The Secret to Longevity
Article by Stefan Burns - Updated September 2022. Join the Wild Free Organic email newsletter!
I’m going to share with you the secret to longevity.
This is longevity in health and lifespan, and the same concept can also be applied to various other parts of life like friendship, love, your career, etc.
First let’s examine the current trend for health and wellness advice, and wow is there an overwhelming amount of health and wellness practices that are good for you to follow.
Some are well-known and proven like:
Eat more vegetables!
Walk 10,000 steps a day!
Sleep 8 hours a night!
Don’t smoke or drink!
Get some sun on your skin everyday!
Others are very niche and promise magic effects:
Take this one supplement to transform your health
Avoid this one food to lose 20 pounds
Boost your cognition with this rare herb
Increase your testosterone 200% using this special light
What both of these categories have in common, one full of things known to benefit your health, the other possibly helpful but more dubious in nature, is that they are something new to do.
Add this into your lifestyle, change this, remove that.
Whether relatively simple or complex to implement, they require that you make a structural change to your life, whether that’s taking a new supplement every morning, completely changing your nightly routine so you sleep better, or shining red light everyday on your family jewels (if you have them) to increase your testosterone.
Yes that last one really exists (1).
Now I don’t want to discount the importance of structural life changes, whether these are dietary, lifestyle, work-related, or other…but what’s important to recognize is that the best advice, even very simple advice, often fails because it simply is too great of a demand for a very stressed person.
Just the thought of doing something different, even if a lot of what they’re doing currently isn’t helping them, is stressful and gets rejected and dismissed. When this is the case, even if sleeping better and activating their parasympathetic nervous system may be exactly what they need to solve their health problems, a different approach is required.
This different approach is what I believe is the secret to longevity.
The Importance of Frequency
Most people, no matter how unhealthy, are doing at least a few things right in regards to their health.
Consider the obese individual who enjoys a cup of herbal tea every morning, or the person plagued by anxiety who still goes to a yoga class once a week.
Prescribing a new concept, idea, modality, or supplement to these people, who are already overloaded to the max, is nearly impossible because there is simply no bandwidth available to implement the change.
What they can do that doesn’t tax their bandwidth is to increase the frequency of the healthy habits they already have.
These habits are already imprinted into their psyche at some frequency of occurrence, and it’s much easier to change the frequency of something that’s already part of someone’s routine than it is to add or subtract from someone’s routine/lifestyle.
To the overweight individual who drinks a cup of chamomile tea every now and then: Great! Drink chamomile and other herbal teas not just just a few times a week or one cup a day but drink 3-4 cups throughout the day! Mix it up, add in some other herbs like mint, chamomile, dandelion, which benefit health by:
Improving digestion
Shifting the microbiome towards greater symbiosis
Increasing metabolism
Improving cognition
Reducing inflammation
To the stressed and anxious individual who does yoga occasionally: Great! Now practice yoga daily, even if just for 15 minutes. Yoga benefits health by:
Strengthening the body
Increasing metabolism
Balancing the bioelectrical system
Increasing parasympathetic nervous system activity
Releases feel-good endorphins
The secret to longevity is to pulse goodness as frequently as possible
Spend more time outside breathing fresh air, meditate more often even if just for a minute or two at a time. There are so many things that can be increased in frequency safely that will greatly benefit your health and wellness if done so!
Whether you’re at the beginning of your wellness journey or further along the path, the more frequently you incorporate wellness promoting things and activities into your life the healthier you’ll be.
Whether it’s drinking tea or eating vegetables more often, making sure to get some safe sun exposure (and therefore synthesize vitamin D) daily, or to keep your body limber and strong by moving it more often, find the healthy habits you already have that can safely be increased in frequency, and simply do them more often! This will improve your health and provide you more room to then overtime embrace new wellness practices into your lifestyle, which you can ten apply the same principle to them.
This concept of pulsing goodness more frequently doesn’t have to apply simply to one wellness practice. It can be multi-faceted. For example it can be a cup of tea in the morning, then a 10 minute stretch break at mid-morning followed later by a healthy meal and a walk at noon…you get the idea.
Heath is a Wave
You can think of health as a wave that is slowly declining in power as you age. Every time you pulse some wellness goodness into your life, you increase the height of the wave slightly and improve your health, and the more frequently you trigger these upswings, even if minorly, the more stable the wave becomes. Then as life allows, bigger structural changes like improving your sleep, earthing, and changing your diet can be incorporated which cause those big jumps in health and wellness.
Lastly this concept of pulsing goodness more often in order to increase longevity applies to many other areas in life such as friendships, love, and your career. Try it out and see how you can transform those areas of your life too.
Spend some time considering the impact frequency has on your wellness and overall life, identify something in your life that you already do that you can easily increase the frequency on, and try it out!
My top recommendation for this would be to drink herbal tea more often. Herbal tea is amazing for health for a variety of reasons which I discuss more in-depth in the article below.
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References:
Ahn, Jinhee et al. “The effects of low level laser therapy (LLLT) on th e testis in elevating serum testosterone level in rats.” (2013).