Would you like to live longer?

On several occasions I’ve explained that when we stop giving meaning to the moment-to-moment events in our lives, we can virtually stop having the negative feelings that cause our stress and emotional suffering.

I’ve also discussed the fact that minimizing your stress can literally improve your physical health. In this post I’ll go one step further: I will show you how reducing your stress can actually have you live years longer.

An article in Time explains how stress decreases life span

A recent issue of Time (February 23-March 2, 2015) has several articles on aging and longevity. One of the articles, “Get Your Head in the Game,” describes numerous research studies that show a correlation between stress reduction and longevity.

I am going to quote several passages from this article to convince you that reducing your stress, everything else being equal (and a healthy diet and exercise are still very important), will improve your health and your longevity. And when you become convinced, you can refer to any of my blog posts that describe how to dissolve how meaningless events occur to you, which will virtually eliminate stress in your life.

“When studies look at which individual will die in the next three years,”

[Elizabeth] Blackburn [of UCSF] says, “the chances are higher if your telomeres are shorter. Telomere shortening plays into cardiovascular disease [and] immune-system problems …. The question is, Are there ways to intervene to spare the telomeres and preserve your health? The answer—at least preliminarily—is yes, and stress reduction is one powerful method.”

Optimistic people live longer

Another study showed significantly different health and longevity results for women who were optimistic versus pessimistic. Pessimism is the result of the meaning we give events. For example, if you intend to take action and you give it the meanings: I will probably fail. It won’t happen. I can’t possibly do it—you are being pessimistic. You can dissolve those meanings and the pessimism disappears.

Dr. Hilary Tindle, a physician and clinical investigator at Vanderbilt University, has produced a body of work on the connection between attitude and health, and all of it points to the improbable power of just being hopeful. In one massive 2009 study, Tindle analyzed data from 97,253 women who had filled out questionnaires for the National Institutes of Health’s Woman’s Health Initiative, trying to correlate hopefulness and mortality. Women who had scored high on optimism—being hopeful about the future—the results showed, had significantly lower rates of heart disease, cancer and mortality than women who scored high on pessimism.

Tindle also studied cynicism, which can be described as feelings of pessimism about other people, expecting them to be untrustworthy and even harmful [such expectations being nothing more than the meaning given someone’s actions]. Women with lower cynicism, compared to those who viewed most people with suspicion, had lower risk of death.

The evidence is mounting

And here’s one more quote from the same issue.

“It comes down to daily behavior and the choices we make,” says Elissa Epel, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), who studies stress and aging. “We have a growing set of studies of people from around the world showing that aging is not just an aspect of genetics but of how we live.” Deciding to live better, it increasingly seems, is the same as deciding to live younger [longer].

There are literally hundreds of other studies that show a correlation between stress, illness, and aging—and lack of stress, health, and longevity.

What are you going to do about it?

So the choice is yours. Using the Lefkoe Freedom Process to dissolve the meaning you give events all day long will eliminate your negative feelings and make you happier; it will get rid of your stress; it will improve your health; and it probably will result in you living longer.

Is there any other single thing you can do that will have such a positive impact on both the quality and quantity of your life?

An important note to my readers:

I had a successful surgery last Thursday (February 17). Dr. Madhulika Varma cut off about a foot of my colon and then put me back together again. She did an incredible job and the UCSF Mission Bay Hospital has a great pain management protocol, so I never felt any pain following my surgery.

I was released Saturday evening and rested at home over the weekend. It is now Monday and I’m back to work. I’m taking it easy for a couple of days, but I feel fine and am excited about writing my weekly blog post and handing my other pending projects. We will be offering an exciting new program next week

I will be starting a new protocol over the next few days to eradicate the cancer that my doctors tell me is still in my body. It probably will include high dose vitamin C, cannabis oil, GC-MAF with Goliac, and many supplements and vitamins.

I am totally confident that I am healthy and will be totally cancer-free in a short period of time.

Thanks for sending your love and healing wishes. I’ve received over 200 notes from readers during the past couple of weeks. Your comments really do mean a lot to me. I think that love from a distance can heal, as we are ultimately all one (like the ocean) manifesting as specific people (different waves). So sending love to someone at a distance is really just loving all of yourself.

Thanks for reading my blog. Please post your questions or comments on how reducing stress will not only make you happier and healthier, it also can increase your life span. Disagreement is as welcome as agreement. Your comments add value for thousands of readers. I love to read them all and I will respond to as many as I can.

If you want others to improve their lives as you have with the information on my posts, please share this blog post with them by using the buttons located below.

If you haven’t yet eliminated at least one of your limiting self-esteem beliefs using the Lefkoe Belief Process, go to our interactive online belief-unlearning program where you can unlearn several limiting beliefs free.

You also can find out about Natural Confidence, an interactive digital program that enables you to unlearn 19 of the most common beliefs, which cause some of the most common behavioral and emotional problems that plague us.

Copyright © 2015 Morty Lefkoe