I couldn’t be more excited to be bringing you this special 3-part series on longevity and anti-aging! Longevity is one of the top, if not the top, interests and areas of research of mine that absolutely captivates me whenever I really start digging in.

We’re going to unearth several fascinating discoveries about longevity and living a long, healthy lifestyle – full of quality of life, just not years of aging. Parts 2 and 3 will come soon enough, so let’s take a look at Part 1 now:

What’s your reason to live?

That’s it. That huge piece of the longevity puzzle is now staring you right in the face. I see it over and over again when those vibrant, radiant 80 and 90 year olds get interviewed about how they’ve stayed so young. They’ll usually mention diet, but it’s never what they’re excited to share with everyone. What they’ll tell people, without hesitation, is that it’s all about having a reason to live – if you’ve got a powerful enough drive to stick around for awhile and make a difference, you’ll find a way to do it.

Interestingly enough, it’s this reason to live, this charge of the love of life, that actually keeps you healthy and vibrant now – as well as years down the road. It’s that huge factor that really determines your overall quality of life, affecting your body, mind, spirit, and emotional balance in every possible way. What is this reason to live? Can it be captured?

As I talk about in a chapter of my book “Why Is Weight Control So Difficult?” , intangible emotional comfort cannot be truly achieved through tangible means. You can’t take a yearning for love and connection to others and fill it with emotional comfort foods, no matter how much it seems to work in that moment. In the same way, your reason to live isn’t tangible – it’s an intangible feeling or experience.

For this reason, it comes down to relationships. It’s that relationship with your partner, with your family, with your friends…and with yourself. Your spiritual life, which many credit healthily to their longevity, really is about your relationship with yourself. From there, you’re able to truly enjoy your relationships with others.

But it’s also about doing what you love. Even with the best relationships, being stuck in a job you hate doing every day can take such a dramatic toll on your mind and body through unnecessary stress levels and so much more. It not only damages your own mind and body, but carries into all of your relationships. The best call for extreme longevity and anti-aging? Combining both for a driving, purposeful reason to live: cherishing your close relationships and doing what you love.

Check back next week for Part 2, where we’ll dive into more specifics on how to keep your mind and body in a state of peak performance…and stay years ahead of your peers!

Unleash Your Vitality,

John Brackett

Leave a comment below and share your thoughts, ideas and opinions on this post!

I hope that you’ve had a chance to think over what this term “lifestyle freedom” really means – the core concepts of natural health, personal fitness and lifestyle freedom are all intertwined but clearly not the same thing. To me, lifestyle freedom encompasses the first two and so much more. Lifestyle freedom is about living the lifestyle that’s calling out to you – the life you desire at the deepest level. The problem is that most people shut down and dust away those deep-seated desires that would actually lead to the kind of lifestyle they’re yearning so deeply to live.

Lifestyle freedom, as I see it, has nothing to do with abdicating responsibility or being “free” of your personal challenges, obstacles and requirements. Rather, it’s simply being authentic and genuine enough to live the lifestyle that feels right to you. That lifestyle may seem to come across as something like the social norm, or it may be the calling that’s so far out and so out of your comfort zone that you might try to tune it out. What’s important to realize is this: everyone is driven by slightly different desires.

Studying entrepreneurship, it becomes apparent that there are 2 main groups of people: those motivated by the quality of their own lifestyle, and those motivated by the growth of the business/brand/identity. Some people absolutely thrive off building up businesses, and are willing to let their health and relationships slide to fulfill that desire. Others put their own individual lifestyle first, and have their work become a means to that end – always placing health and relationships before their committment to their workplace.

It’s eye-opening to see that everyone is driven by their own unique desires and aspirations. It’s so easy for others to compare and judge based on their own perceptions, perspectives and beliefs – and to get lost because of it. Achieving lifestyle freedom has everything to do with listening to where you want to go, and not where others think you should go. Finding the balance of a lifestyle that works perfectly for you is paramount, because it affects how you feel every single day – your enthusiasm for your career, your drive to eat a healthy, natural diet, and your spark for personal relationships and connecting with others. Just remember this today: lifestyle is the only real difference between any two people satisfied or frustrated with their lives. Live the lifestyle that’s calling out your name, and you’ll find that stress and anxiety fall away as easily as they came to be in the first place.

Unleash Your Vitality,

John Brackett

P.S. I’d like you to complete a single, quick exercise for me. Here it is: grab any piece of paper and a pen or pencil (8.5″ x 11″ sheet of paper works best). On the top, write down the title, “My Perfect Day”. Now make sure you’re somewhere you can focus for just a few minutes here – write down all of the parts of your perfect day, from waking up in the morning to going to sleep at night. Don’t bring in the past here, but build on it. If you’re tired of going to bed at 1:00 am, write something like “I fall asleep easily and peacefully at 10:30″, or just “go to sleep at 10:30 pm”.

If you could have the perfect day (let’s say perfect weekday), what would it look like? Write down how you would wake up and spend your day, if you would work the same hours, if you’d change your routines and any meaningless habits and practices you may have picked up along the way. Write it all down and stop putting this off – give it 5 minutes and create your “perfect day”…you’ll be surprised at how much insight this gives you into your current lifestyle and the lifestyle you’re being called out to live.

Leave a comment below and share your thoughts, ideas and opinions on this post!