7 Everyday Activities That Reduce Your Lifespan

 Research has shown that unhealthy habits can take away as many as eight years of life, on average. Sometimes, even the smallest everyday activities we partake in can greatly affect our health and vitality. Take a look at these seven everyday activities that can reduce your lifespan.


Personal traits like optimism and pessimism can greatly affect many areas of your well-being and general health. The thing about negative thoughts is that they promote and heighten stress levels and reflect what you think about yourself. If you can approach a situation with positivity, and not negativity, you will be more productive and determined. The effects of positive thinking can yield increased life span, lower rates of depression and stress, and even reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease.

A key to leading a healthy life is eating healthy foods. Too much intake of processed foods can cause an array of health problems including diabetes, heart disease, and even increased risks cancer. The key to processed foods is moderation of high saturated fats and sugar products.

Believe it or not, there may be conditions of living in a highly urbanized environment that can degrade your health. Surrounded by pollution, noise, millions of strangers, lights, pavement, and a lack of nature, city life can be harmful for our mental and physical health. Urban designers are faced with an important milestone: for the time in history, the majority of the world’s populations are now living in urbanized cities. This poses a plethora of problems that deal with housing, health, environment, and social conditions.

Nearly four billion people around the world are using cell phones — and more signing up by the very minute. It’s an alarming concept to think that the combined radiation, even though they are low-level radio-frequencies, from all these cell phones could potentially affect our health adversely. While the wireless industry affirms that radiation from cell phones lacks the strength to alter molecules in the human body and lead to cancer, other scientists are not so quick to label them as completely safe.

According to researchers at a Toronto Hospital, every hour spent behind the wheel could lead to a 20-minute loss in life expectancy. If you factor in tiredness, stress, traffic, weather conditions, mindlessness, and road conditions, the chances for crashes increase dramatically. Many people are getting behind the wheel too emotionally charged or under the influence to drive safely, which affects everyone else on the road. Fatal accidents continue to be a leading cause of death for young and older people alike.

Nowadays we have laptops, desktops, advanced TV sets, gaming systems, and cell phones. All these technologies have one thing in common that is not only bad for your health, but may be life-threatening: you have to stare at a screen. According to the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, increased risks of heart attacks and strokes are more prevalent in people who spend more than four hours in front of a screen a day. Aside from harmful effects to your vision, this study may also not account for another factor that comes with simply looking at a screen – it indicated prolonged sitting or periods of inactivity.

Conditions like insomnia, anxiety, attention deficit disorders, and depression are not life-threatening, but may impose many inconveniences in our lifestyle. Many people who regularly take medications to treat these conditions, may experience distressful side effects like decreased alertness and coordination, time sensitivity, breathing problems, and misjudgment. The concern about these psychiatric medications is that they are increasingly being prescribed for people who show little or no signs of what the medication is supposed to treat. Since the FDA does not require many drug companies to provide long-term effectiveness of a particular drug, it falls to people to make the right choices in which medications to take.

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