2024 August 6 Keep a young attitude

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the website and podcast about reimagining your life. 

A few weeks back, I mentioned the book Breaking the Age Code by Becca Levy. She talks about how much difference your attitude can make to your enjoyment of life and your health and other aspects as you age. There is strong evidence that having a positive attitude about aging throughout your life can add up to seven and a half years more of life added on.

We also spoke about how these negative beliefs about aging bombard us all the way from the time we're infants right up through when we become the target of this hurtful speech as we get older. As I continue to read through the book, the results of Becca's and others' studies just continue to astound me.

It's not like A positive attitude can have up to 5% positive impact. No. It's more the magnitude of—

One of the examples they use is APOE (a gene mutation called the dementia gene). People who have that are far more likely to have dementia. Something like 10% of the population has that. But now, are you ready for this? This is strictly based upon attitude. People who have that gene, who are usually much more likely to get dementia, are 47% less likely to get dementia if they live their lives with a positive attitude towards aging. 

So if you're in that group where you're really at risk for dementia, but you have a good attitude, you're less than half as likely to end up with dementia. As a matter of fact, it improves your chances so much, you're actually lower than the overall pool of people based solely upon your attitude towards aging.

And yes, that study was corrected for all the common variables that might confound or bias the results. This is not cherry picking numbers. This is a real bona fide, well thought out, large population study. Those are the results that popped out of it. A 47% reduction in the chance of getting dementia. Those are some pretty powerful results just from positive thinking. 

Another interesting result is that people who started exercising, especially when coupled with the positive aging outlook—but no matter what, those people who started later in life quickly caught up to the people who'd been exercising their entire lives, which is something very different than you normally hear.

Oh, when you're older, it's harder to put on muscle, it's harder to do this, harder to do that. Well, particularly if there's a good attitude involved, your body reacts and it changes it. What's even more fun is it turns out there's a strong correlation, not surprisingly, between a positive attitude and lowered stress. Lowered stress helps the body take the best advantage of physical activity. That tends to lead to more endorphins and happiness, which leads to more activity and better health, and so on. It's a real positive feedback loop. 

So if you start being more active as you get older, it turns out it has huge health benefits way beyond just saying, Oh, you walk a little bit and you feel better.It goes way beyond that because it helps you raise your attitude. When your attitude increases, there are a lot of positive benefits across all your health spectrum. There's also strong memory loss—those senior moments—are also not a foregone aging phenomenon. 

Just as an aside, by the way, the term senior moment didn't even appear in print until 1997. That was just 27 years ago as of the time this is being recorded. It's in everything—you see it in greeting cards, etc, where it's just assumed that as you get older, you can't remember anything. 

It's just not really so. It's become expected, and so you tend, as we all do, to live into your expectations. I've been trying to make an effort not to take that as an excuse. I've completely stopped saying, Oh, senior moment! I just don't say that stuff anymore, and it's made a difference. Of course I can remember it. I could actually feel myself have something in my thoughts, and then forget it as I try to go for it. I wonder if my brain is just trying to make the belief that I created come true. It's like we're not supposed to remember everything. 

Positive attitude in everything makes a huge difference. In societies where old people are more respected and ageism is less common, older people don't tend to have memory problems, and they're often the repository for societal knowledge—the exact opposite of what we see in Western cultures.

To quantify the effect, a large study showed that people with positive age beliefs had 30% better memory capability than people with negative age beliefs. That's a huge difference—one third better. I've come across some really gratuitous examples of ageist comments in some really surprising situations. One was in a meeting for a governmental body where everything is very carefully controlled, so nobody's offended. The presenter, who was a bit younger, was talking about something and mentioned all those little buses, like airport buses. They always have those really low steps so the decrepit old people can get in. I was like, Say what? I was going to call them out on it, but I didn't want to make a huge stink. After rethinking it, I'll definitely be more vocal the next time should it happen again.

The statement really floored me because there is zero reason to put it in that context. At least six people, maybe more, on the call were in their 60s or older. Sometimes there's one of the senior people there and he's in his mid to late 70s—and quite sharp, I might add. It just seems to become something you say.

You just take one whole demographic. It's the only prejudice, the only bias, in Western cultures that's considered acceptable. All the other things you can't say this, you can't do that, you can't offend this, all these other special groups. Even though one of the protected groups is supposed to be based upon age, everybody completely ignores it and just flings "jokes" and comments all the time. 

Then I was on another website. It was actually a YouTube channel. Someone made a quick data chart with these age categories. They're roughly something like the first column was like 18 to 25, the next one was like 25 to 30, and the third column was old geezers. What the heck? When did publicly insulting a large segment of the population become acceptable? 

Then today I was on a site like Reddit, a discussion site. Someone made a comment about login.gov, the identity program I talked about last week, and they closed the comment with I'm pretty tech savvy, and it wasn't clear to me. Imagine how difficult it would be for some boomer! 

Hey buddy, why don't you tune in to my upcoming course on how to create a login.gov account? The inherent presumption there, the deeply embedded assumption that anyone older than them, but certainly anyone who's old, obviously couldn't learn something new, especially if it involved a computer. 

But what is fascinating, like when you finally discover the secret to something—once you become aware of this, you can stand back and look at your own attitude, of course, but also look at other people's attitudes. Once you know what to look for, it's really fascinating how people undermine themselves.

There's a regular column in the Wall Street Journal called Retirement Rookies. It's about a slightly older couple. They both retired around the end of 2022. It's all about how they handled the transition to retirement, what they're doing, etc. A little bit of it is financial, but really much more of it is social interaction, what they're doing with their lives now. It's a good series of articles. It's the whole retirement package, but from some people who went into it and are documenting it as it's happening. 

What's fascinating now is looking at how they're starting to evaluate everything that happens in terms of how old they are now. There was just one in today's paper, and I think he may have used those words directly. He had an eye issue, and immediately he went down this rabbit hole of, Oh, it could be this, it could be that. What am I going to do if I go blind?

What happens with these things? We thought we were going to have health, but that didn't come out of the blue. That's been trained into him for a long time. For reference, he's 66. He and his wife ride a tandem bicycle like 12 to 20 miles most days. They go for literally months-long bike trips. They eat carefully. They're mentally and physically active. 

But still. The constant drone of ageism is already starting to take a huge toll at the ripe old age of 66. Even the insurance companies think he's going to live a couple more decades, but he is starting to doubt it. I'll probably try and send him or get him to buy a copy of Becca's book and say, Take this to heart. Read your article, read your last installment, and read this book again. Put those two together and see what you're doing to yourself. 

To be clear, they're both educated professionals. They're not wildly rich, but they're not suffering, and they're currently in good health. Even with all those solid foundations, they've been strongly negatively influenced, him in particular. Now, think about someone who spends hours a day on TV or social media—particularly if they're retired and watching TV all the time. They're watching ads telling us we can't use a phone if it isn't a flip phone, that we can't be safe without an alert pendant if we're over 60. And of course, all the medicines we should be asking our doctor about. 

Then throw in all the jokes and memes, and if you aren't somewhat self confident, you'll quickly start to believe that all those false stories, all that false drivel, is really true. Do not believe it. It's not true. We've talked often about how some things do change, how our superpowers can change as we get older. 

But that doesn't mean we're automatically falling apart. But that's the common story, and most of our peers are only too happy to hop on the pity wagon with us and agree how getting old is horrible, and on and on down that slippery slope the conversation goes into this rabbit hole of how horrible it is to get old. 

Just like you can change the whole world, you can also change your own, and even your friend's self story. When that ageist talk starts, even by your peers for goodness sake, just stop it. Say, I don't really believe that. I just started swimming the other day because I wanted to do that my whole life. It's great! Or whatever positive activity you can share. 

When the conversation turns to all your bad health, woes, and everything else, talk about how wonderful it is that we have so many care opportunities, and that we're still able to be independent, and actually, since we're independent, why don't we go to the museum this afternoon and do something different?

Take control of the situation, turning it to a more positive direction. Not only may you help save a friend's health, or even their life, but you also help yourself see all the good that's still around you and maybe get back some of those extra seven and a half years that marketing and social media are trying to steal from us.

So that's it for the evening. Be positive in all you do and most especially be positive and remember all the good things about aging. Honestly, there are so many things that I love about where I am in my life right now and, and one of those things is that I know if there's something I'm not satisfied with, I can go look in a mirror and talk to the guy that caused it.

I can also go talk to the guy that can work to change it. That self honesty is something that took years to come to, and it serves me very well every day, along with all the knowledge and confidence that I've accumulated throughout my life. Would it be fun to still be active 20 hours a day and still be functional the next day?

Well sure, it would, I guess. But, when I was young I'd probably have wasted those 20 hours, and still at my older age, probably get more pleasure and enjoyment out of each day than many of my younger friends do. So enjoy your life no matter what your age, and always live it to the fullest, and just ignore all the ageist comments.

Keep a positive attitude towards aging. Keep a positive attitude towards life. That will be your best insurance against anything that comes your way. Many of the things you hear just aren't true, and holding in a negative attitude about aging will do more to harm you than almost any other thing in your life.

Your homework (always optional) is to think about all the good things and attitudes you have now that you're older. You don't have to be any particular age. Just look back 10 or 20 years and compare how you are now to how you were back then. It's pretty unusual that things don't look better now than they did then. Sometimes there might be new bumps that come up in the road, but you also have new capabilities, new insight into how those things happen and what you can do to either change them, mitigate them, or work around them to keep moving yourself forward.

That's wisdom and knowledge that comes from age. There's no real good substitute for it. Extra points if you then make a habit of reminding yourself and your friends of the things that you're finding enjoyable right now. Use those positive attitudes to redirect the negative conversations to get everyone back to focusing on the many positives that still come into our lives every single day. So thank you very much. 

As always, remember UKR7.com has links to help Ukraine. The war is still going on there. Also in Israel and the Mideast. There are a lot of things going on. Niger's under a mess right now. The Venezuelan election with most of the votes counted, the one side claimed they had 51%, and actually most of the votes they had were over 109% of the votes counted. They're just stuffing the ballot box. There's a really good story about that. 

There's a lot of things going on in a lot of different places that really need some support and your thoughts and prayers. World Central Kitchen, operating where disasters are throughout the world. You can support them at WCK.org. The big thing is, if you can support somebody monetarily with your thoughts, prayers—however you can do it, that's really great. If you want to support somebody locally, that's also great. 

If you're just not in a position or the mindset to donate, just remember that one of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others. When you meet someone on the street, just smile at them and say something nice to them. If you see somebody's looking a little down, say, Hey, hope you have a good day. That's it. You don't have to make a big thing about it. Just put positiveness into their life. That can make a huge difference here.

As always, thank you for stopping by. If you found something interesting and useful, please pass it along. Please subscribe, hit that like button, and if not, please drop me a comment as to what you'd like to hear. Have a great week. Remember to live the life that you dream of, because that's the path to true contentment. Love and encouragement to everyone. See you next week on 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com. Thank you.