Just say NO to AGING? (Excellent Science article)

note: This supports my own practice of breaking cultural thought forms about aging. If you do long life practices but continue to buy into the cultural thought forms, you will still age, if more healthily. But if you want to hang around with me until 150, this article will highlight the danger of the limiting chi field around you every where.
michael

JUST SAY NO TO AGING?
By Wray Herbert
Newsweek
Apr 14, 2009

http://www.newsweek.com/id/193197/output/print

A provocative new book <http://bit.ly/ttRiZ> from a Harvard psychologist
suggests that changing how we think about our age and health can have
dramatic physical benefits.

…………

Imagine that you could rewind the clock 20 years. It’s 1989. Madonna is
topping the pop charts, and TV sets are tuned to “Cheers” and “Murphy
Brown.” Widespread Internet use is just a pipe dream, and Sugar Ray Leonard
and Joe Montana are on recent covers of Sports Illustrated.

But most important, you’re 20 years younger. How do you feel? Well, if
you’re at all like the subjects in a provocative experiment by Harvard
psychologist Ellen Langer, you actually feel as if your body clock has been
turned back two decades. Langer did a study like this with a group of
elderly men some years ago, retrofitting an isolated old New England hotel
so that every visible sign said it was 20 years earlier. The men — in their
late 70s and early 80s — were told not to reminisce about the past, but to
actually act as if they had traveled back in time. The idea was to see if
changing the men’s mindset about their own age might lead to actual changes
in health and fitness.

Langer’s findings were stunning: After just one week, the men in the
experimental group (compared with controls of the same age) had more joint
flexibility, increased dexterity and less arthritis in their hands. Their
mental acuity had risen measurably, and they had improved gait and posture.
Outsiders who were shown the men’s photographs judged them to be
significantly younger than the controls. In other words, the aging process
had in some measure been reversed.

I know this sounds a bit woo-wooey, but stay with me. Langer and her Harvard
colleagues have been running similarly inventive experiments for decades,
and the accumulated weight of the evidence is convincing. Her theory, argued
in her new book, “Counterclockwise” <http://bit.ly/ttRiZ> is that we are all
victims of our own stereotypes about aging and health. We mindlessly accept
negative cultural cues about disease and old age, and these cues shape our
self-concepts and our behavior. If we can shake loose from the negative
clichés that dominate our thinking about health, we can “mindfully” open
ourselves to possibilities for more productive lives even into old age.

Consider another of Langer’s mindfulness studies, this one using an ordinary
optometrist’s eye chart. That’s the chart with the huge E on top, and
descending lines of smaller and smaller letters that eventually become
unreadable. Langer and her colleagues wondered: what if we reversed it? The
regular chart creates the expectation that at some point you will be unable
to read. Would turning the chart upside down reverse that expectation, so
that people would expect the letters to become readable? That’s exactly what
they found. The subjects still couldn’t read the tiniest letters, but when
they were expecting the letters to get more legible, they were able to read
smaller letters than they could have normally. Their expectation — their
mindset — improved their actual vision.

That means that some people may be able to change prescriptions if they
change the way they think about seeing. But other health consequences might
be more important than that. Here’s another study, this one using clothing
as a trigger for aging stereotypes. Most people try to dress appropriately
for their age, so clothing in effect becomes a cue for ingrained attitudes
about age. But what if this cue disappeared? Langer decided to study people
who routinely wear uniforms as part of their work life, and compare them
with people who dress in street clothes. She found that people who wear
uniforms missed fewer days owing to illness or injury, had fewer doctors’
visits and hospitalizations, and had fewer chronic diseases — even though
they all had the same socioeconomic status. That’s because they were not
constantly reminded of their own aging by their fashion choices. The health
differences were even more exaggerated when Langer looked at affluent
people: presumably the means to buy even more clothes provides a steady
stream of new aging cues, which wealthy people internalize as unhealthy
attitudes and expectations.

Langer is not advocating that we all don uniforms. Her point is that we are
surrounded every day by subtle signals that aging is an undesirable period
of decline. These signals make it difficult to age gracefully. Similar
signals also lock all of us — regardless of age — into pigeonholes for
disease. We are too quick to accept diagnostic categories like cancer and
depression, and let them define us. Doing so preempts the possibility of a
healthful future.

That’s not to say that we won’t encounter illness, bad moods or a stiff back
— or that dressing like a teenager will eliminate those things. But with a
little mindfulness, we can try to embrace uncertainty and understand that
the way we feel today may or may not connect to the way we will feel
tomorrow. Who knows, if we’re open to the idea that things can improve, we
just might wake up feeling 20 years younger.

Herbert writes the blog We’re Only Human at:
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman