I’m only 32ish!

This year in January,  tagging along behind my 65th birthday, came thoughts about getting older. I’ve learned a lot over the years and this I know to be true…our thoughts and constant inner dialogue on aging impact us on a physical level.

While musing my age I remembered a 1971 social experiment, conducted by Harvard professor Ellen Langer and her colleagues. They piled two groups of men in their seventies and eighties into vans, drove them two hours north to a sprawling old monastery in New Hampshire, and dropped them off into an environment 22 years earlier in time …1959.

The group who went first stayed for one week and were asked to pretend they were young men, once again living in the 1950s. The second group, who arrived the week afterward, were told to stay in the present and simply reminisce about that era. Both groups were surrounded by mid-century furnishings and mementos—1950s issues of Life magazine and the Saturday Evening Post, black and white TV shows and movies and vintage radio programs—and they had spirited discussions on the events of the time.

Before and after the experiment, both groups of men were given a series of cognitive and physical tests, and after just one week, there were dramatic positive changes across the board. Both groups were stronger and more flexible. Height, weight, gait, posture, hearing, vision—even their performance on intelligence tests had improved. Their joints were more flexible, their shoulders wider, their fingers not only more agile, but longer and less gnarled by arthritis. But the men who had acted as if they were actually back in 1959 showed significantly more improvement. Those who had impersonated younger men seemed to have bodies that actually were younger.There were many critics of Langer’s work, at the time, but recent progress in epigenetics and quantum physics are now proving her theories.

So, after a recent serious flair up of arthritis left me virtually housebound and feeling older than my 93 year old Mum, I decided to try my own experiment. I downloaded some old photos of myself when I was young and very healthy and began a new inner dialogue of constant reminders that I was only 32. Within days, the rememberance of  how I used to look and feel physically and emotionally, began to have an effect. I walked faster and stronger, stood straighter and had more energy. The changes have been almost miraculous! Yesterday my sister noticed my hair was darker and there wasn’t as much gray, which is the only bummer of this experiment because I loved the grey!

The freedom lesson this month, is freeing myself from ideas and concepts on aging and I have to say, I’m really enjoying being 32ish…again!