Is Aging Bad?
Now, some say these treatments are feeding into an unhealthy fear, and that aging is getting a bit of a bad rap. They say that our culture doesn’t understand or value the aging process and instead has consistently overvalued youth and become addicted to vanity.
“Aging is a natural process,” they point out, “and nothing to fear!”
I think this is an encouraging take, albeit one that’s often expressed by much younger people who aren’t quite speaking from personal experience.
Me? I guess I’m somewhere in the middle. I’m not especially eager to turn into an “old man.” But I’m also averse to wasting my remaining years worrying over some wrinkles or thinning hair. So I have to wonder if it’s possible to accept this “natural process” of aging while still working to retain as much of my youth as I can, while I can.
But I’m not really into creams, pills, and surgeries unless absolutely necessary. So what I really wondered was how much of aging is natural entropy at work and how much was mindset?
Is it possible to actually think yourself younger?
Age Is Just a… Thought?
I believe in positive thinking. Yet the notion that something like aging could be mitigated by simply altering your thoughts seems like nothing more than wishful thinking. Sure, our thoughts are powerful, but it’s asking a bit much to believe that how we think and act could somehow slow down or even reverse aging.
Or so I thought.
Let me introduce you to Dr Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who not only wondered the same thing I did about whether mindset could affect aging, she actually conducted a remarkable experiment to find out.
For over 40 years, Dr Langer has studied the power of mindfulness. If her name sounds familiar to you, it may be because she’s often referred to as the “Mother of Mindfulness,” and for good reason. Her work has established a powerful and undeniable connection between the power of one’s mindset and their physical health.
Now, it’s worth noting that Dr. Langer’s version of mindfulness is not specifically attached to meditation but is rather a simple way of applying one’s attention and focus. It’s “a flexible state of mind in which we are actively engaged in the present, noticing new things, and sensitive to context,” she says.
Back in 1981, Dr Langer wondered whether aging was really purely mechanistic, or whether one’s environment and mindset played a role. To find out, she recruited eight men, all in their 70s, most with standard-issue problems of average men in their 70s: some joint stiffness, back pain, arthritis, and mobility issues. Some walked with a cane or were slightly hunched over. Others had eyesight or hearing trouble.
A Time Travel Experiment
On a crisp New Hampshire autumn day in 1981, these men were driven to a converted monastery which had been renovated to be a communal living space for the eight subjects. But this was no ordinary renovation. As the men entered their new temporary home for the next five days, they felt like they’d just stepped through a time portal.
In the living room, The Ed Sullivan Show was playing on an old black and white TV. Somewhere in another room, Doris Day was singing from a vintage radio. The books, newspapers, and magazines were all from the late 1950s, as was the furniture and decor. They were given clothes they might have worn in 1959. Even the food was 1950s cuisine. Nothing of the present-day world was evident.
It was as if these men had time traveled back some 20-plus years into the past.
But the subjects quickly learned that this was no nursing home or hotel. Nobody was going to haul their luggage up to their rooms for them. They were to do everything for themselves, from the cooking to the cleaning.
The men were not just there to reminisce about “the old days,” however. For the duration of the week, they were instructed to adjust their mindset, to effectively turn back their clocks by twenty-two years, and to live, speak, and act as if they were over twenty years younger.
