Achieving longevity starts with the correct mindset that inspires us to create positive life-enhancing habits and choices. This in turn, leads to the development of an optimum lifestyle with the ideal life situation.

The ideal life situation is enriched with happiness, opportunity, life-enhancing resources, inspiring and supportive people and the ability to enjoy life without the excessive strain of unnecessary negativity and stress.

Our past, current and future versions of our life situations have both short-term and long-term effects on our entire life and overall well-being. Therefore, it’s important to evaluate and create the ideal life situations throughout the entire journey of our lives.

Health span: the number of years in your life that you are healthy, fee of chronic sickness and disease.

Life situation: the assortment of all circumstances within your life that defines the quality of your life.

Longevity: for individuals, it’s the length or duration of life.

Choosing The Right Life Partner

Remember, your partner is the one who you choose to spend the rest of your life with through the ups and downs. For this reason, they need to be a compatible long-term mate, someone who you can trust, love and make life-changing decisions with.

We’ve all heard the old saying ‘opposites attract’. The difference in a couple’s personality may add a little spice and interest in a relationship due to variety. However, couples that have opposite mindsets toward major lifestyle choices usually experience a relationship with conflict, stress and occasionally the decline of respect and appreciation for each other.

When choosing a partner, it’s important to avoid anyone who is unsupportive, controlling, emotionally or physically abusive. People who get caught in these negative relationships usually experience a decline in self-esteem and self-awareness. Unfortunately for them, negativity slowly becomes the new normal. Consequently, the mindset becomes distracted away from achieving the desired quality of life.

Relationship strain due to opposite lifestyle beliefs and habits and or the strain of living in a toxic relationship can result in stress, anxiety and even depression. This negative situation can greatly impact your health span and longevity.

Having someone special in your life who shares the same interest in achieving optimum wealth, health and happiness is crucially important. Couples who share these core values live an enhanced life of happiness, health and conflict free lifestyle.

Choose a partner who you are socially and emotionally compatible with, someone you feel comfortable with. This should be someone you can share your thoughts, feeling, dreams and desires with, someone who makes you feel happy and alive.

In summary, choose a partner who shares the same life-enhancing values that support each others health span and longevity.

Choosing The Right Career

It’s extremely important to choose a career and workplace that truly make you happy. The average person will spend about 8-12 hours a day performing their job. For most of us, this means we spend about 50 – 75% of our waking day in the workplace. This equates to the reality that if you are unhappy performing your job, then you are unhappy for most of your day. From a phycological standpoint, this situation is unhealthy and increases the risk for anxiety, depression and other mental disorders.

Avoid any job or career that will put you at risk of workplace illness or that may shorten your life expectancy due to toxic or hazardous conditions. Many careers involve these conditions but still provide safe working environments due to strong health and safety policies and protocol. Avoid companies that don’t have their employee’s health and safety as their number one priority.

Always Manage Stress

Stress is a normal part of our daily lives, alerting us of potential threats and concerns. This is especially true when it concerns our well-being or the possible loss of something that we perceive to be important. However, too much and continuous stress in our lives creates havoc on the body both physically and mentally.

Here are just a few of the common yet serious effects related to high levels and continuous exposure to stress:

Heart Disease – Each time you experience stress you are putting excess strain on your heart which increases your blood pressure. This excess strain on your heart and circulatory system over time increase the risk of heart disease including heart attack.

Decreased Immunity – When you experience stress your immune system becomes suppressed. Continuous suppression of your immune system increases your risk of cancer, infections and other life-threatening diseases.

Accelerated Aging – Stress causes you to age faster. Excessive and or constant stress reduces the development of anti-aging hormones which lead to premature aging.

Increased Blood Sugar – Experiencing stress increases blood sugar levels. Continuous and long-term episodes of stress can increase your risk for diabetes, obesity, kidney failure, nerve damage and vision problems.

Increased levels of Stress Hormones – During episodes of stress, the body becomes flooded with stress hormones such as cortisol which can cause anxiety, depression, insomnia, a decline in cognitive function and increase the risk of addiction. Additionally, high levels of cortisol throughout a lifetime can lead to Alzheimer’s and senile dementia.

It’s virtually impossible to eliminate stress completely simply because our lives are continually changing and evolving. However, we do have some control in avoiding or preventing much of our stress. We can manage our stress levels by making changes to our current situations as well as changing our decision-making process.

Medical Screening And Early Detection

There is no question that many diseases can be prevented by maintaining a healthy lifestyle. However, there are some cases where disease and illness are beyond our control. Consequently, medical screening provides the ability to detect risk factors and the early development of disease and other medical conditions.

The enormous advantage of early detection is that it allows us to provide medical treatment before too much damage has incurred. Not only does early detection increase our chances for survival it can also shorten the recovery time in many cases.

Achieve Quality And Sufficient Sleep

Sleep is vital for normal daily function and the support of optimum health and longevity. Sleep provides an important restorative process for the entire body including the brain.

During this restorative process, the body naturally produces growth hormones that are essential for the growth and repair of cells and tissue that comprise the brain and other vital organs.

Additionally, sleep allows the brain to detoxify by flushing out harmful toxins and the neural waste products that brain cells generate throughout the day. This cleansing process is vital for overall brain health and reduces your risk of Alzheimer’s and dementia.

Consequently, inadequate sleep reduces the biological restorative process, thus allowing premature decline of health and the acceleration of the aging process. This process also strengthens the immune system which is vital in combating infection allowing the body to function normally.

Those who are continually sleep deprived experience hormonal fluctuations which often lead to weight gain. If not corrected this will eventually result in obesity, which is responsible for creating additional life-threatening health issues.

Another important factor to consider, the lack of sleep greatly impairs cognitive function which affects awareness, slows reaction time and lowers tolerance levels. This situation creates emotional instability resulting in increased anxiety and stress levels which negatively affect decision making. Poor quality decision making usually produces undesirable consequences which further increase stress, anxiety and the potential risk for injury or life threatening situations.

Always Find Happiness

Many studies have shown that people who are internally happy live longer than their unhappy counterparts. Those who live with internal happiness generally have a positive outlook on life and focus mostly on the good things and the potential for possibility. They rarely invest their emotions in negativity, thus, they usually experience less stress, anxiety and depression.

Many experts suggest that happiness boosts the immune system because of the reduced negative emotions associated with being happy. Happiness is typically associated with people who experience less aches and pains and who are less likely to develop sickness and disease. Additionally, experts have stated that happier people usually have quicker recovery times when inflicted with an illness or disease.

To promote longevity, be happy, focus on the positive, express gratitude and love, and of course, live each day with laughter.

Choose The Right Social Circles

In a previous post “Achieving Longevity – The Basic Mindset” we briefly covered a topic called “Finding Social Support”. In that topic, we talked about how like-mind people are attracted to each other and how this impacts the overall lifestyle of the respective social circles. In this section, we will revisit the importance of choosing the right social circles to achieve longevity.

When creating and maintaining a healthy lifestyle, it’s important to evaluate our social circles to understand the positive or negative impacts they have on our longevity.

The people that we accept into our lives have an impact on our emotions including our stress and anxiety levels, our level of happiness, empathy and even our tolerance levels. Additionally, they influence our lifestyle goals, attitudes, and our decision-making.

Consequently, these influences directly or indirectly affect longevity. Therefore, it’s extremely important to choose friends and colleagues who will influence your phycological well-being and inspire you to make good lifestyle choices.

Always surround yourself with those who are supportive and share common interest, dreams and desires. This will become especially important when you find yourself straying away from your healthy lifestyle goals. It’s at these moments, the support and influence of a positive social circle will motivate you to get back on track.

Conversely, it’s crucial to avoid those who inflict negativity and stress. Always remember, the right friends will lift your spirit and motivate you to live a life of success, vitality and happiness, all which contribute to your longevity.

Wealth – Achieve More Than Enough

Many will argue that wealth is unnecessary for living a happy and healthy life. This is true for many who live in regions where everything they truly need is either free or extremely affordable. Additionally, living without wealth would require living an entire life without unexpected situations that demand unexpected expenses.

However, for most of us, life can be expensive and present the unexpected. Therefore, achieving sustained health and longevity requires some level of wealth that provides more than just enough.

Wealth allows us to acquire everything we need without relying financially on others. Additionally, wealth also reduces the stress associated with the continued lack of money as well as managing those unexpected expenses.

To further understand why wealth is important, check out “Understanding the 5 Main Reasons Why Wealth Is Important”

Choose The Right Place To Live

It’s no secret that where you live is extremely important to the quality of your health and type of lifestyle you desire. Ideally, your location should provide the life-enhancing resources needed to achieve wealth, health and happiness.

Always choose an area that has strong social and cultural beliefs and attitudes toward a high-quality lifestyle. Generally, areas that possess a strong sense of community usually provide a variety of good social and recreational resources that promote healthy living.

Create Your Ideal Life Situation

Start extending your health span and longevity by changing your overall life situation. Create life-enhancing choices and changes that avoid or resolve negative situations that impact the quality of your life and your overall well-being.

Whether you are starting a new lifestyle at a young age or making changes at some point along the way, you are in the process of improving your health, happiness and most importantly the extension of your health span and your longevity.