How To Foster A Longevity Mindset & Reap The Benefits
Dan Sullivan
What’s a longevity mindset, and how does it benefit your life and the way you age?
How long you think you’re going to live is perhaps the most fundamental thought in the human brain.
Adopting a longevity mindset changed my whole notion of the present. It suddenly made life more abundant and made me conscious of the way I care for my body. Now, anytime I think of my current age, I think of 156, the age to which I plan to live. This was double the average lifespan of a male in 1987, the year I created the goal.
What is a longevity mindset?
A longevity mindset is one where you decide and wholeheartedly believe that longevity is normal and attainable. With a longevity mindset, aging is abnormal, and longevity is what’s considered healthy. This mindset permanently benefits the way you live, think, and act.
I created a neat exercise for entrepreneurs around longevity called The Lifetime Extender; then, I observed how the mindset benefited them. Within one year, most of them were twice as interested in exercise, medical checkups, and resolving health problems.
When you’re committed to longevity, your whole being benefits, as does your mindset. You prioritize the things that foster longevity—like exercise, sleep, and a healthy diet—and you cultivate an environment and community that supports it. In essence, you prepare for the long haul.
How to foster a longevity mindset.
As part of my process of cultivating this longevity mindset, before I start my daily exercise routine, I visualize that what I’ll do in the next hour will be what I’m doing at 100 years old. This benefits my workout and makes me push harder since that’s how I want to be exercising when I’m 100 in 2044!
How will I do this? Well, I’ll just do it every day between now and then!
When we discuss longevity, Peter Diamandis, founder and chairman of the X Prize Foundation and pioneer in the field of innovation, recognizes that exponential technologies are transforming healthcare to catch and prevent cancer, heart disease, and neurodegenerative diseases earlier than ever. There are also age reversal technologies like gene therapy, stem cell therapy, and more. But the things we can do right now for longevity are simple and accessible: get a good night’s sleep, eat a healthy diet, exercise regularly, and have a longevity mindset that’s supported by your peers and environment.
There are five conditions that I believe benefit the extending of physical life:
- Always have an increasing quality and quantity of friends, so you’re never lonely (or the only one left!).
- Believe that there’s always enough money to fund your biggest goals.
- Know that the purpose for your future is more significant than anything you’ve achieved in your past.
- Constantly increase the level of enjoyable novelty in your life. It benefits and stimulates your brain and forces you to adapt.
- Be proud of who you used to be, and don’t try to escape your past. It’s a platform from which to build extraordinary things.
You can create a much bigger future for yourself with a longevity mindset. Longer lifetimes have been a constant quest. Today, we benefit from being in a period of history where this is a practical reality.
As Peter Diamandis says, “You don’t need to accept what used to be the norm. Change is happening now. Without a target, you’ll miss it every time.” He believes strongly that disease and decline are abnormalities, and longevity is normal. The science supporting this explains that aging occurs when genes become dysregulated in the body. The trick is to get the body back into the proper state of regulation—and keep it there.
So, create a target lifespan. Then, cultivate the mindset and lifestyle necessary to hit that target or even surpass it.
My daily motto? “Today, I’m going to give death no assistance.”
To go through my Lifetime Extender exercise, grab your free copy of My Plan For Living To 156. In reading this book, you’ll find that the imagination can have a massive impact on our behavior, and a simple mindset shift can literally change every thought in your brain. A longevity mindset is massively beneficial for maximum freedom and long-term vitality as an entrepreneur.
