The way you live during your youth has a considerable impact on how your life turns out as you age. Avoiding activities that increase the likelihood of contracting some life-threatening diseases helps you age gracefully. You should know that aging beautifully doesn’t happen by trial and error but rather by making smart, deliberate steps.
Cultivate Strong Social Connections
It’s a well-documented fact that human beings don’t thrive on being alone but rather survive and excel in tight-knit social settings such as nursing homes in Worcester County. It’s therefore essential to cultivate strong social ties from an early stage. Having supportive connections from friends, relatives, and colleagues impacts your mental and physical well-being.
The absence of positive, enduring relationships can cause both the mind and body to fall apart. It makes you susceptible to a myriad of health conditions. Loneliness is often associated with high blood pressure, depression, and poor sleep.
These effects become more pronounced in the older generation when these support groups break down due to disability, sickness, and death. As one gets older, it’s of vital importance to keep rebuilding these ties to avoid getting into a state of emotional decline.
Stay Physically Active
It might come as a surprise, but spending too much of your free time binging on your favorite shows is bad for your health. The average American watches five hours of television every day, and this can prove deadly.
Recent studies unveiled a connection between watching too much TV and an increased risk of developing heart diseases, type 2 diabetes, and premature death. Researchers found that watching TV increased the risk of type 2 diabetes by 20 percent, while the chance for a heart condition rose by 15 percent over a decade.
The increased food consumption and decreased physical activity that comes with spending too much time watching TV is the root of the problem. These health conditions ruin your quality of life and get worse as you age.
Don’t Let Stress Build Up
You’ve probably heard that worrying gives you wrinkles, but the truth is worse than that. Research indicates that psychological stress speeds up biological aging, meaning that stress contributes to premature aging. When you’re always stressed, your body engages a constant fight or flight mode, and that takes a toll on your body.
The body releases cortisol and adrenaline to provide you with energy to cope with the stressful situation. However, if the condition persists for a long time, it throws your body off balance. An overload of the stress hormones is associated with a myriad of health problems, including high blood pressure, heart diseases, and a weak immune system.
With time, the body loses its ability to regulate hormone levels, leaving you at a perpetual state of worry and anxiety. An overload of cortisol can damage the hippocampus, the brain part that stores and retrieves memories, increasing the risk of Alzheimer’s diseases.
Taking care of your health is the key to aging well and avoiding a myriad of complications. Some of the seeming innocuous activities have a far-reaching effect on your health as you age. They increase the risk of contracting some diseases that ruin your quality of life. Leading a healthy life in your youth enables you to be happy as you age.
