Growing older shouldn’t be your goal – but rather to live longer, live better. Growing old has a negative connotation, but exceptional aging, because you’ve chosen a healthy lifestyle, is full of possibilities no matter what your birth year.
If you ever study human nature, you’ll find that there are forty-year-old people who look and act like they’re twice their age. Yet on the other side, you’ll find eighty-year-old men and women who seem half their age.
What’s the secret to their success? Have they found an internal fountain of youth? Hardly. Their success is a result of making good choices at a younger age that led to a better quality of life in the best of their years. The choices they made had long lasting effects.
How can you live longer, live better too? If you’re thinking that needing to eat right and exercise is part of the equation that will add up to a longer life, then you’re right – and it’s advice that’s good and something we should all take heed.
There’s something even more important than eating right and exercising that plays a larger part in longevity and that something is your mind. You may know the old adage, “You’re only as young as you feel,” but what you may not know is that statement is only half the truth.
In reality, you’re only as old as you think. The mind is your most powerful tool in your quest for a good life. Maintaining good mental health is the key to a longer life. Part of the wrong mindset is thinking that you should work for fifty or sixty years and then once you retire, you’ll have time to enjoy life, to travel, to do all the things you’ve been wanting to do for years.
The problem with that kind of mentality is that life isn’t meant to be a long series of working hard so that you can later enjoy it. Life is meant to be savored as you go along. That means that you take the time to enjoy life right now. You travel now. You do what you want to do right now.
To live longer, live better, don’t put your life on hold. Don’t live in a world of someday. You know how that works. ‘Someday, I’ll take up dance lessons,’ ‘Someday, I’ll learn how to paint pictures,’ ‘Someday, I’ll travel to Paris (or wherever).’
You’ll be surprised at how much richer your life will seem by doing what you want to do in the present time. You’ll be more relaxed, you won’t have as much stress by planning adventures to look forward to and by doing it now, you won’t have the fret of saving for ‘someday.’
