Dr. Stephen Sideroff
Today, we’ll focus on measurement and biomarkers of health, aging and longevity measurement is a key to behavioral and physical improvement. It’s important to know where you’re at right now. Your starting point, this gives you a baseline. From this point, you can determine your progress in getting healthier and more resilient. If you get your baseline and then engage in healthy behaviors and then retest yourself. You’re able to determine the effects of your new behaviors. You can see clearly your improvement. This in a sense, reinforces your hard work. So you can say to yourself, wow, these behaviors are paying off. I need to continue because now I’m going to expect continued success. It helps you be motivated and keeps you on the path of developing more healthy behaviors, thinking and attitude. At the same time, it’s important to guard against self judgment or discouragement. If a measure indicates some impairment or poor functioning, the best approach as difficult as it might be is to be accepting of whatever the measurement shows accepting doesn’t mean you like it. It simply means this is my current reality in the moment I can’t make it any different.
So I might as well be accepting of this reality. I emphasize this because any bad score can be discouraging, particularly if you’re someone who gets down on yourself, this then makes it even more difficult to make positive changes in your life. In fact, a key to emotional health is acceptance of whatever reality you’re dealing with. Many go into regret or self discrimination about past behaviors or mistakes. This only undermines your ability to do it right in the moment. Therefore, it’s important to let go of past mistakes as quickly as possible to give yourself the best opportunity to succeed. There’s a saying the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The next best time is right now, if you have a chronic condition getting upset or down about it becoming depressed or anxious, even though that may be, the tendency will only make things worse. Remember, we’ve been talking about the mind, body connection, your emotional state has a direct impact on how your body functions and how well it’s able to heal itself as difficult as it might be. This doesn’t change the reality that coming from either a place of acceptance or cultivating a positive outlook and expectation will help your body go into a better state of calm and this in turn will facilitate the healing process.
I like to say that no matter what you are dealing with, there is always a best way when you realize this, it already sends your thoughts in the right direction as you engage the process of looking for that best way it’s up to you and it’s up to all of us to find this best way, this attitude, one that’s positive, but more importantly, one that supports persistence and engagement and not giving up is a key component of success in healthy aging and longevity. So let’s take a look at some of these biomarkers and measurements. And in general, you want to be thinking about how you could measure your current behaviors, level of health. You know, in the path of longevity, we emphasize the importance of measurement, whether it’s biological markers, whether it’s getting blood tests or whether it’s psychological markers, such as looking at your stress response from a physiological perspective and seeing how your body responds to stress. This notion of measurement. This notion of where am I right now, let me get grounded in where I’m at right now so that I can now see how my behaviors, how my interventions actually show improvement is most important. So let’s dive into this today.
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