An exciting idea came through me in the last few days. What if an awareness of your mortality doesn’t just help you live more fully…
What if it also helps you live longer?
Perhaps true longevity is not achieved through supplements, cold plunges or the latest bio-hack, but through accepting, on a regular/daily basis, the only certainty in life?
Sounds crazy, right? Think about your mortality and live longer? But there might just be a wonderful irony in this idea. Please bare with me…
When you genuinely grasp that your time is finite, something wakes up in you. Call it an inner guidance system. First and foremost, you stop taking life for granted. You become aware of the miracle of each precious moment of existence.
You stop drifting and start paying attention and in this headspace, you intuitively begin to want the things that a long life is actually built from.
When you stop taking life for granted and start to live in gratitude, you begin to look after your body. That’s because it’s the only life you get and you’d like it to carry you a good while yet. You also desire to feed your mind rather than numb it, so spending hours of your life doing things like Netflix bingeing, suddenly becomes less appealing.
On top of that, the relationships that matter to you begin to mend and you let go of the ones that drain you, and you stop postponing the things that matter most in life.
Physical and mental health improves. You start to sleep better and above all, you want to spend your days living a purposeful life, because it’s the only life you have.
In short, an awareness of your mortality means you start living your life in its fullest expression of ‘aliveness’.
That’s the part I find fascinating. Because when you look at what the science says actually keeps people alive, that list is almost exactly what comes up.
Here’s the science:
Take purpose. In 2014, researchers Hill and Turiano tracked thousands of adults and found that people with a clear sense of purpose simply lived longer, across every age group.
A later study in the medical journal JAMA found that a low sense of purpose was significantly linked to earlier death in people over fifty. It’s one of the threads running through the world’s longest-lived communities too: the Blue Zones.
The Okinawans have a word for it, IKIGAI, your reason for getting up in the morning.
The people of Nicoya in Costa Rica call it plan de vida. In both places, people carry a strong sense of why they’re here well into their nineties and beyond, and they last.
Then there’s connection. The longest study of human life ever conducted, the Harvard Study of Adult Development, has followed people since 1938, tracking their health across entire lifetimes. When the researchers went looking for what predicted who would grow old healthy and happy, they expected cholesterol, blood pressure, the usual suspects.
What they found instead was that the single strongest predictor was the warmth of your relationships. Not wealth or fame or IQ… the people most satisfied with their close relationships at fifty were the healthiest at eighty.
And it cuts the other way too. A major review by the researcher Julianne Holt-Lunstad, pooling data from over three hundred thousand people, found that strong relationships improve your odds of survival by around 50%, and that loneliness carries a mortality risk comparable to smoking.
Just sit with that for a moment… purpose extends life. Connection extends life. Looking after your body and mind extends life. These aren’t wellness slogans, they’re some of the most robust findings out there.
Now back to my hypothesis
Most approaches to health go after these things one at a time. For example, a diet for the body. Or therapy for the mind. A course on finding your purpose. A push to see friends more etc etc. Useful, but piecemeal, and easy to let slide.
Aliveness doesn’t work like that as it doesn’t target one lever. It reaches underneath and flips the master switch. Because when you truly understand your time is limited, you don’t have to force yourself to eat better or call your brother or find your purpose. You want to. The motivation stops being discipline and becomes clarity. One shift at the root, and all the branches move.
I’ve felt this in my own life. Since I started practicing Aliveness I sleep better, I move more and I’m a nicer human being. I’ve cut out the things that were quietly poisoning me, not because I’m trying hard, but because wasting a finite life on them stopped making sense. The self care came as a side effect of waking up.
Please note, this longevity idea is just a hypothesis, not a proven fact. As far as I am aware, nobody has run the study that isolates “practising mortality awareness” and measures the years it adds.
The science confirms each ingredient separately. The claim that Aliveness switches them all on at once, from a single root, is an idea I’m am going to start testing and thinking through.
But I sense it points somewhere hopeful, and delightfully upside down.
We treat death as the enemy of a long life… but what if turning to face it is one of the most life-giving things a person can do? The very thing that would have us living fuller, healthier, and LONGER?
The irony would be quite something. That to live long, you first have to make peace with dying. Because when you do that, you intuitively begin to step into your deepest potential and purpose in life… the very energy that fuels your aliveness.
Practice Aliveness here.
This week’s question:
If you knew that facing your mortality could help you live longer, what is one thing you would start doing differently today?
Please reply in the comments - your answer may inspire others.
Thank you for being here. Make the most of the time you have.
Live happy,
Hoppy
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If this article landed with you, please share it with one person who needs it.
I am a former CEO, filmmaker, Soul Midwife and Druidic Bard. Several times in my life, the life I was living no longer aligned with the person I had become. Finding the courage to make difficult changes led me closer and closer to my purpose, and eventually to work I could never have imagined doing today. Aliveness grew from that journey, with a dream that it might one day become as impactful as Mindfulness: a daily practice that helps people live more bravely, leave fewer regrets and build a more present and generous world.
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What’s Next?
Sat Nov 14th - I am teaching my Aliveness Workshop at the Carl Jung Centre in Texas - link to book tickets will be released soon.
I will start to release my brand new ‘Aliveness Book’ one chapter at a time, to paid subscribers.
I will start giving monthly Aliveness workshops at La Ecovilla community in Costa Rica, where I am now living.
If you would like me to give my 2 hour Aliveness workshop - please get in touch: hello@aliveness.be
