Turn-back-the-clock New Year's Resolutions
I want to be younger – not older -- this time next year. Don’t you? Of course you do. We can’t do anything about chronological time – it keeps on ticking – but as readers of this blog (and my book) know, we can do something, often a BIG something, about biological time. We can adopt habits and ways of being that help turn back our biological clocks and make us younger from the inside out.
The start of a new year can be an auspicious time to start new plans and projects. How about starting your own up-close-and-personal anti-aging project? In the spirit of New Year’s resolutions, I offer the following ten anti-aging action items. Research on New Year’s resolutions shows that 1) making one big, amorphous resolution – “Get healthier in the new year” – absolutely doesn’t work and 2) taking on too many resolutionary tasks at once usually backfires. So…start by choosing ONE from the list below. Choose another next month, and so on.
I’d love to hear what you choose and how it’s going. In the meantime, I wish you all a happy, healthy, vibrant new year.
1. Eat breakfast. (No, not pain au chocolat et cappuccino.)
2. Take vitamin D. (You need it, really you do.)
3. Moisturize daily. (All that oil you worked so hard to get rid of as a teen? Get it back.)
4. Get up and move for 3-5 minutes every hour. (The only thing sitting is good for is middle-aged spread.)
5. Hang out with upbeat, active people. (There really is such a thing as “environmental aging”: You become as old as those around you.)
6. Sleep more.
7. Try one new-to-you movement activity. (Some hints: Barre workouts, boxing, fencing, tabata, zumba, crossfit.)
8. Re-invigorate your curiosity. (Pose one question for yourself every week -- something you’ve wondered about, something someone mentioned in passing -- and dig into it.)
9. Hunch your shoulders. Now let them fall. Rotate them up and back, pressing your shoulders down and your shoulder blades together. (Stay that way. Forever.)
10. Close your eyes. Visualize your older self, your vibrant, vital, meaningfully engaged older self. (Hold on to that image. Forever.)