3 Things I’ve Learned:

Our attitude towards aging impacts our longevity.

Negative self-perceptions of aging can decrease our life expectancy and positive self-perceptions of aging can increase it—significantly.

Adults with positive attitudes towards aging live more than seven years longer than adults with negative attitudes.

If that's not crazy enough, a positive attitude towards getting older has a greater impact on longevity than gender, socioeconomic status, exercise, weight loss and loneliness.

And the effect is more powerful the earlier it begins (i.e. a positive attitude towards aging beginning at age 40 is more powerful than one beginning at age 60).

Regardless of your age though, it pays to be positive.

Credit: https://www.apa.org/monitor/oct02/attitudes; listen to this podcast—you won't regret it

2. Mindfulness can change the way our brain operates.

Mindfulness is defined as: awareness of one's moment-to-moment experience nonjudgmentally and with acceptance.

Importantly, acceptance doesn't mean resignation—it means allowing ourselves to experience something (like an emotion) fully without the need to suppress it.

Mindfulness is associated with decreased activity in our amygdala, which is the part of our brain responsible for emotions, and increased activity in our prefrontal cortex, which is the part of our brain responsible for rational thinking.

In other words, practicing mindfulness improves our ability to regulate our emotional responses because it allows us think through our experiences rationally.

It's counterintuitive—to gain better control of your emotions, let yourself feel them more freely.

Credit: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3679190/

3. Reframing anxiety as excitement improves performance.

Instead of trying to calm ourselves down when we're feeling anxious before asking someone out, giving a presentation, or taking an exam, we're much better off reframing our anxiety as excitement.

Trying to calm down when you're anxious is hard because you have to shift your mindset (from uncertain and nervous to assured and relaxed) and your physiology (from high to low arousal).

But reframing your anxiety as excitement is easy because both feelings are characterized by high arousal, so all you have to do is shift your mindset.

This can be done simply by saying "I am excited" out loud before performing your task.

You trade the limiting effects of anxiety for the enhancing effects of excitement by doing a fraction of the work compared to attempting to calm yourself down... which rarely works anyway.

As Michael Scott would say: It's a win-win-win.

Credit: https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/xge-a0035325.pdf

2 Questions for You:

What are you struggling with right now? If someone else came to you with the same problem, what advice would you give them?
When's the last time you did something because you wanted to and not because you thought you should?

1 Quote:

“What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of our mind.”—Buddha

Our mind is so much more powerful than we realize and so often we try to work against it rather than alongside it.

Instead of demonizing every negative thought and feeling we have and therefore treating our mind like the enemy, let's remember that our brain has evolved for millions of years to quite literally be our best friend—keeping us alive and looking after our best interests.

Maybe, just maybe, our thoughts and feelings are trying to tell us something.

And maybe we should listen.

Live your life to the fullest,

Chris

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