Setting High Life Goals Leads to Healthy Lifestyle

Steven Petrov
The Paw Print

Confidence, self-esteem, and faith in the accomplishment of big goals and dreams, despite all of the difficulties and set-backs one may encounter, makes a person live longer. Scientists from Brandeis and Rochester universities have also proven that people who tend to set higher goals for themselves tend to lead a more healthy life. These facts support previously established conclusions regarding the length of a person’s life and their academic accomplishments. It has been proven that people without higher education tend to live shorter than those with bachelors, masters, or PHD’s. Both of these statements and findings can be true at the same time without being mutually exclusive. The one thing that connects them is the fact that in most cases a person who has a big goal to achieve, he/she has been to college, or both tends to have better cognitive abilities due to the large amount of effort, research, and self-improvement all the time that either requires. The better a person’s cognitive abilities, the better care he/she will take of themselves and their family, the better job he/she will have, and the better medical treatment one will have. This leads to the logical conclusion that it is much more likely for more intelligent people to live longer, which of course cannot be stated as a general rule because there are always exceptions. For example, the psychologists leading this national study, in which more than 6,000 US citizens participated, have found distinctive differences among the people with smaller dreams and lack of higher education. Self-control has turned out to be of a significant role in determining one’s potential length of life. The psychologists observed a 3 times lower death rate for the people who had showed higher levels of self-control compared to those who lose their temper easily and can’t manage their emotions and actions adequately.
This national study, supported by the US National Institute on Aging, has concluded that there is a positive correlation between one’s dreams and academic degree and the length of one’s life. However, self-control was found to be a hugely important determinant of one’s health. The study showed that self-control is so important in our lives that even people who lack higher education and haven’t put high goals for themselves are found to live almost as long as those who do have these things, but only when they have exceptional self-control qualities.