Having a better menopause experience alone ensures you increase longevity and your health span. Usually we talk about preserving muscle, reversing bone loss, and enhancing walking speed to do so. Today, it’s a lot less sweat and breathlessness. but probably the hardest exercise I could ask you to do.
Research shows that older individuals with more positive self-perceptions of aging, measured up to 23 years earlier, lived 7.5 years longer than those with less positive self-perceptions of aging.
If you don’t like what you see, change it. Change the people around you, change what you’re doing or not doing.
The research study consisted of 660 individuals aged 50 and older who participated in a community-based survey, the Ohio Longitudinal Study of Aging and Retirement (OLSAR). By matching the OLSAR to mortality data recently obtained from the National Death Index, the authors were able to conduct survival analyses. The findings suggest that the self-perceptions of stigmatized groups can influence longevity.
If perceptions about aging are formed by the age of 6, you might want to consider that we’ve likely contributed to our children’s and grandchildren’s early death or improved longevity, one or the other.
You and I have either helped them live longer stronger or believe the little things we’ve said, and I quote from people and potentially myself having said this:
“I’m getting old,” which we don’t usually say with a positive spin. This is most likely first said often at age 25 or at 30 when you have at least ⅔ or ¾ of your life left to live.
“It’s hell getting old.” -said at any age
“Just you wait.” -said to younger women about trying to get or stay fit
“Grandma is old, honey, you have to be careful.”
“There’s nothing good about it.” -in reference to getting old
“So, that’s when it happens/when things start falling apart.”
“I am my mother.”
But, how important are these offhanded, casual, lighthearted comments really?
Increase Longevity Through Growth and a Positive Outlook
A 2018 Plus One study found that the chances of dementia can be lowered by 49.8% if a positive outlook is maintained.
Who do you surround yourself with? What are your own thoughts? Do you think about yourself in 20, 30 or 40 years? What do you see? How does it feel? What are you doing and who are you doing it with?
Physical exercise and nutrition are the two most important of the tangible things you can do. Your mindset, however, is number one. Yes, you should move every day and we eat every day. We think 60-70,000 thoughts a day and 90% of those are the same as yesterday. We continue living the same pattern and change becomes hard.
While preparing for a class reunion, I looked through old yearbooks filled with messages like, “keep being you” or “don’t forget who you are when you go to…. [university].” In reality, we didn’t intentionally do it, but that advice is some of the worst we could have given each other.
“Keep changing and evolving, growing and becoming” would have been wise beyond our years but even teachers didn’t write things like that.
Increase Longevity With a Youthful Mindset
Dr Ellen Langer, the Mother of Mindfulness, tells us that we will stay stuck getting the same results, changing very little, if those habits aren’t changing WHO we are. Unless your best habit is to break habits that keep you doing and repeating thoughts that aren’t getting you results, you’ll continue on the path you’re on now. Virtually, you won’t change much.
The reframing of anything is possible. You’ve probably done it.
For instance, you may have had to run in high school for punishment if you lost or you made mistakes or talked too much in class. Running then was bad.
As an adult you may have come to love running maybe because someone you loved or envied did it and seemed to enjoy it.
Not eating for a long period of time seemed so difficult, it was like dieting, which has a negative connotation stemming from deprivation. But today we know not eating between meals and going 12 hours between dinner and breakfast without calories is positive, and that some often go 16 or more hours without consuming calories and call it intermittent fasting.
So when I go in for a fasting blood test and all that means is I haven’t eating after dinner and it’s 7:30 and they ask if I’m fasting or the phlebotomist asks what I’m going to eat first, as if I must be starving, I’m always a bit surprised they refer to it as a hardship not to have eaten for 11 hours, while I was sleeping most of the time.
A reframe, right?
Dr Ellen Langer’s well-known Counterclockwise study (there’s a book by the same title) with older adults asked to pretend “as if” they were their younger selves for a short time. They were exposed only to music, periodicals, movies of the time they were younger and by the end of the week older adults who arrived using canes, moving slowly, could hear better, see better, were playing touch football. Simply by changing their thoughts about aging.
References:
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2002, Vol. 83, No. 2, 261–270
Copyright 2002 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0022-3514/02/$5.00 DOI: 10.1037//0022-3514.83.2.261
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0191004
Levy BR, Slade MD, Pietrzak RH, Ferrucci L (2018) Positive age beliefs protect against dementia even among elders with high-risk gene. PLoS ONE 13(2): e0191004. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0191004
Other Episodes You May Like:
Think You’re Too Old? Ageism Dismantled with Ashton Applewhite:
https://www.flippingfifty.com/ageism-dismantled/
The Senior Games | Off The Scale and Onto a Starting Line:
https://www.flippingfifty.com/senior-games/
Positive Aging Sources:
How to Change the Way You Age | Bolder is Better:
https://www.flippingfifty.com/growing-bolder/
What, When & Why to Exercise for Women 40+ Challenge Bundle
https://www.flippingfifty.com/store/uncategorized/what-when-why-to-exercise-for-women-40-challenge-bundle/
Resources:
Flipping 50 Membership:
https://www.flippingfifty.com/cafe
Flipping 50 STRONGER 12-week program:
https://www.flippingfifty.com/getstronger
Discovery Call with Debra:
https://www.flippingfifty.com/wellness-coaching-for-life/
