Tips to help you live longer
Sleep
Most people need a good eight hours a night. If we don’t get our sleep right it is very difficult to get anything else right.
Brain activities
The brain is best seen as a muscle: if we don’t use it, we lose it. Stress, lack of sleep and ageing break brain tissue down. However, it is elastic and every time we practice something, we rebuild that part of it. We should do as many activities a day as possible to stimulate our grey matter: reading, crosswords, balancing, kicking a ball, dancing, swimming, singing, drawing, speaking another language. The older we are, the more we should make this a daily habit.
Exercise
Twenty minutes of intense exercise that combines weights, balance and endurance is optimal and will help stave off heart attacks, and diabetes. It will stimulate brain development, boost the immune system, reduce stress and clear toxins.
Nutrition
Processed foods and sugars are bad; margarines, canned vegetables, canned tuna, ketchup, mayonnaise and soda drinks. For many years we had a blind spot for sugar, but the world has woken up to this toxin and governments are slowly putting pressure on industry to remove it.
Supplements
Antioxidants like vitamin C and vitamin E are no longer recommended in high doses. They may slow down our own powerful antioxidant systems. High quality fish oil and vitamin D have many benefits. Instead take just one supplement it would be a good quality multi-vitamin, three times a week. We don’t need it every day, but a few times a week should replace the minerals and vitamins we are not getting from our modern nutrient-poor diet.
Laugh
In 2017, Japanese physician Dr Shigeaki Hinohara died aged 105. He championed the concept that we should never retire, but continue working for society — as he did until a few months before his death. He was a fan of physical activity and encouraged people to climb two steps at a time, even after the age of 100. But the topic he was fascinated with was laughter — a powerful healer, painkiller and essential part of living younger.