People are social creatures and we depend on our relationships with others for our health and happiness. While we can individually make efforts toward slow living, finally we need the support of others and community organizations to be successful. Slow Cities meet this need. Like Slow Food, the Slow Cities movement started in Italy. Its organization is known as Cittaslow, which has spread to about 30 other countries throughout the world since 1999.

Cittaslow has set up 50 goals and principles, which supports communities as they protect the environment and build upon their own special qualities reflecting their historical roots as well as their strong desire or ambition for the future. This is not about nostalgia and following tradition closely; rather it is a call to refuse the forces of the same types that result in every place looking and feeling like every other place. By gathering together with others who share the same opinions or interests, we can start to include new projects to further improve the quality of life in our communities by using our imagination.

The basic part of Slow Cities is the idea that our health and happiness partly depend upon a healthy connection to the people and place where we live. The growing Sunday Parkways movement is just one great example of an activity that combines many of the well-being goals for cities in a fun, healthy, and family-oriented way. The Cittaslow website is designed as a place where ideas like these can be explored and exchanged.

The Slow Cities movement is not just about improving the quality of life of the citizens; it also encourages communities to develop their friendly and generous behavior towards guests, offering them an organized event, for example, a concert, a sporting event so that visitors can go through what is different and special about the area, really learning about the local culture. Slow Cities invite people to slow down so that they can see and connect with the rich diversity of the world where they live as well as the diversity of the world around them.

Humans have two different ages. There is chronological age (实际年龄), which measures how much time a person has spent on Earth, and then there is biological age, referring to how old a person seems. Many lifestyle factors like diet, exercise and psychological state can impact someone’s biological age.

A new study from Deep Longevity, the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Stanford University found that feelings that cause poor mental health like sadness, loneliness and general unhappiness add an extra 1.65 years to a person’s biological age. Meanwhile, smoking can add up to 1.25 years and suffering from restless sleep can add 0.44 years to a person’s biological age. However, being currently married can reduce 0.59 years, according to the study.

As part of the study, researchers said they came up with a new “aging clock” based on data from 4,846 Chinese adults in 2015 as part of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study.

The data included 16 blood biomarkers (生物标志物) like cholesterol and glucose levels as well as other health information like blood pressure, body mass index, lung function and so on.

Researchers compared the chronological age of CHARLS participants with the ages predicted by their new “aging clock”. The results found that the new age was roughly 5.6 years older than the CHARLS participants’ actual ages. The team also found that smokers and those with a history of stroke, liver or lung disease were predicted to be older than the remaining 4,451 healthy adults.

“Chronological age isn’t how old we really are,” said professor David Sinclair, co-director of the Paul Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging at Harvard Medical School. “We all age biologically at different rates according to our genes, what we eat, and how much we exercise. Biological age is what determines our health and ultimately our lifespan. Biological age is a number of candles we really should be blowing out. In the future, with advances in our ability to control biological age, we may have even fewer candles on our cake than the previous one.”

Many diseases and medical conditions are caused by things out of our control. Yet experts say you can control and even prevent many of the factors that increase your chances of dying. Experts note that an unhealthy lifestyle can put you at great risk of heart disease and strokes. So doctors urge us to eat healthy foods, get exercise, stop smoking and limit our alcohol intake. But there is something else you can do. And it is free and easy. Smile!

Anand Chockalingam is a heart disease specialist at University of Missouri Health Care in Columbia, Missouri. He advises his patients to smile. “When we smile, the brain wiring gets altered. The chemicals that are released are more positive.” He says smiling is a first step in fighting physical and emotional stress and sometimes the stress has harmful effects on human health. This is not just New Age advice. Several studies support Dr. Chockalingam’s prescription -smile more.

Disorders of the heart and blood vessels(血管) are the number one cause of death around the world. The main causes of heart attacks and strokes are blockages in blood vessels. These prevent blood from flowing to the heart or the brain. When you feel stressed or under pressure, your body releases many natural hormones(激素) that increase your heart rate and blood pressure. Cortisol is the body’s main stress hormone. It increases sugar in the bloodstream. If you are truly in danger, these hormones can help you. They are part of what we call our fight- or-flight response. However, when you are stressed for a long period, these stress hormones may lead to health problems.

Dr. Chockalingam says a smile may be one way to help. He tells his patients to smile 20 times an hour. To some, that might seem like a lot of smiling. Or some might even feel foolish... smiling for seemingly no reason. But a smile does not involve drugs. It is free and it has no bad side effects.

“Once people smile, they are relaxed. This relaxation directly lowers blood pressure, and improves sugar levels in the blood. If we are smiling, we are breaking that link between stress and health.”