Nearing your thirties can feel bittersweet. As you age, you usually get more in touch with who you are and what you want out of life, regardless of the opinions of others. Many women in their thirties report feeling better about themselves and the lives they are crafting, compared to when they were still in their twenties.
However, in our twenties, we can get away with an unhealthy lifestyle and counterproductive habits without noticing many negative consequences. As you’re nearing your thirties, you will start to realize that you can’t go on living an unhealthy lifestyle unpunished. This blog post will help you understand which habits are important to stick to when you’re nearing your thirties.
In this blog post, I will mostly dive into the “why” of starting these habits. This is because your motivation and willpower to do anything in life will substantially increase when you know the reasons for doing something. I want you to finish this blog post feeling fully informed and inspired to maintain your health and wellness as you age!
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1. Fasting
If you’re interested in holistic health and wellness and have been into the topic for a while, there is almost no way you have missed the hype of fasting, also known as time-restricted eating.
But if you aren’t yet familiar with fasting, or just want your memory freshened up a bit, you do not want to scroll to point number 2 immediately.
Why? Because fasting is a profound yet simple way to influence many facets of your overall wellness, health, and aging for the better.
I repeat: if you are not yet familiar with fasting, you want to dive into this.
Benefits of Fasting
There are many (and when I say many, I mean many) benefits to fasting. Honestly, too many to list all of them in this blog post. However, these are some of the benefits of fasting that relate most to healthy aging:
- It triggers cellular repair and supports the process of removing damaged cells to turn them into energy.
- It helps regulate your blood sugar levels, which supports metabolic health and insulin sensitivity. These factors help keep type 2 diabetes at bay.
- It maintains the neurons and connections in your brain, supporting brain health as you age.
- It can improve cognitive function and focus, leaving your mind feeling less slow and foggy.
- If done correctly, it can help regulate your hormone levels (See below).
- It reduces inflammation in your body. Inflammation is a common source of all kinds of bodily issues, such as various pains in your body, skin conditions, digestive issues, fatigue, and headaches (to name only a few). Especially nowadays, many of the habits in our daily lives add up to the overall inflammation in our body, which is something we want to avoid as much as possible.
Fasting and Hormones
Now, there’s a caveat if you are a woman. Especially, if you are a woman struggling with hormonal imbalance and anxiety.
When done incorrectly, fasting can have a negative influence on your hormone balance, especially cortisol levels. If done right however, it can have a positive influence on your hormonal balance.
That is why women need to keep their menstrual cycles into account when practicing fasting. I highly recommend you take a look at Dr. Mindy Pelz’s work. As a researcher, she is highly passionate about fasting and its effects on your hormones.
She can tell you all about how to manage your fasting schedule according to your menstrual cycle, better than I ever could! She even wrote a book about fasting specifically tailored to women and their hormones, which is at the top of my reading list.
2. Increase Collagen Intake
Something you want to consider as you’re nearing your thirties is to start supplementing collagen. Collagen is a protein that your body uses to grow, repair, and maintain connective tissue in your body. Think of skin, hair, nails, bones, and tissue that make up healthy joints.
Collagen is therefore considered as the body’s building block.
Our body is naturally capable of producing its own collagen, but there’s a catch. After our thirties, our body produces less and less collagen every year we age.
Less building blocks available means less (re)building and repairing of these tissues. And thus your body will begin to show signs of aging, such as wrinkles, sagging skin, and stiffness in your joints.
Although studies on collagen for skin and hair are not 100% conclusive, studies investigating the effectiveness of collagen for improving joint function and supporting connective tissue health have shown promising results so far.
Regardless of the effectiveness of collagen on your skin, it is an incredibly dense and easy source of protein. Having a high enough protein intake is just as (if not more) important as getting enough collagen. So I consider supplementing with collagen a win-win!
3. Daily Facial Massage
Massages rock, and are an underrated technique to solve many bodily-related problems. Something I have surprisingly discovered quite recently however, is facial massages.
I have noticed the effects of facial massage after only one ten-minute session. Besides the fact that it just feels freakishly good to soften the tension in your facial muscles, my skin also appeared fuller, less dull, and overall healthier in just one go.
Now if this isn’t convincing enough already, there are specific reasons why you want to commit to this practice when you’ve reached or are nearing your thirties.
Benefits of Daily Facial Massages
- First of all, massaging your face increases blood flow and circulation to the skin, giving your skin a more radiant complexion. It also helps deliver nutrients and oxygen to the skin, as well as remove toxins.
- Furthermore, regular facial massages support the drainage of excess fluid and toxins from the facial tissue. This results in a more sculpted and toned appearance, as it helps deal with inflammation, fluid retention, and puffiness.
- It also helps relax your facial muscles. Tense muscles can increase the formation of wrinkles and can leave your overall facial structure looking off.
- Lastly, some studies suggest that massaging the face can increase collagen production in the skin. Now, as we’ve just learned, collagen is an important element in maintaining healthy skin tissue.
If you want to get started with facial massages you want to invest in a high-quality oil and could start by using just your hands. I also use this face massager and Gua Shua facial tool. It’s a perfect tool to keep on your coffee table. When in sight, it’s way easier to stick to the habit and get in some daily massaging!
4. Maintaining Your Muscle Mass
Unfortunately, collagen production is not the only thing that declines after 30. Another thing that slowly declines after the age of 30 is our muscle mass. As you age, your body will lose 3% to 5% of muscle mass every 10 years. It sounds like a slow process, but its effects will show over time.
Especially when you consider the principle of: You snooze it, you lose it. This principle also applies to muscle mass.
However, you can still maintain, and even get significant muscle growth after the age of 30 if you engage in exercise regularly.
If you don’t have any exercise routine particularly focused of building (or at least maintaining) muscle, then your muscle mass will inevitably start to decline.
Besides the fact that your body will age less gracefully, the effects of declined muscle mass will gradually show up in the form of a slower metabolism, a decline in strength and mobility, overall pain and stiffness, and a decrease in insulin sensitivity.
How to Prevent a Decline in Muscle Mass?
The best way to hijack this process is to engage in strength training exercises, such as resistance training, pilates or yoga.
Now obviously, if you enjoy exercising or if you’ve already built strong habits around exercise this shouldn’t be too much of an issue for you.
However, if you’re someone who just flat out does not enjoy exercise all too much, but wants to start building some habits to support healthy aging, consider a short and simple routine with compound exercises.
Compound exercises target multiple muscles or muscle groups within the same exercise. Talk about an effective way to maintain strength!
Start with these 3 compound movements, and perform them every other day.
- Squats: target your quads, hamstrings, glutes, core, lower back, and stabilizing muscles.
- Deadlifts: target hamstrings, quads, glutes, lower back, and upper back.
- High Planks: target your abs and obliques, your stabilizing spine muscles, shoulders, triceps, quads, and glutes.
5. Manage Stress in a Healthy Way
Stress is a part of life that is hard to avoid. Even if there would be such a thing as “being fully healed” (which – spoiler alert – there isn’t) you will still experience stress in your life. For this reason, learning how to handle stress in proper, healthy ways is essential when you’re turning thirty.
Think about it: You can deal with stress in all sorts of unhealthy ways, but the effects of your choices will always catch up on you eventually. You can ignore it and distract yourself with unhealthy coping mechanisms and unhealthy habits, such as unhealthy eating, drinking, or ignoring your problems, to name a few.
These practices might be effective in helping you forget about your stressors, not about relieving their impact.
I am sure you have a few habits that come to mind right now. You know these coping mechanisms only negatively affect your stress levels in the end. And even if they might help dissolve some stress, they still wreak havoc on your body and mental well-being over time.
Something you want to avoid as you’re nearing your thirties!
Instead of turning to unhealthy coping mechanisms when stress peaks its’ head around the corner, try practicing journaling, mindfulness, or taking a walk in nature. Cook yourself a nutritious stew, or engage in a tapping routine or intuitive dancing.
Stress is a part of life, which means it is here to stay. As you’re entering this new phase of your adult life, your job is to learn how to deal with stress through holistic choices, so that your coping mechanisms counter the negative effects of aging.
6. Continuous Learning
Keeping your brain engaged in continuous learning as you are aging is essential to keeping that cognitive powerhouse of yours energized. Similarly to muscle mass, the same principle applies to your brain: If you don’t use it, you will lose it.
As we are nearing our thirties our cognitive abilities naturally decline, especially if you don’t challenge your brain every now and then!
Studies have shown that a lack of mental stimulation can accelerate our cognitive decline, which negatively impacts our memory, focus, and processing speed.
Furthermore, it can also increase a brain process called pruning: A process in which your brain eliminates neural connections that have been unused and have become redundant.
No thank you!
Therefore, if you want to keep your brain alive and kicking you need to stimulate it frequently to keep your mental edge. Keeping your mind engaged and curious, and gently forcing it to make new neural connections continuously, will help your brain stay sharp.
Think of picking up a new hobby, diving into a challenging book, or watching a documentary about a topic you’re unfamiliar with. Even striving for new experiences or having a deep conversation with someone you usually avoid can count as continuous learning.
Keeping up with continuous learning will ensure your brain gets a daily workout.
Take Away
In this blog post I started a case for why you would want to embrace these habits into your daily life. Failing to stick to these habits will unfortunately spill negative consequences.
Not right this year, maybe not even the year after that. You might not even really notice it all that much. But your body will.
Therefore, reflecting on your habits and routines can be a great act of self-love, so you can hopefully consider making some positive changes. Your mind and body will thank you over time! I can promise you that.
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