Let’s get this out of the way up front – aging is a natural part of living, and we can’t escape it. However, we can strive to remain as physically, emotionally, and mentally healthy as possible while growing older.
Sadly, many people speed up the aging process by engaging in bad habits or exposing themselves to adverse external conditions. This lifestyle-induced aging can make someone look and feel older before their time. Understanding the top reasons aging can occur prematurely can help you slow down the process and look and feel your best.
1. Avoiding Water: You’ve been told thousands of times that you need to drink more water. In fact, people hear it so often, they tend to reject the advice – but they shouldn’t. There is good reason to heed the guideline of drinking at least six glasses of water daily. As it pertains to aging, water is necessary to keep the skin moist, but that is not the only reason to reach for water before any other beverage. Most people replace water with caffeinated drinks such as coffee, tea, and soda – and caffeine causes dehydration and dry, sagging skin. Keep in mind, water affects all organs this way. Therefore while the skin is an evident sign of dehydration, all of your bodily organs are being adversely affected.
2. Not Sleeping Enough: A lack of sleep affects us in many ways, beginning with the way it can affect our energy, our mood, and our productivity. Those suffering from too little sleep don’t operate at their optimum capability and can even cause anxiety and depression. But not getting enough sleep can also prematurely speed up the aging process because a sleep-deprived body experiences a surge of the stress hormone cortisol. While cortisol usually is healthy and useful, a constant supply of cortisol decreases the production of collagen, which is necessary for healthy skin and hair.
Too much cortisol will also produce lines and dark circles under your eyes and even weaken your bones.
3. Smoking and Drinking: Smoking is now known to cause a host of issues that can seriously derail our health, but the habit also accelerates aging. Ingesting nicotine inhibits the production of collagen, which will cause sagging skin – but nicotine also thins the skin, making it look uneven and less smooth.
Alcohol also contributes to premature aging by causing liver damage and inhibiting your body’s natural ability to detoxify from toxins that cause you to age more rapidly. Alcohol also encourages dehydration and overloads your system with cell-damaging sugars. Finally, alcohol influences blood circulation, which ages you both internally and externally – often resulting in spider veins on your legs.
The wrinkling caused by smoking seems to be reversible in a noticeable way within a year or two of quitting. Although smoking a pack a day makes a person eight years older in RealAge (physiologic age), cessation of smoking can earn back seven of those years. Of course, the number of years you smoked before you quit determines somewhat how many years you get back. The sooner you quit, the better.
4. Poor Diet: It should come as no surprise that diet also contributes to premature aging. The wrong foods can cause inflammation, and inflammation impacts the body in a host of negative ways. Sugar-laden, high carbohydrate foods minimize the body’s ability to produce collagen and lead to premature aging of the organs, such as a fatty liver.
5. Low BMI: Because of the proliferation of weight-related diseases in our country, people are often focused on preventing a high BMI or body mass index. But too low of a BMI can also be detrimental to your health, causing a loss of soft muscle tissue and reducing collagen production. Because good health is not only skin deep, it is important to note that a too-low BMI will weaken the immune system and cause fatigue or anemia. Therefore the goal of a health-conscious person should not be to lower the BMI to be as skinny as possible, instead to maintain a healthy BMI range.
6. Lack of Exercise: A sedentary lifestyle is another major cause of premature aging – in fact, your risks double if your lifestyle involves sitting all day. While strenuous exercise is neither necessary nor advisable for older individuals, the body does need to get up and move to keep it functioning correctly. Two of the most critical ways that exercise can help to prevent premature aging are by strengthening your immune system and protecting your telomeres. Telomeres are located at the ends of each DNA strand and are vital in protecting your DNA and enabling cells to divide. When cells do not divide, they die. When an individual is healthy, telomeres have a longer length – but when someone is unhealthy, telomeres are too short to do their job.
7. Too Much Stress: Our contemporary lifestyles make it difficult to avoid stress. While some stress is normal, too many of us are under unhealthy stress due to financial woes or societal fears. Research studies have associated shortened telomeres to work stress, emotional stress, depression, PTSD, and chronic anxiety. If you suffer from any of these conditions or feel like you are drowning in stress, it is recommended that you seek help. Stress can destroy your emotional, physical, and mental health, but it can be addressed.
Aging is inevitable, but there are many ways to slow down the process and protect our overall health in the process.
If you are seeking better alternatives to cope with stress, quit bad habits, or manage your diet, call the experts at Longevity Wellness Clinic. We are committed to helping you reach your wellness goals naturally and holistically.