Mindful Longevity

The body follows the mind

The other night, I was having a wide-ranging, meandering conversation with a new dinner companion, and somehow the topic turned to our height: she is 5’3” and I’m 5’2.” As we were chatting, she mentioned that she nearly always wears heels so she can be taller. I, on the other hand, rarely wear them for a whole host of reasons, but as she was talking it dawned on me that I don’t often feel the need to appear taller. It reminded me of a time when a friend of mine surprised me by saying,  “Gosh, you’re so little!” and I was taken aback that she saw me as small.

It could be that I have the mindset of a chihuahua and see myself bigger than I actually am, because my height is not something that occurs to me… except when I’m in the supermarket and confronted by those really high, impossible-to-reach top shelves. I also can say the same for my age. Even though I’m a couple of years into my sixties, I still find it shocking and hard to believe—even writing this made me gulp. I certainly don’t feel over sixty. I’ll go out on a limb and say most days I don’t look over sixty. I sincerely hope I don’t sound like I’m over sixty. And I’m making a concerted effort in what may very well be the most important aspect of aging: I don’t see myself as over sixty.

That’s not to say I dress like a trendy thirty-year-old. Heaven forbid, no. But I’ve long held the belief that one tool in my longevity arsenal is my frame of mind. Although I’m an older mom (we have a 17-year-old) and all of my “mom” friends are at least 10 to 15 years younger than I am, I never feel out of step due to my age. I’m in better physical shape than most, and I haven’t adopted the mindset of “gosh, I’m soooooo much older than these women…” And that, I believe, is one of the keys: I don’t even allow myself to say those words, let alone think them.

Longevity mindset
Lately, I’ve been giving mindset a lot of thought (pardon the pun), because I believe it to be an essential piece of the longevity puzzle. It may explain why I have had a long-standing aversion to retirement communities, although I admit that they have come a long way in the last 50 years. I understand and appreciate what a great option they are for many people with all the amenities, comforts, and safety nets. I get it. But for me, at least as I view it now, being in an environment focused on a life of ease for the eldery would shift my thinking to an older mindset…and that’s a slippery slope.

My theory may have some validity. Recently I was listening to an interview with Dr. Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychology professor who has pioneered research on mindfulness for the past 40 years, on the Rich Roll podcast, and I was heartened to hear her perspective on mind-body unity, especially as it pertains to longevity. She contends that Americans, in general, have such a strong negative mindset about aging that it makes us predisposed to accepting a myriad of maladies as inevitable… placing us squarely on the aforementioned slippery slope.

I was so intrigued by the many anecdotes that she shared in that high-speed interview (she has an amazing amount of energy!) that I’m now reading her book The Mindful Body. It is chock full of study... upon study… upon study… that demonstrates a startling reality of how much our mind truly impacts our bodies and our overall well-being.

Challenging the convention
Circling back to my aversion for a safety-net future, Dr. Langer postulates that typical life challenges help us to be more mindful, more engaged—and that mindlessness results in autopilot and atrophy. She argues that with elderly people, we too easily accept the first sign of any issue (such as fumbling with keys or being forgetful,) as evidence of decline. Instead of allowing the elderly to struggle with and overcome these challenges, we simply succumb, and the unfortunate cycle of protection and weakening begins. As she so eloquently writes, “Whether beast or beauty, to be alive is to be imperfect, welcoming challenges and uncertainty, and that should be perfectly fine at every age.”

In her opinion, the most debilitating mindset is the expectation that our memory must worsen with age. Dr. Langer is of the belief that we are far too accepting of the notion that we are all destined to have poor memories—and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. In one particular nursing home study, she set out to prove that with exercise and reward, a patient’s memory can be stimulated and improved. Residents were asked to remember innocuous things such as the nurse’s names, and in return, they received tokens for their successes. Every week, as the tasks became increasingly more difficult, she found that the subjects’ retention actually increased.

Another fascinating memory study was one that she conducted with her graduate student, Yale psychologist Becca Levy. They hypothesized that the belief that memory problems increase with age can in fact lead to memory problems. They decided to focus on the difference between a cultural cohort of people who readily accept memory decline as a consequence of aging (Americans of a variety of ages),  and a cohort who don’t (Chinese people who honor elders of similar age ranges). They found in the American group, the young outperformed the old on memory tests, as might be expected. However, this did not hold true for the Chinese group, in which the older subjects’ ability to remember was just as strong as the young.

Environmental influences
An entirely different subject that is equally—if not more—compelling is Dr. Langer’s contention that we can make bodily changes by changing our minds. She had this radical concept over 30 years ago, testing it with her 1979 “counterclockwise” study. The study aimed to see “if priming the minds of elderly men to believe that they were in the past would also affect their bodies.” To test the theory, she and her team placed two cohorts in a time-machine retreat for a week. The retreat environment had been painstakingly recreated to resemble the subjects’ lives twenty years earlier, from news broadcasts and entertainment to music. In essence, they had been transported back in time. The experimental group was asked to base their discussions on the events and entertainment of the time-machine environment as if it were occurring in real-time, in the present.  A control group living in the same retreat environment, experiencing the same input, was instructed to base their discussions on the same topics, but as if it were in the past.

Prior to the retreat, the study team created a baseline by measuring various biological, psychological, and physical markers in the participants. Remarkably, reliving the environment of their youth coupled with being in a noble environment created notable improvements in both groups. Hearing, memory, and grip strength improved, in addition to several other measures. But even more astonishing results were found in the group that was fully immersed in the mindset of 20 years earlier; they outperformed the control group on a slew of other measures such as vision, joint flexibility, manual dexterity, IQ, and gait. There was even an improvement in posture and a decrease in symptoms of arthritis. Truly amazing.

Similarly, I’ve long thought that learning new things, keeping up with culture, and consuming a wide range of visual and material information will go a long way in keeping my mind active and pliable. Because of the nature of our work, my husband and I often find ourselves engrossed in conversations about a variety of novel subjects, with people of all ages, and our circle of acquaintances swells and contracts with projects. Now I know that this constant stream of fresh input and stimuli will not only benefit our minds but could also have a tremendous impact on our bodies and our overall health.

As Dr. Langer aptly states, “In study after study conducted over the past forty-some years, we’ve found that with only subtle shifts in our thinking and expectations, we can begin to change the ingrained behaviors that sap health, competence, optimism, and vitality from our lives.”

I’m very grateful to have come across Dr. Langer’s comprehensive body of work. It has opened up a world of well-founded, mindful practices that confirms that we can foster a mindset to live well, age great.

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