Super Ager. Elise Marie Collins

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      To Super Age is to embrace the power of the universe inside of you and to believe that your power is infinitely good. You will experience hardships, trials and tribulations throughout life. Successful aging means embracing these ups and downs and then choosing to see the good. This requires self-compassion and self-love. To pay attention to life, to see the beauty in each moment, is to see through mindful rose-colored glasses. Your health—mental, physical, spiritual and emotional—requires the digestion and assimilation of all life experiences. This requires great compassion towards yourself and others. In the purest sense, mindfulness actually means compassion. Mindfulness means paying attention with love. This is the greatest gift you can give yourself, your loved ones, and the world. When I listen to the stories and wisdom of the oldest of old, from nanogenerians to centenarians to super-centenarians, I hear compassion, gratitude, and acceptance. Sometimes a centenarian may seem feisty or crabby, but peel back the veneer, and deep compassion is present.

      To embrace and live a long life, compassion towards yourself may be one of the most important tools. Compassion allows you to digest and integrate suffering. You will not be able to escape suffering, but you will be able to weave that pain into a beautiful tapestry called life. Once you have given yourself space for compassion, there is space for grief, for suffering, and for joy.

      In every moment, you have a choice to see things as generally positive or negative. You may feel “negative” emotions such as anger, jealousy, fear, anxiety, judgment. Your health arises not from your ability to push away or shove these negative feelings into a corner or out of sight. Rather, it arises from giving these feelings space and a voice. Your resilience comes from quiet introspection and understanding all of the emotions and experiences of living. There is darkness and there is light. Healthy aging and longevity require deep wells of inner compassion. When you feel and not just pay lip service to that compassion, you are ready to move on to the next journey of life.

      Yet life rarely presents clear forks in the road. Life is full of complexities and shades of gray. The brain or the mind has a job, and that is to keep us safe. Fear and negativity had a role in our evolution and survival. Vigilance and seeing things through a negative lens helped us survive at one point. Those who were fearful and vigilant survived more often than those who may have been more carefree. When humans anticipated a threat or attack and that was a correct assessment, negative thinking helped people to survive. As humans, we are always growing, learning, and watching out for danger. Our brains are wired to look for things to fear. But this is not the only way of looking at things. A positive outlook, even in the face of not so positive life circumstances, seems to be a personality trait that may be associated with longevity. And to survive eighty years and beyond, a certain kind of resilience and reframing will be necessary.

      In 2017, Sardinians age 90–101 were interviewed about their life histories and beliefs. Younger relatives of this group of nano and octogenarians were also queried on their long-lived family members’ personalities. Researchers found that these older adults exhibited better mental health than younger people. Despite a decline in physical vigor, older adults of Sardinia had a mostly positive outlook. They were filled with hope and optimism, despite what life had dealt them. It seems that to live to be 100, one either becomes more positive or perhaps optimism helps one survive past a certain age. In Ayurveda, the last part of life, is influenced by the air element which is expressed through a positive attitude and inspirational point of view.

      Back to School

      As one of the oldest undergraduates at UC–Berkeley, Delores Orr, age seventy, is part of a trend of older adults going back to college after age twenty-five. However, at her age, she is more of an exception at highly selective schools such as Berkeley. As Delores’ own granddaughter struggled in elementary school, she told her grandma she believed she could not succeed in school. Delores Orr’s pursuit of higher education arose from a deep desire to inspire her granddaughter. When her granddaughter continued to doubt that she could succeed in school, Delores told her, “but you can: I’ll show you.” She was accepted to Cal, yet when she arrived on the Berkeley campus, her confidence wavered. She found herself surrounded by students who looked and acted very different than her. They rode skateboards and stared at their smartphones. Orr felt her fear and then did something about it. She sat across from the office of the registrar at Sproul Hall, repeating positive affirmations over and over: “I am worthy, I am worthy, I am worthy.” Her mindset leads her to her success. She will graduate in Spring of 2018.

      The Power of Positive Thinking

      Do optimists live longer than pessimists? Recent research suggests optimism strongly affects cardiovascular health. A 2015 University of Illinois study analyzed data from an ongoing survey, called the Multi Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis, finding that those who exhibited the highest levels of optimism had almost double the odds of having ideal cardiovascular health, in comparison to their more pessimistic counterparts. The study’s author, Rosalba Hernandez, Professor of Social Work at University of Illinois, emphasized that the significance of a hopeful attitude was clear. “This association remains significant, even after adjusting for socio-demographic characteristics and poor mental health,” she said. In a similar study at Harvard University, researchers found links between optimism, hope, life satisfaction, and a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease, as well as strokes.

      But can it be that easy? Believe it or not it can be, kind of. Affirmations can help redirect our neurons to create pathways that help override old and long-ingrained patterns. Breaking habitual patterns of negativity can be surprisingly easy and, well, hard. Why is that? Because the mind creates patterns, and breaking these patterns feels very, very uncomfortable. You are changing the neural pathways that direct the mind to fear. It is important to realize that this is very different than suppressing, overriding, or bypassing pain or reality. In the highest sense, when you feel the fear, name the fear, listen to the fear, express the fear, and give it compassion, you create space. Once you create this space, there is a potential to choose a new thought, a new goal, a new path, and this is the “positive” mindset that healthy aging both requires and (I believe) teaches. When we age in a healthy way, we become more resilient and we also become great teachers. There is potential in aging to learn deep lessons of resilience, and this imparts great wisdom on the person who is aging. This is the gift of Super Agers.

      In Ayurveda, speaking, thinking, and acting in a way that is positive, kind, and truthful restores the spirit and the mind and helps increase feelings of wellbeing. A 2012 study revealed similar traits in centenarians. The study, titled “Positive attitude towards life and emotional expression as personality phenotypes for centenarians,” included participants with an average age was 97.5 and found that “qualities of positivity,” including being optimistic or easygoing, were more prevalent in the 243 centenarians studied than the average population in the US. Laughter was valued by these Super Agers, and most were part of a larger social network. Most were emotionally expressive, less neurotic, and expressed a higher-than-average level of conscientiousness. Similar studies of centenarians have evoked surprisingly likeminded data, indicating that perhaps the mental attitude of Super Agers contributes greatly to their ability to live so much longer than average.

      The results of the Heidelberg Centenarian study challenged the belief that older adults have maxed out on feeling positive, given the adversities common in advanced age, such as losing a СКАЧАТЬ