The Anti-Aging Mindset and the Mind-Body Connection

Mindset is an established set of attitudes, intimate beliefs, and feelings about ourselves and the world in which we live. It creates our worldview or philosophy of life. This shapes our mental attitude and determines how we will interpret and respond to any situation life throws our way. As a result, these fixed states of mind create habits, which shape our future in all aspects of life.

Our state of mind can influence our physical health. The mind-body connection is real. A body subjected to long-term negative thinking will have a higher probability for ill-health than a body congruent with positive thoughts. Chronic stress can devastate the body.

Our minds are in constant motion—some estimate we have 50 – 60,000 thoughts per day. Once we reach adulthood, 90 – 95% of our thoughts are the same as the day before. This becomes our personality, our mindset, who we are, and therefore, creates our personal and physical reality.

How to Change Your Reality with an Anti-Aging Mindset

There are two overriding roles the mind plays in our health:

1. The creation of our habits, and
2. The shaping of our physical reality

Habits

Decisions. We make thousands of them every day. Most we make without thought, habits deeply engrained within. Some habits serve us. Others conspire against us. But where do these come from?

From the moment we’re born, our minds learn and grow. From the environment, from our personal contacts, from our daily experiences. Thoughts internalised often enough become automatic, instinctual. Habits.

What if our habits don’t serve us? How can we adopt a mindset to better the odds of living a long and healthy life?

Philosophy

While each of us has a philosophy of life that is complex and unique, the starting point for a philosophy of anti-aging begins with responsibility.

Sadly, we often abdicate this responsibility when it comes to our health. We believe ads we have read or seen on TV. We take as gospel the words of a medical community with little training on prevention of disease. Taking meds is often the default first choice when confronted with a health issue. We fall for old wives’ tales or the latest fad diet or exercise.

What we need to accept is: You are responsible for you. No one else. You are where you are today in every aspect of your life—your health, your wealth, your relationships—based on all decisions you have made to this point of time.

Who or what is responsible for your state of health? Your weight? The sore back? Your chronic condition? The old man staring back at you in the mirror every morning?

Stress

Not your spouse or your doctor. Not the government. It’s not a lack of medications, an operation, or the flu shot.

You are. You.

Don’t like where you are today?

Make different decisions. Adopt an anti-aging mindset.

It’s time to take back our minds and think. It’s time to take responsibility for our health and the quality of our future lives. How?

New Thoughts

Start with purpose. A definite purpose.

Who do you want to be? Want a new and improved you? What do you want to accomplish with the time you have left on planet Earth? Want to feel better and see a brighter future?

Find your true purpose by asking questions.

• Why is living a long and healthy life important to me?
• How would meeting my first great-grandchild affect me?
• What gets me excited enough to leap out of bed every day?
• What will do that thirty years from now?

The better the questions, the more compelling the purpose.

Change your thoughts and you will change your world

New Beliefs

With purpose you can change your beliefs. Jettison the thoughts of the long, slow slide into a nursing home. Don’t accept chronic disease, a fragile, overweight body, and a weakening mind as inevitable. A cane or a walker—or worse, a wheelchair. A yanked driver’s licence. Walk-in bathtubs. Meds. Adult diapers.

Banish these thoughts.

Use the leverage of purpose to reject this thinking. Replace it with optimistic beliefs about aging. About relationships. Mobility. A sharp mind. Living an independent life.

Think about it—if you are in your fifties or sixties, you have another 30, 40, even 50 years or more of life left to live. Many of these years can be productive and joyful. It starts with an anti-aging mindset and believing it possible.

New Choices

Much of what you can do is plain common sense—things you know. The entire world knows smoking devastates the human body—quitting is the only option. That daily chug of soda isn’t good for you. Eating a steady diet of processed food isn’t either. A sedentary lifestyle spent binge-watching Netflix won’t cut it. If you need to lose weight, you know it but don’t act upon it. Exercise is important but can never find the time? Prioritise it and carve out several hours a week.

Getting old is inevitable. Being old is not. Choose to believe that. Use your mind. Think your way to a healthier future you by making better choices.

New Actions and Behaviours

Now that you’ve made new choices, take action. Like exercising a weak muscle with weights, start small. Commit to grow every day, increasing the effort, making bigger and better choices.

Start creating those new habits today. Baby steps.

Retrain Your Mind with an Anti-Aging Mindset

Quit something. Coke. Pepsi. Netflix. Watching the nightly news. Smoking.

Do something new. Ten squats or push-ups. Or five on your knees, if that’s all you can do. Increase it daily. Get up an hour earlier every day. Get an extra 30 minutes of sleep. Learn to play chess. Start painting. Volunteer in a local youth organisation. Eat six servings of veggies a day.

Dedicate time every day to learn. Self-improvement. Daily meditation. Take up ballroom dancing. Or coding. Revisit your high school French.

In short, take action. Action towards your purpose. Toward an anti-aging mindset.

New Habits

Understand the rest of your life is a marathon, not a sprint. If it’s taken you most of your adult life to lose your health and fitness, it won’t come back quickly. But it will come back if you act. If you create new habits.

Action. Correct action. Rinse and repeat and it becomes a habit. It’s these habits that become your anti-aging mindset and lifestyle.

Changing to an Anti-Aging Mindset

The Anti-Aging Mindset

Few of us want to die but all of us will. Even fewer of us want to end up immobile, without a mind of our own, and zero independence. Me? I always joke I want to drop dead on a soccer field after celebrating a brilliant goal scored the day after my 120th birthday.

Who wouldn’t want to live for as long as possible if your quality of life was terrific right to the end?

Your mindset—your outlook on life—is the critical first step to improving your odds of living a long and healthy life. You do it by changing your thinking. Forming new beliefs. Making new choices. Taking sensible action and creating new behaviours. The resulting new habits will serve you well.

These new habits will surprise you. Surprise you by changing your reality. By changing your health. By changing the quality of the future you.

It’s doable. It’s within your reach. Will you do it?