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When Age Is A Flexible Number
Plus: two steps to stop sabotaging yourself
The 10almonds Team
April 14, 2024
Sponsored by
Want to reduce your meat consumption but not skip it entirely? When using mince, mix in cooked lentils (any kind is fine for this; red lentils are often cheapest and are the quickest to cook) to make a smaller amount of mince seem like more—with negligible change to the experience of eating it.
Your gut will thank you, and there’s a reduced cancer risk to enjoy too!
⏰ IN A RUSH?
Today’s 30-Second Summary
If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:
How young do you feel?
Chances are, you’d have a different answer if we’d asked “how old do you feel?”, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to psychosomatic age-related effects.
Today’s main feature examines the landmark “Counterclockwise” study, in which by psychological means alone, many markers of aging (including physical markers) were rejuvenated over the course of a week.
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👀 WATCH AND LEARN
Two Steps To Stop Sabotaging Yourself (2:22)
Alain de Botton is, as usual, offering insights that may change how things appear:
Prefer text? Click here to read the transcript 😎
Want to watch it, but not right now? Bookmark it for later 🔖
❓ MYSTERY ITEM
This one is cool!
Hint: today’s mystery item gives a convenient way to look after the vasculature of your face
🕰️ MAIN FEATURE
Aging, Counterclockwise!
In the late 1970s, Dr. Ellen Langer hypothesized that physical markers of aging could be affected by psychosomatic means.
Note: psychosomatic does not mean “it’s all in your head”.
Psychosomatic means “your body does what your brain tells it to do, for better or for worse”
She set about testing that, in what has been referred to since as…
The Counterclockwise Study
A small (n=16) sample of men in their late 70s and early 80s were recruited in what they were told was a study about reminiscing.
Back in the 1970s, it was still standard practice in the field of psychology to outright lie to participants (who in those days were called “subjects”), so this slight obfuscation was a much smaller ethical aberration than in some famous studies of the same era and earlier (cough cough Zimbardo cough Milgram cough).
Anyway, the participants were treated to a week in a 1950s-themed retreat, specifically 1959, a date twenty years prior to the experiment’s date in 1979. The environment was decorated and furnished authentically to the date, down to the food and the available magazines and TV/radio shows; period-typical clothing was also provided, and so forth.
The control group were told to spend the time reminiscing about 1959
The experimental group were told to pretend (and maintain the pretense, for the duration) that it really was 1959
The results? On many measures of aging, the experimental group participants became quantifiably younger:
❝The experimental group showed greater improvement in joint flexibility, finger length (their arthritis diminished and they were able to straighten their fingers more), and manual dexterity.
On intelligence tests, 63 percent of the experimental group improved their scores, compared with only 44 percent of the control group. There were also improvements in height, weight, gait, and posture.
Finally, we asked people unaware of the study’s purpose to compare photos taken of the participants at the end of the week with those submitted at the beginning of the study. These objective observers judged that all of the experimental participants looked noticeably younger at the end of the study.❞
Remember, this was after one week.
Her famous study was completed in 1979, and/but not published until eleven years later in 1990, with the innocuous title:
You can read about it much more accessibly, and in much more detail, in her book:
We haven’t reviewed that particular book yet, so here’s Linda Graham’s review, that noted:
❝Langer cites other research that has made similar findings.
In one study, for instance, 650 people were surveyed about their attitudes on aging. Twenty years later, those with a positive attitude with regard to aging had lived seven years longer on average than those with a negative attitude to aging.
(By comparison, researchers estimate that we extend our lives by four years if we lower our blood pressure and reduce our cholesterol.)
In another study, participants read a list of negative words about aging; within 15 minutes, they were walking more slowly than they had before.❞
Read the review in full:
The Counterclockwise study has been repeated since, and/but we are still waiting for the latest (exciting, much larger sample, 90 participants this time) study to be published. The research proposal describes the method in great detail, and you can read that with one click over on PubMed:
It was approved, and has now been completed (as of 2020), but the results have not been published yet; you can see the timeline of how that’s progressing over on ClinicalTrials.gov:
Hopefully it’ll take less time than the eleven years it took for the original study, but in the meantime, there seems to be nothing to lose in doing a little “Citizen Science” for ourselves.
Maybe a week in a 20 years-ago themed resort (writer’s note: wow, that would only be 2004; that doesn’t feel right; it should surely be at least the 90s!) isn’t a viable option for you, but we’re willing to bet it’s possible to “microdose” on this method. Given that the original study lasted only a week, even just a themed date-night on a regular recurring basis seems like a great option to explore (if you’re not partnered then well, indulge yourself how best you see fit, in accord with the same premise; a date-night can be with yourself too!).
Just remember the most important take-away though:
Don’t accidentally put yourself in your own control group!
In other words, it’s critically important that for the duration of the exercise, you act and even think as though it is the appropriate date.
If you instead spend your time thinking “wow, I miss the [decade that does it for you]”, you will dodge the benefits, and potentially even make yourself feel (and thus, potentially, if the inverse hypothesis holds true, become) older.
This latter is not just our hypothesis by the way, there is an established potential for nocebo effect.
For example, the following study looked at how instructions given in clinical tests can be worded in a way that make people feel differently about their age, and impact the results of the mental and/or physical tests then administered:
❝Our results seem to suggest how manipulations by instructions appeared to be more largely used and capable of producing more clear performance variations on cognitive, memory, and physical tasks.
Age-related stereotypes showed potentially stronger effects when they are negative, implicit, and temporally closer to the test of performance. ❞
(and yes, that’s the same Dr. Francesco Pagnini whose name you saw atop the other study we cited above, with the 90 participants recreating the Counterclockwise study)
Want to know more about [the hard science of] psychosomatic health?
Check out Dr. Langer’s other book, which we reviewed recently:
Enjoy!
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📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW
Practical Optimism: The Art, Science, and Practice of Exceptional Well-Being – by Dr. Sue Varma
We've written before about how to get your brain onto a more positive track (without toxic positivity), but there's a lot more to be said than we can fit into an article, so here's a whole book packed full with usable advice.
The subtitle claims "the art, science, and practice of...", but mostly it's the science of. If there's art to be found here, then this reviewer missed it, and as for the practice of, well, that's down to the reader, of course.
However, it is easy to use the contents of this book to translate science into practice without difficulty.
If you're a fan of acronyms, initialisms, and other mnemonics (such as the rhyming "Name, Claim, Tame, and Reframe"), then you'll love this book as they come thick and fast throughout, and they contribute to the overall ease of application of the ideas within.
The writing style is conversational but with enough clinical content that one never forgets who is speaking—not in the egotistical way that some authors do, but rather, just, she has a lot of professional experience to share and it shows.
Bottom line: if you'd like to be more optimistic without delving into the delusional, this book can really help a lot with that (in measurable ways, no less!).
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Wishing you a peaceful Sunday,
The 10almonds Team
