For the longest time, we’ve been lied to. By the government, by the food industry, and by the pharmaceutical industry. Following the advice of any of these entities over the last century would have led you to tragic health outcomes.

Eventually, people realized this. Now, there’s a growing health and longevity space attracting millions. People are waking up and taking their health into their own hands.

I’ve read the top 5 books on longevity, hundreds and hundreds of pages, so that you don’t have to. The purpose of this article is to provide you with principles and strategies for living a long and healthy life.

Principles

These are the powerful books I read: Outlive, Lifespan, How Not to Age, The Telomere Effect, The Blue Zones Secrets for Living Longer. From these books I extracted the most important principles for longevity.

With these principles, I created a framework for anyone that doesn’t have the time to sift through loads of information. Let’s get into that framework.

Entropy

“Life is a miracle because of the chaos at a molecular scale.”

David Sinclair (Harvard Longevity Expert)

To delay or prevent something, it’s important to know why that something happens. In the world of longevity, we’re trying to delay and prevent death itself.

When you ask people why we die, they usually give answers like:

• “Because God made it so.”
• “It’s the natural order of the universe.”
• “All living things entropy.”

These are all valid answers, but for practicality, we are going to focus on the third. As far as we understand, death is a result of entropy.

At the most fundamental level, all living things are made up of cells. Humans are made up of tens of trillions of cells. Within those cells are our genes. Everyone knows about genes. Genes are why we look like our parents and why we’re able to have kids. Genes are the information of life.

As we live our lives, the functioning of our genes becomes impaired by processes of decay. They become dysfunctional because of the entropy or loss of information.

Longevity is all about slowing down and even reversing the entropy and decay that impairs our genes and cells.

Stress

“All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; only the dose permits something not to be poisonous”

– Paracelsus

Now that we understand what leads to death at the cellular level, we can talk about how to prevent it.

You may have heard the term “the dose makes the poison”. Spend too much time in the sun and you end up sunburnt. Spend too little time in the sun and you end up vitamin D deficient. We can apply this philosophy to stress.

Stress gets a bad rap because some of it’s negative effects on health. The stress that we want to avoid is long-term, chronic stress. On the other hand, short-term, acute stress is the single most powerful tool for longevity.

Now that we’ve reframed stress, let’s talk about the forms of stress that are great for longevity.

Exercise

Around the world, there are places called blue zones. Blue zones are places where there are a disproportional number of people living for a very long time. In these zones, you see many people living past one hundred and staying active as they do so.

One of the common denominators of these blue zones is exercise. The people in these zones are very active.

Exercise is the art of putting short-term stress on your body. This acute stress is powerful for reversing aging.

When we workout, we challenge our body to mobilize massive amounts of resources. This stresses our cells and forces them to adapt. This is why exercise makes us healthier and makes us live longer.

I like to split exercise and human movement into four different areas:

• Stability
• Strength
• Cardiorespiratory Fitness
• Flexibility/Mobility

To move great throughout your life, it’s important to spend time focusing on all of these different areas.

People used to spend time on all of these different areas naturally as they worked on farms or roamed across the lands. In the modern world, it’s increasingly difficult to engage in all of these different areas of human movement.

Luckily in the modern world we also have access to the most information dense tool ever created, the internet. We can use this tool to learn about the different areas of human movement and incorporate them into our lives. Our ancestors never had access to this tool. We get to use information to combat inactivity.

Plants

Plants that are more stressed tend to be healthier and more colorful. The stress activates the plants survival circuits. Humans have long had a great relationship with plants. They are packed with nutrients that our bodies thrive on.

It’s not certain why stressed plants seem to be healthier for us. There are theories, but it’s definitely the case that plants help us engage processes in our body that delay aging.

Eating a diet rich in vegetables is one of the most sure-fire ways to increase your lifespan and live a healthy life. You want to eat a diet rich in plant products including:

• Vegetables
• Fruits
• Nuts
• Seeds
• Herbs

A diet rich in plant foods was also one of the common denominators of all of the long-living blue zones.

Rejuvenation

We talked about how important short-term stress is for increasing longevity, however, we also need to give the body a chance to rejuvenate after short-term stress. This prevents it from turning to long-term, detrimental stress.

Sleep

“Sleep is Mother Nature’s best effort yet to counter death.” – Matthew Walker (Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology)

Every cell in our body is fighting against chaos for our entire lives to prevent us from dying. Sleep is our bodies chance to repair and grow without having to worry about moving around and surviving.

While we sleep, incredible things happen. Our body repairs damaged cells and eliminates detrimental cells. Our brain solidifies memories and practices things that we learned throughout the day. Our brain flushes out toxic chemicals that impair our cognitive function. These are just a few of the incredible processes that take place.

We still don’t fully understand sleep and all of it’s mysterious dream states, but thanks to people like Matthew Walker, we have a glimpse into all of it’s remarkable effects.

Engaging in proper sleep is equally as important as exercise and nutrition. Our society has long neglected it and we’ve suffered the consequences. Sleep is without a doubt one of the most important foundations of a healthy and long life.

Family

When we think about health, we usually think about exercise and nutrition. However, surrounding yourself with family and friends is just as important as these other elements.

Another common denominator in all of the blue zones was an emphasis on family. As human beings, we’re designed to be with family. Our biology compels it. This is where the term homesick comes from. Being away from family literally makes us sick at the cellular level.

As someone who moved across the country, away from my entire family when I was twenty-one, I can confirm this effect.

When I moved away, I developed a disturbed eating pattern that led me to gain thirty pounds. I spent months and months studying what caused this to happen. I eventually was able to get my eating to a semi-healthy place while living across the country. However, it wasn’t until I moved home that my eating finally returned to it’s normal healthy pattern. I attribute that to family.

Family is a bond that can never be broken. It’s a bond that keeps us psychologically and physically healthy. The power of family should never be underestimated. Our society has forgotten the importance of family and it has paid the price.

In an effort to not make this article go on for the rest of time, I am going to quickly add on friends and romantic relationships. These forms of social bonds are also essential.

Religion/Spirituality

Yet another common denominator of all of the blue zones is religion and spirituality. Life is order and death is chaos. Religion and spirituality are our psychological shelters from chaos. They keep us sane.

The psychological realm is often neglected when we think about health, but it’s equally as important as the realm of exercise and nutrition.

Whether you believe in God or you’re a Buddhist Monk, it is undeniable that humans have a built-in capacity to worship and connect with a higher power. If you neglect this part of your being, there are consequences. Those consequences include accelerated aging and bad health outcomes.

At this point, countless studies have been conducted showing the positive effects of religion and spirituality. There are many forms out there so it’s up to all of us as individuals to find the form that best complements our life.

Conclusion

I hope that the way I laid out all of this information has helped you to build a better mental model for longevity. I didn’t dive into every aspect of each principle, because I could write endless books doing that. My only goal of this article was to provide a helpful framework for understanding longevity.

I believe in the age-old adage that knowledge is power. I invite you to continue exploring all of the ideas that I’ve talked about in this article. I’ve written many other articles on this website that dig into specific strategies for fulfilling each principle of longevity. If you’d like to learn more, check them out.