Daring gerontologists at T ufts University visited a nursing home, selected
a group of the frailest residents, and put them on a weight-traini ng regimen. One might fear that a sudden introduction to exercise would exhaust or kill
these fragile people, but in fact they thrived. Within eight weeks, wasted
muscles had come back by 300 percent, coordination and balance
improved, and overall a sense of active life returned. Some of the subjects
who had not been able to walk unaided could now get up and go to the
bathroom in the middle of the night by themselves, an act of reclaimed
dignity that is by no means trivial. What makes this accomplishment truly
wondrous, however , is that the youngest subject in the group was 87 and the
oldest 96. These results were always possible; nothing new was added here to the
capacity of the human body . All that happened was that a belief changed,
and when that happened, aging changed. If you are 96 years old and afraid
to move  your body , it will waste  away . To go into a weight-training room at
that age, you have to believe that it will do your body good; you have to be
free of fear; and you have to believe in yourself. When I say that aging is
the resul t of a belief, I’m not implying that a person can simply  think aging
away . Exactly the opposite—the stronger the belief, the more rooted in the
body it is and the more immune to conscious control. According to the belief system you and I adhere to, Nature has trapped us
in bodies that grow old against our will. The tradition of aging extends as
far back as recorded history and even prehistory . Animals and plants grow
old, fulfilling a universal law of Nature. It is hard to imagine that aging is
the result of learned behavior , for biology cannot be denied. Yet the core belief that aging is a fixed, mechanical process—something
that just happens to us—is only a belief. As such, it blinds us to all kinds of
facts that don’t fit the belief system we cling to. How many of the following
statements do you believe are facts? a)  Aging is natural—all or ganisms grow old and die. b)  Aging is inevitable—it can’ t be prevented. c)  Aging is normal—it af fects everyone about the same.d)  Agin g is genetic—I’ll proba bly live about as long as my parents
and grandparents did. e)  Aging is painful—it causes physical and mental suf fering. f)  Aging is universal—the law of entropy makes all orderly systems
run down and decay . g)  Aging is fatal—we’re all growing old and dying. If you take any or all of these to be statements of fact, you are under the
influence of beliefs that do not match reality . Each statement contains a
little objective truth, but each can be refuted, too. a)  Agin g is natural, but there are organisms that never age, such as
one-celled amoe bas, algae, and protozoa. Parts of you also do not
age—your emotions, ego, personality type, I.Q., and other mental
characteristics, for example, as well as vast portions of your
DNA. Physically , it makes no sense to say that the water and
minerals in your body are aging, for what is “old water” or “old
salt”? These components alone make up 70 percent of your body . b)  Aging is inevitable, but the honeybee at certain times of the year
can shift its hormones and completely reverse its age. In the
human body , shifts in hormones  may not be as dramatic, but there
is enough latitude so that on any given day your hormonal profile
may be younger than the day , month, or year before. c)  Aging is normal; however , there is no normal curve of aging that
applies to everyone. Some people entirely escape certain aging
symptoms, while others are afflicted with them long before old
age sets in. d)  Aging has a genetic component that affects everyone, but not to
the degree usually supposed. Having two parents who survived
into their eighties adds only about three years to a child’ s life
expectancy; less than 5 percent of the population has such good or
bad genes that their life span will turn out to be significantly
longer or shorter . By comparison, by adopting a healthy lifestyle,
you can delay symptoms of aging by as much as thirty years. e)  Aging is often painful, both physically and mentally , but this is the
result not of aging itself but of the many diseases that afflict theelderly; much of that disease can be prevented. f)  Agin g seems  to be universal, because all orderly systems break
down over time, but our bodies  resist this decay extremely well. Without negative influences from within and without, our tissues
and organs could easily last 115 to 130 years before sheer age
caused them to stop functioning. g)  Finally , aging is fatal, becaus e everyone has to die, but in the vast
majority of cases, perhaps as much as 99 percent, the cause of
death is not old age but cancer , heart attack, stroke, pneumonia,
and other illnesses. It is extremely difficult to ascertain what it would be like to watch the
body age per se. Two cars left out in the rain will rust at about the same
rate; the process of oxidation attacks them equally , turning their iron and
steel into ferrous oxide according to one easily explained law of chemistry . The aging process obeys no such simple laws. For some of us, aging is
steady , uniform, and slow, like a tortoise crawling toward its destination. For others, aging  is like approac hing an unseen cliff—there is a long, secure
plateau of health, followed by a sharp decline in the last year or two of life. And for still others, most of the body will remain healthy except for a weak
link, such as the heart, which fails much faster than do the other organs. You would have  to follow a person for most of his adult life before you
figured out how he was aging, and by then it would be too late. The fact that aging is so personal has proved very frustrating for
medicine, which  finds it extrem ely difficult to predict and treat many of the
major conditions associated with old age. Two young women can ingest the
same amount of calcium, display equally healthy hormone levels, and yet
one will develop crippling osteoporosis after menopause while the other
won’ t. Twin brothers with identical genes will go through life with
remarkably similar medical histories, yet only one will develop Alzheimer ’s
or arthritis or cancer. Two of the most common conditions in old age, rising
blood pressure and elevated cholesterol, are just as unpredictable. The aging
body refuses to behave according to mechanical laws and rules. After decades of intense inves tigation, there is no adequate theory of
human aging. Even our attempts to explain how animals age have resultedin more than three hundred separate theories, many of them contradictory . Our notions of aging have been drastically modified over the last two
decades. In the early 1970s, doctors began to notice patients in their sixties
and seventies whose bodies still functioned with the vigor and health of
middle age. These people ate sensibly and looked after their bodies. Most
did not smoke, having given up the habit sometime after the Surgeon
General’ s origin al warnings about lung cancer in the early 1960s. They had
never suffered heart attacks. Although they exhibited some of the accepted
signs of old age—higher blood pressure and cholesterol, and tendencies to
put on body fat, to become farsighted, and to lose the top range of their
hearing—there was nothing elderly about these people. The “new old age,”
as it came to be called, was born. The “old old age” had been marked by irreversible declines on all fronts
—physical, mental, and social. For untold centuries people expected to
reach old age—if they reached it at all—feeble, senile, socially useless,
sick, and poor. To reinforce this grim expectation there were grim facts:
Only one out of ten people lived to the age of 65 before this century . For centuries in the past, the human body was exposed to the killing
influence of a harsh environment: Inadequate nutrition, a lifetime spent in
physical labor , and uncontrollable epidemics of disease created conditions
that accelerated aging. Leaf through the accounts of immigrants passing
through Ellis Island at the turn of the century; some of the photographs will
horrify you. The faces of 40-year -old women look haggard and drawn,
literally as if they were 70—and an old 70 at that. Adolescent boys look like
battered middle-aged men. Under the surgeon’ s scalpel their hearts, lungs,
kidneys, and livers would have looked identical to those of a modern person
twice their age. Aging is the body’s response to conditions imposed upon it,
both inner and outer . The sands of age shift under our feet, adap ting to how
we live and who we are. The new old age arrived on the scene after more than half a century of
improved living conditions and intensive medical progress. The average
American life span of 49 years in 1900 jumped to 75 in 1990. To put this
huge increase in perspective, the years of life we have gained in less than a
century are equal to the total life span that individuals enjoyed for more
than four thousand years; from prehistoric times to the dawn of theIndustrial Revol ution, the average life span remained below 45. Only 10
percent of the general population used to make it to 65, but today 80 percent
of the population lives at least that long. The Mystery of Aging
Despite this evidence that aging is a shifting, fluid phenomen on, we still
find ourselves operating under  the belief that aging can be understood
strictly as a biological process. When you look at your body and notice how
much it has changed physically since you were young, aging seems an
obvious phenomenon. In fact, it is anything but. Twenty years ago I was a young resident working in a vast and dreary
veterans hospita l outside Boston. In a typical day I ran physical s on dozens
of patie nts, mostly old soldiers who had served in two world wars. The
passing years had taken a toll that was all too obvious. Even when I had my
eyes closed, the sound and touch of their bodies were unmistakable. Their
hands trembled while I took their pulse, and their lungs wheeze d under the
stethoscope. The pounding lub-dub of young hearts had given way to
feebler , threadier rhythms. I knew that unseen destruction was taking place beneath the thin veil of
their dry, wrinkled skin. Blood vessels were hardening and blood pressure
was rising. If I could reach in to touch the three coronary arteries, one or
more would almost certainly be engor ged with fatty plaque. The body’ s
main artery, the aorta, might have turned as hard as a lead pipe, stiffened by
calcium deposits , while the delicate arterioles in the head were likely to be
so tissue-thin that the slightest contact would make them crumble,
triggering a stroke. Vertebrae and hip bones would be getting thin and
brittle too, waiting to crack if the person slipped on the stairs. All over the
body , hidden tumors would be held in check only by the slowed metabolism
of the elderly , which mercifully retards the spread of cancer . All this may sound like an accurate, if grim, description of the aging
process, but in fact I wasn’t seeing old people at all; I was seeing sick
people. All over Amer ica doctors were making the same mistake. Caughtup in treating various diseases, we forgot what aging is like when disease is
not present. Moreover , the few medical researchers who took an interest in
the aging process tended to work in veterans hospitals like the one in which
I practic ed. By definition, the “normal” aging they observed was abnormal,
because a normal person isn’ t hospitalized. No one would dream of defining
childhood by studying patients in a children’ s hospital ward, yet old age
was lar gely defined that way . Across the general population, only 5 percent of people over 65 are
institutionalized, in either hospitals, nursing homes, or mental institutions. Surprisingly , this figure is not significantly higher than for younger age
groups. Obviously , there are many reasons besides old age why someone
might wind up in an institution. Such places are dumping grounds for the
widowed, homeless, alcoholic, mentally incompetent, and destitute. A
doctor can’t spend a day in a typical big-city hospital witho ut seeing a
police car pull up with a load of hapless derelicts swept off the street to
become the faceless statistics that researchers use to define aging. “Fear old age,” Plato cautioned over two thousand years ago, “for it does
not come alone.” He spoke the truth. As we grow older , the things that
bother us most are often not aging itself but the ills that accom pany it. In
the wild, few animals die simply because they have grown too old. Other
factors, such as sickness, starv ation, exposure to the elements, and ever-
vigilant predators, kill off most creatures long before they reach their
potential life span. Gaze at a flock of sparrows outside your window this
spring; by next spring, half will have died from various causes. So, for all
practical purpos es, it is irreleva nt that sparrows can live over a decade if
kept safe in a cage. Long life spans are possible among birds (in captivity , eagles can survive
for fifty years and parrots for more than seventy years), which seems
strange considering their fast metabolisms and racing heartbea t. But very
little about the aging process is logical. The evolutionary purpose of aging
is itself a puzzle  to biologists, given that Nature has so many other ways of
ending an anima l’s life. For example, mortality is built into the system of
competition for food. Some animals have to die in order for others to live;
otherwise surviv al of the fittest would have no meaning. Amon g bears and
deer, for example, the males fight for territory during breeding season;when the strongest males win the right to breed with the females, they also
win the prime territory—land that is rich in food—while the losers must
settle for much poorer foraging grounds, where many struggle on the verge
of starvation and quickly die. If a wild animal is fortunate enough to survive to its natural life span, its
body will not just be old, it will be riddled with disease. Cancer , heart
disease, hardene d arteries, arthritis, and strokes are rampant among old
creatures. Aged lions suffer coronaries and old eagles get cataracts. Aging
is so mixed in with other factors that it is extremely hard to separate it out. The same blurring occurs in humans. Although we pride ourselves on
having escaped the trials of the wild, modern people still rarely die of old
age. In 1938 the British medica l journal The Lancet  carried the report of a
senior pathologist who maintain ed that he had never examined a deceased
body that had succumbed to age alone. The closest candidate was a 94-year -
old man who had died just by fading away without overt disease. But
appearances were deceiving: At autopsy it was found that he had been
suffering from an undiagnosed case of lobar pneumonia, one of the most
common causes of fatality among old people. Although it appeals to commo n sense that we grow old because we
simply wear out, no wear -and-tear theory of aging has ever held up under
close scrutiny . Aging bodies only seem to wear out like overworked
washing machines and tractors. “How’ s the old ticker?” a doctor will ask an
elderly patient, as if her heart were a clock winding down on its spring. Unlike machines, however , which run down with too much use, the human
body is capable of getting better the more it is used. A well-exercised bicep
doesn’ t deterior ate; rather , it gets stronger . Leg bones gain mass in
proportion to how much weight  is put on them, which is why osteoporosis
is practically unknown in tribal societies where lifelong physical activity is
the norm. Moreover , if wearing out were the true cause of aging, it would
be a good strate gy to rest in bed all your life. In fact, prolo nged rest is
disastrous for the physiology— a hospital patient confined to complete bed
rest for a few weeks will suffer as much muscle and skeletal  wasting as
someone who has aged a decade. Any purely physical theory of aging cannot help but be incomplete. Consider arthrit is, one of the most common symptoms of age. In medicalschool we were taught that common arthritis (or osteoarthritis) is a
degenerative disorder . This means that its cause is simple wear and tear. After a lifetime of hard use, the cushioning cartilage in large weight-bearing
joints deteriorates, which explai ns why the knee and hip joints, which carry
the burden of supporting the body , tend to be favored sites for arthritis. The
synovium, the smooth lining that cushions the bones where they meet, also
becomes inflamed or deteriorated, leading to the pain, swelling, and burning
of arthritis. Sometimes the synovial fluid dries up, and the bones grind
against each other , creating pits or bone spurs. This kind of degeneration
has plagued mankind since the Stone Age. The familiar image of prehistoric
man walking hunched over from the shoulders is now thought to be a
distortion of what healthy cavemen really looked like. Archaeologists, it
seems, were misled because so many of the intact skeletons they found in
their digs were deformed from arthritis of the spine. As the cause of arthritis, wear and tear appeals to common sense, but it
fails to explain several things. Some people never become arthritic, even
though they subject their joints to extreme stress. Other people develop
arthritis after a lifetime of sedentary desk work, not to mention that certain
favorite spots for the disease, such as the fingers, are not called upon to bear
weight at all. Newer theories of arthritis look to hormones, genetics,
autoimmune breakdown, diet, and other factors; in the end, no clear cause is
known. However , emoti onal factors have been strongly linked to another major
type of arthritis,  rheumatoid arthritis. This disorder seems to favor women
who have a marked tendency to repress emotion, who adopt passivity and
depression as a mode of coping with stress rather than getting angry or
confronting serious emotional issues. The disease can get worse under
stress, and, for inexplicable reasons, it can also disappear , perhaps in
obedience to a deeper current of change. Three Ages of ManThe complexity of the forces operating inside an aging body becomes even
more obvious when you ask a seemingly easy question: How old are you? Before you rush to reply , consider that there are three distinct and
separate ways to measure someone’ s age:
Chronological age —how old you are by the calendar
Biological age—how old your body is in terms of critical life signs
and cellular processes
Psychological age —how old you feel you are
Only the first of these is fixed, yet chronological age is also the most
unreliable of the three. One 50-year -old may be nearly as healthy as he was
at 25, while another may already have the body of a 60- or even a 70-year -
old. T o really know how old you are, the second measure—biological age—
comes into play; it tells us how time has affected your organs and tissues
compared to other people of your chronological age. Time doesn’t affect your body uniformly , however; practically every cell,
tissue, and organ is aging on its own timetable, which makes biological age
much more complex than chronological age. A middle-aged marathon
runner may have  the leg muscles, heart, and lungs of someone half his age,
but his knees and kidneys may be aging rapidly due to excessive stress, and
his eyesight and hearing could  be declining on their own idiosyncratic
paths. You become unique as the years pass. At 20, when muscle
development, reflexes, sexual drive, and many other primary functions are
reaching their peak, most people  look alike to a physiologist. Young hearts,
brains, kidneys, and lungs all exhibit healthy color and firmness; evidence
of malformed, diseased, or dying tissue is scanty or nonexistent. But by age
70, no two bodie s are remotely alike. At that age, your body will be like no
one else’ s in the world; its age changes will mirror your unique life. Biological age also has its limits as a measurement tool. Considered
purely as biology , the aging process moves at such a slow rate that its fatal
effects rarely match those of faster -moving diseases. Most critical organs
can function well at 30 percen t of peak capacity . Thus if our bodies are
losing 1 percent of their functio ning per year after age 30, it would take 70
years, or age 100, before aging per se threatens a particular organ withimminent break down. But social and psychological influences  are ever at
work, our lifestyles subject us to various conditions, and the differences in
how we age show up much earlier in life. Two stroke patients in their midfifties with identical medical conditions
can, and often do, display wildly different outcomes—one may recover
from his attack quickly , respond well to physical therapy , and easily regain
lost speech and movement, eventually returning to normal life. The other
may respond poorly to treatmen t, be overcome with depression, and give up
all active pursuits; in short order he may grow old and die. The determining
factor is psychological age, which is the most personal and mysterious of
the three measurements but also the one that holds the most promise for
reversing the aging process. Biological age is known to be changeable—regular physical exercise, for
example, can reverse ten of the most typical effects of biological age,
including high blood pressure, excess body fat, improper sugar balance, and
decreased muscle mass. Gerontologists have found that elderly people who
agree to adopt better lifestyle habits improve their life expectancy on
average by ten years. Thus, the arrow of time can move forward quickly or
slowly , stop in its tracks, or even turn around. Your body becom es younger
or older biologically depending on how you treat it. Yet your third age, psychological age, is even more flexible. Like
biological age, psychological age is completely personal—no two people
have exactly the same psycho logical age because no two people have
exactly the same experiences. Listen to the voice of Anna Lundgren, age
101, who made a very important observation as a child that influenced how
she aged  for the next eighty or ninety years. “Back in Norway where I was
a little girl, when people got to be 55 or 65, they just sat. I never felt that
old. That’ s old. I don’t feel that old today .” How old you feel you are has no
boundaries and can reverse in a split second. An old woman recalling her
first love can suddenly look and sound as if she has turned 18 again; a
middle-aged man who hears that his beloved wife has died can wither into
lonely senescence in a matter of weeks. Instead of coming up with a fixed number to answer the questi on “How
old are you?” we need to arrive  at a sliding scale that shows how fast our
three ages are moving in relation to one another . Take two 50-year -olds:A, who was recently divorced, suffers from acute depression , with a
history of heart disease and overweight; B, who is happily marr ied, healthy ,
optimistic, and satisfied with his job. Because of the various factors at work, the true age of A and B is best
expressed by a three-tiered graph:
The arrows point in the directio n of aging and their length indicates how
fast the process is taking place. Although A and B are both chronologically
50, A is under so many negative influences that his body is 10 years older
biologically and is aging quickly ; in terms of psychological age he is about
par with his calendar years, but he is aging fairly rapidly there, too. The
picture is very different for B, who is younger on both the biological and
psychological scales. His good physical and mental health indicate that he
is aging slowly biologically and actually getting younger psychologically . Overall, A is in much worse shape than B. Depending on how severe his
depression and heart condition are, his composite age might be as high as
60, but this figure is artificial. It ignores the fact that all the factors that
make him so much older than his chronological age are reversible. Ten
years from now, he could be as happy , optimistic, and fit as B, in which
case his composite age would decline. When gerontologists try to predict longevity , all of the following
psychosocial factors must be taken into account to accurately determine if
the aging process is being accelerated or retarded. NEGA TIVE F ACT ORS THA T ACCELERA TE AGING
    Asterisk (*) denotes major factors
*  Depression
    Inability to express emotions    Feeling helpless to change oneself and others
    Living alone
    Loneliness, absence of close friends
*  Lack of regular daily routine
*  Lack of regular work routine
*  Job dissatisfaction
    Having to work more than 40 hours per week
    Financial burdens, being in debt
    Habitual or excessive worry
    Regret for sacrifices made in the past
    Irritability , getting angry easily , or being unable to express anger
    Criticism of self and others
POSITIVE F ACT ORS THA T RET ARD AGING
*  Happy marriage (or satisfying long-term relationship)
*  Job satisfaction
*  Feeling of personal happiness
    Ability to laugh easily
    Satisfactory sex life
    Ability to make and keep close friends
*  Regular daily routine
*  Regular work routine
    Taking at least one week’ s vacation every year
    Feeling in control of personal life
    Enjoyable leisure time, satisfying hobbies
    Ability to express feelings easily
    Optimistic about the future
    Feeling financially secure, living within means
As you can see, there is much more to psychological age than the cliché
“You’re only as old as you think you are,” and changing your psychological
age involves interweaving personal and social factors. Among the major
factors are sever al we have touched upon. The importance of a regular daily
and work routine is emphasized by almost every longevity study . Job
satisfaction emerges as the most reliable indicator that a perso n is at lowrisk for a heart attack, while being dissatisfied with one’s job puts one at
extremely high risk. Living alone is precarious, while being happily married
indicates that one will age slowly . The combinations of these factors become extremely complex, mirroring
the complexity of one’s personal life. Gerontologists have gone to great
lengths to try to quantify some of these factors, with plaus ible results. Someone who has lived alone for four years, for example, would have a
slightly different psychological age from someone who has lived alone for
eight years. The relative value assigned to having a regular daily routine is
considered three  times more important than having a satisfying sex life,
while being optimistic about the future cancels out, point for point, the
negative trait of not having a hobby . But I have perso nal reservations  about any attempt to quantify someone’ s
personal makeu p; despite the general accuracy of these factors, they lose
the essence of personal life, which is its ability to shift and transform itself,
to touch many chords both happy and sad, to under go sudden reversals and
abrupt illuminat ions. When I think of myself, my image is not of a fixed
collection of attributes—things are always changing inside,  sometimes
drastically . The list cannot quantify intangible qualities such as being able to give of
oneself and having regard for others. In general, this is a limitation of
modern psychology , with its overreliance on numbers and impersonal data. One unusual study bridged the gap rather neatly , however . Larry Scherwitz,
a Unive rsity of California psychologist, taped the conversation s of nearly
six hund red men, a third of whom were suffering from heart disease, the
rest of whom were healthy . Listening to the tapes, he counted how often
each man used the words I, me, and mine. Comparing his results with the
frequency of heart disease, Scherwitz found that men who used the first-
person pronoun most often had the highest risk of heart trouble. In addition,
by following his subjects for several years, he found that the more a man
habitually talked about himself, the greater the chance he would actually
have a coronary . Counting the times a person said “I” was an ingenious way to quantify
self-absorption, and to me, there’ s something very fitting in the fact that the
less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers. Theantidote, Scherwitz concluded, was to be more giving: “Listen with regard
when others talk. Give your time and energy to others; let others have their
way; do things for reasons other than furthering your own needs.” In those
words, he goes beyond the quantifiable data to issues of love and
compassion, which appeal very much to our intuitive sense that an open,
loving person should age well. One thing the quantified research has shown so far is very valuable:
Biological age responds to psychological age. If you look over the list of
positive psychosocial influences, subjective words such as happy , satisfied,
and enjoyable  indicate how completely personal these factors really are. By
nurturing your inner life, you are using the power of awareness to defeat
aging at its sourc e. On the other hand, changes of awareness in the direction
of apathy , helplessness, and dissatisfaction push the body into rapid decline. The Value of Adaptability
It is very frightening to watch an old person give up his desire for life, and
it is extremely difficult to show  him what he is doing. When life becomes
meaningless, the body’ s sustaini ng energy seems to drain silently away like
a leaky battery . But if we look closer , we can prove that this draining away
of vitali ty, curio sity, and the will to live is controllable and in fact has
nothing to do with normal aging. The body is self-replenishing; it renews its
energies automa tically after times of depletion. No matter how severe the
stress, once the body has responded, it returns to a state of balance. This
tendency to remain in balance is completely necessary to life and proves to
be a key survival mechanism. In 1957 , Fland ers Dunbar , a professor of medicine at Columbia
University , reported on a study of centenarians and “nimble
nonagenarians.” She found that psychological adaptability in the face of
stress was domi nant among these people. This trait more than any other set
them aside from the general population. Although everyone has occasions
for grief, shock, sadness, and disappointment, some of us spring back much
better than others. Dunbar went on to compile six traits that in her opinionwere shared by “precentenaria ns,” people who have the best chance of
living to be 100:
  1. Responding creatively to change. More than any other , this trait
made precentenarians stand out from ordinary people. 2. Freedom from anxiety . Anxiety is a great enemy of our ability to
improvise and create. 3. The continued ability to create and invent. 4. High levels of adaptive ener gy. 5. A capacity to integrate new things into one’ s existence. 6. W anting to stay alive. As with all predictive models, this one is flawed. It must be conceded
that some people vegetate and still live to be 100, as do some who are rigid
and uncreative, who couldn’ t care less whether they stay alive. But positive
qualities are far more common in centenarians, and as a description of the
kind of old age that is most desirable, Dunbar ’s list is extremely helpful. Her precentenarians are special because they reveal that just as people have
strong or weak immune systems, we all vary in how well we adapt
mentally . For some, the journey of life, however harsh on the outside, is met
with resilience instead of brittleness; they are the reeds who bend in the
storm, not the oaks who stand stif f and break. Adaptability can be most simply defined as freedom from conditioned
response. To remain open to change, to accept the new and welcome the
unknown, is a choice that involves definite personal skills; for left to inertia,
the mind tends to reinforce its old habits and increasingly to fall prey to its
conditioning. ADAPT ABILITY QUESTIONNAIRE
If you want to see whether you have learned the skills that make
someone adaptable, answer the following questions as they apply to
you, assigning the following points:Almost never applies 0 points
Sometimes applies 1 point
Usually applies 2 points
Almost always applies 3 points
  1. When I am first confro nted with a problem and have no idea how
it can be solved , I take the attitude that the right answer will
emer ge. 2. Events in my life happen with their own right timing. 3. I feel optimistic about my future. 4. When someone rejects me, I feel hurt, but I accept that the
decision was theirs to make. 5. I feel the loss of family and friends who have died, but the grief
resolves itself and I move on—I don’t try to bring back what
cannot be brought back. 6. I feel committed to ideals lar ger than myself. 7. When I’m arguing with someone, I defend my position, but I also
find it easy to acknowledge the rightness in the other side. 8. I vote the man, not the party . 9. I donate time to worthwhile causes, even if they are unpopular . 10. I am considered a good listener . I don’t interrupt others when
they talk. 11. If someone has a lot of emotion at stake in something, I will hear
them out without expressing my views. 12. Given a choice between a high-salaried job that is fairly boring
and a job I like doing at half the pay , I’ll take the job I love to do. 13. My style of managing other people is to allow them to do what
they want rather than try to control them. I interfere as little as
possible. 14. I find it easy to trust others. 15. I am not prone to worry; the ups and downs of difficult situations
affect me less than most other people. 16. In a compe titive situation, I am a good loser—I will say, “Good
game,” not, “I wasn’ t at my best.”
17. Being right in every situation isn’ t all that important to me.18. I feel comfortable playing with young children; I enter  their
world easily . 19. I don’ t think about my moods very much. 20. I can easily feel what someone else is feeling. 21. Quiet people make me feel comfortable. Nervous people don’t
make me nervous. Total score: ______
Evaluating your scor e:
50 points or over:
You are an exceptionally adaptable person who has spent a long
time on personal growth. Others seek you for guidance and advice. You place a high priority on your ability to remain comfortable under
pressure and readily accept new challenges. You pride yourself on
being able to resolve conflicts well. 30–50 points:
You are reasonably adaptable to everyday challenges, but the
amount of work you have put into this area has probably been
limited. You are the kind of person that others consider easygoing,
but you are likely to have more  worries and regrets that you haven’ t
faced up to. Conflicts upset you, and you tend to fall under the
influence of people with stronger emotions than yours. 20–30 points:
You have definit e ideas of right and wrong behavior and put a high
priority on defending your point of view . Working on personal
growth has not been a high priority in your life so far. You are likely
to be well organized and decided ly goal oriented. If you find yourself
in a situation of conflict or competition, you really want to be on the
winning side. Under 20 points:
Your sense of self needs considerable work. Dominated by one or
both parents as a child, you fear rejection and become upset or criticalwhen others disagree with you. You have your way of doing things
and do not like surprises. You are likely to be obsessively orderly ,
with lots of hidden worry , or else very disor ganized, reacting strongly
to one external event after another . The purpose of this test is not to make anyone feel superior or inferior
but to spur conscious growth. The common denominator of all adaptable
people is that they actually work, on a daily basis, at keeping their
awareness open. Most of this book is devoted to that work, and I feel that
there is no higher life purpose than trying to open your awaren ess until the
full impact of reality—in all its beauty , truth, wonder , and sacredness—is
consciously experienced. Reduced awareness occurs when life is not
consciously lived and appreciat ed. This tendency is often so subtle that it
may take month s or years befor e the damaging results are evident, but the
trail of clues is very obvious for anyone who cares to look. The age changes
that develop in mind and body are the end products of thoughtl essly giving
in to rigid assum ptions, beliefs, and opinions. Some people, for instance,
have absorbed the notion that they are going to lose their memory in old
age, an expectation frequently reinforced by those who believe in the “old”
old age. As soon as they are 55 or 60, such people begin to worry about every tiny
memory lapse, despite the fact that occasional memory lapses occur to
everyone, youn g and old. Memory is a funny thing. You can’t make
yourself rememb er anything, but you can make yourself forget. One way to
do this is to block a memory with anxiety . Remember that last time you
were in an emer gency and had to call home? You rushed to a pay phone in a
state of anxiety , and as you picked up the receiver , the thought flashed
through your mind, “What’ s my number? I’ve forgotten my number!” This
thought doesn’ t go away until you calm down and allow the fog of anxiety
to withdraw , which then permits memory to arise spontaneously . Some people are so anxious about growing old that they cannot help but
leak that anxiety into every situation that calls for them to remembersomething—a friend’ s name, someone’ s address, the place where they left
their keys. They start trying to monitor their memory (“Okay , am I about to
forget this?”), which only makes matters worse, until they get caught up in
a viciou s circle: They are so persuaded of encroaching senili ty that they
force themselve s into memory loss by not allowing enough relaxation for
memory to work. The development of any character trait starts early in life and begins to
display itself by middle age. The best way to ensure that you will be
adaptable in old age is to work on being that way when you are still young. This was demon strated in a classic study started fifty years ago by Harvard
psychologist Geor ge Vaillant. He took 185 young men, students at Harvard
during World War II, and monitored their health for almost forty years. Vaillant found that even if someone appeared perfectly healthy in youth, he
was very likely to die premature ly if he reacted poorly to stress, fell prey to
depression, or was psychologically unstable. Of the men who had the best
mental health, only 2 became chronically ill or died by age 53. Of the 48
men with the poorest mental health, however , 18—almost ten times as
many—were chronically ill or dead by that age. Vaillant concluded that early aging—defined as irreversible physical
decline—was retarded by good mental health and accelerated by poor
mental health. The most formative years for establishing these conditions,
he found, were between ages 21 and 46, because those are the years when a
person generally succeeds or fails in establishing a secure sense of self,
regardless of even the most terrible childhood traumas and abuse. Once the
seed is planted, the results of mental health show up physically in one’s
fifties. Late middle age is the perilous decade often called “the danger
zone,” because it is then that premature heart attacks, runaway
hypertension, and many types of cancer first show up in great number . To put it more generally , Vaillant found that the aging process is learned. People with good mental health  teach their bodies to age well; depressed,
insecure, and unhappy people teach their bodies to age badly . Although
Vaillant observe d that increased stress was often found in the lives of those
who became chronically ill and died young, he had the insight to realize
that stress doesn’ t make people sick; giving up their inner adaptability to
stress does. The greatest threat to life and health is having nothing to livefor. Children display tremendous vitality and rush at each day with open
arms. This is natural to them and remains natural unless they learn the
dulling habits and attitudes that smother spontaneous curiosity and wonder . Vaillant was among the first researchers to establish that being depressed
often leads to premature aging, chronic illness, and early death. Generally ,
at the root of depression is a kind of emotional numbness; the person feels
he has no laugh ter or joy inside  because these positive emotions have been
blocked by unhappy memories. Old traumas lurk inside, and when new
feelings try to bubble up, they are filtered through the traumas. Even the
most beautiful experience, such as having a baby , cannot surviv e if it has to
be filtered through preexisting hopelessness. Giving birth generates a flood
of powe rful hormones, generat ing a surge of energy pouring through the
body . In a wom an with healthy memories of her early childhood, this
surging energy is experienced as a strong bond to her child; at the same
time, the body renews its energy after the exhaustion of going into labor . Within a few days, the whole mind-body system has been returned to
express the joy and power of motherhood. However , in a woman whose
memories associated early childhood with sadness and emotion al hurt, the
flood of new energy during child birth triggers the old programming instead. The joy and power are transformed into apathy and fatigue. Postpartum
depression is the result of outworn memories seizing a new lease on life. Although the vast majority of depressed people are treated with
antidepressant drugs, such medications do not cure the underlying sadness,
trauma, and numbness that are the true cause of the disorder . When the drug
is taken away , the depression flowers again. Even though it takes longer and
requires more insight and coura ge, a more effective way to treat depression
is through psychotherapy . Class ic “couch psychiatry” is often scorned, but
counseling a depressed patient, uncovering  the inner hurt and releasing it,
sometimes accomplishes a lasting cure, which no drug can claim. This
implies that premature aging, which Vaillant so closely linked to depression
and mental instability , might also be treatable in a similar way. In fact, all of
us are learning and unlearning to age, we just haven’ t looked at ourselves
that way . OceanofPDF .comTHE OPENING OF AWARENESS
While I was writing this section of the book, my family received a visit
from my wife’ s uncle, Prem, who flew in from New Delhi. Prem Uncle, as
he would be called in India, is very dear to us. Now 75 and retired from his
corporate job, he bounds up and down the stairs much more agilely than I
do. Prem Uncle was a star tennis player in his youth, and he still plays every
day. Simple in his pleasures and satisfied with his lot, he looks on life with
enviable serenity and happiness. I set aside my reference books and asked him how he kept so young, and
this is what Prem  Uncle replied: “Well, you know , I never push to extremes. I was just born that way. I never got in the habit of overeating. This
morning I had a banana and cereal, and that is about as much as I ever want. I eat lightly at night and never drink more than a little brandy once in a
while. “Second, I sleep very well. That’ s due to my diet, because if I eat a big
dinner , my sleep  is disturbed. Third, I don’t bother about triviali ties. I leave
that to my wife”—he laughs—“you know , whose birthday it is and when
we are due someplace. Fourth, I play tennis and love it.”
Prem Uncle is living proof of his method, but, more important, he doesn’ t
really have a method. The way he has aged is just the result of who he is. Someone else with utterly different habits but the same easy acceptance of
himself would age just as well. In our society we pick up hundreds of
external cues about how to live, yet experience teaches us over and over
that internal cues are the ones we must heed. Prem Uncle did not derive his
lifestyle from an outside authority . He evolved a moderate, sane, healthful
way of life on his own. Most people who age successfully do the same:
They follow their instincts, finding out what works for them. The fact that successful survival is so individual is not an incidental
factor—it is among the most important. For in a society where we areautomatically trained to look to outside authority for expert advice, where
inner cues from our bodies are drowned out by a flood of external
directives, the isolated individual who beats the system is a rarity. Social
scientists have set out to take the measure of such people, and the results
disclose some striking similarities. In 1973, at a major gerontology
conference at Duke University , three papers were delivered describing the
type of person who can expect to live to a healthy old age—between 85 and
100 years old (such people amount to less than 5 percent of the current
population). In her psychology research at the University of Chicago,
Bernice Neugarten concentrated on “life satisfaction,” which entails five
factors. The person:
  1. T akes pleasure from daily activities
  2. Regards his life as meaningful
  3. Feels he has achieved his major goals
  4. Holds a positive self-image and regards himself as worthwhile
  5. Is optimistic
From his research at Harvard, psychiatrist Geor ge Vaillant took a second
but similar perspective (as we have seen), that of mental health. The
longest-lived individuals, he believed, are also the best adapted in their
psychological life, a state characterized by:
  1. Having a stable family life
  2. Regarding their marriages as satisfying
  3. Rarely living alone
  4. Continuing to grow in their careers
  5. Having no disabling mental illness
  6. Not being alcoholic
  7. Having fewer chronic illnesses
The third perspective came from  Eric Pfeif fer, a psychiatrist at Duke who
for many years was project director for a long-term study on older
Americans. In keeping with the first two papers, Pfeif fer pointed out that
using one’s physical and menta l abilities to the fullest was the best way to
age well. People who age successfully , he found, were those who “stayed intraining” throughout their adult lives in three major areas: physical activity ,
psychological and intellectual activity , and social relationships. If we
translate all these findings into larger terms, a profile emer ges of people
who age well psychologically and therefore biologically . Growing old happens in the mind; it is therefore uniquely variable in
humans. After twenty years, any dog is an old dog; after three, any mouse is
an old mouse; after one hundred , any blue whale is a very old blue whale. In all these creatures, biologica l age is the only number that counts, yet
everyone knows people who are young at 80 and others who seem old at 25. The great Renai ssance man Sir Francis Bacon held a caustic opinion of old
people “who object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, and
repent too soon.” This is the kind of old age everyone wants to avoid. Fortunately , nothing in our phys ical makeup forces it upon us. If you don’t
want to grow old, you can choose not to. Belinda, an 80-year -old patien t of mine, is the product of long New
Hampshire winters and rocky farms. She grew up with parents who had no
time to grow old and who lived actively into their eighties. They raised their
daughter to cherish inner qualities such as self-reliance, trust, faith, honesty ,
and dedication to family . Belinda has escaped many typical miseries of old
age. She isn’t on drugs for hyper tension, as more than half of old people are
(or shou ld be— blood pressure medication, even since “water  pills” have
been improved, is greatly disliked and often not taken); she hasn’ t had a
single mild stroke or heart attack; there is no sign of diabetes. As Belin da’s doctor , I don’t believe any of this is an accident. Today is
the youth of your old age, and what you do today affects an outcome thirty
or forty years from now. Belin da’s good health is the direct result of her
lifestyle in the days before she saw the first wrinkle. This is medically
confirmed by evidence that old-age diseases like hypertension, heart
disease, and atherosclerosis arise from microscopic alterations in our tissues
beginning as early as age 10, if not younger . “Why do you think you’ve aged so well?” I once asked Belinda. “I stayed out of trouble,” she shot back, “and I worked hard every day of
my life.”
Many old people have a longevi ty “secret.” Belinda’ s belief in hard work
is shared by many old people, but in truth almost every “secret” oflongevity comes down to invisible traits in the person’ s awareness. Some
people are nourished at the most basic level of their awareness , others are
not. In purely physical terms, Belinda’ s life of grueling farm labor out in the
sun and rain, enduring the harsh climate of New England, could just as
easily have aged  her before her time. Some people are worn down by hard
work, while others thrive on it. The difference lies in complex  social and
psychological factors to which our bodies are constantly responding. We
need to look deeper into these areas before the three ages of man—
chronological, biological, and psychological—fall into a coherent picture. Awareness as a Field Effect
Because so much of our internal programming is unconscious, we miss the
fact that the most powerful influence we have over how we age comes
simply from our awareness. To gain control over the aging process, one
must first be aware of it, and no two people share the same  awareness. What is outside our awareness cannot be controlled, obviously , and because
aging happens so slowly , it rema ins outside most people’ s awareness except
in those  isolated moments of recognition when we realize that youth is
slipping away: Something jogs our awareness to tell us that we don’t feel as
vigorous or as strong or as sexually attractive as we once did. However ,
these distressing moments aren’ t aging. It is in the absence of being aware,
when we don’t see anything happening, that physiological processes slip
out of our control. Not being aware doesn’ t mean that a bodily process has stopped. Your
conscious aware ness is matched by unconscious awareness— the brain’ s
ability to oversee functions you aren’ t thinking about at the moment. In
Nature’ s scheme , provisions have been made for our lapses of conscious
control. The human nervous systems are designed so that critical functions
such as breathing and heartbeat can run by themselves or be controlled
voluntarily . I previously mentio ned Swami Rama, the Indian adept who
displayed remar kable control over bodily functions that were thought to be
totally automatic. In one instance, he caused the skin temperature on oneside of his right  hand to grow warmer while the other side became colder . The rate of change proceeded at about 4 degrees F. per minute, until one
side of his hand was flushed red with warmth and the other was pale gray
with cold; the total temperature dif ference was approximately 10 degrees. What power was being displayed there? In the Indian spiritual tradition
there is a branch  of esoteric practice called Tantra, which teaches elaborate
exercises for controlling involuntary responses. Tibetan Buddhism contains
similar teaching s; young monks are expected to demonstrate their bodily
control by such feats as sitting on a frozen lake and melting the ice around
them with the warmth they gene rate in an intense meditational state. Native
Americans, Sufis, and all shamanist cultures around the world contain such
practices, yet no matter how esoteric these exercises become , the power
being called upon is not mystical: It is the same power of awareness that
you use when you decide to switch from involuntary to voluntary breathing,
blinking, balancing, or any other autonomic function. This switch-ove r happens in your awareness without your having to think
about it; therefo re, we miss the implicit power being expressed. In fact, as
soon as you pay attention to any function, a transformation takes place. For
example, if someone puts a five-pound weight in your hand and lifts it up
and down for you a hundred times, your arm won’ t gain any muscle
strength. However , if you perform the same action voluntarily , completely
different signals  are sent from the motor cortex in your brain. Not just your
biceps but your heart and lung tissues will receive increased stimulus, as
will specific areas of your brain that control motor coordination. The
activity of having your arm passively moved is analogous to unconscious,
unwilled behavior; the activity of exercising represents conscious, willed
behavior . The second mode of activity engages the intricate process called
learning, which is at the root of growing, as opposed to growing old. Thus,
every time you exercise your biceps, you are teaching  it to be stronger , and
your brain, lungs, heart, endoc rine glands, and even immune system are
adapting to a new mode of functioning. Conversely , if you move your body
without awareness, passivity takes the place of learning. Biceps, heart,
lungs, endocrine glands, and immune system eventually lose function
instead of gain it.When you start to assert contro l over any bodily process, the effect is
holistic. The mind-body system reacts to every single stimulus  as a global
event; i.e., to stimulate one cell is to stimulate all. There is a parallel in
quantum terms,  since a reaction anywhere in space-time, including past,
present, and future, causes a shift in the entire quantum field. As one Nobel
laureate put it, “If you tickle the field here, it laughs over there.” The fact
that awareness behaves like a field is now deemed crucial to understanding
aging. On a wider scale, Walter M. Bortz, a senior Stanford physi cian who
specializes in aging, has coined  the term disuse syndr ome to describe how
negligence in paying attention to the body’ s basic needs, particularly the
need for physical activity , can destroy health and lead to rapid premature
aging. It is a well-known princi ple in physiology that any part of the body
that falls into disuse will begin to atrophy and wither away . Bortz took the next step and discovered that this effect was body-wide,
spreading beyond the cardiovasc ular system. When a person decides to give
up physical activity , he essentially invites his entire physiology to atrophy . As a result, a constellation of problems appears: (1) heart, arteries, and
other parts of the cardiovascular system become more vulnerable; (2)
muscles and skeleton become more fragile; (3) obesity becomes a high risk;
(4) depression sets in; and (5) signs of premature aging indic ate that the
body is biologically older than its calendar years. These are the five
components of Bortz’ s disuse  syndrome, which can be observed in
countless older people today . The physical deteriorations on this list are not surprising, but it seems
unusual that being inactive, in and of itself, would lead to depression, long
considered a disorder of mood or personality . However , studi es from the
Russian space program have found that young cosmonauts subjected to the
forced inactivity  of space fligh t fall prey to depression; when put on a
schedule of regular exercise,  this depression is avoided. The brain
mechanism that controls depression appears to lie with a class of
neurochemicals called catecholamines. In depressed patients, whose levels
of catecholamines are abnormally low, healthy levels can be restored by
giving antidepressant drugs, but the natural way to accomplish this is
through regular exercise.Being holistic, exercise sends chemical messages back and forth between
the brain and various muscle groups; part of this flow of biochemical
information stimulates the production of catecholamines. Thus, whenever a
doctor writes a prescription for an antidepressant, Bortz declares, he is
handing out a proxy for the body’s own inner prescription, which is filled
by exerc ise. The news that exercise offsets aging has been well publicized,
although its preventive effect on depression may not be as well known. What is far more fascinating, however , is that the underlying logic—
function precedes structure—can be extended to say that awareness
precedes function. In other words, the parts of the body that age (losing
structure) are not just the ones that are not being used enough (losing
function); the person has also withdrawn his awareness from them. The Man Who Learned to Age
Let me show how the learned and the biological components of aging form
a personal pattern that defines how a person will age. A patient of mine
named Perry, age 67, is a retired realtor whose wife became worried when
he began  to seem “different from  his usual self.” When she brought him in
for examination, Perry was listless and unresponsive to questions. His wife
commented that when she came home late from shopping or visiting a
friend, she often  found her husb and staring at the television, barely noticing
that she had walked into the room. When I asked Perry how he felt, he was noncommittal. “I’m just getting
old,” he said. “There’ s nothing wrong with me that being twenty years
younger wouldn ’t fix.” But in fact the Perry of twenty years ago was
already cultivating the seeds of habit and belief that grew into what he is
today . Like many people of his generation, Perry has outlived both his
parents, who died at 70 and 72 respectively after a lifetime of hard work in
Boston shoe factories. His expectations for himself are probably strongly
marked by having seen them age. His father was “put on the shelf” at 65
and retired to a rocking chair . Taking little interest in making a new life for
himself, he gained weight, drank a little more than before, and readnewspapers. Within three years of getting his gold watch he suffered a heart
attack. His doctors advised him to give up all activity , resigning him to an
invalid’ s life. Within a year, however , a second coronary follow ed, this one
fatal. Perry’ s mother , on the other hand, remained active all her life. Like many
working women in the past, she also took care of her husband  and family ,
doing all the cooking, housework, and laundry while at the same time
holding down an accounting job. Whatever else can be said about such a
life, it kept her in much better physical condition than her husband; she had
no heart  or blood pressure probl ems and was fortunate not to smoke (a habit
she considered unladylike). How ever, she drifted into apathy and loneliness
after her husband’ s death and seemed to lose her purpose in life. With no
one to care for and not wanting to be a burden to her children, she became
semireclusive. Eventually she died after a series of strokes. Perry’ s outlook on aging had been programmed by these two life stories,
and although he probably did not consciously see himself winding up like
his parents, he appeared to be on the threshold of duplicating how they aged
by unconsciously adopting their beliefs. He had lost control of the aging
process by losing touch with his own awareness. Because my medical specialty is endocrinology , Perry and his wife
sought my advice in case he had a thyroid condition; among the disorders
that can mimic aging is thyroid deficiency (hypothyroidism), which causes
an abnor mal decrease in metabolism, making its victims slow and dull, their
hair gray and skin wrinkled. This imitation of natural aging disappears once
normal levels of the missing  hormone, thyroxin, are supplied. Perry
exhibited adequate thyroid levels, however , throwing the burden of
explanation back upon other influences. Whenever anyone seems to be aging so badly that signs of senility ,
feebleness, and disability are present, it’s important to investigate his
lifestyle. Proble ms crop up in a person’ s daily routine that are too often
ignored, especia lly when he is only “showing his age.” It is estimated that
between a third and half of senil ity cases result from the followi ng treatable
factors:
MalnutritionSide ef fects from drugs
Smoking
Alcohol abuse
Dehydration
Depression
Inactivity
All these  factors begin in awareness, stemming either from neglect or from
habit. Alone or in combination, any of these factors can dramatically affect
how a person looks and acts. In the “old” old age of Perry’ s parents, most
people would have paid scant  attention to the destructiveness of these
factors. Elderly people forgot to eat well, neglected fluids, took up smoking
and drinking to assuage their loneliness, and sat around in withdrawn
silence because that was what being old meant. Doctors once routinely prescribed blood pressure medication,  sleeping
pills, and tranquilizers in combination to old patients, knowing full well that
most of them were probably mixing these drugs with alcoho l or taking
wrong doses. Smoking was medically condoned (or even recommended; a
man recently told me that when he was a child, his grandmother went to her
family doctor with sinus conge stion and was advised to smoke menthol
cigarettes! Dutifully following doctor ’s orders, she smoked her first
cigarette at 60 and remained addicted until her death fifteen years later.). Giving nutritional advice did not fall under the scope of a doctors’ work,
and older patie nts had to be seriously malnourished or dehydrated,
sometimes to the point of coma, before medical intervention was sought. Even today, when it is known that lack of essential vitamins  can create
symptoms of senility , particular ly lack of vitamin B12, this informatio n is
not relayed to many of the elderly . Now consider Perry’ s condition  with the above list in mind. Since his
wife had already told me that he sat around the house most of the day,
physical inactivity was already a given. On being questioned, Perry
revealed that he had started drinking more since his retirement and often
began early in the day. When he worked he had set himself a rule never topour a drink before five, but, as he ruefully said, “My self-discipline is shot. I guess it happens.”
Being borderline hypertensive, he was taking blood pressure medication,
exactly what kind he wasn’ t sure (it turned out to be a beta blocker); he had
not had the dosage changed in two years. “I try not to take the pills unless
my pressure’ s gone up,” he confided. I asked how he knew when his blood
pressure was up. “You know , if I feel tense, or the wife is nagging me,” he
replied. In fact, hypertension, despite its name, does not coincide  with being
tense and indeed has no overt symptoms; and medication, in order to be
effective, must be taken every day. This is particularly true of beta blockers,
which require a break-in period while the body adjusts to them. A huge number of preventabl e aging problems can be traced to the
indiscriminate use of prescriptio n drugs. Unless one is alert to this danger ,
mixing medications becomes a growing habit with many people as they
age. Sleeping pills and diuretics (widely prescribed for high blood pressure)
are among the most common drugs used by older people. Tranquilizers are
also extremely common, along with aspir in and assorted other painkillers
taken for arthritis. Besides abusing  these drugs by taking too many too often, older people
often become careless about having their dosages monitored regularly by a
doctor; many tend to forget when to discontinue a medication  and which
drug is meant for which condition. Many older Americans drink, and the
combination of drugs and alcoh ol is almost always dangerous. Therefore, a
person’ s medica tion should always be thoroughly reviewed at the first sign
of physical or mental symptoms of abuse or misuse. In Perry’ s case I also strongly suspected hidden low-level depression—
someone who watches television all day and pays no attention when his
wife walks into the room could easily be mildly or clinically depressed. The
typical old perso n sitting quietly in his corner , once accepted as an image of
normal aging, was probably depressed. To become silent, withdrawn,
apathetic, anxious, and childi shly helpless are common signs of this
condition. Chronic fatigue is often a physical outcome of depression,
accounting for up to 50 percent of cases. Certain severe depressions (called
involutional depression) specifically afflict older people, for reasons not yet
known. However , many cases of depression can be linked direc tly to socialand personal problems. A person who feels useless, discarded, uncared for,
or burdensome to his family can hardly help but fall into depression. In these cases, the ultimate solution doesn’ t lie with medicine but with
personal change. Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer has demonstrated that
people in nursin g homes improve remarkably after altering their lives in the
simplest ways— giving them a potted plant to tend, allowing them to make
up their own menus and take charge of tidying their rooms. Instead of being
passive, lonely dependents playing the role of “old folks in a nursing
home,” these people regained a sense of usefulness and worth.
_OceanofPDF.com_Ageless_Body_Timeless_Mind_-_Deepak_Chopra.txt
Summarize the following text section accurately and concisely. Maintain specific details and numerical information, and use anti-repetition mechanisms:

        Daring gerontologists at T ufts University visited a nursing home, selected
a group of the frailest residents, and put them on a weight-traini ng regimen. One might fear that a sudden introduction to exercise would exhaust or kill
these fragile people, but in fact they thrived. Within eight weeks, wasted
muscles had come back by 300 percent, coordination and balance
improved, and overall a sense of active life returned. Some of the subjects
who had not been able to walk unaided could now get up and go to the
bathroom in the middle of the night by themselves, an act of reclaimed
dignity that is by no means trivial. What makes this accomplishment truly
wondrous, however, is that the youngest subject in the group was 87 and the
oldest 96. These results were always possible; nothing new was added here to the
capacity of the human body. All that happened was that a belief changed,
and when that happened, aging changed. If you are 96 years old and afraid
to move  your body, it will waste  away. To go into a weight-training room at
that age, you have to believe that it will do your body good; you have to be
free of fear; and you have to believe in yourself. When I say that aging is
the resul t of a belief, I’m not implying that a person can simply  think aging
away. Exactly the opposite—the stronger the belief, the more rooted in the
body it is and the more immune to conscious control. According to the belief system you and I adhere to, Nature has trapped us
in bodies that grow old against our will. The tradition of aging extends as
far back as recorded history and even prehistory. Animals and plants grow
old, fulfilling a universal law of Nature. It is hard to imagine that aging is
the result of learned behavior, for biology cannot be denied. Yet the core belief that aging is a fixed, mechanical process—something
that just happens to us—is only a belief. As such, it blinds us to all kinds of
facts that don’t fit the belief system we cling to. How many of the following
statements do you believe are facts. a)  Aging is natural—all or ganisms grow old and die. b)  Aging is inevitable—it can’ t be prevented. c)  Aging is normal—it af fects everyone about the same. d)  Agin g is genetic—I’ll proba bly live about as long as my parents
and grandparents did. e)  Aging is painful—it causes physical and mental suf fering. f)  Aging is universal—the law of entropy makes all orderly systems
run down and decay. g)  Aging is fatal—we’re all growing old and dying. If you take any or all of these to be statements of fact, you are under the
influence of beliefs that do not match reality. Each statement contains a
little objective truth, but each can be refuted, too. a)  Agin g is natural, but there are organisms that never age, such as
one-celled amoe bas, algae, and protozoa. Parts of you also do not
age—your emotions, ego, personality type, I. Q. , and other mental
characteristics, for example, as well as vast portions of your
DNA. Physically, it makes no sense to say that the water and
minerals in your body are aging, for what is “old water” or “old
salt”. These components alone make up 70 percent of your body. b)  Aging is inevitable, but the honeybee at certain times of the year
can shift its hormones and completely reverse its age. In the
human body, shifts in hormones  may not be as dramatic, but there
is enough latitude so that on any given day your hormonal profile
may be younger than the day, month, or year before. c)  Aging is normal; however, there is no normal curve of aging that
applies to everyone. Some people entirely escape certain aging
symptoms, while others are afflicted with them long before old
age sets in. d)  Aging has a genetic component that affects everyone, but not to
the degree usually supposed. Having two parents who survived
into their eighties adds only about three years to a child’ s life
expectancy; less than 5 percent of the population has such good or
bad genes that their life span will turn out to be significantly
longer or shorter. By comparison, by adopting a healthy lifestyle,
you can delay symptoms of aging by as much as thirty years. e)  Aging is often painful, both physically and mentally, but this is the
result not of aging itself but of the many diseases that afflict theelderly; much of that disease can be prevented. f)  Agin g seems  to be universal, because all orderly systems break
down over time, but our bodies  resist this decay extremely well. Without negative influences from within and without, our tissues
and organs could easily last 115 to 130 years before sheer age
caused them to stop functioning. g)  Finally, aging is fatal, becaus e everyone has to die, but in the vast
majority of cases, perhaps as much as 99 percent, the cause of
death is not old age but cancer, heart attack, stroke, pneumonia,
and other illnesses. It is extremely difficult to ascertain what it would be like to watch the
body age per se. Two cars left out in the rain will rust at about the same
rate; the process of oxidation attacks them equally, turning their iron and
steel into ferrous oxide according to one easily explained law of chemistry. The aging process obeys no such simple laws. For some of us, aging is
steady, uniform, and slow, like a tortoise crawling toward its destination. For others, aging  is like approac hing an unseen cliff—there is a long, secure
plateau of health, followed by a sharp decline in the last year or two of life. And for still others, most of the body will remain healthy except for a weak
link, such as the heart, which fails much faster than do the other organs. You would have  to follow a person for most of his adult life before you
figured out how he was aging, and by then it would be too late. The fact that aging is so personal has proved very frustrating for
medicine, which  finds it extrem ely difficult to predict and treat many of the
major conditions associated with old age. Two young women can ingest the
same amount of calcium, display equally healthy hormone levels, and yet
one will develop crippling osteoporosis after menopause while the other
won’ t. Twin brothers with identical genes will go through life with
remarkably similar medical histories, yet only one will develop Alzheimer ’s
or arthritis or cancer. Two of the most common conditions in old age, rising
blood pressure and elevated cholesterol, are just as unpredictable. The aging
body refuses to behave according to mechanical laws and rules. After decades of intense inves tigation, there is no adequate theory of
human aging. Even our attempts to explain how animals age have resultedin more than three hundred separate theories, many of them contradictory. Our notions of aging have been drastically modified over the last two
decades. In the early 1970s, doctors began to notice patients in their sixties
and seventies whose bodies still functioned with the vigor and health of
middle age. These people ate sensibly and looked after their bodies. Most
did not smoke, having given up the habit sometime after the Surgeon
General’ s origin al warnings about lung cancer in the early 1960s. They had
never suffered heart attacks. Although they exhibited some of the accepted
signs of old age—higher blood pressure and cholesterol, and tendencies to
put on body fat, to become farsighted, and to lose the top range of their
hearing—there was nothing elderly about these people. The “new old age,”
as it came to be called, was born. The “old old age” had been marked by irreversible declines on all fronts
—physical, mental, and social. For untold centuries people expected to
reach old age—if they reached it at all—feeble, senile, socially useless,
sick, and poor. To reinforce this grim expectation there were grim facts:
Only one out of ten people lived to the age of 65 before this century. For centuries in the past, the human body was exposed to the killing
influence of a harsh environment: Inadequate nutrition, a lifetime spent in
physical labor, and uncontrollable epidemics of disease created conditions
that accelerated aging. Leaf through the accounts of immigrants passing
through Ellis Island at the turn of the century; some of the photographs will
horrify you. The faces of 40-year -old women look haggard and drawn,
literally as if they were 70—and an old 70 at that. Adolescent boys look like
battered middle-aged men. Under the surgeon’ s scalpel their hearts, lungs,
kidneys, and livers would have looked identical to those of a modern person
twice their age. Aging is the body’s response to conditions imposed upon it,
both inner and outer. The sands of age shift under our feet, adap ting to how
we live and who we are. The new old age arrived on the scene after more than half a century of
improved living conditions and intensive medical progress. The average
American life span of 49 years in 1900 jumped to 75 in 1990. To put this
huge increase in perspective, the years of life we have gained in less than a
century are equal to the total life span that individuals enjoyed for more
than four thousand years; from prehistoric times to the dawn of theIndustrial Revol ution, the average life span remained below 45. Only 10
percent of the general population used to make it to 65, but today 80 percent
of the population lives at least that long. The Mystery of Aging
Despite this evidence that aging is a shifting, fluid phenomen on, we still
find ourselves operating under  the belief that aging can be understood
strictly as a biological process. When you look at your body and notice how
much it has changed physically since you were young, aging seems an
obvious phenomenon. In fact, it is anything but. Twenty years ago I was a young resident working in a vast and dreary
veterans hospita l outside Boston. In a typical day I ran physical s on dozens
of patie nts, mostly old soldiers who had served in two world wars. The
passing years had taken a toll that was all too obvious. Even when I had my
eyes closed, the sound and touch of their bodies were unmistakable. Their
hands trembled while I took their pulse, and their lungs wheeze d under the
stethoscope. The pounding lub-dub of young hearts had given way to
feebler, threadier rhythms. I knew that unseen destruction was taking place beneath the thin veil of
their dry, wrinkled skin. Blood vessels were hardening and blood pressure
was rising. If I could reach in to touch the three coronary arteries, one or
more would almost certainly be engor ged with fatty plaque. The body’ s
main artery, the aorta, might have turned as hard as a lead pipe, stiffened by
calcium deposits, while the delicate arterioles in the head were likely to be
so tissue-thin that the slightest contact would make them crumble,
triggering a stroke. Vertebrae and hip bones would be getting thin and
brittle too, waiting to crack if the person slipped on the stairs. All over the
body, hidden tumors would be held in check only by the slowed metabolism
of the elderly, which mercifully retards the spread of cancer. All this may sound like an accurate, if grim, description of the aging
process, but in fact I wasn’t seeing old people at all; I was seeing sick
people. All over Amer ica doctors were making the same mistake. Caughtup in treating various diseases, we forgot what aging is like when disease is
not present. Moreover, the few medical researchers who took an interest in
the aging process tended to work in veterans hospitals like the one in which
I practic ed. By definition, the “normal” aging they observed was abnormal,
because a normal person isn’ t hospitalized. No one would dream of defining
childhood by studying patients in a children’ s hospital ward, yet old age
was lar gely defined that way. Across the general population, only 5 percent of people over 65 are
institutionalized, in either hospitals, nursing homes, or mental institutions. Surprisingly, this figure is not significantly higher than for younger age
groups. Obviously, there are many reasons besides old age why someone
might wind up in an institution. Such places are dumping grounds for the
widowed, homeless, alcoholic, mentally incompetent, and destitute. A
doctor can’t spend a day in a typical big-city hospital witho ut seeing a
police car pull up with a load of hapless derelicts swept off the street to
become the faceless statistics that researchers use to define aging. “Fear old age,” Plato cautioned over two thousand years ago, “for it does
not come alone. ” He spoke the truth. As we grow older, the things that
bother us most are often not aging itself but the ills that accom pany it. In
the wild, few animals die simply because they have grown too old. Other
factors, such as sickness, starv ation, exposure to the elements, and ever-
vigilant predators, kill off most creatures long before they reach their
potential life span. Gaze at a flock of sparrows outside your window this
spring; by next spring, half will have died from various causes. So, for all
practical purpos es, it is irreleva nt that sparrows can live over a decade if
kept safe in a cage. Long life spans are possible among birds (in captivity, eagles can survive
for fifty years and parrots for more than seventy years), which seems
strange considering their fast metabolisms and racing heartbea t. But very
little about the aging process is logical. The evolutionary purpose of aging
is itself a puzzle  to biologists, given that Nature has so many other ways of
ending an anima l’s life. For example, mortality is built into the system of
competition for food. Some animals have to die in order for others to live;
otherwise surviv al of the fittest would have no meaning. Amon g bears and
deer, for example, the males fight for territory during breeding season;when the strongest males win the right to breed with the females, they also
win the prime territory—land that is rich in food—while the losers must
settle for much poorer foraging grounds, where many struggle on the verge
of starvation and quickly die. If a wild animal is fortunate enough to survive to its natural life span, its
body will not just be old, it will be riddled with disease. Cancer, heart
disease, hardene d arteries, arthritis, and strokes are rampant among old
creatures. Aged lions suffer coronaries and old eagles get cataracts. Aging
is so mixed in with other factors that it is extremely hard to separate it out. The same blurring occurs in humans. Although we pride ourselves on
having escaped the trials of the wild, modern people still rarely die of old
age. In 1938 the British medica l journal The Lancet  carried the report of a
senior pathologist who maintain ed that he had never examined a deceased
body that had succumbed to age alone. The closest candidate was a 94-year -
old man who had died just by fading away without overt disease. But
appearances were deceiving: At autopsy it was found that he had been
suffering from an undiagnosed case of lobar pneumonia, one of the most
common causes of fatality among old people. Although it appeals to commo n sense that we grow old because we
simply wear out, no wear -and-tear theory of aging has ever held up under
close scrutiny. Aging bodies only seem to wear out like overworked
washing machines and tractors. “How’ s the old ticker. ” a doctor will ask an
elderly patient, as if her heart were a clock winding down on its spring. Unlike machines, however, which run down with too much use, the human
body is capable of getting better the more it is used. A well-exercised bicep
doesn’ t deterior ate; rather, it gets stronger. Leg bones gain mass in
proportion to how much weight  is put on them, which is why osteoporosis
is practically unknown in tribal societies where lifelong physical activity is
the norm. Moreover, if wearing out were the true cause of aging, it would
be a good strate gy to rest in bed all your life. In fact, prolo nged rest is
disastrous for the physiology— a hospital patient confined to complete bed
rest for a few weeks will suffer as much muscle and skeletal  wasting as
someone who has aged a decade. Any purely physical theory of aging cannot help but be incomplete. Consider arthrit is, one of the most common symptoms of age. In medicalschool we were taught that common arthritis (or osteoarthritis) is a
degenerative disorder. This means that its cause is simple wear and tear. After a lifetime of hard use, the cushioning cartilage in large weight-bearing
joints deteriorates, which explai ns why the knee and hip joints, which carry
the burden of supporting the body, tend to be favored sites for arthritis. The
synovium, the smooth lining that cushions the bones where they meet, also
becomes inflamed or deteriorated, leading to the pain, swelling, and burning
of arthritis. Sometimes the synovial fluid dries up, and the bones grind
against each other, creating pits or bone spurs. This kind of degeneration
has plagued mankind since the Stone Age. The familiar image of prehistoric
man walking hunched over from the shoulders is now thought to be a
distortion of what healthy cavemen really looked like. Archaeologists, it
seems, were misled because so many of the intact skeletons they found in
their digs were deformed from arthritis of the spine. As the cause of arthritis, wear and tear appeals to common sense, but it
fails to explain several things. Some people never become arthritic, even
though they subject their joints to extreme stress. Other people develop
arthritis after a lifetime of sedentary desk work, not to mention that certain
favorite spots for the disease, such as the fingers, are not called upon to bear
weight at all. Newer theories of arthritis look to hormones, genetics,
autoimmune breakdown, diet, and other factors; in the end, no clear cause is
known. However, emoti onal factors have been strongly linked to another major
type of arthritis,  rheumatoid arthritis. This disorder seems to favor women
who have a marked tendency to repress emotion, who adopt passivity and
depression as a mode of coping with stress rather than getting angry or
confronting serious emotional issues. The disease can get worse under
stress, and, for inexplicable reasons, it can also disappear, perhaps in
obedience to a deeper current of change. Three Ages of ManThe complexity of the forces operating inside an aging body becomes even
more obvious when you ask a seemingly easy question: How old are you. Before you rush to reply, consider that there are three distinct and
separate ways to measure someone’ s age:
Chronological age —how old you are by the calendar
Biological age—how old your body is in terms of critical life signs
and cellular processes
Psychological age —how old you feel you are
Only the first of these is fixed, yet chronological age is also the most
unreliable of the three. One 50-year -old may be nearly as healthy as he was
at 25, while another may already have the body of a 60- or even a 70-year -
old. T o really know how old you are, the second measure—biological age—
comes into play; it tells us how time has affected your organs and tissues
compared to other people of your chronological age. Time doesn’t affect your body uniformly, however; practically every cell,
tissue, and organ is aging on its own timetable, which makes biological age
much more complex than chronological age. A middle-aged marathon
runner may have  the leg muscles, heart, and lungs of someone half his age,
but his knees and kidneys may be aging rapidly due to excessive stress, and
his eyesight and hearing could  be declining on their own idiosyncratic
paths. You become unique as the years pass. At 20, when muscle
development, reflexes, sexual drive, and many other primary functions are
reaching their peak, most people  look alike to a physiologist. Young hearts,
brains, kidneys, and lungs all exhibit healthy color and firmness; evidence
of malformed, diseased, or dying tissue is scanty or nonexistent. But by age
70, no two bodie s are remotely alike. At that age, your body will be like no
one else’ s in the world; its age changes will mirror your unique life. Biological age also has its limits as a measurement tool. Considered
purely as biology, the aging process moves at such a slow rate that its fatal
effects rarely match those of faster -moving diseases. Most critical organs
can function well at 30 percen t of peak capacity. Thus if our bodies are
losing 1 percent of their functio ning per year after age 30, it would take 70
years, or age 100, before aging per se threatens a particular organ withimminent break down. But social and psychological influences  are ever at
work, our lifestyles subject us to various conditions, and the differences in
how we age show up much earlier in life. Two stroke patients in their midfifties with identical medical conditions
can, and often do, display wildly different outcomes—one may recover
from his attack quickly, respond well to physical therapy, and easily regain
lost speech and movement, eventually returning to normal life. The other
may respond poorly to treatmen t, be overcome with depression, and give up
all active pursuits; in short order he may grow old and die. The determining
factor is psychological age, which is the most personal and mysterious of
the three measurements but also the one that holds the most promise for
reversing the aging process. Biological age is known to be changeable—regular physical exercise, for
example, can reverse ten of the most typical effects of biological age,
including high blood pressure, excess body fat, improper sugar balance, and
decreased muscle mass. Gerontologists have found that elderly people who
agree to adopt better lifestyle habits improve their life expectancy on
average by ten years. Thus, the arrow of time can move forward quickly or
slowly, stop in its tracks, or even turn around. Your body becom es younger
or older biologically depending on how you treat it. Yet your third age, psychological age, is even more flexible. Like
biological age, psychological age is completely personal—no two people
have exactly the same psycho logical age because no two people have
exactly the same experiences. Listen to the voice of Anna Lundgren, age
101, who made a very important observation as a child that influenced how
she aged  for the next eighty or ninety years. “Back in Norway where I was
a little girl, when people got to be 55 or 65, they just sat. I never felt that
old. That’ s old. I don’t feel that old today. ” How old you feel you are has no
boundaries and can reverse in a split second. An old woman recalling her
first love can suddenly look and sound as if she has turned 18 again; a
middle-aged man who hears that his beloved wife has died can wither into
lonely senescence in a matter of weeks. Instead of coming up with a fixed number to answer the questi on “How
old are you. ” we need to arrive  at a sliding scale that shows how fast our
three ages are moving in relation to one another. Take two 50-year -olds:A, who was recently divorced, suffers from acute depression, with a
history of heart disease and overweight; B, who is happily marr ied, healthy,
optimistic, and satisfied with his job. Because of the various factors at work, the true age of A and B is best
expressed by a three-tiered graph:
The arrows point in the directio n of aging and their length indicates how
fast the process is taking place. Although A and B are both chronologically
50, A is under so many negative influences that his body is 10 years older
biologically and is aging quickly ; in terms of psychological age he is about
par with his calendar years, but he is aging fairly rapidly there, too. The
picture is very different for B, who is younger on both the biological and
psychological scales. His good physical and mental health indicate that he
is aging slowly biologically and actually getting younger psychologically. Overall, A is in much worse shape than B. Depending on how severe his
depression and heart condition are, his composite age might be as high as
60, but this figure is artificial. It ignores the fact that all the factors that
make him so much older than his chronological age are reversible. Ten
years from now, he could be as happy, optimistic, and fit as B, in which
case his composite age would decline. When gerontologists try to predict longevity, all of the following
psychosocial factors must be taken into account to accurately determine if
the aging process is being accelerated or retarded. NEGA TIVE F ACT ORS THA T ACCELERA TE AGING
    Asterisk (*) denotes major factors
*  Depression
    Inability to express emotions    Feeling helpless to change oneself and others
    Living alone
    Loneliness, absence of close friends
*  Lack of regular daily routine
*  Lack of regular work routine
*  Job dissatisfaction
    Having to work more than 40 hours per week
    Financial burdens, being in debt
    Habitual or excessive worry
    Regret for sacrifices made in the past
    Irritability, getting angry easily, or being unable to express anger
    Criticism of self and others
POSITIVE F ACT ORS THA T RET ARD AGING
*  Happy marriage (or satisfying long-term relationship)
*  Job satisfaction
*  Feeling of personal happiness
    Ability to laugh easily
    Satisfactory sex life
    Ability to make and keep close friends
*  Regular daily routine
*  Regular work routine
    Taking at least one week’ s vacation every year
    Feeling in control of personal life
    Enjoyable leisure time, satisfying hobbies
    Ability to express feelings easily
    Optimistic about the future
    Feeling financially secure, living within means
As you can see, there is much more to psychological age than the cliché
“You’re only as old as you think you are,” and changing your psychological
age involves interweaving personal and social factors. Among the major
factors are sever al we have touched upon. The importance of a regular daily
and work routine is emphasized by almost every longevity study. Job
satisfaction emerges as the most reliable indicator that a perso n is at lowrisk for a heart attack, while being dissatisfied with one’s job puts one at
extremely high risk. Living alone is precarious, while being happily married
indicates that one will age slowly. The combinations of these factors become extremely complex, mirroring
the complexity of one’s personal life. Gerontologists have gone to great
lengths to try to quantify some of these factors, with plaus ible results. Someone who has lived alone for four years, for example, would have a
slightly different psychological age from someone who has lived alone for
eight years. The relative value assigned to having a regular daily routine is
considered three  times more important than having a satisfying sex life,
while being optimistic about the future cancels out, point for point, the
negative trait of not having a hobby. But I have perso nal reservations  about any attempt to quantify someone’ s
personal makeu p; despite the general accuracy of these factors, they lose
the essence of personal life, which is its ability to shift and transform itself,
to touch many chords both happy and sad, to under go sudden reversals and
abrupt illuminat ions. When I think of myself, my image is not of a fixed
collection of attributes—things are always changing inside,  sometimes
drastically. The list cannot quantify intangible qualities such as being able to give of
oneself and having regard for others. In general, this is a limitation of
modern psychology, with its overreliance on numbers and impersonal data. One unusual study bridged the gap rather neatly, however. Larry Scherwitz,
a Unive rsity of California psychologist, taped the conversation s of nearly
six hund red men, a third of whom were suffering from heart disease, the
rest of whom were healthy. Listening to the tapes, he counted how often
each man used the words I, me, and mine. Comparing his results with the
frequency of heart disease, Scherwitz found that men who used the first-
person pronoun most often had the highest risk of heart trouble. In addition,
by following his subjects for several years, he found that the more a man
habitually talked about himself, the greater the chance he would actually
have a coronary. Counting the times a person said “I” was an ingenious way to quantify
self-absorption, and to me, there’ s something very fitting in the fact that the
less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers. Theantidote, Scherwitz concluded, was to be more giving: “Listen with regard
when others talk. Give your time and energy to others; let others have their
way; do things for reasons other than furthering your own needs. ” In those
words, he goes beyond the quantifiable data to issues of love and
compassion, which appeal very much to our intuitive sense that an open,
loving person should age well. One thing the quantified research has shown so far is very valuable:
Biological age responds to psychological age. If you look over the list of
positive psychosocial influences, subjective words such as happy, satisfied,
and enjoyable  indicate how completely personal these factors really are. By
nurturing your inner life, you are using the power of awareness to defeat
aging at its sourc e. On the other hand, changes of awareness in the direction
of apathy, helplessness, and dissatisfaction push the body into rapid decline. The Value of Adaptability
It is very frightening to watch an old person give up his desire for life, and
it is extremely difficult to show  him what he is doing. When life becomes
meaningless, the body’ s sustaini ng energy seems to drain silently away like
a leaky battery. But if we look closer, we can prove that this draining away
of vitali ty, curio sity, and the will to live is controllable and in fact has
nothing to do with normal aging. The body is self-replenishing; it renews its
energies automa tically after times of depletion. No matter how severe the
stress, once the body has responded, it returns to a state of balance. This
tendency to remain in balance is completely necessary to life and proves to
be a key survival mechanism. In 1957, Fland ers Dunbar, a professor of medicine at Columbia
University, reported on a study of centenarians and “nimble
nonagenarians. ” She found that psychological adaptability in the face of
stress was domi nant among these people. This trait more than any other set
them aside from the general population. Although everyone has occasions
for grief, shock, sadness, and disappointment, some of us spring back much
better than others. Dunbar went on to compile six traits that in her opinionwere shared by “precentenaria ns,” people who have the best chance of
living to be 100:
  1. Responding creatively to change. More than any other, this trait
made precentenarians stand out from ordinary people. 2. Freedom from anxiety. Anxiety is a great enemy of our ability to
improvise and create. 3. The continued ability to create and invent. 4. High levels of adaptive ener gy. 5. A capacity to integrate new things into one’ s existence. 6. W anting to stay alive. As with all predictive models, this one is flawed. It must be conceded
that some people vegetate and still live to be 100, as do some who are rigid
and uncreative, who couldn’ t care less whether they stay alive. But positive
qualities are far more common in centenarians, and as a description of the
kind of old age that is most desirable, Dunbar ’s list is extremely helpful. Her precentenarians are special because they reveal that just as people have
strong or weak immune systems, we all vary in how well we adapt
mentally. For some, the journey of life, however harsh on the outside, is met
with resilience instead of brittleness; they are the reeds who bend in the
storm, not the oaks who stand stif f and break. Adaptability can be most simply defined as freedom from conditioned
response. To remain open to change, to accept the new and welcome the
unknown, is a choice that involves definite personal skills; for left to inertia,
the mind tends to reinforce its old habits and increasingly to fall prey to its
conditioning. ADAPT ABILITY QUESTIONNAIRE
If you want to see whether you have learned the skills that make
someone adaptable, answer the following questions as they apply to
you, assigning the following points:Almost never applies 0 points
Sometimes applies 1 point
Usually applies 2 points
Almost always applies 3 points
  1. When I am first confro nted with a problem and have no idea how
it can be solved, I take the attitude that the right answer will
emer ge.
They found that the participants, who were initially frail, were able to regain their physical strength, improve their balance and coordination, and recover their sense of independence within 8 weeks.
What did the gerontologists at Tufts University discover in their study on the elderly?
The author states that aging is the result of a belief or mindset, not a biological process.
According to the author, what is the primary reason why people age?
The author disagrees with the idea that aging is inevitable, stating that it is a learned behavior that can be changed by changing one's beliefs and behaviors.
What is the author's view on the idea that aging is inevitable?
Biological aging refers to the physical changes in the body, whereas psychological aging refers to the mental and emotional changes that occur as one ages.
What is the difference between biological and psychological aging?
The author notes that the man's death was not caused by aging, but rather by an underlying illness, highlighting the importance of distinguishing between aging and disease.
What did the author learn from the case of a 94-year-old man who died of undiagnosed lobar pneumonia?