Imagine that you could rewind the clock 20 years, and you're 20 years younger. How do you feel? Well, if you're at all like the subjects in an experiment by Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer, you actually feel as if your body clock has been turned back two decades. Langer did a study like this with a group of elderly men some years ago, redecorating an old New England hotel so that every visible sign said it was 20 years earlier. The men — in their late 70s and early 80s — were told not to just think about the past, but to actually act as if they had traveled back in time. The idea was to see if changing the men's mindset about their own age might lead to actual changes in health and fitness.
Langer's findings were shocking: After just one week, the men in the experimental group (compared with controls of the same age) had more joint flexibility and less arthritis in their hands. Their mental sensitivity had risen measurably, and they had improved posture. Outsiders who were shown the men's photographs judged them to be significantly younger than the controls. In other words, the aging process had to some extent gone in the opposite direction.
Though this sounds a bit woo-wooey, Langer and her Harvard colleagues have been running similarly inventive experiments for decades, and the accumulated weight of the evidence is convincing. Her theory, argued in her new book, Counterclockwise, is that we are all victims of our own stereotypes about aging and health. We mindlessly accept negative cultural cues about disease and old age, and these cues shape our self-concepts and our behavior. If we can shake loose from the negative stereotypes that strongly influence our thinking about health, we can "mindfully" open ourselves to possibilities for more productive lives even into old age.
