‘A pessimist sees the difficulty in
every opportunity; an optimist sees
the opportunity in every difficulty.’
WINSTON CHURCHILL
Optimists live longer than pessimists! That’s the conclusion of a 30-year study involving 447 people that was conducted by scientists at the Mayo Clinic in the USA. They found that optimists had around a 50 per cent lower risk of early death than pessimists, and wrote that ‘… mind and body are linked and attitude has an impact on the final outcome – death.’
A startling statistic! Optimists were also found to have fewer physical and emotional health problems, less pain and increased energy, and they generally felt more peaceful, happier and calmer than the pessimists.
A 2004 study published in the journal Archives of General Psychiatry found a similar thing. It concluded that there is a ‘… protective relationship between… optimism and all-cause mortality in old age’. Optimism protects you from illness. The scientists studied the responses given by 999 Dutch men and women between the ages of 65 and 85 to a range of statements, including:
‘I often feel that life is full of promises.’
‘I still have positive expectations concerning my future.’
‘There are many moments of happiness in my life.’
‘Happy laughter often occurs.’
‘I still have many goals to strive for.’
‘Most of the time I’m in good spirits.’
The results were very clear. Those who showed high levels of optimism, who would perhaps respond affirmatively to the first question, had a 45 per cent lower risk of death from any cause and a 77 per cent lower risk of death from heart disease than those who reported high levels of pessimism.
Another study examined the autobiographies of 180 Catholic nuns that were written when the women first entered a convent. Scientists examined the autobiographies 60 years later and discovered that the nuns who wrote more positively when they first entered the convent lived much longer than their colleagues whose writing was more negative.
One of the reasons a positive attitude is so important is because it can boost our immune system and therefore our ability to fight illness. A person’s attitude generally influences their emotional experience; that is, whether they meet life with more positive or negative emotions.
In a 2006 study conducted at Carnegie Mellon University in the USA, scientists studied the effects of the common cold and influenza viruses on people who had different emotional styles. One hundred and ninety-three healthy volunteers were interviewed to determine whether they had a positive emotional style (typically experience more positive emotions) or a negative emotional style (typically experience more negative emotions). Then they were exposed to either of the viruses using nasal drops.
It turned out that the people who experienced more positive emotions had much lower rates of upper respiratory infections than those who experienced more negative emotions.
As we go through our lives, our attitudes affect how we react to viruses, bacteria and other pathogens. A positive, optimistic outlook on life is ultimately better for our overall health and longevity. We also deal with life situations differently depending on our attitude to them. A positive attitude helps us to cope with challenges and even to see them as opportunities, which ultimately benefits our health.
In the USA, a University of Chicago study examined the attitude and health of 200 telecommunications executives who had been affected by corporate downsizing. It found that the executives who saw the downsizing as an opportunity for growth were healthier than those who saw it as a threat. Of those with the positive attitude, less than one-third developed an illness during or shortly after the downsizing. But of those with a negative attitude, over 90 per cent became ill. In other words, looking at the same event as positive or negative has a hugely different effect upon health.
Some of the best-studied effects of attitude show that it powerfully affects the heart. One such study, involving 586 people and conducted by scientists at Johns Hopkins University in the USA, found that a positive attitude was the best protection against heart disease.
In 2003, scientists at North Carolina’s Duke University Medical Centre, on examining 866 heart patients, discovered that the patients who routinely felt more positive emotions (e.g. happiness, joy and optimism) had about a 20 per cent greater chance of being alive 11 years later than those who experienced more negative emotions.
And in a 2007 study, Harvard scientists studied the effects of ‘emotional vitality’, which was defined as ‘a sense of positive energy, an ability to regulate emotions and behaviour, and a feeling of engagement in life’. The US study involved 6,265 volunteers and it found that those who had high levels of emotional vitality were 19 per cent less likely to develop coronary heart disease than those with lower levels. Attitude can be protective, or destructive, towards health.
The above title is taken from a US scientific review paper that discussed a 2006 study by University of Utah scientists that had found that married couples’ attitudes profoundly impacted their hearts.
The scientists videotaped 150 married couples discussing marital topics and categorized them according to how they related to each other. They found that the couples that were most supportive of one another had healthier hearts. And the couples that were most hostile towards each other had more hardening of their arteries. Hard marriage, hard heart! Being supportive of another person is much better for health than holding anger and bitterness and constantly criticizing them.
In some research, hostility is defined as evading a question and as irritation and direct and indirect challenges to a person asking a question. Other research defines it as an attitude of cynical beliefs and lack of trust in other people. Yet others define it as being aggressive and challenging, or expressing contempt. In one 25-year study that used these types of definition as a criterion to determine hostility levels, the people who were most hostile had five times more incidents of coronary heart disease than those who were least hostile and were more trusting of people, accepting and gentle.
The connection between attitude and the heart is so reliable that a 30-year study published in 2003 in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that ‘… hostility is one of the most reliable indicators of coronary heart disease risk’.
Scientists can quite accurately calculate a person’s risk of heart disease by examining their diet and lifestyle – the kinds of food they eat, how much exercise they get, whether they smoke or drink lots of alcohol. People with an unhealthy diet, who don’t exercise much and who smoke and drink lots of alcohol are usually most at risk. But scientists can just as accurately calculate the risk based on attitude – whether people have a positive or negative attitude or how hostile they are towards others. The good news is that just as you can change your diet and lifestyle, you can change your attitude. It’s up to you.
Of course, our life circumstances might be so testing that it’s inevitable we become ‘hardened’ to some extent, but we still have a choice, no matter what. I’m deeply inspired by the story of Viktor Frankl, a survivor of the Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz. In his bestselling book Man’s Search for Meaning he writes,
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the
men who walked through huts comforting others, giving
away their last slice of bread. They may have been few
in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything
can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of
the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any
given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
Frankl’s words are a message of hope that no matter what, our attitude is our choice. If we search deep within ourselves, we can always make the highest choice, the one from the softest heart, the one that helps other people to find comfort and happiness; and, in so doing, the one that makes us healthier.
A study of 22,461 people by scientists from the University of Kuopio in Finland found that those who were most satisfied with their lives lived longer. They defined life satisfaction as ‘an interest in life, happiness and a general ease of living’. Reporting in the American Journal of Epidemiology in 2000, the researchers found that the men (but not the women) in the study who were most dissatisfied with life were more than three times as likely to die of disease than those who were most satisfied.
It’s not so much what happens to us in life that determines our health and happiness. It’s how we respond to what happens that matters most. If you live in a nice house but you see someone with a nicer house, do you feel dissatisfied that your house is not good enough or do you give more thought to what you love about your own home and the people who share it with you?
It’s said that the grass is always greener, but if you notice your own grass and don’t pay so much attention to other grasses, then you’re more likely to be happier and in better health. It’s what you focus on that matters most. It’s your attitude that counts.
How often do you complain? In his inspiring book A Complaint Free World, Will Bowen encourages us to take up the challenge of going 21 days without complaining. That means to refrain from complaining, criticizing or unfairly judging. He encourages us to wear a wristband and to change it to the other wrist every time we complain; this draws our attention to when we complain.
It’s an eye-opener. Most people initially have to move the wristband more than 20 times a day. It’s great for making you aware of just how you behave. But after a short time, people find it quite easy to go four or five days without making a single complaint. That’s a huge difference and, as far as I’m concerned, a great boost to their health.
Complaining about things and criticizing people has become a way of life for so many of us, and we don’t even notice how often we do it. It’s a habit. And we rarely complain about the truth of things, only how they seem to us. The same thing may mean something completely different to someone else.
For instance, say a delivery you were expecting doesn’t arrive. You complain that this has ruined your day, setting back your entire schedule. You stress yourself, creating untold negative effects on your body. Someone else with a late delivery might decide that there’s something else they can be getting on with and might find the delay turns out to be for the best. Is the delay actually a good or a bad thing? That’s up to you. But what you decide matters for your health.
Complaining even affects the people around us. We rarely notice this, but we’re like tuning forks. When you hit the fork, other things nearby resonate with it. This is also what happens when we consistently complain around people – we trigger their complaints too. All of a sudden, it seems, they too are inspired to find fault with life and the world. Complaining becomes an emotional virus that we carry around with us, infecting the people that we encounter.
Our thoughts and attitudes inspire our actions, and our actions create our world. So, our thoughts and attitudes create our world. What kind of world do you choose? This is Will Bowen’s sentiment in his book. If we stop complaining then we can get to work on creating a better world. And we’re doing something positive for the health of our body at the same time.
Instead of complaining, try to focus on what you’re grateful for. Gratitude begets gratitude. The more things you focus on that you’re grateful for, the more things you notice and experience that you can be grateful for. And it’s good for your heart.
This was the title of a press release issued on 20 March 2008 by the University of British Columbia in Canada. It describes research showing that people who give money away are happier than those who spend it all on themselves. The research was conducted by scientists from the University of British Columbia and published in 2008 in the journal Science. The results showed that people who spent some of their money ‘pro-socially’ – that is, they spent it on gifts for others or on charitable donations rather than on themselves – were happier.
The research involved 632 people who were asked to rate their general happiness and give a breakdown of their monthly income and spending (including bills, gifts for others, gifts for themselves and donations to charities). The authors reported that ‘Regardless of how much income each person made, those who spent money on others reported greater happiness, while those who spent more on themselves did not.’
The happiest people were the ones who gave money away. This lies contrary to what most people think – that we need to keep all of our money for ourselves just ‘in case’, and that the more we accumulate, the happier we’ll be. But it needn’t be large sums that we give away.
To test this theory, the scientists gave 46 volunteers either $5 or $20 and asked them to spend it by 5 p.m. that day. Half were asked to spend the money on themselves and the other half were asked to spend it on others. The people who spent the money on others reported feeling happier at the end of the day than those who spent it on themselves. The scientists said, ‘These findings suggest that very minor alterations in spending allocations – as little as $5 – may be enough to produce real gains in happiness on a given day.’
Why not decide to give something away today, to whomever you wish and in whatever way you wish?
Many other studies have found that, even though our income and disposable income are higher than they were for our grandparents 50 years ago, we’re not any happier. In fact, some polls have found that people nowadays are less happy than people were 50 years ago.
The British Columbia research shows that the level of income isn’t as important as what we do with our income. Earning a small salary but showing generosity with it might lead to greater happiness than earning millions and spending it all on yourself. Money is not the issue. You can be rich and be happy and you can be poor and be happy. Much of happiness lies in what you do with what you have. It’s down to you!
Indeed, in one aspect of the research, the scientists measured the levels of happiness of 16 employees at a Boston company after they’d received profit-sharing bonuses of between $3,000 and $8,000. The researchers found that happiness was independent of the size of the bonus, but a product of what the recipients did with it. The employees who spent more of it on presents for others and gifts to charity were happier than those who spent it all on themselves.
Attitude affects how fast we age. In fact, positive people live longer! That’s the conclusion of some research conducted by scientists at Yale University who studied the responses of 660 people to a series of questions about attitude, such as ‘As you get older, you’re less useful. Agree or disagree?’ Those who generally disagreed with these types of statement, and therefore had the most positive attitudes about ageing, lived about seven years longer than those who agreed and therefore had the most negative attitudes about ageing.
And just as attitude affects the heart, the Yale scientists even concluded that attitude was more influential than blood pressure, cholesterol levels, lack of smoking, a healthy body weight and exercise levels in how long a person lived.
How we think and feel affects us in so many ways. A 2006 University of Texas study that examined 2,564 Mexican-Americans over the age of 65 found that positive emotions reduced blood pressure.
In 2004, scientists from the University of Texas even found that frailty was linked with attitude. They studied 1,558 older people from the Mexican-American community and to determine levels of frailty they measured weight loss, exhaustion, walking speed and grip strength. Over time, they found that the people with the most positive attitude were less likely to become frail.
And in a similar result to the satisfaction study reported earlier, a 2006 study into satisfaction found that people over the age of 80 lived longer if they were satisfied with their lives. Publishing in the Journal of Gerontology, scientists from the University of Jyväskylä in Finland examined 320 volunteers who filled out a ‘Life Satisfaction’ questionnaire. They found that those who were most satisfied had half the risk of death of those who were least satisfied.
One might argue that people who are healthy tend to have a more positive attitude and that would explain this, and similar correlations, and while this is generally true, the overall body of research does clearly indicate that attitude impacts health and is not just a consequence of it.
Essentially, if you have a positive attitude and keep your mind and body active, you’re likely to stay healthier for longer, and when you do get sick you’re likely to recover faster. Your mental and physical abilities are also likely to stay with you longer. That’s the conclusion of much of the research currently looking at the relationship between attitude and the ageing process. We don’t need to age as fast as we think we do.
Many people cling to the idea that the brain and body decline with age and use it to explain why they forget some things, why they sometimes can’t think clearly and why they feel stiff when they get up. OK, the brain and body do change. But how fast they change is something that we have an impact upon.
A study by scientists from Posit Science Corporation, a US company specializing in brain training, showed that age-related mental decline is actually reversible. Lack of use is a significant factor in mental and physical decline. ‘Use it or lose it’ is an applicable term. If you stop using a muscle, it atrophies and becomes weaker. If you keep using it, it becomes stronger. And even if you’ve lost muscle through not using it, an exercise regime will restore some, or a lot, of its function. The same is true with mental functions. If we use our brain, even when we’re older, it works better.
For the study, the scientists designed a training programme that improved neuroplasticity, which is the ability of the brain to increase its connections. As you’ll see later in the book, the brain is not a hardwired lump of matter, as was once believed, but something that’s constantly changing in response to our learning and experiences.
Publishing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, the scientists reported that elderly adults gained a substantial improvement in memory after doing the training. The study involved volunteers between the ages of 60 and 87 taking part in an eight-to-10-week auditory memory programme that involved listening to sounds for one hour a day, five days a week. At the end of the programme their memories had improved so much that they were performing like adults aged 40–60 instead of adults aged 60–87. Their mental abilities had improved by around 20 years!
Harvard University professor Ellen Langer conducted a novel experiment in 1981. She took volunteers over the age of 70 to a retreat centre for 10 days and asked them to pretend that it was 1959 for the whole time, to ‘try to be the person they were 22 years ago’. The environment in the centre was a recreation of 1959. Music from 1959 was played, there were magazines from 1959, the volunteers wore 1950s clothing and the TV even showed taped shows from the 1950s. The volunteers also had to converse with each other as if it were 1959 – discussing topics and current affairs of the time, and even talking about their children as if it were 22 years earlier.
At the start of the experiment, the scientists took a host of physiological measurements, including height, finger length, strength, mental cognition and eyesight. After the 10 days in the centre, they took those measurements again. Amazingly, they found that the volunteers were physiologically younger by several years.
By acting as though they were younger, they became younger on the inside. They grew taller (changes in their back muscles allowed them to stand taller), their fingers grew longer, they had improved mental functions and their eyesight had improved, some by several prescriptions. Some of the volunteers had become mentally and physiologically younger by several years. Most of them even scored better in intelligence tests.
This study is an excellent example of the fact that how we think and feel, how we act, how we use our brain and how often we use it really matters. When we’re young we’re constantly engaged in mental activities and physical activities. As we go through our adult lives we change in what we think we can, and should, do.
We also use our brains less and less. In the early stages of our professional lives we’re highly active, but over time we gradually become less so, both mentally and physically. But we don’t need to. We just need to find other things to do. Many people who have lived healthily way into their nineties are mentally and physically active right up to their final days.
Recent research in neuroscience has found that some of the best ways to exercise our brain as adults include learning a new language or learning to dance. We don’t need to speak fluently or even to visit the country whose language we’re learning (although we may be motivated to, once we can speak a little of it), nor do we need to strut our stuff at a nightclub on a Saturday night. We only need to use our brain to learn the language or dance steps. It’s the learning – that is, something new – that matters.
Research has shown that actively using our mind can reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease. The authors of one study, reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association, wrote that ‘On average, a person reporting frequent cognitive activity… was 47 per cent less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease than a person with infrequent activity.’
Many adults believe so much that the brain and body have to significantly decline with age that they enter into a self-reinforcing spiral that alters how they behave. They start to behave like older people instead of remaining younger at heart. They move their bodies less and become less mentally active, not necessarily because that’s what happens, but because they believe that’s how things work. In other words, many people tend to act how they think they should, rather than how they feel or want to feel.
In the audio programme Magical Mind, Magical Body, Deepak Chopra, MD, said, ‘One of the things that is becoming very clear about the ageing process is that what we consider normal ageing may be a premature cognitive commitment… We, as a species, get committed to a certain reality of ageing.’
The comedian Billy Connolly had me in fits of laughter once. He said that he knew he was getting older when he started to get up from his seat and caught himself making the sound ‘Ooooohhh’. We sometimes do this out of habit, or just because others do it. We unconsciously pick up on their actions and behave the way we’re ‘supposed’ to.
I noticed one of my nephews do it once when he was four years old, after a few of the adults around him had just got up from their seats. I had to give him the positive reinforcement that he was really strong (much stronger than the ‘old people’) because he could spring up from his seat without making any noise. He never did it again.
In a ‘priming’ experiment – where people are subconsciously primed with an idea – conducted by scientists from North Carolina State University and published in 2004 in the journal Psychology and Aging, 153 people were asked to do memory tests after being primed with certain words. Some were primed with the words ‘confused’, ‘cranky’, ‘feeble’ and ‘senile’ and others with the words ‘accomplished’, ‘active’, ‘dignified’ and ‘distinguished’.
When the participants then did memory tests, older adults primed with the ‘old’ words fared much worse than the ones primed with the more positive words. The scientists wrote that ‘… if older people are treated like they are competent, productive members of society, then they perform that way too’.
It’s not just our own attitudes and how we treat ourselves that are important, but how we treat other people. If you treat someone like an old, infirm person, as well as probably annoying them when you speak to them as if they’re a child, it can gradually erode their spirit and cause them to start believing that how you treat them is how they should be.
It’s my opinion that if people believe they should still be fit and active in their nineties and if, when we’re younger, we treat older people as holders of wisdom, life experience and stories, then there will be many more people in society who are mentally and physically active in their eighties and nineties than we currently see. It’s really up to us.
Attitude is everything, they say. I think there’s a lot of truth in the statement. If we learn to see the positive side of things then we might just live longer, healthier, happier lives. A good way to do this is to stop complaining, be more grateful, and be kind.
In the next chapter we’ll see how what we believe can be so powerful, it can affect our ability to heal.