10 Secrets to Aging Well, According to Dr. Sanjay Gupta

There is no way to prevent aging. However, certain things are in our control, like how we choose to age. In this season of his podcast, Chasing Life, the doctor and longevity expert explores the phenomenon of aging, offering tips and secrets on how to age well. 

In one episode of the podcast, Gupta interviews his parents, mother Damyanti Gupta, and father, Subhash Gupta. He describes his mom as a "happy warrior" and explains that her overall positive attitude helps her with aging. "She's a person who grew up in refugee camps during some of the most formative years of her life. Maybe it's because of the hardships of her life, not despite them that she is so optimistic about aging and everything looking forward," he says. 

Dr. Gupta points out that another one of his mother's secrets? "Aging surely beats the alternative," he says. 

"The other message she was pretty clear about is that for the majority of people, it's not nearly as bad as people make it out to be," Gupta says about aging. "We can all age well. The reason some of us don't do it is because we don't believe it. We lack imagination. People who age well have imagination."

Gupta stresses the importance of a healthy diet, maintaining that "the way that you nourish yourself," is instrumental in how you will age. 

Exercise, or "the way that you move," is also a big part of how you will age, Dr. Gupta says. 

Another thing that will have a "significant impact" on how you age, is the "way that you rest," he continues.

According to Dr. Gupta's dad, a lot of people "age too much because they're worried about things that maybe some of them don't matter," he says. "Don't try to control the uncontrollable, which I learned a long time back," adds his mom. 

In another article, Dr. Gupta stresses the importance of not assigning a number to old age. "I am middle-aged – the point when a person is, jokingly or not, considered 'over the hill.' Yet that doesn't fit my self-perception: If you were to ask me how old I feel, I would say mid-30s. I consider my 50s to be the best decade of my life so far," he writes. 

He adds that erasing old ideas about aging is important, including "so many misperceptions around aging and about what getting older is supposed to look and feel like," he says, using "The Golden Girls" and Archie Bunker from "All in the Family" as examples. 

Finally, Dr. Gupta explains that we need to learn from others. "The real lesson for me is that when you really start to spend time with people who are older and listen to their stories, a much more optimistic picture emerges – not for everybody, but for a lot of people," he says.