It’s never too late to change for good and watching eight common habits can add up to twenty years to your life expectancy, according to a study.
And the habits we discuss below will not just make you live longer, but can significantly improve the quality of your life. All you need to do is adopt certain “healthy” lifestyle choices while eliminating the ones that don’t serve you well.
8 common habits that can make you live longer
The study conducted by Xuan-Mai Nguyen, a health science specialist for the Million Veteran Program at the VA Boston Healthcare System, and her team has shown that people, regardless of their age, can live longer by adopting a healthy lifestyle.
The study from July 2023 specifically highlights the below 8 habits, and men who follow all of them at the age of 40 were predicted to live an average of 24 years longer while women in their middle age who associated themselves with the habits were predicted to live 21 years more.
The research was conducted on 720,000 military veterans between the ages of 40 and 99, all of whom were a part of the Million Veteran Program.
- Increased physical activities – People who often exercise tend to live longer as physical activities showed a staggering 46% decrease in the risk of death from any cause compared to people who did not exercise.
“People who lived longer did 7.5 metabolic equivalent hours of exercise a week. Just to give you a baseline — if you can walk up a flight of stairs without losing your breath, that’s four minutes of the 7.5,” the lead author of the study said.
- Never smoking – While people who have never used tobacco reduced the risk of death by 29%, the study strictly eliminated former smokers. However, stopping smoking at any point in life was shown to be highly beneficial.
- Managing stress – As simple as managing stress reduced early death by 22%, according to the study.
While exercising regularly is proven to reduce stress-associated brain activity, there are plenty of other ways to lead a stress-free life.
- Eating a plant-based diet – The study claims you can reduce the risk of death by 21% by eating a plant-based diet.
You don’t have to necessarily turn vegan or vegetarian to reap the benefits, as the lead author says, switching to a healthy option such as a Mediterranean diet can make a significant difference.
- Avoid binge drinking – While there is a lack of research on the impact of moderate drinking on health, the 2023 study showed that people who consumed more than four alcoholic drinks a day were at the risk of dying early as compared to those who had less than the said amount, reducing death by 19%.
- Sleeping well – People who got a good night’s sleep – anywhere between 7 to 9 hours – reduced early death by 18%. However, you must get interrupted sleep regularly to eliminate early death by any cause.
- Positive social relations – Who you associate yourself with and the relationships you’re surrounded by determine the longevity of your life. People who experienced social isolation had a 32% higher risk of early death as opposed to those surrounded by positive relations with increased longevity by 5%.
- Opioid deaddiction – The opioid crisis in the United States claims hundreds and thousands of lives every year. The study shows not getting addicted to opioids can reduce the risk of early death by 38%.
