When I was a teenager in high school, my home economics teacher made a comment that never left me: “youth is wasted on the young”. As a young person, I thought it an unkind comment and viewed my teacher unsympathetically. Of course now that I am a mature woman, I completely understand what she was getting at. The vitality and beauty of youth, that gets traded off for experience, knowledge and, dare I say, some wisdom in ones growing years, is for many of us, if not most, painful to relinquish.
We rush in hordes to the cosmetic check out counter to pay a premium for the next best promise of youth in a bottle. Maybe this time it will work. We gain some comfort from the fact that today’s forty year olds are the new thirty year olds, and the fifties something crowd, well they are the new forties something crowd. If that doesn’t quell our anxiety, we get on the phone to the surgeon, often too hastily and with dire results. If the results happen to be satisfactory, we can look in the mirror for another decade with a little more ease – if we are lucky. But mostly we’ll just focus on the next thing we need to get ‘fixed’. Ageing phobia is pandemic and palpable.
Now you could say, I am one of those forty something year olds, who is faking the thirties well. Is it a result of all the therapies I’ve tried, or genes, or both? Like most women, I’ve gotten on the anti ageing regime, trying all kinds of the usual products and services on offer: expensive creams and serums, chemical peels, exercise, facial exercises, urine therapy, hydration, supplements, electronic facelifts, diet change … stopping short at injections and surgery – but just. I have consulted a cosmetic surgeon and am filled to my boots with research on procedures. Is any of it working? Maybe, a little. Am I giving up? Definitely not. I am wholly committed to ageing but not getting old and I think it important to draw a distinct line between these two ideas: ageing and being old.
Personally, I don’t think most of us would mind ageing if we didn’t look it. If, in our forties, we looked and felt like we did in our twenties, the fact that we were forty probably wouldn’t bother most of us at all. We have all seen those rare individuals who are in their fifties, sixties, seventies … and they are beautiful. They sparkle, they have something timeless about them, and a youthfulness. If most of us are honest, we would admit we’d like to be like that at their age. Similarly we have all met people who seem far too old for their age. What is it that is going on with these two groups that causes one to remain younger than their years and the other to become older than their years?
Like the society we live in, for most of us, our understanding of growing old is mostly at a surface and superficial level. Most of us don’t know what is going on biologically, emotionally, or mentally when we grow old. We put it down to age and we assign the title of anomaly to those who defy this apparent law of nature. But what science has already proven is that the way we think has a direct and immediate effect on our physical and emotional well being. There is no truer saying than ‘so you think, so you are’ and it begins in the brain.
Like the brain, our thoughts are really no more than energy with the potential to affect other manifestations of energy, like the energy manifestation that is our brain. Basically thought energy interacts with brain energy and if the thought energy is ‘happy, positive’ energy then the effects on the brain will be to effect other parts of the body in a ‘happy, positive’ way. Similarly if the thoughts are unhappy the opposite occurs.
For example, when a person is feeling depressed and experiencing negative thoughts, something very distinct occurs in the brain. It begins to reduce its happy neurotransmitters serotonin, while increasing cortisol, the degenerative, ageing hormone. This causes the body to stop functioning optimally, the immune system becomes depressed, the bodies rate of degeneration accelerates, in essence, the body starts to age faster. Simply put negative thinking reduces the life force of the body and accelerates the onset of death.
Conversely if you observe what is going on in the brains of those who are happy and have a positive disposition, you can observe the opposite. A biological response occurs that increases the individuals life force, slows down ageing and enhances longevity. The brains of positive thinking, happy, people cause the body to increase its happy neurotransmitters (serotonin), increase its feel good endorphins, reduce its cortisol (degenerative hormone) while increasing its DHEA, human growth hormone and melatonin (three hormones associated with youth and vitatlity).
This is not pie in the sky thinking, this is factual and scientifically proven. Any explanatory research on brainwave activity will substantiate this. Brainwave activity is directly correlated to thought processes, and the effects on the body are a direct result of the brains response to the quality of those thought processes.
If we reflect back on those fifty, sixty, seventy year olds, that seem younger than their years, they will all possess the same thing: a generally happy disposition and positive outlook. No matter what life throws their way, they manage to maintain a buoyant outlook. They realise that things will change again, and don’t get bogged down in the temporal hardships of the moment. Similarly for those who are older than their years the opposite can be found. They are mentally burdened, and have a generally poorer outlook on life. When something goes wrong, the effects hang on, and tend to cause the individual to have more trepidation regarding future events. Ironically this tends to increase the negative occurrences in their lives, stead fasting their negative outlook.
What does this all mean for all of us lying somewhere between the two, who need to get happier brains? Many will say, you cannot change your essential character. But this is actually wrong. We can change the general negative or positive outlook of our character because our character is a result of our thoughts, and our thoughts can be changed by changing our brainwave patterns.
For mon:re information: Learn How To Slow Ageing. DHEA The Facts
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