Singapore is the happiest place in Asia

Deepen your existing spiritual commitment.

Serve yourself, put the food away, then eat.

You have to know why you get up every morning.

Kids in a home with grandparents are healthier.

Have fun, be active. Ride a bike instead of driving, for example.

The happiest people in America socialize about seven hours a day.

Walking is the only way proven to stave off cognitive decline - it works.

Eat your vegetables, have a positive outlook, be kind to people, and smile.

The more things for which you develop a fondness the richer the life you live.

Black beans and soy beans are the cornerstones of longevity diets around the world.

A doctor may know more than a peasant, but a peasant and a doctor know more together.

If you’re eating vegetables you are probably pushing unhealthier food out of your diet.

Select your friendships carefully. Gather people around you who will reinforce your lifestyle.

Having a purpose and knowing exactly what your values are will add additional years to your life.

One of the big things I've learned is that there's an advantage to regular low-intensity activity.

A long healthy life is no accident. It begins with good genes, but it also depends on good habits.

The people you surround yourself with influence your behaviors, so choose friends who have healthy habits.

People who are making it to 100 live in environments where they are regularly nudged into physical activity.

The newness effect of a new thing wears off in nine months to a year, but financial security can last a lifetime.

Inconvenience yourself: ditch the remote, the garage door opener, the leaf-blower; buy a bike, broom, rake, and snow shovel.

The brutal reality about aging is that it has only an accelerator pedal. We have yet to discover whether a brake exists for people.

It's hard to reach [the age of] 100. We're not programmed for longevity. We are programmed for something called procreative success.

True happiness involves the pursuit of worth goals; without dreams, without risks, only a trivial semblance of living can be achieved.

So learning to play a new instrument, learning a new language - those sorts of things will pay dividends for years or decades to come.

Diet and supplements and exercise programs aren't what is achieving longevity. Having a faith-based community can add four to 14 years.

I live on the water. I live in a neighborhood that's consummately connected to my neighbors. I bump into them every day. I can bike to work.

The longest-lived people eat a plant-based diet. They eat meat but only as a condiment or a celebration. Nothing they eat has a plastic wrapper.

None of the longest-lived people ran marathons or pumped iron. They live exactly as their grandparents before them - surrounded by family and friends.

Drink without getting drunk Love without suffering jealousy Eat without overindulging Never argue And once in a while, with great discretion, misbehave

You rarely get satisfaction sitting in an easy chair. If you work in a garden on the other hand, and it yields beautiful tomatoes, that's a good feeling.

Of course, Minneapolis, we think, 'Oh well, it's cold there, lethally cold.' But the reality is you adapt to weather... Humans are consummately adaptable creatures.

I think we need to think about our physical activity as a reward, as something enjoyable and something we look forward to doing, not something that we regard as self-flogging.

Gratitude always comes into play; research shows that people are happier if they are grateful for the positive things in their lives, rather than worrying about what might be missing.

I know exactly what my values are and what I love to do. That's worth additional years right there. I say no to a lot of stuff that would be easy money but deviates from my meaning of life.

I think we live in a culture that relentlessly pursues comfort. Ease is related to disease. We shouldn't always be fleeing hardship. Hardship also brings people together. We should welcome it.

The luster of an experience can actually go up with time. So, learning to play a new instrument, learning a new language - those sorts of things will pay dividends for years or decades to come.

Actually, when you get into your sixties and above, you want to think about exercise differently. It's not just about you know cardiovascular or lifting weights. It's also about avoiding accidents.

So setting up automatic savings plans, and buying insurance as opposed to buying a new thing. The newness effect of a new thing wears off in nine months to a year, but financial security can last a lifetime.

The name of the game is to keep from pushing the accelerator pedal so hard that we speed up the aging process. The average American, however, by living a fast and furious lifestyle, pushes that accelerator too hard and too much.

The secret to longevity, as I see it, has less to do with diet, or even exercise, and more to do with the environment in which a person lives: social and physical. What do I mean by this? They live rewardingly inconvenient lives.

Exercise, from a public health perspective, is an unmitigated failure. The world's longest-lived people live in environments that nudge them into more movement. They don't use power tools, they do their own yard work, they grow a garden.

Life expectancy in America is about 79, we should be able to live to 92. Somewhere along the line, we're leaving 13 years on the table. So my quest is -- how do we get those extra 13 years? And how do we make those extra 13 years good years?

I have always followed exactly what interests me and never really worried about the money. And when you think about it, to be able to travel the world... on an expense account and do exactly what interests you, it just doesn't get much better than that.

The beauty of moving naturally, i.e. walking and gardening, is they're low impact. You're less likely to fall down and break a hip. Setting up your life so you're nudged into general physical activity every day is a strategy for your entire life from age 10 to 100.

Centenarians are still living near their children and feel loved and the expectation to love. Instead of being mere recipients of care, they are contributors to the lives of their families. They grow gardens to contribute vegetables, they continue to cook and clean.

We often think about happiness as trying to increase our joy, but it's also about decreasing our worry. So what you get for paying those high taxes is, if you're a parent thinking about putting your child through school, you don't have to worry about it, because all education through college is free.

If one fails to develop goals that give meaning to one’s existence, if one does not use the mind to it’s fullest, then good feelings fulfill just a fraction of the potential we possess. True happiness involves the pursuit of worthy goals. Without dreams, without risks, only a trivial semblance of living can be achieved.

I wake up in the morning and I see that flower, with the dew on its petals, and at the way it's folding out, and it makes me happy, she said. It's important to focus on the things in the here and now, I think. In a month, the flower will be shriveled and you will miss its beauty if you don't make the effort to do it now. Your life, eventually, is the same way.

The gym and the treadmill is a good idea. But the problem is we spend so much effort in marketing messaging, deluding people into thinking if you get on your treadmill or you go to the gym, that's what you need. People who join a gym, the vast majority of them have quit within nine months and almost all of them have quit within two years. So if it's a longevity strategy, does not work.

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