Want to Look and Feel Younger?

Imagine rewinding the clock 20 years. How do you feel?  Well if you’re at all like the subjects in a Harvard University research project, you look and feel two decades younger, as though you managed to stop aging and go backward.

Several years back Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer studies a group of elderly men, retrofitting an isolated old New England hotel so that every visible sign said it was 20 years earlier. The men — in their late 70s and early 80s — were told not to reminisce about the past, and actually act as if they had traveled back in time. Her desire was to see if changing the men’s mindset about their age might lead to measurable changes in health and fitness.

Langer’s findings were remarkable:  After just one week, the experimental group had increased joint flexibility and dexterity, and less arthritis in their hands. Their mental acuity had also improved, as did their gait and posture. When shown the men’s photographs, outsiders  judged them to look younger than their actual age. It seemed the they had managed to stop aging, and to some degree actually look and feel younger.

Langer has since been running similar “stop aging” experiments for years, and the accumulated weight of her evidence is convincing. Her theory, argued in her new book, Counterclockwise,  is that we are all victims of our own stereotypes about aging and health.

She says we all just mindlessly accept negative cultural cues about disease and old age, and these cues shape our self-concepts and our behavior. If we can shake loose from the negative clichés that dominate our thinking about health, Langer tells us, we can look and feel far younger than our actual years, and to some degree stop aging.

Editor’s Note: Your levels of the Human Growth Hormone (HGH) are  key to supporting healthy longevity.  HGH is a natural restorative hormone that is released when your brain is relaxed enough to create very slow, deep Delta brainwave frequencies. There is an online respource — the Quantum Mind Power Gym — that contains engineered brainwave entrainment audios that guide your brain into the Delta brainwaves required for HGH release. The system in directly available from your computer=> Check it out