All living things need good life routine. This is what we observe in nature, looking at plants and animals. Every living thing operates on on 3 cycles: daily cycle, moon cycle and a cycle of seasons (only humans added a weekly cycle!). The daily cycle is the one in which all of our needs and wants should be satisfied, just like it is with all other living creatures. So healthy daily routine needs to include good sleep, food and drink, physical movement, bowel movement, pursuit of one’s passion, compassion, empathy, love. Every day, not “some day”.
If we assume that longevity is any indication of health, it is a huge eye opener to talk to or look at lifestyles of old people, people who live into their hundreds. The first surprise is that very rarely they had a lot of money, growing up or into their old age. This may be explained by the fact that there is such a thing as “too much of a good thing” – all extremes suck, too much or too little is equally bad. Placing our dreams on getting rich is not a promise of good health and long life after all… maybe what we already have is actually all we need…
Another big surprise about lifestyles of very old people is that they typically “cruise” – have a good daily routine that they use every day over the period of many years. Similar amount of hours of sleep every day, same (or similar) time for breakfast and other meals, a steady job they did for decades, steady diet with a healthy variety of food but not to extent of eating different “international” cusines. They didn’t roam the world, lived in different cities or had a lot of partners. (Airplane crews and business people who travel to extreme freequency will tell you that lots of travel actually aged them very fast) All of this points to what we see in success stories of other species – change must requires adaptation and adaptation wastes energy that could have been used to heal or simply to live longer. Not to mention that people who live very long and have very steady lifestyles report very little disease in their lives so regularity and good lifestyle likely improves not just the longevity but also the quality of one’s life.
So bringing regularity and a good routine to your lifestyle could be the best start on your journey to better health. It is actually a win-win proposition as creating a good routing will certainly not diminish your energy or make you be less healty. It is not hard to do and it actually requires no expense – this may be why western medicine hasn’t done more in helping patients improve their lifestyle choices. And the fact that schools don’t teach human health and that there is little research into lifestyle and it’s consequences creates space for a lot of confusion about what the healthy habits and healthy lifestyles are. One easy example is extreme sports – the very first person to run a marathon collapsed and died at the end of it – shouldn’t that tell us something about the extreme effort from our body’s point of view? But it seems that in our race for “faster, better, stronger” it is too hard to stop ourselves anymore, there is very little space left for moderation and kindness towards one self.