Feeling younger, and looking younger, becomes more important as you age and grow older in life. Thankfully, there are steps and changes you can take to slow the aging process and maintain your youthful glow.
Sometimes, making a big change can be easy—simply doing the things you love with the people who care about you can profoundly affect how you look and feel.
Even something as simple as playing your favorite album or song from high school can help contribute to a younger attitude and recognizable changes in your mind and body.
If that sounds impossible, keep reading to see how simple it is to make changes that can affect how you age.
Tips For Feeling Younger
1. Prioritize Fun
Sometimes it can be hard to find time to do the things you love. However, studies show that participating in activities that you enjoy supports healthy aging and prevents depression.
Choosing to do what makes you happy as an alternative to being alone or participating in a sedentary lifestyle improves your positive energy, and no one can deny that positivity is visible. When you’re really having fun, the people around you will notice!
2. Gather Family & Friends
Often as we age, we spend more and more time alone. Creating a space to come together with family, whether it’s your own relatives, your chosen family, or friends, can greatly impact how you feel and appear to others.
Friends and family help you celebrate when you’re feeling good and support you when times are hard. The fact is, everyone needs someone to rely on. Having people around you helps create a sense of belonging and a network that can help you reduce your stress and better process emotions.
3. Spend Time Outdoors
Going outside to spend time in the fresh air is a great way to look and feel younger. When paired with appropriate sun protection, time outdoors is known to relieve stress and depression. In addition, getting out in the sun is a great way to stimulate vitamin D production in the skin, which is known to maintain healthy hair and improve immune health.
4. Travel Frequently
A repeated theme of anti-aging practices is to combat the increase in stagnation as we age. Travel is known to be an indicator of a healthy lifestyle, but studies indicate it may also have lasting benefits that combat aging.
Simple trips such as visiting local parks or national attractions and landmarks engage our social and cognitive centers and help encourage our minds to stay younger as we age.
5. Exercise Daily
Exercise of any kind is known to positively impact looking and feeling younger. One study indicates sweating as a way to detoxify the body, flushing out unwanted substances such as alcohol or other chemicals. Working up a sweat also helps by clearing out pores to improve your skin's natural, healthy look.
Another huge bonus to healthy exercise is improved posture. Fitness experts say exercise and simple work-outs that build muscle and bone health, especially in your core and along your spine, naturally encourage people of any age to stand taller, which can shave years off of your appearance.
6. Smile Often
Everyone knows that smiling makes you feel happier. When you smile, your brain releases dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins, relieving stress, pain, and even acting as an antidepressant.
More than just making you feel younger, smiling has also been shown to help make people look younger. For example, a 2016 study using computer-generated faces that were designed to appear either “smiling” or “sad” showed that participants labeled the smiling faces as younger in appearance.
7. Take NAD+ Supplements
A NAD Booster is an anti-aging supplement that works on a cellular level to make you feel younger and live longer. Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD) is a catalyst that works to spur your metabolism, naturally making you feel more energetic.
Supplements such as Healixir are known to increase the quality of one’s skin, body, and one’s own mental fitness. Aging is known to carry with it a host of aches and pains that can slow you down and make you feel older than you are. The relief of stress that taking a NAD Booster brings supports a better quality of life, which is the first step to a longer life.
8. Meet New People
Having other people need you creates positive, rejuvenating feelings that reflect outwardly. Meeting new people can seem challenging at first, but there are many ways to get started. One common way to meet new people is to participate in a local volunteer organization.
Social interaction is known to spur activity in the brain and keep open cognitive pathways that are at risk of shutting down as we age. Getting to know a new person can be a fun and exciting experience, often bringing back the feelings of meeting people when we were younger.
9. Start A New Hobby
Brainstorming new hobbies is a great way to keep yourself feeling younger and exercise your mind. Participating in new hobbies places us in the sometimes foreign position of being bad at something again. This sort of stress, sometimes called positive stress, is good for the body and the mind. Setting up and completing tasks has that addictive feeling of accomplishment.
10. Listen to Music
Listening to music may not seem like a scientific approach to staying young, but neuroscientists have shown that music we listened to as a young person stays with us our whole lives. The songs we loved as children have the power to influence our emotions, even in old age, and simply listening to your favorite album or looking up your first cd can bring back to life all of the same feelings from years past.
A famous experiment called the “counterclockwise” experiment showed the power of connecting with our past through music, media, and our surroundings. By creating a simulated environment meant to look like their historical youth, doctors showed that participants saw direct benefits to their quality of life. Over the course of a week, participants experienced increased quality in their overall vision, hearing, memory, and physical strength.
Feeling Young Is Often A Mindset
All of the activities above are common among younger people; from listening to music to exercise, young adults do these things daily. However, as time goes on, our opportunities to join friends or family and just have some fun can happen less and less often, so making a concerted effort in daily life can make a measured impact to make one feel younger.
People say the quality of our thoughts creates our quality of life. This means that even manifesting a younger mindset can help impact how you feel and how you are perceived. The added benefits of some of these simple techniques go beyond feeling, and can instill healthy habits that can make anyone live a happier, healthier, and younger lifestyle.