When most of us talk about “belief” it is usually with regard to religious or spiritual beliefs – but we all have many beliefs that become expressed in our everyday thoughts, ideas, and actions. For instance, most of us believe that we must go see a doctor or take some pills if we get sick. Many times this belief turns out to be true, but there is a growing body of scientific evidence that suggests we all have the power to heal ourselves from many of the illnesses, injuries, and pain we sometimes experience. If this is true, then it might be our belief that only a doctor or drug can make us feel better that keeps us from successfully treating these conditions ourselves.
Beliefs can be conscious (often called our “core beliefs”) or unconscious. However, a belief can only be called the truth if it can be proven – at which time it then becomes knowledge. Our beliefs, along with our programmed conditioning and the knowledge attained as we get older, represent a psychological foundation in our mind from which all action arises.
What are our beliefs about aging?
With regard to aging adults, our beliefs about getting older (our perceived limitations, capabilities, ideas about self-worth, potential, etc.) are often shaped by society’s views of the aging process, and we tend to adjust our self-image and behavior to coincide with these beliefs. In other words, what we, and our society, believe about the aging process tend to become a self-fulfilling prophecy – as actions which coincide with this belief system naturally emerge and are reflected in our behavior. As George Herbert Meade indicated – we tend to perceive ourselves to be how we perceive other people are perceiving us. This is especially true of how we perceive a group of “significant others” are perceiving us (friends, family, work associates, neighbors, etc.), but is also true for a larger group of “generalized others” which is represented by the perceptions we receive indirectly through the media, advertising, people we don’t know, and the like.
All of this can be explained neurologically as a set of conditioned synaptic pathways in the brain that control our thoughts, emotions, and behavior. These pathways originate from our belief structures, and then become reinforced over time through our thoughts and actions. Our original beliefs become reinforced through a process called “confirmation bias” – where we tend to pick and choose those experiences which register in our consciousness, based on our desire to confirm what we already believe. This tends to make us feel better about ourselves, and so we continue to do it – reinforcing and deepening the original pathways until they become habitual and largely unconscious. In other words, we act on our beliefs, believing they are knowledge, and then only see the data arising from our actions that confirm these existing beliefs. In this manner we often mistake our beliefs for knowledge – which causes us to lead a partially delusional life.
One of the biggest delusions I see older people having is their belief that they will feel the same – 5,10, even 20 years from now. They will be just as healthy, have the same physical capabilities, the same brain capacities, same interests, same friends, etc. We hear stories about 90 year old plus people who are still active and involved, but how many of those are there – really? It makes a great story, but most people who live to that age today were never subjected to the idea they could actually do something to stave off age-related decline. So instead, they just let aging happen to them, and in most cases it was simply a roll of the genetic dice. Those with good genes and an injury/disease free life lived relatively long pleasant lives. They became the inspiration for many hopeful stories that somehow make us feel better, because that just might one day be our story. This story sounds so nice that we want to believe in it – so we do.
There is no question that medical science is going to keep many of us living a lot longer than our parents or grandparents, but how are we really going to spend those extra years. Are we simply going to believe they will be OK, or are we going to do everything we can to make sure we have the highest quality of life possible during those extra years? If you want to roll the dice, go right ahead. But if you want to proactively impact your own aging process, you are probably going to have to first change your beliefs.
Why Do We Defend Our Existing Beliefs About Aging?
The point I am trying to make is that most of us are in denial of what our future might look like. We don’t want to think about what an extended old age would be like, if we were physically and mentally challenged. In fact, being physically challenged is one thing but, if we are senile or worse, we might not even be able to think about it – we would just be sort of “out of it.” Denial is a frequent condition for most older adults, and it serves to maintain their existing beliefs about aging. Denial is the tool many of us use to maintain our belief that we have little or no control over our own aging process.
OK, so why are we in denial about this thing called aging, and ability to positively impact our own aging process? First of all, people have never lived this long on the average. It has simply never been an issue in the past for a vast majority of people. Second, medical science has been so intent on extending human life in the past decades, it failed to investigate how we might improve our quality of life (QOL) in the process of living longer lives. Third, it has only been recently that other sciences – such as psychology, neuroscience, and gerontology – have done the studies to prove that people really do have control over roughly half of their destiny, as opposed to it being determined 100% by their genes, conditioning, and/or fate.
The shift that is occurring in human consciousness is from being mostly passive people – who allow life to happen to them and rely on others to tell them what to do – to becoming autonomous human beings who understand that they largely control their own destiny. We are moving towards a belief that we really can positively change our own lives – but the quality we must attain to accomplish this feat is “will.” We must have the will to do what is so obviously best for us. We cannot allow ourselves to remain in a state of denial about how we spend the last 10-20 years of our life.
The “Science” of Positive Thinking
The most significant development in human science I have seen in many years are the recent discoveries using brain scan technology. Over the last two decades, as this technology has developed, scientists have discovered that we really are what we think. So, for most of us, if we don’t believe we can positively impact our own aging process – beyond what we are already dong with regard to diet and exercise – then we won’t. If we believe we are going to be stiff and sore when we get out of our chair, then we will be. If we believe we are sick or crippled in some manner, then we will become the physical manifestation of that belief.
Quite simply, the negative messages most of us have going round and round in our heads limit us from becoming all we can be. But what if we could change these messages to something more positive and life affirming? We could positively impact our own QOL. We could get up out of our chairs and start walking without any discomfort. We might even be able to heal ourselves – just by believing we can do so. By changing our internal messages from negative to positive, we might be able to do almost anything.
The possibility that older adults might someday practice “self-directed neuroplasticity” to improve their attitudes, reduce fear, positively alter their personalities, break bad habits, become more optimistic, be happier, feel closer to others, or just about anything else, is a new idea. Sure, we heard all this back in the 60’s and 70’s during the New Age Movement, but that was just a load of bunk – right?
Most scientists and medical professionals have said this form of positive thinking was delusional and, that if we really wanted to get better, we needed to do what doctors and scientists told us to do. The problem with this is that medicine is largely based on a view of empirical science, which says that if something can’t be observed and measured, then it doesn’t exist. In the 60’s and 70’s we couldn’t see the mind or measure it – so it didn’t exist except as a block of interrelated conditioned responses. Now, through brain scanning technology we can see the mind at work, and we can see how it lights up when we do one thing and goes dark when we do another. We also now realize what an amazing machine our mind is, continually producing new brain cells and having the ability to forge new synaptic pathways to accomplish almost whatever we want to do.
How to change our beliefs
My own observation of this process, is that a person must first “believe” they can positively change their mind and its responses. This is difficult to do – at the level necessary – because our society has been brainwashed into thinking doctors and scientists are the smart ones, and that in order to get better we have to go see a professional – whether that is a doctor, a surgeon, a psychologist, a massage therapist, an acupuncturist, or whatever. What most of us actually believe, at the deepest levels, is that we do not have the personal power to change our own lives. If that is what we consciously or unconsciously believe, then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So, how does a person go about changing what it is they believe in? At one level I believe that I can make my own positive changes without the help of anybody, but at a deeper level I have my doubts. So, I don’t practice my own version of self-directed neuroplasticity as much as I could. How can I change this deeper set of beliefs – which I know are false to some degree – so that I can have the freedom to mold myself into whoever I want to become?
In Buddhism, they stress the importance of a Teacher and a Sangha in a person’s development. A teacher is someone who knows more about a particular subject than you do and is willing to share their knowledge. There aren’t many dynamic aging teachers running around today, and even those individuals who have aged in a naturally dynamic manner may not be able to provide much insight into your aging process – because each of us needs to approach optimal aging in our own unique way.
A sangha is a group of fellow practitioners, at all levels of development, who are trying to create the same set of beliefs and changes in themselves as you are. They act as the support system most people need to proactively experience transformational change. Without a sangha – or support group – many of the changes required to age more dynamically cannot be readily achieved. If we surround ourselves with people holding the belief systems of the mass consciousness, then we will more than likely continue to hold these beliefs – at some level – in spite of our having a different conscious understanding of our capabilities. Our beliefs go beyond a simple cognitive understanding of things – they are a set of neural synaptic pathways that have been forged through the interplay of belief, cognition, emotion, genetics, experience, and probably many other factors of which we are not even aware.
The bottom line of this discussion is “don’t try to do this alone.” You need support to age optimally. You need to surround yourself, at least initially, with a group of fellow believers. Find them. Organize them. Do and discuss things with them. Practice with them. This is one of the most important and least understood keys to optimal aging.
That’s all for now,
Dudley