How To Embrace The Feeling Of Eternal Youth | Women.com

Do you want to maintain a young mindset and live life to the full? Here’s how to embrace your wrinkles and enjoy a life full of positivity and laughter!

How many of us long to stay young or return to “our glory days” of our early twenties? There is this societal pressure that says those should be the happiest days of your life and it’s all downhill from here.

These notions come from various forces and influences, largely perpetrated by the beauty and skincare industries. We’re in our physical prime as human beings in our twenties, meaning this is the standard of beauty that we should always aspire to.

This is, quite frankly, ridiculous.

For most people, their twenties are a time of uncertainty, fear, and confusion as they navigate the world as an adult with no life experience. Once you get out of this period and start to become more self-confident as an adult, society expects us to continually look backward to a level of beauty that you can never again achieve.

What The Evidence Says

An abundance of empirical evidence shows that the majority of people admit that they are happier in their lives and with themselves once they hit middle age. So, why do so many of us still believe the lie that we were happier when we were younger and had no wrinkles?

The scary truth is that we’ve all bought into the consumer culture that says we need to look young and beautiful in order to feel happy. Despite the fact that this isn’t true for most of us.

Next time you lament “youth is wasted on the young” or warn someone in their twenties that “things only get worse”, consider how you are perpetuating the cycle of this myth. Try to also think about whether or not you were truly happier when you were younger or if you prefer your life now—even with a few wrinkles and some gray hair.

How To Gain Real Eternal Youth As You Get Older

A much better way to think about the notion of eternal youth is to reframe it into something that you can actively seek. It’s not looking young or making cosmetic changes. Rather, it’s about feeling young in the way you act and the way you interact with the world.

1. Stay Curious About Life

It’s so easy to say that you love to learn new things. But to truly open yourself up to this process, you need to be honest with yourself. We all know the generic benefits of learning something new. It keeps the mind sharp, staves off dementia and other old-age concerns, helps us to meet new friends and so on. However, this isn’t usually a strong enough motivator for many people.

You need to find a reason that motivates you personally to go out and learn new things.

This could be as simple as learning how to play a computer game so that you can impress your grandchildren. It could also be learning Vietnamese so that you can do a bus tour around the country.

With your personal motivators in place, it’s a lot easier to stay curious and do all those wonderful exercises that keep the mind sharp and feeling young.

2. Keep Active And Healthy

A strong, healthy body is the quickest way to feel young. Nothing makes you feel older quicker than being unable to get up off the floor easily because your joints have seized up and your muscles don’t want to work.

Physical activity—even just going for regular walks—will help you to feel a lot younger because you won’t feel vulnerable or like you can’t do something. Remember in your twenties when your knees didn’t hurt every time you bent down or you could say yes to a 5-mile hike without thinking about it because your body was strong? That’s the feeling you want to get back to. And with regular exercise, you can get there again.

If your body feels good and strong, the wrinkles and the gray hairs won’t matter.

3. Learn To Be Bad At Something At First

This point applies to both of the above points, especially if you’re starting something entirely from scratch by learning a new skill or trying a new exercise. You have to accept that you won’t likely be great at it immediately. As we get older, we become very accustomed to being good at what we do. We get comfortable in our jobs, our relationships, and our hobbies, and we hardly ever push ourselves out of these comfort zones.

In order to learn a new language, take up a new hobby, or try a new style of exercise, we need to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. When you’re a beginner, you need to be kind to yourself, open to asking questions, and allow yourself the time needed to get better.

When you’re young, the fear of failure is far less, as is the fear of embarrassing yourself. If you want eternal youth, you have to tap into this lack of fear over things that don’t actually matter. It’s completely normal to be bad at something new, and you should embrace the process.

Eternal Youth Can Be Yours—Wrinkles And All

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to look your best and following anti-aging skincare trends. But as Ellen Berscheid said, “beauty is much more than skin deep”. So too, is feeling young!

It’s time to say hello to feeling young. All it takes is some time to reframe the way you think about youth and what it is that you really want to recapture about your younger years.

Sure, it can be hard to let go of the dream of regaining your young, supple skin and the muscles you so easily built in your twenties. But that’s not the be-all and end-all of being young. Give yourself permission to learn, be curious, stay active, be bad at something, and grow. You’ll soon find that those are things you really want to hold on to from your youth.

Remember—wrinkles are a sign that you’ve lived and laughed!

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