What a 117-Year-Old Woman Teaches Us About Stress and Living Longer

What if the biggest thing standing between you and living longer and feeling better isn't the turmeric supplement you're taking — but the pace you've been living your life?

If you're constantly searching for the next wellness trend, morning routine, or anti-aging solution, you're not alone. So many women feel like they're doing everything "right"—yet they're still exhausted, inflamed, sleeping poorly, or wondering why their body doesn't feel like it used to.

Maybe your body isn't asking you to try harder. Maybe it's asking you to stop living in survival mode.

In this episode, we look at the remarkable life of a woman who lived to 117 years old—and why researchers believe her longevity had less to do with one "superfood" and more to do with the rhythm of her daily life. Her story challenges the belief that healthy aging comes from perfect habits or constant wellness optimization and instead points us toward something much simpler: consistent nourishment, meaningful connection, emotional steadiness, and a life your body can actually sustain. 

🎧 Press play to discover why your body responds more to the environment you create every day than to the latest wellness trend—and how small, sustainable rhythms may be one of the most powerful investments you can make in your long-term health.

Resources

✨ Feeling like stress is aging your body faster than it should? Take my free Hidden Stress Pattern Quiz to discover how chronic stress may be affecting your energy, digestion, sleep, and daily rhythms—and receive personalized next steps to help your body feel supported again.

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Chelsea Johnson Ayurveda / The Body Rhythm

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:00

How differently we approach health today, because we treat the body like a problem to optimize, to fix, to force, to control. But what if the body responds less to how hard we try and more to the environment we create around it? The environment that we create around it day after day, month after month, year after year. And maybe longevity isn't about perfection or the next hyped supplement. Maybe it's about a sustainable rhythm. And I think a lot of women are exhausted from trying to do health correctly.

SPEAKER_00 0:44

Welcome to the Body Rhythm Podcast, the podcast for women who are ready to stop pushing through and start feeling like themselves again. I'm CJ, Ayurvedic Wellness Guide, helping women reconnect to the natural rhythm their bodies have been craving. But it wasn't that long ago that I was exhausted in a way that sleep didn't fix, bloated no matter what I ate, and lying awake at 3 a.m. with my mind already running tomorrow's to-do list. I thought I just needed to be more consistent, more disciplined. I didn't realize that my body wasn't feeling me. It was completely overwhelmed because you're not broken. You've just been living outside your natural rhythm for a long time.

SPEAKER_01 1:32

Hello and welcome to another episode of The Body Rhythm. I'm Chelsea. Thank you for joining me this week. And if you haven't already, please like and subscribe. And let's get to it. So recently I was reading this article, and it was looking at the life of a woman that has lived to be 117 years old. Yes, you heard that right. 117 years old. Olive oil, yogurt, some secret longevity food. But what stood out to me, because I'm a yogi and Ayurveda practitioner, was something totally different than any of that. So what the researchers found was that this 117-year-old woman had low inflammation. She had a strong, diverse gut microbiome. She had emotional steadiness. She had a daily routine. She had close family connection and a life that seemed to support her body instead of constantly pushing against it. And it wasn't one food, it was actually the rhythm of her life. And that is something that I have constantly felt connected to and tried to bring to all of my students. And it made me think about how differently we approach health today, because we treat the body like a problem to optimize, to fix, to force, to control. But what if the body responds less to how hard we try and more to the environment we create around it? The environment that we create around it day after day, month after month, year after year. And maybe longevity isn't about perfection or the next hyplement. Maybe it's about a sustainable rhythm. And I think a lot of women are exhausted from trying to do health correctly. There's always another supplement, another morning routine, another anti-aging trend, another biohack. And underneath most of that is fear. Fear of aging, fear of slowing down, fear of doing something different that isn't glamorized by culture or Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, right? But when researchers study people, study this woman who actually have lived a long, healthy life, the same themes keep showing up: nourishment, movement, community, lower stress, sense of purpose, emotional connection, and daily consistency, daily rhythm. Nowhere on that list is perfection. Nowhere on that list is the keto diet, right? And it's definitely not a nervous system that's been running on overload for 50 years. Something that I talk about often is how our nervous system affects everything. The nervous system affects digestion and inflammation, hormones, reproduction, sleep, immunity, how well your body recovers from anything. But when the body stays in chronic survival mode for years and years and years, it changes how we age. The woman in this study, her name was Maria Branas Moreira. I hope I got that right. Researchers found markers in her, in her um workup, which reduced inflammation. And she had a gut microbiome that looked significantly younger than expected for someone her age. And I found that particularly fascinating because we tend to know that the gut microbiome is tied to immune health and inflammation and mental health and metabolism and resilience. The gut microbiome has a two-way communication pathway with the brain. The brain talks to the gut, the gut talks to the brain. And so stress affects every one of these symptoms. And so when I say that the body is always adapting to the environment it lives in, I don't just mean the outside environment. I also mean the internal environment, the emotional environment. And I think a lot of us are living in a state of chronic internal pressure. We're always thinking, always anticipating, always carrying something, always trying to stay one step ahead, always trying to problem solve. And eventually the body starts organizing itself around survival instead of restoration. And if we can't rest, we can't restore. If we can't sleep, then we can't detoxify and get ready for the next day. We can't restore our resources. And you might feel this in your body as shallow breathing, as digestive issues that don't quite make sense because you're doing all the right things. Exhaustion that just stays with you. Trouble relaxing, even when there's nothing left you need to do. Inflammation or sleep that doesn't actually restore you. And maybe around 2 or 3 a.m. you wake up and you don't know why. Maybe you have a sense of anxiety that creeps up at that time. Actually, episode 21 goes deeper into that into that specifically, because underneath all of it sometimes is a kind of emotional flatness, right? Emotions that have just been pushed down under the surface that we don't want to deal with or we can't deal with because we have all these other things that we have to deal with to get through the day. And so if your body is chronically stressed, if it's dealing with all of these problems that just seem like they can't be solved, or you solve one and another creeps up, it's not because your body is broken, it's because your body has adapted to chronic stress. And that adaptation held for years takes energy. And so aging doesn't only become a biological issue. It's physiological, it's emotional, it's environmental, it's mental. The body remembers the rhythm of your life, remembers the rhythm of your life from childhood, your 20s, your 30s, your 40s, your 50s, your 60s, wherever it may be. And if you've been living in that same to-do mode, that same go, go, go mode, your body is remembering it. But you don't have to stay stuck there. Right? We can always change with small habits. And those small habits affect how we live our life, how we age, how we live longer. And what struck me about Maria's story wasn't that she lived this intense life, right? Always putting out fire fires, having the most pressure-filled job, you know, doing all the things. It was about steadiness. It was about simple nourishing meals, connection, routine, family, and consistency. Nothing was optimized in wellness culture. I think this matters because so many of us are trying to heal through intensity while our nervous system is quietly asking for a rhythm and a routine it can sustain. The body responds to repeated signals, repeated nourishment, repeated rest, repeated safety, repeated connection, repeated slowing down. And in Ayurveda, we talk about digestion or agni, not just of food, but of our life experience. And when the body constantly has to process stress and urgency and overstimulation and suppressed emotion, our capacity eventually weakens. Our digestive fire weakens. Not overnight, but over decades of living in a way that asks too much of the body's resources. Another thing that the researchers noted about Maria was her close family connection, her emotional environment. And this connects to something I keep coming back to and have discussed on this podcast before our emotions, our emotional body. We are relational beings, women especially, we're made for connection. And the nervous system regulates through safe connection. The nervous system does not regulate through supplements or intense routines or the next craze. The nervous system regulates through simplicity, through repeated signals of safety day after day and month after month. Maria has lived to be 117 years old through a daily rhythm she's been able to sustain across a lifetime. And what did that look like for our ancestors? How did they live? What did their rhythm look like? Or what's been lost or carried forward? And for me, I don't know that much about my ancestors. I know that my grandmother on my father's side had a very tough life. And she was always in go mode. And my grandmother on my mother's side was always in problem solving mode, in go mode. So maybe now I'm thinking about it, that's been passed down to me. Right. And so I'm just carrying on their push-through-inness, right? And maybe you think back to what that might look like for you and how it might be appearing and showing up in your life. Because feeling seen and safe and being in relationship matters. Right? Isolation affects the body. Have you ever noticed when we're by ourselves? We might cave forward in protection mode, covering the front half of the body. The shoulders come in, we're protecting our arms come forward across the sex organs. We're ultimately trying to protect ourselves. It's a protection stance. And a lot of us are trying to carry everything alone. And then wondering why our body feels so exhausted. Because the body was never designed for that, my friend. It's never designed to do everything alone. It was designed to do everything in relationship, right? I would think of that story of Adam and Eve in the Bible. You had Adam by himself, and then God realized that he needed a helper. He couldn't do everything on his own. So what did he do? He created this woman, Eve, to help him. Help him with all of the burdens, with all of the tasks that needed to get done, because it's too much for one person. We see this in the story of Shiva and Shakti. Shiva, this warrior, was by himself and realized that he needed something else, someone else to bring in that sweetness and that honey and that creativity and that creation energy. And he couldn't be alone on his own anymore. And this matters for where we are today. We can't do everything on our own. And as we look at what we've been carrying or what our life looks like, and living the longest, bestest life that we possibly can, perhaps begin to ask yourself, what kind of rhythm helps your body feel resilient instead of constantly bracing? What would your day look like if you let your nervous system soften even a little bit instead of staying guarded or on edge? What helps you digest not just your food, but your life experience, everything that you've been living through? I have thought about this in my own life too, because there have been periods where I have tried to fix everything about my health through sheer effort, through drastically changing what I was eating, through pushing harder, through working out more, trying to override what my body was telling me. And it wasn't until I slowed down, where I was actually forced to slow down, that anything shifted. And I noticed that I didn't have to try harder. I just had to show up in a different way. I had to eat foods that were actually nourishing for my body, that weren't eaten on the go. I had to create the space in my life so that I wasn't just going from one thing to the next. And then through Ayurveda, I was able to build a different rhythm to live inside of that worked for me, that created a routine that my body was able to begin to trust, and then created that sense of safety. Because healthy aging isn't about fighting your body, it's about learning to live in relationship with it. And your body responds less to how hard you try and more to the rhythm that you return to. The rhythm that you return to when the chaos is happening all around you, when the stress levels rise, right? So rhythm you can return to every day for year after year, decade after decade. And if you'd like a starting point, something small and specific to your own pattern, the hidden stress pattern quiz that I created is a good place to start. It'll show you what your patterns are and how those might be showing up in the symptoms in your body. And then you'll get personalized small signals, small habits to begin to bring your body back into balance so you can live longer and feel better in your body. Right. And most of us aren't chasing 117 years, although I think that would be fabulous. But we're building a life and a body that we can actually live inside of and that feels good for all the years that we do have here on earth because that's how we live longer and that's how we feel better in our bodies. So thank you for joining me on this episode of The Body Rhythm. If you haven't already, please like and subscribe. And I will see you next week. Be well and nourished.