A Clue About Aging and the Mind - By Deepak Chopra

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A Clue About Aging and the Mind: Part 1

By Deepak Chopra

Read " A Clue on Aging and the Mind: Part 5 " here

 

Among several recent articles on medical research, one posed a link between depression and osteoporosis. A team of researchers at Hebrew University in Jerusalem

were able to cause reduced bone density in male mice in about four weeks. They did this by first causing depressed behavior in the mice through increased stress. The application of external stress included dirty cages, bright lights, or loud noises. The scientists consider a mouse depressed when it becomes indifferent to sugar water or the near presence of a young mouse (akin to a depressed person who loses appetite and sexual drive). Through a mind-body connection, the depressed mice quickly began to produce fewer of the bone-building cells called osteoblasts.

 

The link between depression and osteoporosis had been seen before, but it wasn't clear which came first. Like other debilitating diseases, osteo can bring on depression. But here the link was reversed. The depression seemed to cause a drop in bone density. The new finding is small and isolated, yet it fits a larger pattern in human aging. At a time when the public is being told that the great hope for anti-aging lies in drug therapies such as human growth factor and anti-oxidants, the role of the mind may actually prove to be the key. Research has conclusively proved that depression, for example, leads to a compromised immune system. Being more susceptible to disease is one of the banes of the aging process.

 

But one can go further. Recently widowed people also become more susceptible to disease, and in general they can statistically expect to die younger. Going back earlier in life, it's been known for forty years that men who deal with psychological issues in their twenties are less prone to heart disease than men who ignore such issues. The link may be stronger than that between heart disease and dietary cholesterol. However, on all these fronts the choice of treatment has inevitably turned to drugs rather than to the mind. The reasons are familiar by now. We are a society addicted to quick fixes. Taking a pill is much quicker than looking inward or seeking therapy. It's more convenient for doctors and it's what they are trained to do.

 

Yet at bottom, most people will continue to age without considering the mind because medicine doesn't have an adequate model for the mind-body connection, despite the fact that this connection is irrefutable and has been explored for at least fifty years. It has fallen to each of us as individuals to pursue the possibility of anti-aging through the mind. Fortunately, the benefits are real and very much worth pursuing.

 

 

A Clue About Aging and the Mind: Part 2

By Deepak ChopraCompared to the massive funding devoted to developing new drugs, there is little corporate profit to be had from mind-body therapies. Yet for at least five decades evidence has piled up to show that the mind can play a decisive part in prevention and also in healing. This is particularly true in the field of aging. Aging isn't a disease. It is a normal process whose causes remains a mystery. The human body doesn't simply wear out like an old car with too many miles on it. For a long period of time -- roughly from birth to age sixty -- the body actually becomes stronger the more you use it. A vacuum cleaner will remain new if you leave it in the closet and never turn it on. But startling studies with young college athletes have shown that in as little as a week, continual bed rest causes the body to lose years of muscle training.

 

In the coming decades, the population is going to skew more and more toward old age. Already the group 80 and over is the fastest growing part of the population. Gerontology isn't going to keep up with the age explosion, and drug companies aren't going to stop pushing their products (as it stands, the average senior is on seven medications a day). Anti-aging programs that are based on the mind will have to be started by each individual. Even though the field is relatively new, the important findings about the mind and aging are not experimental or hypothetical. The major factors are as follows:

 

 

1. Constantly using and challenging the mind helps to keep brain function from aging.

 

2. Keeping up mild exercise benefits the body at all ages, up to one's nineties.

 

3. Social connections with family and friends helps to prevent aging.

 

4. Isolation, loneliness, and depression rapidly speed up aging.

 

5. Expecting to remain young is highly beneficial, while expecting to decline with age is very debilitating.

 

6. Genes play a part in how quickly one ages, but their role doesn't override all other factors. People with " good genes " on average survive only three years longer than average.

 

7. Reducing stress prevents symptoms of aging, most significantly by improving blood pressure and immunity to disease.

 

8. Treating depression becomes critical as a person ages. The effects of late onset depression can be disastrous in older people.

 

9. Positive thinking per se doesn't prevent aging. Being emotionally resilient (the ability to bounce back from traumatic events) is far more important.

 

10. In general, the evidence points toward the mind-body connection as the most flexible and powerful agent for healing.

In the next part of this post I will outline how these factors can be incorporated into one's own personal anti-aging regime.

(to be continued)

A Clue About Aging and the Mind: Part 3

By Deepak Chopra

As the media hand out more information about the aging process, people naturally want to know how various medical advances can help them personally. At the moment there is a wide divide between the medical establishment and popular opinion. At the grass roots level millions of people seek alternative solutions to aging, as they do for healing in general. Mainstream doctors lag far behind, since their primary function hasn't shifted from drugs and surgery. Even the most basic prevention programs are more likely to be gotten from a book or magazine than one's family doctor.

 

In the last post (read the last post here) I listed ten indisputable findings in how the mind affects aging. At first they look self-evident. Eating well, exercising, and keeping our mind active aren't special needs for old people. They are needs throughout life. Yet few Americans actually follow preventive measures with any consistency over the years, and older people tend to be the worst at keeping up prevention. The temptation to rely on medications is everywhere, and due to anxiety about their health, millions of older people allow themselves to be over-medicated by doctors who prescribe various drugs by rote, without any real consideration for the individual.

 

All of which is a prelude to making your own decisions about the aging process. Arranging your priorities in the following way could make a huge difference in the coming years.

 

 

1. Emotional health

 

2. Self-image and perception of one's personal situation

 

3. Stress reduction

 

4. Social connections

 

5. Spiritual growth

The reason that the highest priority goes to emotional health is simple. Aging studies as well as studies of lifestyle diseases like coronary artery disease indicate that the people who are emotionally healthiest also have the healthiest bodies. This shouldn't be surprising given that the opposite is true: people with the poorest mental health fall into low categories of physical health. But doctors haven't followed up on this finding, in large part because they aren't trained to (nor is there much proof that doctors themselves fall into the high group for emotional health — their susceptibility to stress, Type A behavior and drug abuse indicates the exact opposite, in fact).

 

If it were possible to get people to put spiritual growth first, that would be extremely desirable, for reasons I will go into. But realistically, getting Americans to take their emotional health and stress levels seriously is already a huge challenge. The huge advantage of spiritual growth is that mind and body are both benefited from a very deep level. What we traditionally cal the soul can also be defined as the source of the mind-body connection, and the closer to the source one can get, the more effortlessly nature itself can prevent the decline associated with aging.

 

In the next post we will cover how the five parts of this mind-body program can be followed on a practical basis.

 

A Clue About Aging and the Mind: Part 4

By Deepak Chopra

Only a few decades ago mainstream medicine had almost nothing to say about the link between aging and the mind. Today there is a fad for all things related to the brain, and therefore the mind has come in the back door. With a larger array of drugs that can affect brain function, doctors make the rough-and-ready assumption that they are treating the mind. From another perspective this isn't so. We all know that we have a mind, and it's obvious that the brain is intimately involved in it. Beyond that, many mysteries lie.

 

It could be that the brain is the receiver of thoughts, the way a radio is the receiver of music. Only rank superstition would hold that a radio composes music, that it appreciates beauty, or that it mechanically produces music through the "hard wiring" of its components. For the moment, such assumptions are made about the mind by leading brain scientists.

 

In practical terms, what this means is that each of us is responsible for our minds, even though medicine is becoming more and more skillful at treating brain disorders. If the brain malfunctions, a doctor is usually the only recourse. but aging isn't an isolated disease that can be treated with drugs; it isn't a disease at all. For the moment, while we await deeper insights into why we age and how genes can be manipulated, possibly, to offset the aging process, using your mind to combat aging makes sense.

 

Let me expand on a few areas where the most good can be done.

1. Emotional health. We know almost with certainty that being emotionally healthy provides physical benefits. Exactly why isn't known. Diseases tend to be specific while emotional health is non-specific. For a while researchers grew excited about finding the so-called "cancer personality." For example, patients who were emotionally repressed seemed to be more susceptible to cancer, particularly if depression was a factor. But this research ran into a dead end when it was found that emotional repression, along with depression, can't be isolated as a carcinogen. Such people are more susceptible to a wide range of disorders, not just cancer.

 

The lesson to be drawn, however, is encouraging. If you take emotional health seriously, which means dealing head on with depression, anxiety, past traumas, childhood abuse, and repressed pain, your body will reward you. The aim should be what's called psychological resilience. This is the ability to withstand even the most difficult traumas and challenges without becoming emotionally damaged. No one can avoid psychological blows, since life is unpredictable and full of potential pain. But the people who age the best, as studies frequently show, aren't those who had an untroubled life but those who met their troubles with resilience, who bounced back after encountering difficulties.

 

2. Self-image and perception of one's personal situation. People age badly who expect to age badly, and vice versa. The role of beliefs and expectations is hard to pinpoint, and yet there is a whole constellation of factors that prove relevant. Do you think that you are victim? Do you deserve to be happy? How much, or little, do you expect to achieve? How happy are you with who you are? These are basic questions about being human, and your body is listening in to the answers you give. For almost everyone the positive expectations of youth tend to crumble with age. In a culture that prizes youth, beauty, fame, and money. Old people find themselves sliding down the scale as the years progress.

 

The secret to maintaining high self-worth starts early. Instead of buying into social norms for evaluating yourself, you must develop personal norms. What makes someone worthy for the rest of their lives? The belief that you are lovable, which is the root of being loved and giving love back. The belief that your work is valuable. Holding to a set of moral values that you are proud to uphold. These inner factors survive far beyond the external values imposed by society.

 

3. Stress reduction. Stress is a hackneyed term by now, but over-use hasn't led to advances in stress reduction. Americans lead faster, more stressful lives than ever, with external demands that steadily lead to physical and mental deterioration. By subjecting themselves to external stress (noise, deadline pressures, lack of sleep, over-work, etc.) people are constantly creating hormonal imbalance in their bodies. So-called stress hormones like cortisol are found in a wide range of damaging lifestyles, from high-pressure jobs to night shifts, from the battlefield to households where domestic violence occurs.

 

In the face of such obvious factors, Americans too often resort to bravado. We hear of people who thrive on stress, and high-performance figures like athletes are lionized in their peak years while turning a blind eye to the price they pay off the field as their bodies age. But in fact no one thrives on stress; we are all hurt by it. If put on the front lines of war long enough, every soldier will succumb to shell shock and battle fatigue. Thriving on stress has to do with reacting to stress. Some people are tougher, more resilient, and more used to blocking out stress than others. In and of itself, this doesn't make stress "good."

 

You have to look deeper and realize that stress is never completely external. How you react to stress is equally important. This is the inner factor that creates a feedback loop between yourself and your environment. In one family there may be plenty of noise and seeming chaos, for example, but if the atmosphere is loving and happy, these external factors won't be stressful. On the other hand, in a tense atmosphere of repressed fear and anxiety, even a small amount of disorder can be felt as a major stress. What this means is that the mind plays a primary role in determining if you are suffering from stress.

 

Stress reduction isn't a simple matter of moving to the country where everything is quiet and slow-moving, albeit that such a lifestyle has been correlated with longer life. Stress can be managed in the midst of a busy urban life by looking closely at a few decisive factors:

 

Random stress

Unpredictable stress

Uncontrollable stress

 

If you can minimize the extent to which you are subject to these three things, you will boost your psychological resistance to stress. I will go into detail about how to accomplish this in the next post.

 

 

A Clue About Aging and the Mind: Part 5

By Deepak ChopraRead " A Clue About Aging and the Mind: Parts 1-4 " here

So far we've covered three areas where the mind-body connection seems to affect aging the most.

 

1. Emotional health

 

2. Self-image and perception of one's personal situation

 

3. Stress

The remaining two areas are

 

4. Social connections

 

5. Spiritual growth

As we saw before, stress isn't harmful simply on an objective basis. A person's reaction to stress is equally and perhaps more important. The great French writer Marcel Proust was so hyper-sensitive to noise that he lived in a cork-lined apartment, yet this doesn't mean that the operator of a jackhammer is shortening his life by working around noisy machinery. People react the worst to stresses that are unpredictable, random, and out of their control. That's why battlefield conditions are capable of breaking down even the most courageous soldier. Our bodies produce too much adrenaline and other so-called stress hormones when we are subjected to random stressors that are out of our control. Lab animals quickly decline and age under such conditions.

 

4. Social connections. Isolation and loneliness create the conditions for rapid aging. Heart attack and death rates are known to increase among the recently widowed and among men who have been suddenly terminated from their jobs without warning and against their will. The emotional value of social bonding is immense, yet in modern America we have moved in the opposite direction for decades. With high divorce rates, single-parent families, and a population constantly on the move, social bonding keeps declining. The trend will be exacerbated as the fastest-growing portion of society, those 80 and over, move into retirement homes. Old people are no longer cared for at home, and there is still a stigma about seniors being a burden to the young and a drag on society.

 

The key here is to keep connected. Resist the impulse to go quietly into semi-isolation because you assume that society expects that of you. Losing friends and spouses is an inevitable part of aging, and many people can't find replacements or lack the motivation to. By "replacement" I don't mean a new spouse and family but emotional bonds that mean something to you, that offer continued meaning to your existence. No amount of reading and television substitutes for human contact that nourishes on the level of love and caring. One of the most effective steps is for older people to become involved with mentoring programs, education, and youth programs in general.

 

5. Spiritual growth. In an ideal society spiritual growth would be a lifelong process, culminating in a time of wisdom and contentment in old age. It has been found that older people who can look back on their lives with satisfaction are better equipped to manage old age than people who feel that they have accomplished little and made many mistakes. But if spiritual growth continues, then it's not just the past that feels fulfilling but also the present and the prospect of an unlimited future.

 

The reason that old people might not feel spiritually fulfilled is complex, but the most important factor, I believe, is lack of vision. Unlike traditional societies where wisdom and enlightenment are held out as life-long goals that culminate in old age, older American's find themselves at the stale end of a consumer culture that extols youth and material achievements. Wisdom and enlightenment are intangible, and what's less obvious is that they depend upon a long process of maturation. We expect older people to put meaning in their lives through superficial projects like owning a pet or taking care of a garden while leaving unexplored the vast spiritual territory that only opens up to a mature mind.

 

I've only been able to offer a sketch of how aging and the mind are linked, but each area is full of potential. As our society ages, it's important not to focus solely on drug benefits, retirement homes, gerontological medicine, and other physical factors. One's aim cannot be the prolongation of youth and middle age. Those are productive stages in the human life cycle, but old age is meant to be just as fulfilling in its own very different way.