88. Are You Thinking Yourself Older Faster? Mindset and Aging

Midlife And The Age Story

We refer to the phase of life in our 40s, 50s, maybe early 60s, often as midlife. That's what this podcast is called, right? Mind your midlife, mindset for midlife women. And so what does that mean? Are we still young? Are we old or seasoned, as I sometimes like to say? And what control do we have over that? Because I bet you know someone who is 55 and looks pretty young. You would think they were at least 10 years younger. And you know someone else who is exactly the same age and looks far older. So why? Why does that happen? What if it could be about how we think and how we allow our minds to relax and enjoy? Let's talk about it. Welcome to Mind Your Midlife, your go-to resource for confidence and success, one thought at a time. Unlike most advice out there, we believe that simply telling you to believe in yourself or change your habits isn't enough to wake up excited about life or feel truly confident in your body. Each week, you'll gain actionable strategies and, oh my goodness, powerful insights to stop feeling stuck and start loving your midlife. This is the Mind Your Midlife podcast.

Psychocybernetics And Self-Image

I am referring to one of my favorite books on mindset, and that is Psychocybernetics for this episode. You can find it on my website, Cherylpfischer.com slash read, and it's by Maxwell Maltz. The interesting thing is he was originally a plastic surgeon, and he found that some of his patients, let's say he had changed their the appearance of their face. Maybe he had gotten rid of something that was disfiguring. Some of them completely changed their lives after that. And others of them really weren't any different at all. And it happened over and over again. And he was not sure why would that be? Why would a change in appearance affect some people and not others? Fascinating, right? And so he went down the path of let's figure that out. And of course, there's so much to do with how we think about ourselves, how we think about life. It's really a fascinating book. If you're watching the video, you can see me holding it because I'm referring to it. He wonders, and I think this is very possible, whether we sometimes think ourselves into old age. And as soon as I say that, you might be thinking, maybe, maybe. So let me tell you what he says. And then we're gonna kind of help each other through this. What I said to you at the beginning of this episode was some people let's say age 55. He says between the ages of 40 and 50 begin to look and act old, old, air quotes, while others continue to act and look young. I'm doing air quotes again. There was a study done that he is quoting in the book that found that the oldsters at 45 thought of themselves as middle-aged past their prime over the hill, while the youngsters at 45 still conceived of themselves as being this side of middle-aged. Interesting, right? It's about how they thought of themselves and what their age was. So

How We Think Ourselves Older

there's a couple things going on here. It's possible that if we expect to grow old at a certain age, we set up in our brain basically a mental function that's going to help us to cause that to happen. And what I mean is this if we believe, this might be deep in our subconscious, that 55 is the age where people are old. That's old. That's the cutoff, it's old. It hurts me a little bit to say that because I don't believe that. But let's say what happens, maybe, is we hit that age and then we start acting old. And what does acting old look like? Well, we might cut back on how busy we are. We might feel like we need more downtime, but we might cut back on any sort of rigorous exercise or movement that we were doing, maybe out of fear of having an injury. What do you think is gonna happen if we start doing less and less activity versus what we were doing before? Interesting. What he says, and this is from a study, is that when we begin to taper off vigorous physical activity, we tend to lose the flexibility in our joints. That's a big deal. Second thing, lack of exercise causes our capillaries to restrict and maybe even virtually disappear, which means the blood supply getting to our tissues is minimized. And blood supply getting to our tissues is what keeping our cells alive. So if we have this vision in our minds that at X age, we are now old and we slow way down, we're causing our own bodies to age faster. For no reason. Now, of course, you may have a chronic illness, you may have some other debilitating situation that causes you to have to slow down. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about you just kind of decided that this was now old and you slow down. It has repercussions in our bodies that make us look that way on the outside because we're acting that way and thinking that way on the inside. Really interesting. So if we go the opposite way, I'm 55. You hear me talk about it all the time. I don't exercise as many days a week as I probably should, but I go to my pure barre workout usually twice a week. I try to walk. I'm thinking about getting a bike because my husband likes to ride bikes. Sometimes I golf. I try to keep moving, and barre is pretty significant movement. And I'm actually, I think, stronger now than I was in my 40s, maybe even late 30s. So I've no intention of stopping. Now, do I need to modify it a little bit so that I don't hurt myself? Yeah. Yeah. Because I have noticed, maybe you've noticed, that quick movements sometimes I might hurt myself. I might just pull a muscle or something. And I've done it just, you know, getting up out of a chair. We can do it doing anything, walking. I could, I think I pulled a muscle in my heel the other day. Just walking, nothing interesting. Those things might happen, but I don't change what I'm doing to worry about that, at least not at this time. I'm trying to go the same as long as I can. And what he's saying is that's what keeps us mowable and feeling younger and even potentially looking younger because your body is changing from the inside out or staying the same from the inside out. So, can we think ourselves older? We can. We can think ourselves older. Now, I'm assuming you're here with me listening to this because you are in the group that feels like, well, I don't think I want to just think myself older. Nothing wrong with being older, better than the alternative. However, we don't want to think ourselves older before we need to act that way. So that's one piece. Keep moving. Go back and look at some of my previous episodes where we've talked about movement. It's, you know, I say this all the time. It's more important now that we take care of our bodies than it was back in our 30s. And I used to get so resentful when I was in my 30s and a little bit overweight, if I'm being honest, when people were always saying exercise, exercise is the solution for everything. Exercise, exercise, I would get annoyed. But here in my 50s, I get it. Moving our bodies is required if we want to stay able to move our bodies. Period. Taking care of yourself. Okay, the second piece of this is also very interesting. And both of these are mindset and self-belief in nature, but this one even more so than the first one. So we talked about the fact that if we slow down because we have this artificial belief that now we're old, ear quotes, that's going to change our bodies and our appearance. Second thing is, if we don't want to think ourselves old, another piece that needs to be there is we need to be looking forward to more life. And in the book, he's quoting studies about scientists trying to figure out what is the life force. They call it adaptive energy. What is creating the cell processes that are always functioning? It's amazing, right? It seems to be that people heal faster, people heal better, people feel better when they are looking forward to something. Maybe they're excited

Looking Forward Fuels Healing

to get back to work after an injury or an illness, or they're excited to be able to play with their kids once they can move around more or whatever. The looking forward makes a huge physical difference, even just in injury healing. So what if looking forward to your future after now, after your 40s and 50s, is the key to staying feeling younger, to staying mobile, to staying healthy. If you can say, okay, I'm excited, I'm excited about the next few years, I'm excited about my 60s, I'm excited about my 70s, I'm excited about my 80s. I'm a little scared about my 80s, to be honest with you, but I'm also thinking, wow, I'll be able to retire from some of the things I'm doing, and I'll be able to travel whenever I want, and I'll be able to knit and play mahjong whenever I want, and I'll pick up new hobbies, and I'll be able to do them whenever I want, and I'll be able to see my family and just hang out. I have this idea of all this relax and travel and having fun. I'm looking forward to that. And I know that there will be negatives, right? We're gonna lose people in our families if we haven't already. We're gonna have life changes that happen. We know that. That happens at any age. But if you can look forward and expect to enjoy tomorrow and next year and the next year, and he calls it developing a nostalgia for the future, like a happy thought forward towards the future, an enthusiasm for life, that creates a need in you for more life. And that mental shift affects everything about your body, about the actions, the choices you're gonna make, and potentially you get more time, more life. Now, this is not a guarantee, of course. If this were a guarantee, we could all live forever because we just keep looking forward to more life. But the point is that this is powerful. And he he does a little aside about men and retirement here. And I actually am going to do a series probably early fall about the men that we live with and love, our brothers, our husbands, our whatever the relationship is, partners, and how we can recognize what they might be going through in midlife and understand them better. Because we're talking about women ourselves all the time, but we're there's men in our lives in some capacity, typically. So we're gonna get to that. But I just want to focus on this retirement piece for a second. So he's writing about men and retirement. This applies for women as well. If you have a career that has been a very defining career for you in a lot of ways, and you retire, let's listen to what he's saying. Many men go downhill rapidly after retirement. And I think we just have more statistics on that for men versus women. They feel that their active, productive life is completed and their job is done. They have nothing to look forward to, become bored, inactive, and often suffer a loss of self-esteem because they feel left out of things, not important anymore. They develop this self-image in their minds, beliefs about themselves of a useless, worthless, worn-out hanger on. And a great many die within a year or so after retirement. I actually know someone that this happened to, uh wife and her husband, who were so excited when he finally retired and he didn't live but about a year after retirement. Now, I don't know the health issues, right? We're being very, very general here, but this is a piece that we can control. So why not try? So, what he's saying is it's not retiring from the job that kills these men. It's retiring from life. It's that feeling of uselessness, being washed up, the lower self-esteem, less courage, less self-confidence. And sometimes culturally, we're kind of encouraging that. We're talking about people being old and we're we're kind of shoving aside older people, and you know, they don't have any value. What are they contributing? They don't understand technology. You know, we all do it in some ways. And now we're maybe being more careful because we see ourselves closer to that age group, but we all do it. So society contributes to this a little bit. And he says this is all an out-of-date concept. 50 years ago, and this is interesting, psychologists thought that man's mental powers reach their peak, man's and woman's, at the age of 25, and then began a gradual decline. Can you imagine? 50 years ago, I was alive. Our our mental peak at 25 and then start a decline immediately, gradually? Not true. The latest findings show that men and women reach their peak mentally somewhere around the age of 35 and maintain the same level until well past 70. Wow. So we talk about brain fog and creatine. Go listen to that episode. It wasn't that long ago. We talked about brain fog on this podcast. But that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about the ability to reason, the ability to think, you got time and you're gonna be able to hold on to that. So all these sayings that you might have heard, you can't teach an old dog new tricks, we still hear them. They're not true. They're not true. They were wrong. You can still learn at any point, especially before 70, but it's not as if it just turns off at 70. It might start a gradual decline. That's an amazing amount of time. So if we're training ourselves to look forward to what's coming, it makes a physical and mental difference. Now, I'm not saying don't take care of your skin, don't worry about anti-aging skincare, don't worry about what you eat. I am definitely not saying any of those things. I have been using anti-aging skincare since I was 40. I believe in what I'm using. If you want to know what it is, it's on my recommendation page. Go find it at Cherylpfischer.com/slash recommendations. Happy to share. And the mental piece of this is more powerful. So you need to take care of your skin. You need to take care of your body, you need to eat healthy. We just established how important exercise

Build A Future You Want

is. And the mental piece is equally as powerful and sometimes maybe more. So, how do we take care of that? How do we figure out how to look forward? Well, a clue for me has been observing people that I've coached, people that I know, and watching how they're moving through this midlife phase: 40, 45, 50, 55, 60. I've seen some people take up new hobbies and get excited about that and maybe make new friends. This is why I play Mahjong because I realized it was good for my brain. I could meet new people, and it could get me out of the house and get me with people. I work from home. I need to be around people sometimes. Triple benefit. That's new. I just started learning it about a year and a half ago. My husband has started learning how to play ice hockey. He started this at 55, started taking lessons. He had ice skated a little bit when you know he was a teenager or a kid, but nothing major. Started taking lessons. Now he's taking hockey lessons. He loves it. Who would have thought? Find something that you want to do that you can, as Maxwell Malt says, have nostalgia for the future for that. If you can right now, just pause with me and take a deep breath. Take a slow deep breath. And think about when you're 70. What is the immediate feeling that comes over you? Like is it like a looking forward to type of feeling? Is it excitement or appreciation or enjoyment? Or is it fear? Is it worry or anxiety? Is it fear of the unknown? Which way are you looking at the future? And I'm not saying that if anxiety and worry and fear came up, you're automatically gonna have a shorter life. I'm not saying that. What I am saying is if we can do something to change that even a little bit, it could make a huge difference. So what can you do now? You can take up a new hobby. Try something new. You can get in touch with friends. It doesn't matter if they're old friends. A lot of the people I hang out with, because I'm super lucky to have this be true. A lot of the people I hang out with are friends of mine from college, and that was a long time ago. They happen to live here in the area. Yay! Make a new friend, reconnect with an old friend. It doesn't matter. Something that allows you to start to believe that going forward, you can do these fun things. Find something you enjoy doing. Maybe it's a craft. Maybe it's reading a certain genre of books. And then you can kind of get yourself a little bit more excited about it because you can go out on social media and you can find people who talk about this thing, this craft or this genre of books. There's people excitedly talking about everything: mahjong, knitting, romance books, women's fiction, beach reads. This is what's all over my Instagram. And it makes me happy. And I'm looking forward to being able to do those things more and more. Find something like that. And we've talked about this. Give it a chance. Give it a couple chances before you throw an idea out. This mindset, this mental language does change how our bodies age, whether we're talking truly about physical things like capillaries and joint flexibility, or whether we're talking about hair, face,

Share Your Thoughts And Next Week

how we look, it matters. It makes a difference. I would love for you to try it. I would love for you to tell me what you think about this. Find me on social media at Cheryl P. Fischer and tell me. Tell me what you think. Send me a message. I would love to hear. And make sure you've hit the follow button on Mind Your Midlife because we are coming back next week to hypnotherapy. And that is a great connection to what I've been talking about today. I have a guest expert joining me. I'm looking forward to it. I'll see you then. And in the meantime, keep remembering midlife is your time to take just a little bit better care of yourself. Just a little bit better on the outside and on the inside. Makes a big difference.