Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Authors
Also by Deepak Chopra and David Simon
Title Page
Introduction
How to Use This Book
1 
Escaping the Prison of Conditioning
2
STEP #1
You Can Reverse Your Biological Age by Changing Your Perceptions
3
STEP #2
You Can Reverse Your Biological Age Through Two Kinds of Deep Rest—Restful Awareness and Restful Sleep
4
STEP #3
You Can Reverse Your Biological Age by Lovingly Nurturing Your Body Through Healthy Food
5
STEP #4
You Can Reverse Your Biological Age by Using Nutritional Complements Wisely
6
STEP #5
You Can Reverse Your Biological Age by Enhancing Mind/Body Integration
7
STEP #6
You Can Reverse Your Biological Age Through Exercise
8
STEP #7
You Can Reverse Your Biological Age by Eliminating Toxins from Your Life
9
STEP #8
You Can Reverse Your Biological Age by Cultivating Flexibility and Creativity in Consciousness
10
STEP #9
You Can Reverse Your Biological Age Through Love
11
STEP #10
You Can Reverse Your Biological Age by Maintaining a Youthful Mind
Epilogue
Grow Younger, Live Longer Recipes
Appendix
References
Index
Acknowledgments
Copyright
Deepak Chopra is the bestselling author of thirty-one books, including Ageless Body, Timeless Mind and The Path to Love. He is the Director of Educational Programmes at The Chopra Center for Well Being at La Costa Resort and Spa, California. David Simon is Medical Director of the Chopra Center.
Human ageing is reversible. Scientific research shows that we can literally turn back the markers of getting old, including blood pressure, muscle strength, cholesterol levels and many others. Using the tools in this book, you can learn specific strategies for melting away those biological years so you can feel, perform and look like you did as many as fifteen years ago.
Combining all the knowledge and pioneering spirit that made Ageless Body, Timeless Mind into a huge international bestseller, with all the latest discoveries in mind/body medicine, Grow Younger, Live Longer will show millions of readers round the world how they can achieve a long life filled with joy and vitality.
Creating Health
Return of the Rishi
Quantum Healing
Perfect Health
Unconditional Life
Ageless Body, Timeless Mind
Journey into Healing
Creating Affluence
Perfect Weight
Restful Sleep
The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success
The Return of Merlin
Boundless Energy
Perfect Digestion
The Way of the Wizard
Overcoming Addictions
Raid on the Inarticulate
The Path to Love
The Seven Spiritual Laws for Parents
The Love Poems of Rumi
(edited by Deepak Chopra; translated by Deepak Chopra and Fereydoun Kia)
Healing the Heart
Everyday Immortality
The Lords of the Light
On the Shores of Eternity
How to Know God
The Soul in Love
The Chopra Center Herbal Handbook
(with David Simon)
The Deeper Wound
The Wisdom of Healing
A Simple Celebration
(with Ginna Bell Bragg)
Return to Wholeness
Vital Energy
The Chopra Center Herbal Handbook
(with Deepak Chopra)
There are many souls contributing to the collective dream that is transforming our vision of health, aging, and life itself. To each of you who remind us on a regular basis of our essential purpose and meaning, we thank you from the depths of our being.
In particular we wish to acknowledge: Carolyn Rangel, Nan Johnson, Jennifer Pugh, Nicolette Martin, Jenny Hatheway, Roger Gabriel, Dennis Sugioka, Jude Hedlund, Sara Kelly, Veronique Franceus, Brent Becvar, Chantal Kovatch, Debbie Myers, and the team of immeasurably nuturing and talented people at the Chopra Center for Well Being and MyPotential.
Leanne Backer, for developing our age-reversing menu and for her power to transform love into food.
Peter Guzzardi, our beloved editor, who continuously encourages us to push the envelope.
We would also like to acknowledge the love and support of our families, which enable us to do our work: Rita Chopra, Mallika Chopra, Sumant Mandal, Gautam Chopra, Pamela Simon, Max Simon, and Sara Simon.
IN 1993, THE first edition of Ageless Body, Timeless Mind: The Quantum Alternative to Growing Old was released. The essential message of the book was that the human body is not a piece of biological machinery that deteriorates steadily and inexorably over time. Rather, human beings are magnificently organized networks of energy, information, and intelligence in dynamic exchange with their environment, fully capable of transformation and renewal. Since the publication of Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, thousands of patients at the Chopra Center for Well Being have experienced profound changes in the quality of their lives by applying the principles presented in that book, which at this writing is in its eleventh printing. According to many readers and literary critics, Ageless Body, Timeless Mind remains a classic, consciousness-based approach to the reversal of aging.
Grow Younger, Live Longer: 10 Steps to Reverse Aging extends this consciousness-based approach and includes ten practical steps that can become habit-forming, enabling you to reset your Biostat (your biological, or functional, age) up to fifteen years younger than your chronological age. We have intentionally made this new book simple and practical, so you can begin implementing these approaches right away. By integrating these insights and practices into your lifestyle, you will notice immediate improvements in your physical and emotional well-being. As you begin to reverse your biological age, you will reclaim the ability to tap into your inner reservoir of unlimited energy, creativity, and vitality. You will feel younger and you will function like a much younger person, too.
Our generation has been celebrated for its willingness to challenge the prevailing assumptions of society. Rather than viewing the second half of life as a time of progressive deterioration in body and mind, we see aging as an opportunity for greater wisdom, love, creativity, meaning, joy, and increased mental and physical capacity. More people than ever before are living into their eighties, nineties, and beyond with sound bodies and clear minds.
This book is designed as a manual for renewal. Three very practical recommendations are suggested for each of the ten steps. Each week we encourage you to implement the action steps so that by the end of ten weeks you are taking full advantage of all the resources available to you. Although awareness is the essential first step in any transformation, unfortunately, reading this book is not enough for you to begin reversing the aging process—you have to actually execute the recommendations on a daily basis in order to reap the benefits of this program.
Readers familiar with our previous works may ask if it really matters that we reverse our aging. If, as we often state, we are immortal souls on an eternal cosmic highway without beginning or end, if our essential nature is transcendental reality not subject to the laws of the material world, does it really matter if we grow younger and live longer? Why should we care about maintaining a youthful appearance for an extended time? Is it mere vanity? Does it take our attention away from our true self?
To those of you who ask these questions, we answer that in the deeper reality, all is play. Life is a cosmic game of hide and seek in which we lose ourselves to find ourselves. At our core we are all members of the same being and it does not matter if we are young or old, villain or hero, sinner or saint. The real purpose of the book is to remind you, the reader, that this deeper reality, the domain of pure potentiality, of spirit, is the essence of who you really are. Reversing aging and growing younger is part of the possibility. Whether you choose to activate this choice and implement this possibility is up to you.
We believe our primary purpose here is to seek the pure spiritual potential that is available to all of us. As human beings, the vehicles we use to explore our spiritual potential are the human body, the human nervous system, and the human mind. We therefore believe it is worth focusing attention on maintaining optimal functioning of our body/mind so we can seek our true nature as spiritual beings.
The experience of life through a human nervous system is a miraculous gift of creation. We are blessed among species in that we can change our perceptions, interpretations, and expectations of life and thereby transform our reality. As a result of changing our perceptions and taking new action steps, we can literally create a different physical body. As an expression from the ancient Ayurvedic system of healing tells us, To know a person’s experiences from the past, examine their body now. To know a person’s body in the future, examine their experiences now.
The basis of these principles and of this book is that every impulse of experience is transformed into the chemistry and electricity of your body. With every thought, sensation, and feeling you have, your nervous system undergoes subtle shifts in physiology, generating chemical messengers that regulate your body. These biochemical communicators continuously mold the molecules that comprise your cells, tissues, and organs.
The field of mind/body medicine declares that you can influence your health and well-being through the choices you make. Your mind and body are intimately interwoven so that changes in one instantaneously influence the other. Our personal and professional experience at the Chopra Center makes us confident that applying the principles and practices offered in this program will enhance the way you think and the way you feel. You have the capacity to reverse your aging. This book provides the tools. We welcome you on this journey to renewal and look forward to hearing about your success.
HUMAN AGING IS reversible. Read this book at least twice and make sure you understand all the principles. If something is not clear to you, send an e-mail to younger@chopra.com. Once you feel confident that you have grasped the essence of this book, set a date for fully committing to the ten-step program. Make the ten steps a routine for ten weeks. You will be amazed at the results.
Ten weeks is about the time it takes to create a habit. Congratulations. You are on your way to looking, feeling, and being young as a lifelong habit.
1 
The “normal” experience of the body and its aging is a conditioned response–a habit of thinking and behavior.
By changing your habits of thinking and behavior, you can change the experience of your body and its aging.
YOU HAVE BEEN living inside a prison that has no visible walls—the confines of your self derive entirely from the habits and conditioning of your mind. If you are committed to growing younger, you must escape this prison of conditioning. You are not to blame for living within unnecessary limitations. If a rope is tied around the leg of a baby elephant and attached to a stake in the ground, it learns that it can move only within very narrow limits. Years later, as a powerful adult, it still remains within narrow confines when its leg is staked, even though it has the strength to uproot an entire tree. It has been conditioned to accept the limitations imposed upon it.
In a similar way, most people think and act within the narrow limitations of what they have been taught during childhood, without questioning the basic assumptions that structure their worldview. To live a healthier, richer, more creative life you need to recognize that most of what you hold to be true derives from habits of thought. We are born into a prevailing conversation about the world. As soon as we are capable of speaking, we engage in this conversation, reinforcing with our own thoughts and actions the patterns of thinking and behavior that surround us. This is unmistakably true in regards to how we view the body and its aging.
Until recently, few have questioned the assumption that aging is irreversible, and therefore, for generation after generation, people have reinforced the habitual thinking that growing older meant a progressive decline in mental and physical capacity. It is now time to change our habits of thinking and behaving and alter our experience of the body and the aging process.
Drawing upon the wisdom traditions of the East, the dramatic new discoveries of modern quantum physics, and our own personal and professional experience, we invite you to change the way you think about and experience the world and your body. Despite how radical some of these ideas may at first appear, we encourage you to try out the practical approaches we offer and experience for yourself how this program can revitalize your body and mind.
From the perspective of quantum physics, reality is a mysterious, magical place. While on the physical plane of everyday life, time and space predominate and entropy, decay, and aging are the normal course of events, these are not features of quantum reality. The quantum realm is the fountainhead of pure potentiality, giving rise to the raw material of your body, your mind, and the physical universe. The quantum realm is the womb of creation, the invisible world where the visible is designed and assembled. We can summarize the key principles of quantum physics in five main points:
Your own body/mind system is also an expression of the same quantum field that underlies everything in the universe. Therefore, you can apply these quantum principles to the way you look at your body and aging. Rephrased in terms of your biology, they would be:
If you choose to see yourself as a physical entity, separate from everything else, you discard the chance to reverse the aging process. If you are able to look at yourself as a field of possibilities, intimately interrelated to everything else, wonderful new opportunities emerge. We encourage you to use these thoughts to trigger a paradigm shift in your awareness. With this shift you can gain a completely different understanding of the body/mind system you inhabit, the world you perceive, and the essence of your being.
Viewing your body from the perspective of quantum physics opens up new modes of understanding and experiencing the body and its aging.
The practical essence of this new understanding is that human beings can reverse their aging.
Knowledge traditions seek to understand and explain the workings of the cosmos. The perspective of quantum physics offers a fascinating way to view life, the body, and aging. The perennial wisdom traditions of the East offer equally amazing insights into the nature of reality. As explorers of both modern science and the ancient knowledge traditions, we are enthused and inspired by the closer and closer alignment between these different perspectives on life. According to Ayurveda, the ancient healing tradition of India, aging is an illusion because your true self is neither your body nor your mind. Your essential nature, who you really are, is the domain of ever-present witnessing awareness that is beyond your physical and mental layers. This field of consciousness gives rise to both the thoughts in your mind and the molecules in your body. Tapping into this realm of awareness where time and space have no meaning is the basis of emotional and physical renewal.
Accessing this field of pure potentiality has spiritual as well as physical consequences. Knowing your essential self as a nonlocal being, inextricably interrelated to everything else in the cosmos, awakens greater creativity, meaning, and purpose in life. Although the most profound way to improve health and reverse aging is ultimately a spiritual one, not everyone is immediately ready to accept this approach. One person may want to lose weight, another may need help to stop smoking, while a third may be seeking a more fulfilling love relationship. Each of these needs is important in its own right, but taking a spiritual approach opens the door to the evolution of consciousness, which can make all these things possible, and many more.
A spiritual approach means that we expand our awareness, even while focusing our attention and intention locally.
The reason we perform any action is in the hope that it will bring us satisfaction, fulfillment, and happiness. Embracing the spiritual domain, which is the source and goal of all desires in life, creates the possibility for satisfaction, happiness, and fulfillment independent of the inevitably changing situations, circumstances, and people that surround us. Those fortunate ones who dwell in this domain have achieved what is often called enlightenment.
Viewing your choices from a spiritual perspective means asking the big questions: Who are you? Why are you here? What do you really want? How can you best serve? Although at first glance these questions may seem irrelevant to slowing the aging process, they are actually essential to renewal. Shifting your internal reference point from an egocentric being, whose sense of worth depends upon the positions and possessions one has accumulated, to a network of conscious energy, woven from the threads of universal intelligence, has a profound effect on your mind and body. When you become clear that the reason you want to live to a hundred or more years is so you can express your full creative potential, you change your chemistry and physiology. When you identify your unique talents and commit to using them in the service of others, you strengthen your immune system. When you decide that exercising regularly or preparing a balanced meal is an enjoyable experience, you improve your circulatory health and lower your blood pressure. Your perceptions, interpretations, and expectations influence every aspect of your mental and physical health. Shifting your perspective and making new choices provide you with powerful tools to change your life.
One of the ways science makes major advances is by studying situations, circumstances, and events that are the exception to the usual way things work. These are sometimes called anomalies, or exceptions to the rule. Most scientists ignore anomalies, but in fact, these are the very things we should be studying. If something breaks the rule, no matter what it is, no matter how infrequent it is, no matter how remote the probability, it means that a new possibility has arisen. And if a new possibility has presented itself, there must be a mechanism. Even if only one person out of ten million cures himself of cancer or of AIDS, we have to pay attention. Most scientists tend to disregard events that are so rare they do not regularly infringe upon the prevailing view of the world. They may dismiss an anomaly by saying that it is so rare—one in ten million—what’s the point of investigating it?
The point is that it doesn’t matter if something happens only once in ten million, because if it has happened even once, there must be some mechanism to account for its occurrence. And if there is a mechanism, then as scientists we want to know what that mechanism is, because once we understand the mechanism, we may be able to reproduce the phenomenon.
Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein are examples of scientists who questioned the prevailing assumptions of their time and expanded their view to include phenomena that had previously been ignored. These and other great scientists paid attention to anomalies and sought to understand the mechanism that explains them. When something doesn’t fit the paradigm, doesn’t fit the pattern, doesn’t fit the theory, it forces us to examine the model we are using. It compels us to expand or change the theory to incorporate the exceptional situation.
A good example of this is a friend of ours who was diagnosed with AIDS over fifteen years ago. He was close to death when he made the choice to change his life. He started meditating, began eating a healthy diet, and made the commitment to eliminate toxins from his life. Fifteen years later he is feeling completely well and has undetectable levels of the HIV virus in his blood. When we first met him, he was an anomaly, but now we know many more people like him. Our theory of consciousness predicts that if we reach a critical mass of people who have the same experience, then it will become true for everyone.
We believe that these same principles apply to human aging. If we look at recent historical times we see that the average life expectancy has shifted remarkably. The average life span of a human being during the Roman Empire was twenty-eight years. The average life span of a human being born in the Western world at the beginning of the twentieth century was forty-nine years. Although in the past, high rates of infant mortality influenced human life expectancy, the fastest-growing segment of the American population today is over the age of ninety years.
A baby girl born in America today is expected to live just less than eighty years; an infant boy has a life expectancy of almost seventy-four. Historically, there are many people who have lived to ripe old ages and have made major contributions to civilization. Leonardo da Vinci was drawing sketches in his sixties, Leo Tolstoy was writing novels into his seventies, and Michelangelo was sculpting in his eighties. Winston Churchill, with his fondness for cigars and Scotch, was active and productive until his death at age ninety. As our collective consciousness embraces the belief that we can have the biology of youth with the wisdom of experience, it will become the pervasive experience.
Recognizing that human beings do not age at the same rate, scientists have described three different ways to characterize a person’s age. The first is chronological age, which is what your birth certificate says. Your chronological age measures the number of rotations Earth has performed on its axis and around the sun since you left your mother’s womb. Your chronological age cannot be altered through mind/body approaches, but it has the least relevance to how you feel or function.
Biological age is a measurement of how well your physiological systems are functioning. It is the most important component of the aging process. Your biological age is calculated in reference to an average population of people who have the same chronological age that you have. Values for almost every biochemical and physiological process can be determined for different age groups. Known as the biological markers, or biomarkers, of aging, these include blood pressure, amount of body fat, auditory and visual thresholds, hormonal levels, immune function, temperature regulation, bone density, skin thickness, cholesterol levels, blood sugar tolerance, aerobic capacity, and metabolic rate (see the table here). Once you know your results, you can compare them with the group average and see if your biomarkers are older or younger than your chronological peers. Your biological age can be very different from your chronological age. A fifty-year-old who takes good care of herself can have the biology of a thirty-five-year-old. Alternatively, a fifty-year-old who has not been attentive to his health may have the biology of men many years older. Whatever your biological age is today, we believe we can alter it by implementing the changes recommended in this book.
Biological age is the key component of the aging process.
Psychological age is your subjective experience of how old you feel. We meet many people in their sixties who report that they feel better than they did in their thirties. In prior times they may have been smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, were unhappy in their jobs, and were not eating well. Since instituting the ten steps to reverse aging, their mental and physical well-being has dramatically improved. They have learned to relax and enjoy life, so although they are chronologically older, they unequivocally feel younger than they did years ago. Psychological age is closely linked to biological age. When the body is functioning in a more efficient, energetic manner, we experience this vitality as feeling more alive.
Although we cannot reverse our chronological age, we can reverse the more important measures of our biological and psychological age—and by so doing can regain the physical and emotional vitality we had in the past.
AEROBIC CAPACITY |
ANTIOXIDANT LEVELS |
AUDITORY THRESHOLD |
BLOOD PRESSURE |
BLOOD SUGAR REGULATION |
BODY FAT |
BONE DENSITY |
CHOLESTEROL AND LIPID LEVELS |
HORMONAL LEVELS |
IMMUNE FUNCTION |
METABOLIC ACTIVITY |
MUSCLE MASS |
MUSCLE STRENGTH |
SKIN THICKNESS |
TEMPERATURE REGULATION |
VISUAL THRESHOLD |
In the 1970s, Alexander Leaf, a Harvard doctor, journeyed around the world seeking the secret to a long, healthy life. He visited communities in the southern republics of the former Soviet Union, northern Pakistan, and the Andes Mountains of Ecuador, where it was rumored that many people were living dynamic, vital lives well into their eighties, nineties, and beyond. In many cases, these stories were true. Leaf discovered that the one consistent feature of these people living in widely separated regions of the world was their attitude about aging. Simply stated, in these societies, growing older meant growing better; vibrant centenarians were revered for their knowledge, physical vitality, and personal presence. They had the wisdom of experience with the biology of youth.
Another interesting study was performed by Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer. She took groups of men in their seventies and eighties and encouraged them to think and behave as if they were twenty years younger. After doing this for only five days, these men showed a number of physical changes associated with age reversal. Their hearing and vision improved, they performed better on tests of manual dexterity, and had improved joint mobility.
Both of these studies tell us the same thing. Expectations determine outcomes. If you expect your mental and physical capacity to diminish with age, it probably will. If you have the expectations that you can grow younger and live longer, this will be your experience. As more and more people shift their expectations and experience reversal of aging for themselves, it will become the expectation of everyone.
When a doctor wants to check the status of a specific biochemical in your body, he draws blood for analysis. The results obtained from scrutinizing a minute sampling are accepted as being true for the entire body. For example, if we want to check your blood sugar level, we need to examine only a minuscule amount that can be collected from a tiny pinprick. We assume that what is true for one drop of blood is true for every drop in your body. This assumption is a result of the recognition that the body is holographic. This means that the whole is contained in every part; whenever one aspect changes, everything changes.
Applying this principle to the reversal of aging, you can see that making a healthy shift in any one component of your life will have a positive influence on your entire state of well-being. The more you are able to replace life-damaging choices with life-affirming ones, the more profound the benefits you will experience physically, emotionally, and spiritually. When you reverse one biological marker of aging, you will reverse almost all the others. For example, improving your muscle strength leads to an increase in bone density. Improving your aerobic capacity enhances your immune function. Our ten-steps-to-reverse-aging program is therefore a practical holistic approach to creating a profoundly better quality of life. These approaches are simple yet powerful and we are enthusiastic to share them with you.
The body is holographic; therefore, when you change one biomarker you influence them all.
The conditioning of our society leads us to believe that as we grow older, we deteriorate physically and mentally. When you break out of this conditioning, you will learn from your own experience that every day in every way you can increase your physical and mental capacity. That is the promise of this book. If you practice the ten steps you will reverse your biological age, and biological age is the only age that really matters.
2 I am reversing my biological age by changing my perceptions of my body, its aging, and of time.
I put this into practice by:
1. Changing my perception of aging by resetting my Biostat and practicing on a daily basis the rituals that remind me of my biological set point.
2. Changing my perception of time by the practice of self-referral techniques, bringing my attention to the nonchanging factor in the midst of change.
3. Changing my perception of my body by learning to experience it as a field of energy, transformation, and intelligence, practicing the Energy, Transformation, and Intelligence technique.
Perceptions create reality.
By changing your perceptions you change your reality.
By changing the perception of your body, its aging, and of time, you can reverse your biological age.
A BASIC PRINCIPLE of Ayurveda is stated as: What you see you become. What you see is a selective act of attention and interpretation. Although you are inundated by billions of bits of sensory impulses every moment, you selectively filter out the vast majority, allowing only a very small fraction into your awareness. What you allow into your awareness is determined by your habitual patterns of seeing and interpreting the world.
To make this point clear, consider a situation in which you and your friend are sitting on a park bench. Across the street a woman is walking her beagle. Your friend, the manager of a woman’s apparel store, hones in on what the woman is wearing, scrutinizing her outfit. Deciding that she does not like what the woman is wearing, your friend feels mildly annoyed. As an animal lover, you barely notice the woman but instead focus on her dog, which reminds you of a puppy you had as a child, and as a result, you feel a little wistful. What is the reality? It is clearly different for both of you as a result of your selective acts of attention and interpretation.
Reality is flexible and subject to revision.
Reality is the result of perception, which is a selective act of attention and interpretation.
There are many visual examples of this principle. Each of the four pictures that follow demonstrates how your attention and interpretation determine your reality. The sensory data does not change when you make the leap from one interpretation to another. What you see changes as a result of a change in your consciousness.
Can you see the chalice? Can you see the faces?
Can you see the old woman? Can you see the young woman?
Do you see the face? Do you see the word?
Do you see the bird? Do you see the rabbit?
Your attention and interpretations create what you see and ultimately determine what you believe. A belief is simply an interpretation that you hold to be true. For example, due to habits of perception, most people half a millennium ago believed that the sun revolved around Earth. When Copernicus suggested that our planet was not the center of the universe, people were upset because challenging prevailing beliefs inevitably generates resistance. However, new ideas that expand awareness, enhance life, and take us closer to truth are contagious. Before long, a critical mass of people embrace the new idea, and their beliefs about themselves and the world are forever changed.
As we enter the new millennium, the insights of our most advanced scientists are just beginning to influence our collective views. Our ideas about the human body, its aging, and even time itself are undergoing a dramatic shift, opening the possibility for unprecedented health, vitality, and longevity. Let’s look at how we may begin to embrace these more expanded and empowering beliefs.
Your habits of attention and interpretation create deeply ingrained beliefs, which are the interpretations you hold to be true. Beliefs create biology.
The only true way to measure the aging process is through the biomarkers of aging. By now you know that the biological markers of aging are reversible (see here to review the biomarkers of aging). Now it is time to use the organizing power of your intention to set a clear expectation to reverse your aging. Your intentions establish your expectations, and your expectations influence outcome.
We know from many scientific studies that whatever you anticipate happening with your health is much more likely to occur. Doctors sometimes ridicule this as the placebo effect, but the placebo effect is a testimony to the power of intention. When a doctor and a patient believe in a treatment, the positive results can be as high as 100 percent, even if the treatment is later found to have no pharmacological effect. If patients with asthma are given salt water and told it will help their breathing, they will breathe more easily due to the placebo effect. Given the same salt water with the suggestion that their breathing will worsen, they experience the expected deterioration. This is called the nocebo effect. In every condition imaginable—from high blood pressure to cancer, from stomach ulcers to anginal heart pain—your expectations can make the difference between health and illness, life and death. We can summarize this principle in one line: What you believe you become.
We can use this principle to great effect. Set the intention to grow younger and live longer. Your intention is a powerful activator of your inner pharmacy. Your expectation of growing younger will lead to the reversal of your aging.
Close your eyes. Become aware of your breath, releasing any tension you may be holding in your body. Now, choose an age within the last fifteen years that you would like to be in biological terms. This means you would like to have the physical and mental capacity of a healthy person at that age, that you would like your biomarkers to reflect that particular age, that you would like to feel and look that particular age. As an example, let’s assume you are sixty years old. Choose an age between forty-five and sixty. Let’s say you choose the age of forty-nine years. This becomes your Biostat—your set point in consciousness. Just as a thermostat adjusts the temperature in a room to a particular set point, so, too, your Biostat will orchestrate your psychology and biology around the biological age you have chosen.
This will happen through the following mechanisms: (1) Your intention to stay at a particular Biostat will directly influence your body of energy, transformation, and intelligence. This is because intention influences your biochemistry through its infinite organizing power. This is the principle of teleology, which states that intended outcomes orchestrate the biological mechanisms to fulfill themselves. (2) Keeping your Biostat in your awareness will influence your thinking, your moods, and your behavior and reinforce your intention to maintain your biology at that set point. Once you have identified your set point, begin affirming it five times a day. We suggest practicing the following ritual upon awakening, before breakfast, before lunch, before dinner, and at bedtime. On each of these occasions close your eyes and mentally repeat to yourself each of the following phrases at least three times:
