Negative Stereotypes Kill

You really need to read Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility, by Harvard psychology professor Ellen Langer (Ballantine Books, NYC, 2009).

Undoing aging
In the book, Dr. Langer reports on an experiment she and colleagues conducted some time ago: small groups of men debilitated by age and dependent upon relatives were placed in environments that simulated life as they’d lived it 20 years earlier – with newspapers, magazines, radio and TV shows, décor, and everything else that surrounded them reflecting life 20 years prior.

Crucially, the men were expected to make their own choices and fend for themselves. Nobody was going to carry their luggage, or tie their shoes, or (god forbid) cut up or even cook their meat. They had to do all that.

Significantly more youthful in one week
After one week, participants showed measurable improvement in hearing, memory, height, weight, gait, posture, intelligence, manual dexterity, and joint flexibility. Expert observers who knew nothing about the study found that all of the experimental participants looked noticeably younger at its end.

Langer and her colleagues concluded that how we think about ourselves aging has a huge impact on how we age. “It is not primarily our physical selves that limit us,” she wrote, “but rather our mindset about our physical limits.”

Aging is not all in your mind, but . . .
Of course, the cumulative cellular damage caused by life processes is real. And disease processes caused by genetics, environment, and past behavior can’t be wished away. But if we think of ourselves as “decrepit,” “failing,” inexorably “falling apart,” we definitely hasten our own decline.

This is why the negative stereotypes of aging that our culture generates like a firehose are so harmful. If we internalize them, we come to see ourselves – and act –  far more diminished than we are.
Negative beliefs about aging can trigger a vicious cycle

Internalized negative stereotypes can spark a self-fulfilling prophecy of real decline, which hastens dependence, which accelerates further decline:  when we’re treated like helpless children, we start to feel like helpless children, which starts a vicious spiral that ends with someone cutting up our meat for us and calling us “honey.”
Redefine your physical changes

Dr. Langer says we can, instead, consciously engage in an exploratory process, noticing and embracing new abilities, new applications for old abilities, and new applications for insights gained from change. “Every change,” she writes, “is an opportunity for creative re-thinking of self.”
 
Tell me about a time
When have you changed the way you feel—and act—by changing the way you think about your changing abilities? Do you think Langer’s ideas are a bunch of Pollyanna-ish hoo-hah, or legitimately great, even life-saving, advice?