We check our bank accounts every day.
How much income did you have this month?
How much money is left in the account?
How much has been earned from investments?
We are very concerned about the balance.
However, there is one account that we rarely look at seriously.
That is our own time balance.
Some time ago, I saw Alina Rui Su talking in an interview about anti-aging.
Her answer surprised me a bit.
A young person with a background in biological research, who studied for a doctorate at Harvard Medical School and is now engaged in research on human lifespan and healthy lifespan, when asked what ordinary people should pay attention to if they want to delay aging, did not mention anything overly complicated.
Instead, it was the few things we face every day:
sleep, exercise, diet, and understanding one's body and having regular check-ups.
At the age of 25, she has already started to think about how much time is left in her life.
Alina Rui Su is very young.
At around 25 years old, she has already entered a question that ordinary people rarely think about so early -
Can humans have longer and healthier lives?
She once studied for a doctorate in biomedical research at Harvard Medical School and later chose to leave the laboratory to do something she thought was more meaningful.
The Generation Lab she is currently involved in founding also focuses on issues related to human aging and healthy lifespan.
What impressed me most was, apart from her education, age, or entrepreneurial experience.
It was her understanding of time.
She once reminded herself with a very simple number:
30,000 days.
If calculated based on an average lifespan of about 84 years, a person's entire life is only around 30,000 days.
30,000 days.
When life is converted into this number, it feels completely different.
We usually say "There are still decades of life ahead", which sounds very long.
But when it comes to 30,000 days, each day becomes concrete.
I can't help but start thinking:
How many days have I used up?
How much of my time balance is left?
How much time balance is left?
In our concept, time is "limited", but it is just a concept.
I have never truly thought:
Time is actually calculated so clearly, and we can see it decreasing day by day.
Alisa said that many things in the world can be quantified, and time should also be quantified.
She once made such a calculation:
Assuming the average lifespan is 84 years.
She was 25 years old at that time, so from 25 to 84 years old, there are 59 years left.
Doesn't 59 years sound long?
But she didn't stop there.
She further "quantified" these 59 years.
According to her own calculation method, about half of a person's life will be spent on sleeping, eating, transportation, and other matters that maintain daily life.
These times are of course part of life, but they are not the time we can freely control.
So, after deducting this part of time, she calculated the time balance that she can actively use - 9,771 days.
She is precisely calculating how much time she has left and what she can do.
Bank balances can increase through work, income, and investments.
Time seems unable to re-save the parts that have passed, and It may be able to extend it.
One comes from the progress of future medicine, where the healthy lifespan of humans is constantly extending. A person originally calculated at 84 years old can live to 90 or 100 years old, and then his future truly available time will also increase accordingly.
The other one is ourselves. If we can take good care of our bodies, we can also extend our lifespan.
So, of course, we will be concerned about how to increase our human lifespan beyond the average lifespan?
It turns out that time balance can also be increased.
When asked, Alisa gave four suggestions for ordinary people if they want to live 10 more years:
1、Maintain sleep.
8 hours of sleep must be guaranteed
Sleep is really a problem that we need to pay high attention to!
Regarding sleep, I have also heard the traditional Chinese medicine health preservation theory before: from 11 p.m. to 3 a.m., it is an important time for the human body to have a good rest.
But most of us always ignore it.
Especially when we are busy with work, we always think that sleeping is a waste of time.
While the work isn't done, we stay up for a while longer.
While the phone hasn't been finished reading, we keep scrolling for a while longer.
Even though we are already very tired, we still think:
Let's keep going.
But now thinking about it, if time itself is a kind of asset, then sleep is definitely not a waste of time.
It is protecting our ability to use time in the future.
No matter how much time we have, if our physical and mental state is not good, what's the point?
So now, I increasingly feel that sleep is not a trivial matter that can be sacrificed at will.
It might be the investment we make for our future selves every day.
2. Regular exercise
Alisa emphasized that muscle content is an important factor causing your aging.
More and more people are starting to pay attention to muscle training.
Gyms are good places for exercise, but home training is also possible.
Once a doctor suggested: There is no need to go to the gym. Squats and push-ups can be done anytime at home. All you need is to start.
When I was young, my elder brother had to apply for a sports school and would run 8 kilometers every morning at a fixed time.
The daily running exercises made his figure very attractive and he walked lightly. I tried to run with him, but as a sleepy person, I couldn't get up in the morning.
Later, when I finally managed to develop the habit of running every day, it had been several decades since then.
And I finally found that feeling of walking with light steps.
If I had started running when I was a teenager, how would it be like now?
3. Diet
Three meals a day, as we often say:
With vegetables and high-quality protein as the main ingredients, reduce overly processed foods. Don't consume excessive sugar and unhealthy fats for a long time.
These are not secrets.
The question is:
Can we really stick to this?
Have we easily overlooked something?
Health is not something decided suddenly one day. It is more like a long-term accumulation.
How you sleep, move, and eat every day, maybe there won't be huge changes in the short term, but after several decades, the difference might be very obvious.
4. Regular check-ups
Alisa said： to understand your body, regular check-ups are very important.
When it comes to check-ups, I feel very self-satisfied.
I have been doing it once a year.
However, although I go for check-ups every year, I haven't really understood my check-up report carefully.
As long as there are no obvious problems, I usually just flip through it and put it aside.
Those medical indicators to me are often like a book of hieroglyphics.
Blood sugar, cholesterol, triglycerides, liver function, kidney function...
- What does each number mean?
- What is the normal range?
- Which changes should be paid attention to?
I actually don't really understand.
We all pay attention to the numbers in our bank accounts, but we rarely pay close attention to the numbers in our body accounts.
When the bank balance is low, we will be nervous.
When the investment account changes, we will immediately study the reasons.
But some indicators in our body quietly change, we often don't pay that much attention.
My check-up package includes dental cleaning
Once, after the dentist's examination, I was told that I needed a filling.
Because I didn't feel any toothache at that time, I quickly forgot about it.
Later, my friend told me that she had injured her nerve due to toothache and had to visit the clinic three times before her tooth was fixed.
This sentence made me alert and I went to the dental hospital immediately, fortunately, I had the tooth fixed in one go.
Now thinking about it, if I had waited until it started hurting, perhaps the problem would have become more serious and the treatment would have been more troublesome.
The true significance of a physical examination is not just to tell us "whether we are ill", but to help us gradually understand our bodies.
The most important thing is not how well she did at the age of 25, but that it made me re-examine myself.
Looking back now, I found that what really touched me about Alina Su was not what she had accomplished at the age of 25.
Nor was it because she was young, had a Harvard background, or was running a company related to human lifespan.
It was a young person who studied human health lifespan who, when talking about how ordinary people can delay aging, ended up saying the same things that we can do every day:
sleeping, exercising, eating, and understanding our bodies.
They seem so ordinary that they can't be more ordinary.
But from another perspective, they are actually helping us protect our "time capital".
- Sleeping well is protecting the body's ability to recover.
- Sticking to exercise is protecting muscles, physical ability, and mobility.
- Careful eating is providing the body with long-term needed nutrition.
- Regular physical examinations are finding it before it becomes serious.
So, "time balance" gives us two layers of meaning:
One layer is ：to remind us not to waste today and leave it for the truly important people and things.
The other layer is ：to remind us to protect our bodies so that there will be more time available in the future to use.
We can't recharge the time in the past, but we can start from today and strive to add some healthy time to the future.