ve bitten off more than you can chew and how big the gap between the less-than-perfect present you and the ideal future you really is.
When you feel overwhelmed with the dozen or so things you have to change about yourself, you start realizing that it’s easier to go back to your earlier lifestyle. Changing yourself for the better incrementally and slowly is, ironically, much harder because most people want quick results. But it is much more reliable than trying to become someone super healthy overnight, and failing the next week spectacularly.
Harvard Medical School points out that genetics accounts for around 25% of the variation in the human lifespan. The rest, however, depends a lot on what we do daily and how we take care of ourselves. Again, the goal isn’t just to live longer, but to also enjoy a good quality of life.
What you eat directly impacts your well-being. Healthy foods repair your body, replace damaged cells, and support your immune cells. Meanwhile, unhealthy foods like sugar, some fats, and processed products “can leave cells throughout the body more vulnerable to damage and poor function.”
In other words, low-quality food leads to an increased risk of various infections, illnesses, cancers, inflammation, and chronic diseases like cardiovascular problems, diabetes, and obesity.
Instead of gobbling down junk food, try to introduce more fruits, nuts, vegetables, seeds, fish, legumes, and grains into your diet. Minimize potatoes and red and processed meat.
