Getting older is simply part of living. However, you might have things in your life that are actually causing your body’s aging process to speed up making you look and feel older than you really are. To prevent premature aging, you need to avoid these top ten causes.
#1 – Drinking Other Liquids
One of the ways that you can induce aging is by not drinking enough water. With all of the admonitions to drink between six and eight glasses of water daily, it can be easy to start turning a deaf ear toward the advice.
When you don’t get enough water – and instead, you replace that liquid intake with other fluids such as caffeinated coffee or sodas, you can cause premature aging.
That’s because caffeine has the same effect on the body that a diuretic does. It forces the body to get rid of water. You end up with organs not being able to function properly as well as dry, sagging skin.
#2 – A Lack of Sleep
Not getting enough sleep speeds up the aging process. When you lose sleep, the body experiences a surge of cortisol, which is the stress hormone.
Under normal circumstances, this stress hormone is healthy and enables you to deal with situations, but a steady influx of this hormone actually causes your body to slow down the production of collagen.
Since collagen is necessary for healthy-looking skin, your skin will begin to show the effects of insufficient collagen, caused by not getting enough sleep. Your skin then begins to sag.
You’ll also develop lines and dark circles under your eyes. Besides the extra cortisol, you’ll experience a lack of growth hormone when you lose sleep. You need this growth hormone to keep your bones from becoming weak.
#3 – Bad Habits
Not only can certain bad habits cause problems with the health of your organs and lead to life-threatening conditions, but they can also lead to premature aging. Smoking can cause a host of health problems that can shorten your life.
Smoking kicks enzymes into high gear that work against your appearance and health. That means that you’ll develop wrinkles, lines, bags, and sagging skin.
Not only is smoking a habit that can cause premature aging, but so is drinking alcohol. When you drink, the ingredients in alcohol destroy cells that your body normally uses in the detoxification process. These toxins accelerate the aging process.
Drinking also causes changes in how your body is able to handle blood circulation. This causes your body to age prematurely both internally and externally. One of the outward changes you’ll see from this impacted blood flow is the development of spider veins on your legs.
#4 – Stress
Everyone on the planet is familiar with the effects of stress. There can be small stressors that you have to deal with on a day-by-day basis. These don’t last long and usually don’t cause a lot of harm to the body.
But on the other hand, there can be major stressors, which can lead to premature aging. Your body has DNA strands that have ends on them known as telomeres.
Telomeres are what protect your DNA strands, and is instrumental in enabling your cells to be able to divide. When cells can no longer divide, they die. In healthy bodies, these telomeres have a longer length. In unhealthy bodies, the length is short.
These telomeres can be shortened by stress, which can lead to premature aging, disease, and even death. There are studies that link shortened telomeres to work stress, emotional stress, and chronic anxiety or worry.
#5 – Low BMI
With so many articles focused on making sure you have a low BMI (body mass index) to stave off weight-related diseases, it can be easy to think that having a low BMI is a good thing.
The leading cause of a low BMI is not carrying the right amount of weight for your body’s frame. While it might be tempting to think that the thinner a person is, the better it will be for their overall health, that’s simply not true.
A too-low BMI can lead to premature aging. What you need is a healthy BMI range, not one that’s considered too low. When you have a low BMI, it impacts the body’s soft tissue by causing a loss of it.
When this happens, your collagen production slows down and you’ll develop sagging skin and wrinkles at a younger age than someone who has a healthy BMI range.
It’s not all about appearances, either. A BMI that’s considered too low can weaken the immune system as well as cause anemia. It can also lead to low levels of energy.
#6 – Your Diet
When you eat right, you can stave off premature aging. When you don’t, you can hasten the aging process. Whenever your body has an inflammation issue, you don’t feel well and you don’t look well.
Inflammation impacts the body because it can make you appear to be older than you are. Some types of foods are worse than others.
High carbohydrate foods – even foods that aren’t considered junk foods – cause a breakdown in the body’s ability to produce collagen. Without the right collagen production, you can see the effects of premature aging on your skin.
But inside the body, your diet can lead to premature aging among your organs. You can develop a fatty liver, which is directly tied to the kinds of foods that you eat.
#7 – Being a Couch Potato
When your lifestyle is mostly sedentary, your risk of premature aging doubles.
There’s more to it than making sure that your muscles and bones can remain strong. Exercise can help keep diseases at bay that can be caused by an unhealthy weight or a sedentary lifestyle.
But one of the top reasons that exercise can prevent premature aging is that exercise protects your telomeres. When your telomeres become shortened, it means that your cells can’t divide as often as they would normally be able to.
This lack of division causes aging due to the death of the cells. What exercise does is strengthen the telomere, which has a preventative, anti-aging result. When you engage in regular exercise, not only are you helping prevent cell death, but you’re reaping all of the other benefits as well.
#8 – Depression
There are times when everyone can experience periods of feeling down. But usually, these periods don’t last. In someone like that, depression usually doesn’t cause premature aging.
However, when you’re dealing with chronic bouts of feeling down or have been diagnosed with depression, this is tied to premature aging. Depression can cause the body’s cells to age faster, which can then cause inflammation and other health problems.
People who experience depression can develop health issues that you would normally only see in people who were much older. These issues can include cognitive problems, cardiovascular disease, weakened bone strength, tremors, and muscle weakness.
Another reason that depression can cause premature aging is that it can cause the length of the telomeres to shorten.
#9 – The Sun
Being in the sun can cause sagging skin, fine lines, and wrinkles. When you’re out in the sun and there’s a bright glare, you automatically squint. This produces the wrinkles and lines as well as the sagging around your eyes. If you have to squint outdoors, wear sunglasses – even in the winter – especially if you live in an area that gets snow.
The sun can damage your skin and cause premature aging even in the cold months.
It can also cause a breakdown in the cells that lead to the development of skin cancers. Exposure to the sun’s rays can give your skin a dry, weathered appearance.
If you’ve ever noticed people who practice years of tanning, you’ll see that their skin tends to make them look a lot older than they really are. This is a direct result of the sun hastening the aging process.
#10 – PTSD
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) can be caused by either physical or mental stress. This can develop because of having experienced a physical or emotional trauma personally or having seen a trauma occur.
Your brain can only handle so much trauma at once. Your body can experience such a high level of stress at any given time that it can be an overload.
When you have PTSD, you can experience depression, insomnia, have higher inflammatory markers, and have telomeres of shorter lengths.
Studies done on PTSD and premature aging found that besides shorter telomeres and higher inflammatory markers, there was also a link between diseases that are normally associated with people who were much older.
These diseases included heart disease, intestinal problems, cognitive ability, and even dementia. People who struggle with PTSD were shown to have higher mortality rates due to the premature aging process.
Aging is going to take place for all of us. But there are many things we can do to slow down its progress. Some of that is physical, such as applying sunscreen, but a lot of it is a mindset and mental fortitude that you also have to work on achieving so that you live a peaceful life and age at a slower pace.
