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You never skip your skincare.
You watch what you eat.
And still, something seems to be missing. Do you ever feel that way?
The essence of anti-aging is not only care from the outside.
From within, from the level of the cell, from the brain: approaches like these lead to youthfulness in the truest sense.
Today, I’d like to suggest billiards as one such approach.
Youth begins in the brain
You want to try a new cosmetic.
You want to visit a café that caught your eye.
Your heart skips over fashion. That curiosity, undimmed, is itself a sign of youth.
“Subjective age” is a concept worth knowing about.
Neuroscience research has shown that the younger people feel compared with their actual age, the higher the density of gray matter in their brains, and the better they score on memory tests.
In other words, people who feel young really do have younger brains.
The key to this is the frontal lobe.
The frontal lobe is the brain’s highest center, governing curiosity, motivation and judgment.
As we age and the frontal lobe begins to decline, our drive to try new things fades, and the feeling of “it’s too much trouble” grows.
The urge to look after your appearance, the curiosity to try a new beauty routine: their fading is also closely tied to the aging of the frontal lobe.
Put the other way, by continuing to stimulate the frontal lobe, curiosity and motivation stay undimmed, and you stay youthful both in looks and within.
Billiards is a sport that strongly stimulates the frontal lobe.
Backward thinking, spatial awareness, emotional control: every single shot calls for judgment and concentration.
As this builds up, it activates the frontal lobe and helps keep your subjective age young.
👉 Why billiards is an intellectual sport: read more here
Stress speeds up aging
Work is over, but your head is still in work mode.
Things you have to do keep circling in your mind. Have nights like that been piling up?
When you feel stress, a hormone called “cortisol” is released.
Cortisol is also known as the “aging hormone,” and when it keeps being released chronically:
- Sleep quality drops, and less growth hormone is released
- The collagen that keeps skin firm and elastic is broken down
- Immune function weakens, making skin trouble and feeling unwell more likely
and in these ways it speeds up visible aging.
What if you had time to focus on just one thing, in a quiet space?
No room to think of anything else, simply facing the one ball in front of you: in that time, a moment may come when your shoulders quietly let go.
Billiards is a “sport of stillness.”
Before each shot you steady your breath, focus, and let go of needless emotion. That repetition builds the strength to manage your feelings.
Keeping cortisol from running too high, improving sleep, preserving the firmness of your skin: that chain leads to anti-aging.
👉 On the mindfulness effects of billiards
👉 Before the serum, walk. — On skin and exercise.
Telomeres tell how young your cells are
Have you heard of the twin study conducted in Denmark?
Even among twins with the same genes, the one who looked younger lived longer and had better cognitive function. That was the finding.
And one of the factors behind that difference is telomeres.
Telomeres are structures at the ends of the chromosomes in our cells, and they grow a little shorter with every cell division.
The shorter the telomeres, the more the cells age, skin turnover is disrupted, and wrinkles and sagging increase.
People who look young have longer telomeres and less deterioration of the brain’s nerve cells, and at the same time the cells of their skin and hair are kept in good order.
What matters in protecting telomeres is avoiding chronic inflammation and stress, and continuing intellectual activity.
As you keep going, your skin somehow seems to be doing better.
Your heart seems a little lighter. Small changes like these may in fact be happening at the level of the cell.
An intellectual, quiet immersion like billiards holds the potential, through less stress and more mental stimulation, to become an anti-aging way of life in the end.
👉 Applying it wasn’t enough. — Let’s talk about cells.
Brain and cells are quietly connected
People with curiosity naturally keep looking outward, at the world.
They go to see new things.
They visit places that catch their interest.
They meet people.
Small stimulations like these activate the brain further, move the emotions, and make the face more youthful.
When the frontal lobe is activated, subjective age stays young, and the will to care for your beauty does not fade.
When cortisol is held in check, sleep improves, and the skin stays firm.
When telomeres are protected, cellular aging slows, and skin and hair stay youthful from within.
Brain, emotions and cells do not exist separately.
They are all quietly connected.
To build that virtuous circle naturally into everyday life: that is anti-aging at its core.
And billiards is a hobby that lets you keep that circle turning while you enjoy yourself.
Enjoy yourself, and stay young
Anti-aging is not a duty.
What you can keep doing with enjoyment is what brings long-term results.
Skincare, watching your diet: none of it means anything if you can’t keep it up. On that point, billiards is an excellent choice.
With friends, with a partner, or quietly on your own: how you enjoy it is up to you.
And as those hours add up, they stimulate the frontal lobe, release stress, and protect your cells.
Before you notice, changes begin to show, little by little, outside and within.
That is the essence of billiards as an anti-aging habit.
👉 See the Yokohama Billiard Hall Guide
👉 Billiards turns out to be a sport that makes you beautiful from within.
Why not make billiards your next beauty habit?
References
- Kwak, S. et al. (2018). Feeling How Old I Am: Subjective Age Is Associated With Estimated Brain Age. Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, 10, 168. doi:10.3389/fnagi.2018.00168
- West, R. L. (1996). An application of prefrontal cortex function theory to cognitive aging. Psychological Bulletin, 120(2), 272-292. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.120.2.272
- Chen, Y. & Lyga, J. (2014). Brain-skin connection: stress, inflammation and skin aging. Inflammation & Allergy Drug Targets, 13(3), 177-190. doi:10.2174/1871528113666140522104422
- Christensen, K. et al. (2009). Perceived age as clinically useful biomarker of ageing: cohort study. BMJ, 339, b5262. doi:10.1136/bmj.b5262
- Harley, C. B., Futcher, A. B. & Greider, C. W. (1990). Telomeres shorten during ageing of human fibroblasts. Nature, 345(6274), 458-460. doi:10.1038/345458a0
- Epel, E. S. et al. (2004). Accelerated telomere shortening in response to life stress. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 101(49), 17312-17315. doi:10.1073/pnas.0407162101
