Seniors Matter(s): No wonder I’m tired!

What your body does in a day!

Sometimes you may feel like your body is beginning to creak and fail you on the outside, but do you ever stop to consider the incredible work that's taking place inside?

There's so much going on and everything fits together so well but it's almost impossible to comprehend it. Let's look at what's going on inside your body every single day!

Your heart pumps approximately 2,000 gallons of blood through its chambers every single day. It beats more than 100,000 times a day to achieve this incredible feat.

You take around 17,000 breaths a day on an average and don't have to think about a single one of them. Yet, if you want to stop breathing temporarily, you can voluntarily hold your breath - typical clear adults lungs can hold a huge six litres of air.

Every day, your body ensures you don't contract cancer thousands of times over. Cancers are formed when cells are altered in a way which pre-programs through DNA. It’s estimated that thousands of cells suffer cancer-causing lesions every day but the body sends special enzymes cutting them around to inspect DNA strands which faults and fixes them before they turn into tumours.

Your brain doesn't stop working. It's estimated that about 50,000 thoughts pass through each day, on average, although some scientists put the figure close to 60,000. That's a whopping 35-48 thoughts every minute.

The cells of your stomach lining produce an alkaline substance every few milliseconds to neutralize stomach acid. If they don't do this, your stomach would digest itself because some of the acids are so strong they are good enough to dissolve metals.

We blink about 28,800 times every day so each one, lasting just 110th of a second, is a voluntary reflex the body uses to keep the eyes clean and moist which is pretty crucial given that 90 per cent of information you process is visual. Then you can weigh up any visuals seen in just about .01 seconds. Consider how many people and objects you look at every day.

It's remarkable most of the body's energy is expelled via heat. Your body produces the same heat as 25 lightbulbs over the course of a single day.

Red blood cells literally shoot around the body taking less than 60 seconds to complete the full circuit. This means that each of yours makes 1,440 trips around your body every day, delivering oxygen and keeping your body energized. Your life-span is short having made 60,000 trips around the body - they must be exhausted!

You shared more than one-million skin cells every single day but they're constantly replenished automatically to save you from turning transparent and becoming rather exposed. Your skin is actually an organ; in fact, it's the largest organ you have with a surface area of 18 square feet or two square metres.

Your hair, if you still have any, grows about half a millimetre per day. The average adult with a full scope has around 100,000 hairs on their heads so that's combined 50 metres of hair to growth every single day.

Your brain and mouth work together to allow you to speak, on average, about 5,000 words a day. Well, that's if you are a woman because studies suggest that men speak only 2,000 words a day.

Your liver is so busy over the course of a day it's almost impossible to summarize its activities. It manufactures cholesterol, Vitamin D and blood plasma; it identifies the nutrients your body needs and stores away for future use; it filters 1.3 quarts (1.43 litres) of blood every minute; and produces a quart (maybe four litres) of bile every day to help you breakdown your food. Basically, you have a factory plant running inside you every day which is pretty amazing.

The glands in your mouth produce an incredible 1.5 litres of saliva every day. If this didn't happen, your mouth would dry up and become over-run with bacteria, and wouldn't be able to digest your food.

Each of your kidneys contains one-million tiny filters that work together to filter an average of 2.2 pints of blood every minute. That’s 3,168 pints (1,872 litres) every single day, despite each kidney only being the size of a fist. If that weren’t enough, the kidneys also expel an average of 1.4 litres of urine from the body every day too.

You grow eight millimetres every night while sleeping before shrinking back down again the next day. This saves you from some pretty hefty clothing bills and ensures you don't have to raise the door frames every two years.

Your body works overtime to digest your food. The process starts even before it hits the mouth - when you smell food, your mouth automatically produces more saliva to prepare the system for work. It takes about 68 hours for food to pass through the stomach and two days to complete the digestive process. The average person will eat more than 50,000 tons of food in his or her lifetime.

All your body cells are regenerating themselves every single day without any prompting. This means you have an entirely new set of taste buds every 10 days, new nails every six to 10 months, new bones every 10 years, and even a new heart every 20 years.

So, next time you think your body is starting to creak, just think about all the incredible things that are happening inside it every day because each of us is really a mere miracle.

Don't regret growing older; it's a privilege many don’t get to enjoy.

I’d rather burn out than rust out.

‘Till next time.