People will try to tell you that all the great opportunities have been snapped up. In reality, the world changes every second, blowing new opportunities in all directions, including yours.
—KEN HAKUTA
• Increasing our mental and physical flexibility as we age seems to run counter to nature’s design, but that has more to do with fear than with destiny.
• Learning to respond more flexibly to change offers important benefits that may make life more enjoyable, rewarding, and fulfilling.
• Thinking about thinking, or metacognition, is an important brain-based ability for increasing mental flexibility with age.
• Cultivating response flexibility involves learning a manageable set of skills that simultaneously strengthen stress hardiness while reducing fear.
“My life is essentially finished.” This outlook is all too common in the second half of life. Many people do not feel a sense of fulfillment or satisfaction about the completeness of their life. They are full of regrets about missed opportunities and a wishing for what might have been.
As we age, we are invited to reexamine, reevaluate, reenergize, and refashion how we live going forward. We have the opportunity to make conscious choices that will influence how we actually live. At some point, we all receive the invitation to enrich the quality of our lives. It is rare to go through life without hearing that call of an inner voice that challenges us to make changes to enrich our lives. Ultimately, the call is an opportunity to ask, “Am I aligning my life with the best in me so that I can offer the best to those around me?” But not all of us choose to invest the time and energy in exploring how to respond to that inner voice. What makes responding to the call so challenging?
• Fear of going beyond what we’ve grown comfortable with—feeling that the “devil we know is better than the devil we don’t know.”
• Avoidance of what seem like daunting challenges. Cultivating new paths for living can be hard work, even when our current path is clearly outmoded, emotionally spent, and spiritually unsatisfying.
• As we age, we are biologically less capable of making changes that would open up new possibilities for a more joy-filled and satisfying life unless we make the conscious decision to do so.
In chapter 2 we debunked the assumption that we inevitably grow less physically and mentally flexible as we age. We do become slower in our physical movements and slower to process certain kinds of novel information. But less flexible? Not necessarily. Older brains are sometimes able to process information with more flexibility than younger brains. Life experience has its benefits. Accumulated life experience provides a reservoir of variations and solutions that can be combined to increase options for responding flexibly. Older brains can be more efficient brains as a result. Neuropsychological studies of older subjects consistently show that retention of mental agility is to a large degree a function of attitude, practice, and experience, and not an inevitable consequence of time’s passing.1,2
This brings us to the important influence of premature cognitive commitments (PCCs).3 The brain is designed to learn and to convert learning into response patterns that quickly become automatic, unconscious habits. What we come to believe about our daily world reflects acquired biases of which we are scarcely aware, but these biases (PCCs) dramatically influence what we think, what we say, and what we do.
When we are exposed to information that we do not thoughtfully consider or critically evaluate, we unwittingly absorb and accept it. Advertisers make use of the ease with which we are influenced outside of our awareness. That is why we may suddenly sense that we need something we didn’t even know we wanted! The role of PCCs is like what happens when we are infected by a virus that, unbeknownst to us, takes over a cell and directs it to produce new viruses. Similarly, our mind’s belief systems are commandeered by PCCs to conform to their outlook without our awareness that it is happening. For example, we carry a wide range of cultural biases about aging that are faulty or even flatly wrong. Unexamined beliefs about aging reflect PCCs that influence our expectations to the degree that our daily functioning actually changes to conform to these false beliefs! Here are common examples.
• Getting older means getting sicker and more infirm before ultimately dying alone.
• Getting older means becoming a burden on everyone else.
• Getting older means you will get Alzheimer’s disease and forget your loved ones.
• Getting older means becoming irrelevant and useless.
These negative PCCs, implanted outside of awareness, represent a major threat to the chances of our remaining flexible as we age.
Of course, we can also be infected by healthy biases and PCCs. Harvard University researcher Ellen Langer discovered this effect in studies in the late seventies and early eighties. In one study, she transported two groups of older adults to an isolated monastery where they stayed for a number of weeks. One group was asked to act “as if” they were younger versions of themselves. They were helped out by books, newspaper articles, old-time radio programs, and black-and-white television, all associated with the year 1959.4 The second group was asked only to reminisce about those earlier years, to nostalgically think back but not necessarily act the part. By the end of the first week, the first group showed how much mental attitudes impact physiological and cognitive functioning.
The first group of adults had clearly “regressed.” They broke out of their PCCs and showed measurable changes consistent with “growing younger.” They were more physically flexible. A number were even playing touch football by the end of the week. Even more dramatic were the findings that their memory, the degree of gnarling in their arthritic fingers, the fluidity of the movement of their muscles and joints, and their intellectual functioning all improved. As Dr. Langer concluded, “Wherever you put the mind, the body will follow.”
The lessons of Langer’s studies have been known for more than thirty years. The findings have been duplicated by others.5 Why, then, are we still victims of premature cognitive commitments and the distorted perceptions they create? In a word, fear. When we function under the influence of the many forms of fear, we tend to become more rigid and less able to respond with adaptive flexibility. Instead of being able to thoughtfully consider, Hm, what makes sense to do right here, right now?, we respond out of fixed, preconceived, and automatic habits (those darned PCCs). Responding out of unconscious habit is the essence of a rigid response style.
We are actually designed for flexible responding. That is what has made the human species so adaptable and successful. But being flexible depends on active management of fear. There are differences in how people cope with fear and anxiety. Coping styles can be boiled down into two contrasting but complementary approaches, protective coping and adaptive coping.6
When under the influence of fear, the brain’s prefrontal cortex (PFC), which helps us with higher-level thought and reasoning, is largely off-line. As a result, we revert to what we’ve known from our past, and that’s usually our preset response patterns. So rather than responding more adaptively to the actual situation at hand, we hunker down in protective coping mode. Did you ever deal with your concern about a looming deadline by escaping into a movie rather than digging into the project? This kind of avoidance is a classic protective coping. A protective coping style is less flexible, more impulsive, more aggressive, and less attuned to the specific details of the source of stress.
Protective coping is influenced by the relative levels of dopamine and serotonin released by the brain: too little serotonin release and we revert to protective coping. Serotonin promotes calmness and contentment (one reason it is widely affected by antidepressant medications). As we age, serotonin levels naturally decline. So the protective coping style can then become the default style, resulting in more rigid, reactive response patterns. If we’re not careful, our declining serotonin levels and increasing propensity for protective coping can actually make us less flexible in how we face life’s challenges as we age.
But protective coping isn’t inevitable. The converse is an adaptive coping style, and it can be learned and cultivated—at any age. An adaptive coping is slower, more thoughtful, and more flexible. It allows us to adjust and adapt to the specifics of the situation at hand, and possibly craft a more effective strategy for solving a problem that’s in front of us.
By slowing down our response, adaptive coping allows us to attend to the details in a situation, and that means we can generate a tailor-made response—one that is likely to be more effective. In order to find this response, we must have the ability to pay focused attention to an issue and to sustain that attention over time. Adaptive coping takes more time, but the results permit greater adaptive flexibility.
Nobel Prize laureate Daniel Kahneman describes the interplay of these two systems of thinking and coping in his important book Thinking, Fast and Slow.7 The slow thinking, adaptive system of coping relies on the release of dopamine, the attention-focusing molecule. Flexible coping requires the brain to be able to distribute both serotonin and dopamine effectively. Staying calm and focused can be very useful when creating new solutions to old problems. Therefore, simple practices that promote mind-brain health generally can also promote greater response flexibility throughout life. Some of the best practices are also the simplest. Common examples include
• learning to meditate.
• getting consistent and restful sleep.
• participating in activities that you enjoy and that challenge your mind.
• engaging in playful activities that regularly make you laugh.
• identifying what situations you find most stressful and disturbing while also developing a personalized plan for effectively managing your stress response.
Modern life demands adaptive coping. Without it, we can succumb to physical, mental, and emotional risks that increase as we age. But by taking active steps to promote optimal mind-brain health, we can face life with more flexibility and joy.
The pervasiveness of fear is nothing new. Chapter 2 of the Bhagavad Gita, the ancient Hindu text written at least 2,300 years ago, tells us, “No step is lost on this path, and no dangers are found. And even a little progress is freedom from fear.”8 To be flexible requires loosening our grip on what has been before so that we can open up to what comes next. Letting go requires that our hands are sufficiently open so that we can use them to construct the second half of our lives with a forward-looking, flexible plan, rather than anxiously glancing back over our shoulders as our “good old days” recede.
As the Gita says, even a little progress is freedom from fear. Small steps can make big differences. Twenty years ago a colleague named Bill wanted to go skydiving. When the day arrived, he was full of excitement. His more experienced skydiving friend Stan accompanied him, offering plenty of encouragement to calm Bill’s nerves. When it was his turn to jump, Bill found himself on the platform to exit the plane, tightly gripping the handrail for dear life. Bill told Stan, “I can’t let go!” Stan, wise and unflappable, calmly said, “That’s okay. Don’t let go. But surely, you can loosen just your index finger and hold on with the others.” Bill agreed and did so. Next Stan said, “I’ll bet you can hold on with just your thumb, your middle finger, and your pinky.” Again, Bill agreed and discovered he could still hold on. When Stan pointed out that “it would be interesting to notice what happens when you’re just holding onto the rail with the pinky and thumb,” Bill loosened the middle finger’s grip and, with only a thumb and pinky to hold him, found himself airborne. The free fall was exhilarating. The opening of the parachute occurred right on cue. The surreal descent back to earth was gentle. It was a giddy lesson in acquiring flexible learning, one simple step at a time.
We are hardwired for fear. We are also hardwired for flexibility. Learning to cultivate a successful balance between our biologically based flexibility and fear-based rigidity helps us adjust and adapt to the challenges of the second half of life. There are many reasons why differences in flexibility show up across individuals (and often within the same individual!) over the span of their lives. The combination of our inborn neural wiring and our accumulated life experience creates what Michael Merzenich, the godfather of neuroplasticity research, describes as our “soft-wiring.” In other words, we have genetic predispositions for fear or flexibility, but our brains are forever being modified by ongoing experience.9
Neuroplasticity is the ability of our brain to adapt and change—in effect, to be rewired. But how does that actually happen? Once a new response pattern is recognized and learned, and once the brain finds that this new pattern actually works to achieve a goal, satisfy a need, or solve a problem, the brain seems to let out a big neurological sigh.10 Harmonious brain wave patterns reemerge. Deep within the brain’s circuits, sweeping neuroplastic changes are under way.11,12
The rewiring brain sends out signals for new proteins to be synthesized. Instructions for genes to be turned on or off are received. Chemical changes at the synaptic junctions linking one neuron to the next are catalyzed. The new way to get something accomplished gets encoded as a new neural firing pattern. This is the heart of flexibility. With time and repeated practice, the new way will morph into the old (established) way of doing things. At the same time, the aging but youthful brain maintains its search for something new to learn. And so, the tug-of-war continues between your being a lifelong learner and your being a security seeker, content with what you already know. Mind-body practices balance that tension.
Our neurobiology is designed to turn the unfiltered chaos we perceive through our senses into predictable and controllable routines and habits as quickly as possible. Not having to figure everything out for the first time is a major time saver. More important, it conserves precious metabolic energy that can mean the difference between survival and oblivion for most species. We don’t have to take time each morning to figure out the best route to take to work. That learning is encoded and can be simply reactivated and downloaded into our routine each morning as we step out our front door. Those routines help to make life manageable by giving us a sense of predictability and control.
The reality, however, is that life is ultimately unpredictable and minimally controllable. Dr. Ken Druck, a renowned psychologist, had a seemingly ideal professional and personal life until the day in 1996 when he experienced a tragic loss. His beautiful daughter had been killed in a road accident while studying abroad. He says that in that instant, the tragedy “ended my life as I knew it.”13 Over time, his loss led him to look more deeply at life. He developed a set of “rules” or principles by which life can be lived more fully, despite our limited control over many of its unforeseeable twists and turns (specifically, he learned that a breakdown can lead to a breakthrough). Those principles are outlined in his book The Real Rules of Life. The rules guide us to respond with courage to what daily life often entails—how life actually is—so that we can learn to adapt and respond in order to create what we would like life to eventually be. This is the essence of flexibility.
Seeking flexibility requires tolerating uncertainty and ambiguity. Flexibility emerges from trial-and-error strategies of problem solving without knowing what the result will be, and such experimentation with new patterns of living is at the heart of curiosity. This search pattern often generates anxiety or even psychological upheaval. Lev Vygotsky, the early-twentieth-century pioneering Russian psychologist, introduced the idea that child development proceeds along a path that involves evolution and revolution. It is anything but a straight line of gentle, predictable growth.
He might as well have been discussing the challenge of remaining flexible in our approach to the second half of life. Having to adjust and adapt to change demands the ability to modify what we know and expect as we engage what is new and unfamiliar. Many people seek to avoid such changes by constructing a life of familiar and safe routines that keep anxiety (a mental form of fear) at bay. The price of overrelying on such efforts is to risk stagnation, and stagnation correlates with measurable shrinking and thinning of brain tissues, resulting in a clear loss of adaptive flexibility. In effect, our fear-driven beliefs about what we might become turns into the biology of who we actually are.
Natalie had a life crisis that demonstrates the frightening tension between the new and the familiar, and the capacity for neuroplastic change. Until her early fifties, Natalie’s beauty defined her relationships. When her husband’s serial infidelity came to light, so did her tremendous anxiety. Her fear-driven beliefs said that she could not survive outside the marriage. The well-rehearsed beliefs took their toll on her biology: she looked sallow, with limp hair, aching muscles, and intestinal and heart symptoms. She couldn’t think straight! Fear-driven stagnation was pushing her to stay in old patterns. Through focused mind-body therapies, the forces of adaptability won out. As she broke free of the stagnating beliefs about her beauty, her anxiety gradually receded, right along with the biological symptoms that were the physical sign of the loss of adaptive flexibility.
By choosing to embrace uncertainty, we ready ourselves to explore the unknown. As we experiment with new ideas or activities, there arrives a moment when we finally gain a sense of competence, maybe even mastery. But until that magical moment, there is effort, frustration, and even impatience or irritation. The reward for pursuing flexibility is the moment when we can play the scales on the piano as though the fingers know what to do all by themselves, or when we develop the sales plan for a new customer without staying up all night writing it. These different experiences reveal that what had been a struggle begins to feel more natural, less exhausting, and even rewarding or inspiring.
The brain also has an insatiable appetite for continuing to learn—throughout life. It tires of stale routines and craves new learning that challenges us to grow. That striving for novel experience pushes us toward what is unknown, unfamiliar, and uncomfortable. We can even see this process on EEG readings of the brain’s electrical activities. When we’re engaged in something new, brain wave patterns initially become chaotic. Energy expenditure increases. Blood flows into the brain centers engaged in generating a new response. Sugar metabolism increases to feed those brain areas busily brainstorming new solutions to new problems, or inventive solutions to old problems. The brain is working hard to discern an identifiable pattern that can eventually turn into a repeatable habit.
Becoming more flexible is not a straightforward process. Some of the steps are quite unexpected. Jazz is a musical genre known for in-the-moment innovation. It doesn’t follow a set score, although the musicians repeatedly return to the basic musical theme, before setting off again on another variation. The creative tensions between the main melody and the improvisational sets define the wonder of jazz. Pianist Dave Brubeck said, “There’s a way of playing safe, there’s a way of using tricks, and there’s the way I like to play, which is dangerously, where you’re going to take a chance on making mistakes in order to create something you haven’t created before.”
Brubeck captured an important point that is relevant to becoming more flexible in our thinking and behavior. Risk is a necessary ingredient of the creative process. Logic suggests that people who are more creative have more flexible minds. How else do they come up with such mind-bending innovations? Surprisingly, research suggests just the opposite: that creativity and innovation decrease as response flexibility increases. Creativity needs to be balanced by the ability to ignore distractions and diligently persevere with the creative task, or it often fails to produce finished works. In other words, creativity flourishes when accompanied by the ability to maintain a fixed and prolonged mental focus.14 This is one of the most important benefits of learning mindful attention skills, as discussed in chapter 3. Learning to focus on one thing, like one’s breathing, opens the door to thinking more creatively about many things.15 Like a metronome, a flexible mind sets the pace for the back-and-forth movement between novelty and familiarity, and between ambiguity and certainty.
Andrea Griffin of the University of Newcastle, Australia, in a study of mynah birds, showed that within that species, certain birds are more innovative but less flexible, adapting to their environments more gradually and cautiously. Other birds are more flexible, exploring their environments slowly but with fine attention to detail.16 Some birds see “the forest” while others see the individual “trees.” Her conclusion is that each ability is better suited for certain environments and certain circumstances. Most birds have both, but individual birds, like individual people, tend to fall along a continuum between rapid, inflexible, big-picture thinking and slower, adaptable, more detail-oriented thinking.
Innovation involves a kind of rule breaking. It often challenges established tradition, just as creativity involves “going where no one has gone before.” Innovation and creativity are important when an individual encounters a new environment. Our ancestors would have faced this challenge over and over as they migrated to new climates and populated the earth. They had to scout a new environment by learning its features and identifying its resources and dangers. They had to delay implementing old ways as they determined what the new environment would require of them. Once the clan was established in the new environment, a different set of skills was needed. They relied less on adaptive flexibility and more on the ability to quickly apply what had been slowly and patiently learned. Details were less important. Rapidly applying more general rules and routines now became favored, and those most able to do that were often the most adaptable.
Which mynah bird are you? Are you drawn to what is shiny and new? Do you yearn for what is familiar and comforting? Knowing where along the continuum you tend to fall can provide you with an important clue on where to focus as you grow your flexibility. If you are a person who chases new experiences, the key is to become more comfortable with, and tolerant of, routines and repetitions. For that person, it is important to build “depth” by going deeper into an experience and staying with it for a time. On the other hand, if you are a seeker of sameness, the goal is to increase “breadth” of life by broadening the range of experiences you sample, even if the conclusion is that what is new in this particular instance is not to your liking. Different strokes for different folks. But response flexibility involves regular sampling of “strokes” from beyond your comfort zone.
An old Saturday Night Live routine featured a gabfest among different characters. Inevitably, the main character would become emotionally overwrought. Then she’d encourage the others to “talk amongst yourselves” as she worked to regain her emotional composure. When it comes to learning to be adaptive, flexible, and optimistically forward-looking, being able to “talk amongst yourselves” is vitally important. The difference is that all the “selves” are different facets of your own mind, and learning to have them talk together is a critical step in becoming an adaptively flexible adult.
How do you talk amongst your mind’s inner selves? How do you begin? In The Power of Habit, author Charles Duhigg says that we may have little control over what triggers the habits that control our lives. Falling into old habits in spite of sincere resolutions to change can leave us feeling powerless. Certain people seem to set us off in predictable ways. Seeing that fast-food shop on our drive home from work can overwhelm our earlier commitment to go home, change into our exercise clothes, and head for the gym.
Duhigg also indicates that we may have little control over the reward a habit offers. While some of those rewards are chemical—the effect of alcohol, a wedge of chocolate, or a drag on a cigarette—others are more subtle but no less powerful (the compliment paid, the argument avoided, the recognition received, and the exposing of personal vulnerability dodged). It is the sequence of actions we take (the routine) that perpetuates the belief/habit that we lack the ability to alter our lives. Instead, like the jazz musician playing the same song, only differently, we can learn to introduce life-expanding flexibility into our daily routines, step by subtle step, until we have created a new repertoire of patterns, routines, and experiences that are more enriching and fulfilling.
Four Steps for Developing Adaptive Flexibility
Step One: Minding the Body to Message the Mind
It is hard to deny our fascination with our physical body. We exercise it. We expose it to exotic and unsustainable diets. We surgically and irreversibly modify it. We take mounds of pills to cure it or cleanse it. We are either depilating it or seeking to replace the hair that used to grow on it. We color it, dye it, and tattoo it. And yet, for many of us, we also shame it with all sorts of messages about how it fails to look or do what it should in order for it—and for us—to be acceptable. Some of the most powerful messages we carry involve our aging body.
For centuries, it has been said that the history of a person’s life can be read by looking at that person’s body. For too many, that history would be a tale of resistance to time’s advance. There is often a desperate urge to turn back the clock. We may have given up on being able to influence our future, so as time marches on, our sense of defeat gets more deeply etched into the body.
Many wisdom traditions have found that the most fundamental path to changing one’s outlook on life begins not with the mind, but with careful attention to the body (see chapter 4). The goal is not to perfect the body but to learn to attend to its needs for nourishment, for stimulation, for pleasure, for rest and relaxation, for activity, for growth, and for love. Yoga, for example, can be a lifelong journey to the core of what matters most in our lives. Our body supports our most central mental, emotional, and spiritual needs. While yoga is wonderful, it isn’t necessary for developing increased adaptive flexibility. Go for a nightly walk after dinner. Get a monthly massage. Join a Silver Sneakers class at the local YMCA. Join a birding club. Take swimming lessons. Ride a bicycle along a well-kept bike path. The choices are endless. The key is to engage in an activity with attention to the activity as well as to how the body feels while engaged in it. The important point is that by making these kinds of healthful choices, you are not only mending your body, you are taking an important step toward maintaining your mind in a youthful manner.
Step Two: I Think It, Therefore I Become It
The ability to be aware of what you are thinking as you think it is called metacognition (also known as mindfulness of thought). Its companion is behavioral self-regulation, or the ability to modulate your moods and your behavior to best match the context in which you find yourself. Together, they are central to learning flexibility in your daily life. You may become anxious as you witness changes in your work world, the declines or death of aging parents, or the extent to which adult children move on, becoming immersed in the details of their own daily lives. These normal changes induce feelings of being both vulnerable and increasingly expendable.
Learning simple mind-body techniques to actively monitor your thinking is vital. Listening in on your own mind (while gradually inserting more balanced and self-compassionate thoughts) is a portable, powerful, and readily available skill. Monitoring or observing your thoughts is far different from debating them. Ironically, directly challenging or dismissing worries only serves to strengthen them. Practicing mindful awareness lets you observe your thoughts from a dispassionate, nonjudging position. With practice, this approach undermines and then dismantles the premature cognitive commitments (PCCs) we have all unwittingly absorbed. Replacing old PCCs with enlightened thoughts more flexibly suited to the potential of the second half of life turns on the brain’s central regulator—the prefrontal cortex (PFC). This effectively soothes the fear-generating part of the brain. The more creative and innovative parts of the mind can then become engaged. What emerges are plans of action that may successfully counter the negative conversations that chatter away in most people’s minds. Moreover, these practices help to direct and regulate behavior in ways most consistent with your values and ideals.
What isn’t initially obvious is that these practices actually rewire your brain. In many respects, the brain is an equal opportunity consumer. If we feed it shaming, self-limiting, fear-generating messages, it absorbs them. If we feed it more positive messages about physical vitality and mental or emotional vibrancy, it absorbs them instead. The brain is the most complex, self-organizing system in the known universe. That complexity is a blessing that flowers when you use it to live the life you set out to live in your later years.
Here is a simple acronym to drive home how metacognitive or mindful practices lead to behavioral self-regulation, and how both can lead to greater response flexibility. Alan Marlatt, a professor of psychology, coined the acronym SOBER. We usually associate the word with abstinence from alcohol or drugs. Being sober also means achieving a quiet state of mind that is free from excess or extravagance, as in someone who is able to exercise effective self-control. Here are the five steps to a SOBER mindfulness practice.
Stop: Use mindful awareness to pause before acting on a thought; just pause.
Observe: Observe the thoughts and feelings you are experiencing without judging them.
Breathe: Take a few slow, deep, and calming breaths (to bring your PFC online).
Expand perspective: Engaging your PFC, take a big-picture view of your situation.
Respond wisely: Practice flexibility by selecting the response that is most consistent with your best self.
Step Three: Build Empathy with Your Friend, ToM
Mindfulness practice is essential to developing greater response flexibility by helping us stand witness to our own thoughts and feelings. This puts us in the pivotal position of being able to influence those thoughts and feelings, and to then witness the impact this influence has on the thoughts and feelings that come next. Still, mindfulness is only half of a dynamic duo of sorts. The other half is called theory of mind (ToM) and is the basis of empathy (which will be the focus of chapter 10). Empathy is the social glue that emotionally connects us to one another. Brain-based ToM circuits are the seeds from which empathy grows. When we feel connected to someone, through empathy, we can feel emotionally safe and more secure. And often, the safer we feel, the more able we are to take the necessary risks that develop greater response flexibility when called upon to do so.
Almost all people possess at least minimum levels of empathy, which is partly how we are able to become couples, raise children, interact with coworkers, and do passably well in our various social relationships. In the second half of life, well-developed empathy skills enable us to respond flexibly as we interact with our aging peers, our children and grandchildren, and our larger community. Offering our accumulated wisdom while continuing to be open to learning from others and from a world that is rapidly changing around us rests on well-developed empathy abilities.
Empathy skills emerge from the same soft-wired brain as all the other skills we have identified. Therefore, like those other skills, empathy can be improved with gentle, repeated practice. Strange as it may seem, growing empathy toward others can be enhanced by becoming more sensitive to your own feelings first. Research has shown that the only way we know what someone else may be feeling is by being able to tune into the feelings inside ourselves that are generated by our interactions with them. In other words, we read the feelings we have in us to clue us in on what they are feeling inside of them.
Growing your empathy skills requires three steps, summarized as Stop, Look, and Listen. As people age, there is evidence that the ability to take another’s perspective declines right along with other aspects of flexibility. But as Dr. Pam Greenwood17 and others have pointed out, many of these changes are not inevitable consequences of aging, but rather the consequences of not continuing to exercise the abilities we have: we “use it or lose it.” So, what is involved with exercising Stop, Look, and Listen skills?
Maintaining good empathy skills requires putting the mental brakes on our impulses. When you have a strongly negative emotional reaction, for example, you lose flexibility if you get swept up by the power of the reaction. If you don’t put on the brakes, the emotion drives an inflexible response.
STOP: When the urge to react rises up, stop and create a momentary pause—a mental time-out—in the reaction cycle. Inserting a small mental space created by the stop allows the chance to look inside.
LOOK: What are you reacting to? What is your reaction linked to? Can you take a moment to regain your emotional composure and bring your mindfulness skills back online? Then, with the emotional freedom that comes with putting the brakes on runaway emotions, you can direct your empathic attention to them and listen to the other person.
LISTEN: What seems to be driving their behavior? Can you better understand where they are coming from so you can better respond to them with your best self leading the way?
This three-step process exercises empathy skills so that pausing, checking in, and tuning in to the other person becomes more automatic, rewarding you with greater response flexibility and deeper connections to others.
Step Four: Write Another Chapter in Our Never-Ending Story
One thing that makes mysteries so enticing to read is our inability to predict how the story ends. The twists and turns that a good mystery writer weaves into the tale keep us guessing. One of the dangers of premature cognitive commitments is that they convince us that we know where our unwritten future will lead. We recognize that at some point our life will end. But if we believe we already know that our journey into the second half of our life will play out negatively or in an unsatisfying or unfulfilling way, we lose our motivation to actively influence the unfolding of that journey.
Imagine going to the airport for a scheduled flight. You find your seat, put your bag into the overhead bin, buckle yourself in, and wait for the flight attendant to go through the usual preflight monologue. Only this time, it is an invitation to a dialogue. The flight attendant says, “Welcome aboard,” and then asks, “Where would you like to go today?” How would you answer the question? Are you even prepared to answer the question? And since life is more about the journey than the destination, what if the question were about the particular path you want your life’s inner and outer journey to follow?
It is said that human beings do not exist outside of their story: a personal narrative that ties together their various experiences, memories, and dreams into a coherent whole. What is often overlooked is that the story is being actively constructed by us throughout our lives, not dictated to us from some prewritten script. Living in a way that recognizes that we are the writer, producer, director, and central actor in the narrative story that we write is not easy, especially when we have forty, fifty, sixty or more years of remembered history that can seem so compelling. We can easily forget that it is never too late to make essential changes to the narrative script of our lives.
Here are questions to help you become an active author of the untold story that is the rest of your life.18 1. Get a tablet of paper and write down what you most want out of your life. 2. Then consider what you write in terms of how invested or committed you are to obtaining what you seek. 3. Next, ask yourself how challenging or difficult it will be to reach your goals. 4. Finally, ask yourself how desirable the goal is and in what ways it might be rewarding. Then, after getting an idea of what you are after, ask yourself the following questions:
• What are the actions you are actively taking that are intended to reach the goals you have set?
• With unblushing honesty, consider whether what you are doing is working. Is it bringing you any closer to your goals?
• How are the goals you have set, and the steps you are taking, making a positive impact on you and on the world around you?
• When you imagine yourself in the future continuing to act in a way consistent with the path you have identified, what are the feelings that you experience now?
• If five years from now someone who knows you well wrote a single paragraph about you, what you do each day and how you conduct yourself and impact your community, what would the paragraph say?
Rewriting the history of your future helps you increase your adaptive flexibility. Are you ready?