How Can We Reverse Aging?
Imagine that you could rewind the clock 20 years,
and 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,
renovating 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 recall 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 handiness and less arthritis in their hands.
Their mental sensitivity had risen measurably,
and they had improved 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.
Though this sounds a bit woo-wooey,
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,
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.
Langer's 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.
That's not to say that we won't encounter illness,
bad moods or a stiff back.
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.