Imaginative Seniors
The year was 1979, but for a group of elderly men, the year was actually 1959. At least, Ellen Langer, the psychologist leading the study, had convinced them to pretend that the year was 1959:
The magazines, newspapers, and music the men saw and heard were all 20 years old and the men themselves were told to behave and talk as if it were 1959.
It doesn’t sound particularly impressive does it? Get a bunch of old men to play make-believe, what could that possibly do? Apparently it can do a lot, because at the end of the experiment the men:
- Looked visibly younger
- Had straighter posture
- Had more flexible joints
Now the problem with all of those is that they’re kind of hard to measure. There was, however, one area of improvement where the evidence was incontrovertible: finger length.
As we get older, our bodies succumb to gravity and generally shrink, and our fingers, which are no exception to this rule, get shorter. But the fingers of the men in this study were actually longer at the end of the experiment. The aging process had literally been reversed.
Healthy Hotel Maids
Just a year ago, in 2007, Ellen Langer started a new experiment, this time with colleague Alia Crum. The researchers took various health measurements from a group of 84 hotel workers, and then split the group in two. They told one group that the physical exercise they were getting by cleaning hotel rooms satisfied the Surgeon General’s recommendations for an active lifestyle and the maids were given specific examples of how their work was actually exercise.
Langer and Crum told the other group, the control group, nothing.
And the results:
Four weeks later, Langer and Crum returned to find some measurements of both groups: the control group hadn’t changed physically, but the test group had decreased all of the following: weight, blood pressure, body fat, waist-to-hip ratio, and body mass index.
It’s important to realize that the maids hadn’t actually done anything different, they changed all those physical aspects of themselves with their minds. It almost sounds like science fiction, but it’s not. Your mind is an extremely powerful tool for change.
So what can we learn from this?
What was going on in the brains of the senior citizens and the hotel workers is a process called the psychosomatic effect. Most of you are probably familiar with the psychosomatic effect but don’t know it, because it’s what causes stress to be so unhealthy for us.
But rather than letting it make us unhealthy, we should be using the psychosomatic effect to our advantage:
- Think Young – It might be a stretch to surround ourselves with 20 year old magazines and T.V. shows like the seniors in the first study did, but there are other things you can do to stay young. First, don’t act your age! Most people would agree that people younger than themselves are more active and are out having more fun, so go be more active and have more fun. Second, recognize and enjoy the things in your life that are ‘young’, like that sport you love to play or that late night out with friends.
- Think Healthy – It would be difficult to sit on the couch and think your waist line smaller, but what you can do is recognize that the exercise you do get is effective and good for you.
- Think Happy – This may sound a little counter-intuitive, but just like stress has a lot of negative effects on the body, happiness has a lot of positive effects on the body. One thing you can do is just be mindful of your own mood. If you’re not happy, look for some aspect of the situation you find yourself in that is positive, and be grateful for it. Something else you can do is smile more. Our brains don’t know the difference between a real smile and a fake smile, so even a fake smile, although it might not look great, causes your brain to release a lot of the same ‘happy chemicals’ that it would release if your smile had been real.
These are all great ways to use the psychosomatic effect to your benefit, but remember that it’s equally easy for it to have a negative effect on your body. That means that you should also focus on banishing negative thoughts from your mind, lest they counteract all your positive thinking.
Further Reading:
- How You Tell The Story Of Your Life by Senia Maymin
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This is the best article I have read on boomer stuff. It is amazing and so real what the mind can do to change our demeanor, health and looks…Think young, walk young, feel young, look forward to new things, eat well..It is easy..so just do it!!!!
Thanks for submitting this post to our blog carnival. We just published the 40th edition of Brain Blogging and your article was featured!
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Shaheen
One thing I wanted to point out about the second study: in the summary I had read about it, they posted a flyer of some sort explaining the positive health effects of the work they were doing, so they were constantly reminded that there work was healthy for them.
Also, I had always wondered about this possible alternative explanation for those effects: those who were aware that their work for healthy went about their work physically differently, which caused them to exert themselves more and actually become healthier. For example, if I’m going up a flight of stairs, I usually don’t really think about it. However, if I think that it’s good exercise, I walk up them in such a way as to maximize the energy expended by walking up those stairs. I wonder if there was a similar effect in this experiment.
However, the first experiment about the seniors is really interesting!
That was very interesting. Many of us believe that the body is an expression of the mind, so it’s great to see examples of this principle in action.
I would like to first thank you for your interesting and thought-provoking review of the recent experiments that have demonstrated aging to be as much of a state-of-mind as it is a physical process. Although it may simply be the implication that we have a considerable amount of control over the nature of getting older that is so appealing, these studies have the potential to dramatically change the approaches to aging we take. On one hand, it seems as though so much of the admittedly admirable work that comes out of the science and research communities focuses on the abnormal aspects of aging, while on the the other, the booming cosmetic and plastic surgery industries bomboard us with the notion that vigor and vitality are things we have to buy in a bottle. For so many left somewhere in between the two extremes, it is refreshing to learn that psychological as well as physiological benefits can be had using the power of thought. While the three “suggestions” you set forth might seem like common sense in achieving these ends, I believe they speak to a larger acceptance of aging as a journey within itself, rather than an obstacle to be overcome or an ending to be dreaded.