CONTENTS
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Deepak Chopra
Title Page
Praise
Preface
PART ONE: The Land Where No One Is Old
IN PRACTICE: How to Reinterpret Your Body
PART TWO: Aging and Awareness
IN PRACTICE: Using the Power of Awareness
PART THREE: Defeating Entropy
IN PRACTICE: The Wisdom of Uncertainty
PART FOUR: The Science of Longevity
IN PRACTICE: Breath of Life
PART FIVE: Breaking the Spell of Mortality
IN PRACTICE: The Timeless Way
Index
Acknowledgements
Copyright
‘Deepak Chopra is one of the most important healers of our time. Ageless Body, Timeless Mind is a treasure’ Marianne Williamson, author of A Woman’s Worth
‘Ageing is much more of a choice than people ever dream.’ In this revolutionary book, Dr Deepak Chopra shows us how we can all control the ageing process.
A million-copy worldwide bestseller, Ageless Body, Timeless Mind combines scientifically supported theory and a wealth of practical exercises to demonstrate the extent to which sickness and ageing are created by nothing more than gaps in our self-knowledge. By increasing this self-knowledge, we can master simple yet effective ways to metabolize time, and achieve our unbounded potential.
‘Drawing on both modern science and ancient wisdom, here is a model of health and illness that can stand the test of scientific scrutiny because of one simple fact: it works’
Larry Dossey, author of Reinventing Medicine
‘A renowned physician and author, Deepak Chopra is undoubtedly one of the most lucid and inspired philosophers of our time’ Mikhail Gorbachev
I look back on this as the most optimistic book I’ve ever written. I hope that sense of promise continues to fill these pages, because ‘the new old age’, as the media calls it, continues to advance, raising life expectancy and improving many of the ills and deficits of growing old. But the new old age cannot truly be new without a spiritual vision. To grow old should arrive as the crown of life – a phrase dating back to ancient Rome. Mere survival, even to the century mark, doesn’t deserve that rich accolade. The crown is bestowed for wisdom, and wisdom in its purest definition means that you have learned to live the mystery of life. We have been given one of the longest life spans of any creature on earth, not for biology’s sake – the moment a person’s genes are passed on through having a child, the naked interest of biology has been served – but for the sake of the soul. It takes time for a soul to mature. When it does, there is no more beautiful thing in creation. Then old age is more than a crown; it is a revelation.
One unfortunate trend since this book first appeared over ten years ago is that biology has crowded out wisdom more and more. It would benefit mankind enormously if the cure for Alzheimer’s were to appear, if human growth factor could be used to reverse physical deterioration, and if the most stubborn scourge of old age – cancer – could be eradicated. Yet for all this promise, what is the point of keeping the human body from wasting away if in the end it remains a machine? It is sad to watch a finely crafted machine rust slowly in the rain, I grant. We are subject to physical forces such as entropy that tempt us to see ourselves like that. But entropy doesn’t rule over spirit; decay bows before evolution, which is the master hand in creation.
I wanted this book to give a glimpse of the master hand at work. You and I are its handiwork but also its co-creators. The business of life isn’t breathing, eating, and sleeping. Those are maintenance for the body – and important to attend to on their own level. The real business of life, however, is to find out who you really are. In the title of this book I called the human body ageless and the human mind timeless because they are our links to immortality. I meant that literally when this book first appeared, and now, when spiritual dignity is the single greatest need of every person, the truth must be repeated:
You are the reason for life to exist, not the other way around.
You are the goal of an eternal mystery.
You are the sleeping god ready to awaken.
Long life is worthwhile finally because, in the length of days, you and I will realize these truths together. In that belief this edition of Ageless Body, Timeless Mind is offered.
Deepak Chopra
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Epub ISBN: 9781407060934
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Published in 2008 by Rider, an imprint of Ebury Publishing
A Random House Group Company
First published in 1993 in the United States by Harmony Books
Published in Great Britain in 1993 by Rider
Reissued 2003
Copyright © Deepak Chopra 1993
Deepak Chopra has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781846041044
This book gives non-specific, general advice and should not be relied on as a substitute for proper medical consultation. The author and publisher cannot accept responsibility for illness arising out of the failure to seek medical advice from a doctor.
Creating Health
Return of the Rishi
Quantum Healing
Perfect Health
Unconditional Life
Journey into Healing
Creating Affluence
Perfect Weight
Restful Sleep
The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success
Boundless Energy
Perfect Digestion
The Way of the Wizard
Overcoming Addictions
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)
Everyday Immortality
How to Know God
The Soul in Love
Grow Younger, Live Longer
The Deeper Wound
Golf for Enlightenment
Magical Beginnings, Enchanted Lives
Soulmate
Peace is the Way
SynchroDestiny
The Book of Secrets
Life After Death
The Third Jesus
This book was made possible by the loving support and encouragement of the following people:
The friends who form my staff at Quantum Publications—Roger, Gita, Carol, Mara, Steve, Bob, Joe, and Jimmy. Your genuine caring inspires my work every day.
My wife and children, whose love is manifested in so many ways but particularly in their unstinting patience and understanding.
My agent, Muriel Nellis, whose sage guidance has shaped every step in my career as a writer.
My editor, Peter Guzzardi—this book was his vision to begin with, and only he knows what ingenuity and patience it took before these pages lived up to his high ideal.
Wayne Dyer, who offered me his devoted friendship and challenged me to new heights.
And my loving parents, the best examples of graceful aging I have ever known.
Thank you all. I hope this book reflects your best hopes for me and the future of mankind.
THE FIRST STEP toward experiencing your body in a different way is to change your interpretation of it. No two people experience their bodies in exactly the same way, because each of us interprets experience—including the experience of inhabiting a body—according to his own personal beliefs, values, assumptions, and memories. An aging body involves one style of interpretation; an ageless body involves an opposite style.
Try to let go of the assumption that your body is aging because things just are that way. If you feel certain that growing old is natural, inevitable, and normal, I don’t want you to erase those assumptions instantly. You couldn’t do that if you tried, for the old paradigm has taught all of us to accept these assumptions without question. However, while still honoring your deep belief in aging, sickness, and death, allow yourself to set aside the old paradigm for a moment.
The quantum worldview, or the new paradigm, teaches us that we are constantly making and unmaking our bodies. Behind the illusion of its being a solid, stable object, the body is a process, and as long as that process is directed toward renewal, the cells of the body remain new, no matter how much time passes or how much entropy we are exposed to.
The great enemy of renewal is habit; when frozen interpretations from the past are applied to the present, there will always be a gap, a mismatch between the need of the moment and the solution from the past. To have a renewed body, you must be willing to have new perceptions that give rise to new solutions. The exercises below are designed to help you open up new perceptions. Some are exercises in absorbing the new knowledge of the quantum worldview as it applies to your body. Others are exercises in new experience, gaining an inner feeling for that level inside your body that is ageless. Ideally, as we move on to later exercises, knowledge and experience will begin to fuse—that is the sign that you are fully assimilating this new worldview in place of the old.
The most important step in gaining the experience of ageless body is to unfreeze the perceptions that have locked you into feelings of isolation, fragmentation, and separateness. These frozen perceptions reinforce the idea that only the reality of the five senses can be believed. So let us see if we can go beyond the senses to find a level of transcendental experience, which is in fact more real than the world of the senses.
Look at your hand and examine it closely. Trace its familiar lines and furrows, feel the texture of the skin, the supple flesh cushioning the submerged hardness of bone. This is the hand your senses report to you, a material object composed of flesh and blood. In this first exercise we will attempt to “thaw out” your hand and give you a different experience of it beyond the reach of your senses.
Holding the image of your hand in your mind’s eye, imagine that you are examining it through a high-powered microscope whose lens can penetrate the finest fabrics of matter and energy. At the lowest power, you no longer see smooth flesh but a collection of individual cells loosely bound by connective tissue. Each cell is a watery bag of proteins that appear as long chains of smaller molecules held together by invisible bonds. Moving closer, you can see separate atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and so on, which have no solidity at all—they are vibrating, ghostly shadows revealed through the microscope as patches of light and dark.
You have arrived at the boundary between matter and energy, for the subatomic particles making up each atom—whirling electrons dancing around a nuclear core of protons and neutrons—are not spots and dots of matter. They are more like traces of light left by a Fourth of July sparkler waved in the dark. At this level you see that all things you once took to be solid are just energy trails; the instant you see one trail, the energy has moved elsewhere, leaving nothing substantial to be touched or seen. Each trail is a quantum event, fleeting, dying out as soon as it is noticed.
Now you start sinking even deeper into quantum space. All light disappears, replaced by yawning chasms of black emptiness. Far away on the horizon of your vision, you see a last flash, like the farthest, faintest star visible in the night sky. Hold that flash in your mind, for it is the last remnant of matter or energy detectable by any scientific instrument. The blackness closes in, and you are in a place where not just matter and energy are gone, but space and time as well.
You have left behind your hand as a space-time event. Like all space-time events, your body has to have an origin beyond the fourth dimension. There is no such thing as “before” or “after” in this region, no concept of “big” or “small.” Here your hand exists before the Big Bang and after the universe’s end in the “heat death” of absolute zero. In reality these terms are meaningless, for you have arrived at the womb of the universe, the pre-quantum region that has no dimensions and all dimensions. You are everywhere and nowhere.
Has your hand ceased to exist? No, for in crossing the boundary of the fourth dimension, you didn’t go anywhere; the whole notion of place and time simply doesn’t apply anymore. All the grosser levels of perception are still available to you; your hand still exists at all these levels you have traversed—quantum, subatomic, atomic, molecular, cellular—connected by invisible intelligence to the place where you now find yourself. Each level is a layer of transformation, completely different from the one above or below it, but only here, where there is nothing but pure information, idea, creative potential, are all levels reduced to their common origin.
Ponder this exercise for a moment to absorb its lessons:
Now examine your hand with a new understanding—it is the stepping-off point for a dizzying descent into the dance of life, where the dancers disappear if you approach too near and the music fades away into the silence of eternity. The dance is forever, and the dance is you.
Now that we have touched that level of quantum space underlying all physical existence, I want you to become more comfortable there. Ordinarily we think of space as cold and empty, but quantum space is full—it is the continuity that connects everything in the universe. When the quantum field is active, it gives rise to a space-time event; when it is quiet, there is just quantum space. But this doesn’t signify that the field has gaps in it—imagine the Earth surrounded by lines of magnetic force radiating out of the north and south magnetic poles. All the separate magnets on the planet participate in this field. They are small, separate outcroppings of magnetism, yet even when a magnet is not in your immediate vicinity, the magnetic field surrounds you. A horseshoe magnet is a local outcropping of the field (a space-time event), while the lines of the magnetism surrounding the Earth are a nonlocal, invisible presence. Both are connected as aspects of one underlying field of energy.
Because your body emanates electromagnetic frequencies, you are yet another expression of the same field. The pulsations of nerve signals racing along your limbs, the electric charge emitted by your heart cells, and the faint field of current surrounding your brain all demonstrate that you are not separate from any form of energy in the universe. Any appearance of separation is only the product of the limitation of your senses, which are not attuned to these energies.
Imagine two candles standing about three feet apart on a table in front of you. To your eyes they appear separate and independent, yet the light they cast fills the room with photons; the entire space between them is bridged by light, and therefore there is no real separation at the quantum level. Now carry one of the candles outside at night and hold it up against a background of stars. The pinpoints of light in the sky may be billions of light-years away, yet at the quantum level each star is just as connected to your candle as the second candle in the room; the vast space between them contains waves of energy that bind them.
As you look at the candle and the distant stars, photons of light from both land on your retina. There they trigger flashes of electrochemical discharge that belong to a different vibratory frequency from visible light, yet they are part of the same electromagnetic field. Therefore, you are another candle—or star—whose local concentration of matter and energy is one outcropping in the infinite field that surrounds and supports you.
Think about this organic connection between everything in existence. The lessons of this exercise are
When you begin to own this knowledge, nothing in your environment will feel threatening to you. As a result, the fear of separation will loosen its hold over you, and the unbroken flow of awareness will counter entropy and aging.
The quantum field transcends everyday reality, yet it is extremely intimate to your experience. To fetch a word from your memory, to feel an emotion, to grasp a concept—these are events that change the entire field. The eminent British physicist Sir James Jeans once remarked, “When an electron vibrates, the universe shakes.” There is no flicker of activity in any of your cells that goes unnoticed across the entire quantum field.
At its finest level, every physiological process registers in the fabric of Nature. In other words, the more refined a process is, the more connected to the basic activity of the cosmos. Here is a simple breathing exercise that can give you a remarkably vivid experience of this phenomenon.
Sit comfortably in a chair with your eyes closed. Gently and slowly inhale through your nostrils, imagining as you do so that you are drawing the air from a point infinitely far away. See the air gently coming to you from the edge of the universe. Feel it coolly suffusing your body.
Now slowly and easily exhale, sending every atom of air back to its source infinitely far away. It may help if you envision a thread that extends from you to the far reaches of the cosmos; or you might visualize a star hovering in front of you that is sending light from infinitely far away—in either case, imagine the thread or the star as your source of air. If you aren’t a good visualizer, don’t worry; just hold the word infinite in your mind as you breathe. Whatever technique you use, the aim is to feel each breath coming to you from the quantum field, which at a subtle level is actually happening. Reestablishing the memory of your connection with the quantum field will awaken the memory of renewal in your body.
Having absorbed the knowledge that your body is not a sculpture isolated in space and time, redefine yourself by repeating the following statements silently to yourself:
I can use the power of my awareness to experience a body that is
| Flowing | instead of | solid |
| Flexible | ” ” | rigid |
| Quantum | ” ” | material |
| Dynamic | ” ” | static |
| Composed of information and energy | ” ” | random chemical reactions |
| A network of intelligence | ” ” | a mindless machine |
| Fresh and ever-renewing | ” ” | entropic and aging |
| Timeless | ” ” | time-bound |
Another good set of redefining statements:
Repeating these statements serves as more than a mental reminder. As a process rather than an object, the human body is constantly filled with messages of every kind; the verbal messages we hear in our heads are just one version of the information being exchanged from cell to cell every second. Because every person’s awareness is colored by past experiences, the flow of information inside us is influenced by unconscious imprints we are barely aware of. We will examine in detail how these unconscious imprints break down the smooth flow of messages, creating the loss of intelligence that results in aging.
For the time being, know that you can change these imprints by giving the unconscious new assumptions and beliefs to operate with. Every thought you have activates a messenger molecule in your brain. This means that every mental impulse gets transformed automatically into biological information. By repeating these new statements of belief, affirming to yourself that your body is not defined by the old paradigm, you are allowing new biological information to be produced; and, via the mind-body connection, your redefined sense of yourself is being received by your cells as new programming. Thus, the gap between your old, isolated self and the image of yourself as an ageless, timeless being starts to close.
ALTHOUGH AWARENESS GETS programmed in thousands of ways, the most convincing are what we call beliefs. A belief is something you hold on to because you think it is true. But unlike a thought, which actively forms words or images in your brain, a belief is generally silent. A person suffering from claustrophobia doesn’t need to think, “This room is too small,” or, “There are too many people in this crowd.” Put into a small, crowded room, his body reacts automatically. Somewhere in his awareness is a hidden belief that generates all the physical symptoms of fear without his having to think about it. The flow of adrenaline that causes his pounding heart, sweaty palms, panting breath, and dizziness is triggered at a level deeper than the thinking mind.
People with phobias struggle desperately to use thoughts to thwart their fear, but to no avail. The habit of fear has sunk so deep that the body remembers to carry it out, even when the mind is resisting with all its might. The thoughts of a claustrophobic—“There’s no reason to be afraid”; “Small rooms aren’t dangerous”; “Everyone else looks perfectly normal, why can’t I get over this?”—are rational objections, but the body acts on commands that override thought.
Our beliefs in aging hold just this kind of power over us. Let me give an example: For the past twenty years, gerontologists have performed experiments to prove that remaining active throughout life, even up to one’s late seventies, would halt the loss of muscle and skeletal tissue. The news spread among retired people that they should continue to walk, jog, swim, and keep up their housework; under the slogan “Use it or lose it,” millions of people now expect to remain strong in old age. With this new belief in place, something once considered impossible happened.
Daring gerontologists at Tufts University visited a nursing home, selected a group of the frailest residents, and put them on a weight-training regimen. One might fear that a sudden introduction to exercise would exhaust or kill these fragile people, but in fact they thrived. Within eight weeks, wasted muscles had come back by 300 percent, coordination and balance improved, and overall a sense of active life returned. Some of the subjects who had not been able to walk unaided could now get up and go to the bathroom in the middle of the night by themselves, an act of reclaimed dignity that is by no means trivial. What makes this accomplishment truly wondrous, however, is that the youngest subject in the group was 87 and the oldest 96.
These results were always possible; nothing new was added here to the capacity of the human body. All that happened was that a belief changed, and when that happened, aging changed. If you are 96 years old and afraid to move your body, it will waste away. To go into a weight-training room at that age, you have to believe that it will do your body good; you have to be free of fear; and you have to believe in yourself. When I say that aging is the result of a belief, I’m not implying that a person can simply think aging away. Exactly the opposite—the stronger the belief, the more rooted in the body it is and the more immune to conscious control.
According to the belief system you and I adhere to, Nature has trapped us in bodies that grow old against our will. The tradition of aging extends as far back as recorded history and even prehistory. Animals and plants grow old, fulfilling a universal law of Nature. It is hard to imagine that aging is the result of learned behavior, for biology cannot be denied.
Yet the core belief that aging is a fixed, mechanical process—something that just happens to us—is only a belief. As such, it blinds us to all kinds of facts that don’t fit the belief system we cling to. How many of the following statements do you believe are facts?
If you take any or all of these to be statements of fact, you are under the influence of beliefs that do not match reality. Each statement contains a little objective truth, but each can be refuted, too.
It is extremely difficult to ascertain what it would be like to watch the body age per se. Two cars left out in the rain will rust at about the same rate; the process of oxidation attacks them equally, turning their iron and steel into ferrous oxide according to one easily explained law of chemistry. The aging process obeys no such simple laws. For some of us, aging is steady, uniform, and slow, like a tortoise crawling toward its destination. For others, aging is like approaching an unseen cliff—there is a long, secure plateau of health, followed by a sharp decline in the last year or two of life. And for still others, most of the body will remain healthy except for a weak link, such as the heart, which fails much faster than do the other organs. You would have to follow a person for most of his adult life before you figured out how he was aging, and by then it would be too late.
The fact that aging is so personal has proved very frustrating for medicine, which finds it extremely difficult to predict and treat many of the major conditions associated with old age. Two young women can ingest the same amount of calcium, display equally healthy hormone levels, and yet one will develop crippling osteoporosis after menopause while the other won’t. Twin brothers with identical genes will go through life with remarkably similar medical histories, yet only one will develop Alzheimer’s or arthritis or cancer. Two of the most common conditions in old age, rising blood pressure and elevated cholesterol, are just as unpredictable. The aging body refuses to behave according to mechanical laws and rules.
After decades of intense investigation, there is no adequate theory of human aging. Even our attempts to explain how animals age have resulted in more than three hundred separate theories, many of them contradictory. Our notions of aging have been drastically modified over the last two decades. In the early 1970s, doctors began to notice patients in their sixties and seventies whose bodies still functioned with the vigor and health of middle age. These people ate sensibly and looked after their bodies. Most did not smoke, having given up the habit sometime after the Surgeon General’s original warnings about lung cancer in the early 1960s. They had never suffered heart attacks. Although they exhibited some of the accepted signs of old age—higher blood pressure and cholesterol, and tendencies to put on body fat, to become farsighted, and to lose the top range of their hearing—there was nothing elderly about these people. The “new old age,” as it came to be called, was born.
The “old old age” had been marked by irreversible declines on all fronts—physical, mental, and social. For untold centuries people expected to reach old age—if they reached it at all—feeble, senile, socially useless, sick, and poor. To reinforce this grim expectation there were grim facts: Only one out of ten people lived to the age of 65 before this century.
For centuries in the past, the human body was exposed to the killing influence of a harsh environment: Inadequate nutrition, a lifetime spent in physical labor, and uncontrollable epidemics of disease created conditions that accelerated aging. Leaf through the accounts of immigrants passing through Ellis Island at the turn of the century; some of the photographs will horrify you. The faces of 40-year-old women look haggard and drawn, literally as if they were 70—and an old 70 at that. Adolescent boys look like battered middle-aged men. Under the surgeon’s scalpel their hearts, lungs, kidneys, and livers would have looked identical to those of a modern person twice their age. Aging is the body’s response to conditions imposed upon it, both inner and outer. The sands of age shift under our feet, adapting to how we live and who we are.
The new old age arrived on the scene after more than half a century of improved living conditions and intensive medical progress. The average American life span of 49 years in 1900 jumped to 75 in 1990. To put this huge increase in perspective, the years of life we have gained in less than a century are equal to the total life span that individuals enjoyed for more than four thousand years; from prehistoric times to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the average life span remained below 45. Only 10 percent of the general population used to make it to 65, but today 80 percent of the population lives at least that long.
Despite this evidence that aging is a shifting, fluid phenomenon, we still find ourselves operating under the belief that aging can be understood strictly as a biological process. When you look at your body and notice how much it has changed physically since you were young, aging seems an obvious phenomenon. In fact, it is anything but.
Twenty years ago I was a young resident working in a vast and dreary veterans hospital outside Boston. In a typical day I ran physicals on dozens of patients, mostly old soldiers who had served in two world wars. The passing years had taken a toll that was all too obvious. Even when I had my eyes closed, the sound and touch of their bodies were unmistakable. Their hands trembled while I took their pulse, and their lungs wheezed under the stethoscope. The pounding lub-dub of young hearts had given way to feebler, threadier rhythms.
I knew that unseen destruction was taking place beneath the thin veil of their dry, wrinkled skin. Blood vessels were hardening and blood pressure was rising. If I could reach in to touch the three coronary arteries, one or more would almost certainly be engorged with fatty plaque. The body’s main artery, the aorta, might have turned as hard as a lead pipe, stiffened by calcium deposits, while the delicate arterioles in the head were likely to be so tissue-thin that the slightest contact would make them crumble, triggering a stroke. Vertebrae and hip bones would be getting thin and brittle too, waiting to crack if the person slipped on the stairs. All over the body, hidden tumors would be held in check only by the slowed metabolism of the elderly, which mercifully retards the spread of cancer.
All this may sound like an accurate, if grim, description of the aging process, but in fact I wasn’t seeing old people at all; I was seeing sick people. All over America doctors were making the same mistake. Caught up in treating various diseases, we forgot what aging is like when disease is not present. Moreover, the few medical researchers who took an interest in the aging process tended to work in veterans hospitals like the one in which I practiced. By definition, the “normal” aging they observed was abnormal, because a normal person isn’t hospitalized. No one would dream of defining childhood by studying patients in a children’s hospital ward, yet old age was largely defined that way.
Across the general population, only 5 percent of people over 65 are institutionalized, in either hospitals, nursing homes, or mental institutions. Surprisingly, this figure is not significantly higher than for younger age groups. Obviously, there are many reasons besides old age why someone might wind up in an institution. Such places are dumping grounds for the widowed, homeless, alcoholic, mentally incompetent, and destitute. A doctor can’t spend a day in a typical big-city hospital without seeing a police car pull up with a load of hapless derelicts swept off the street to become the faceless statistics that researchers use to define aging.
“Fear old age,” Plato cautioned over two thousand years ago, “for it does not come alone.” He spoke the truth. As we grow older, the things that bother us most are often not aging itself but the ills that accompany it. In the wild, few animals die simply because they have grown too old. Other factors, such as sickness, starvation, exposure to the elements, and ever-vigilant predators, kill off most creatures long before they reach their potential life span. Gaze at a flock of sparrows outside your window this spring; by next spring, half will have died from various causes. So, for all practical purposes, it is irrelevant that sparrows can live over a decade if kept safe in a cage.
Long life spans are possible among birds (in captivity, eagles can survive for fifty years and parrots for more than seventy years), which seems strange considering their fast metabolisms and racing heartbeat. But very little about the aging process is logical. The evolutionary purpose of aging is itself a puzzle to biologists, given that Nature has so many other ways of ending an animal’s life. For example, mortality is built into the system of competition for food. Some animals have to die in order for others to live; otherwise survival of the fittest would have no meaning. Among bears and deer, for example, the males fight for territory during breeding season; when the strongest males win the right to breed with the females, they also win the prime territory—land that is rich in food—while the losers must settle for much poorer foraging grounds, where many struggle on the verge of starvation and quickly die.
If a wild animal is fortunate enough to survive to its natural life span, its body will not just be old, it will be riddled with disease. Cancer, heart disease, hardened arteries, arthritis, and strokes are rampant among old creatures. Aged lions suffer coronaries and old eagles get cataracts. Aging is so mixed in with other factors that it is extremely hard to separate it out.
The same blurring occurs in humans. Although we pride ourselves on having escaped the trials of the wild, modern people still rarely die of old age. In 1938 the British medical journal The Lancet carried the report of a senior pathologist who maintained that he had never examined a deceased body that had succumbed to age alone. The closest candidate was a 94-year-old man who had died just by fading away without overt disease. But appearances were deceiving: At autopsy it was found that he had been suffering from an undiagnosed case of lobar pneumonia, one of the most common causes of fatality among old people.
Although it appeals to common sense that we grow old because we simply wear out, no wear-and-tear theory of aging has ever held up under close scrutiny. Aging bodies only seem to wear out like overworked washing machines and tractors. “How’s the old ticker?” a doctor will ask an elderly patient, as if her heart were a clock winding down on its spring. Unlike machines, however, which run down with too much use, the human body is capable of getting better the more it is used. A well-exercised bicep doesn’t deteriorate; rather, it gets stronger. Leg bones gain mass in proportion to how much weight is put on them, which is why osteoporosis is practically unknown in tribal societies where lifelong physical activity is the norm. Moreover, if wearing out were the true cause of aging, it would be a good strategy to rest in bed all your life. In fact, prolonged rest is disastrous for the physiology—a hospital patient confined to complete bed rest for a few weeks will suffer as much muscle and skeletal wasting as someone who has aged a decade.
Any purely physical theory of aging cannot help but be incomplete. Consider arthritis, one of the most common symptoms of age. In medical school we were taught that common arthritis (or osteoarthritis) is a degenerative disorder. This means that its cause is simple wear and tear. After a lifetime of hard use, the cushioning cartilage in large weight-bearing joints deteriorates, which explains why the knee and hip joints, which carry the burden of supporting the body, tend to be favored sites for arthritis. The synovium, the smooth lining that cushions the bones where they meet, also becomes inflamed or deteriorated, leading to the pain, swelling, and burning of arthritis. Sometimes the synovial fluid dries up, and the bones grind against each other, creating pits or bone spurs. This kind of degeneration has plagued mankind since the Stone Age. The familiar image of prehistoric man walking hunched over from the shoulders is now thought to be a distortion of what healthy cavemen really looked like. Archaeologists, it seems, were misled because so many of the intact skeletons they found in their digs were deformed from arthritis of the spine.
As the cause of arthritis, wear and tear appeals to common sense, but it fails to explain several things. Some people never become arthritic, even though they subject their joints to extreme stress. Other people develop arthritis after a lifetime of sedentary desk work, not to mention that certain favorite spots for the disease, such as the fingers, are not called upon to bear weight at all. Newer theories of arthritis look to hormones, genetics, autoimmune breakdown, diet, and other factors; in the end, no clear cause is known.
However, emotional factors have been strongly linked to another major type of arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis. This disorder seems to favor women who have a marked tendency to repress emotion, who adopt passivity and depression as a mode of coping with stress rather than getting angry or confronting serious emotional issues. The disease can get worse under stress, and, for inexplicable reasons, it can also disappear, perhaps in obedience to a deeper current of change.
The complexity of the forces operating inside an aging body becomes even more obvious when you ask a seemingly easy question: How old are you?
Before you rush to reply, consider that there are three distinct and separate ways to measure someone’s age:
Chronological age—how old you are by the calendar
Biological age—how old your body is in terms of critical life signs and cellular processes
Psychological age—how old you feel you are
Only the first of these is fixed, yet chronological age is also the most unreliable of the three. One 50-year-old may be nearly as healthy as he was at 25, while another may already have the body of a 60- or even a 70-year-old. To really know how old you are, the second measure—biological age—comes into play; it tells us how time has affected your organs and tissues compared to other people of your chronological age.
Time doesn’t affect your body uniformly, however; practically every cell, tissue, and organ is aging on its own timetable, which makes biological age much more complex than chronological age. A middle-aged marathon runner may have the leg muscles, heart, and lungs of someone half his age, but his knees and kidneys may be aging rapidly due to excessive stress, and his eyesight and hearing could be declining on their own idiosyncratic paths. You become unique as the years pass. At 20, when muscle development, reflexes, sexual drive, and many other primary functions are reaching their peak, most people look alike to a physiologist. Young hearts, brains, kidneys, and lungs all exhibit healthy color and firmness; evidence of malformed, diseased, or dying tissue is scanty or nonexistent. But by age 70, no two bodies are remotely alike. At that age, your body will be like no one else’s in the world; its age changes will mirror your unique life.
Biological age also has its limits as a measurement tool. Considered purely as biology, the aging process moves at such a slow rate that its fatal effects rarely match those of faster-moving diseases. Most critical organs can function well at 30 percent of peak capacity. Thus if our bodies are losing 1 percent of their functioning per year after age 30, it would take 70 years, or age 100, before aging per se threatens a particular organ with imminent breakdown. But social and psychological influences are ever at work, our lifestyles subject us to various conditions, and the differences in how we age show up much earlier in life.
Two stroke patients in their midfifties with identical medical conditions can, and often do, display wildly different outcomes—one may recover from his attack quickly, respond well to physical therapy, and easily regain lost speech and movement, eventually returning to normal life. The other may respond poorly to treatment, be overcome with depression, and give up all active pursuits; in short order he may grow old and die. The determining factor is psychological age, which is the most personal and mysterious of the three measurements but also the one that holds the most promise for reversing the aging process.
Biological age is known to be changeable—regular physical exercise, for example, can reverse ten of the most typical effects of biological age, including high blood pressure, excess body fat, improper sugar balance, and decreased muscle mass. Gerontologists have found that elderly people who agree to adopt better lifestyle habits improve their life expectancy on average by ten years. Thus, the arrow of time can move forward quickly or slowly, stop in its tracks, or even turn around. Your body becomes younger or older biologically depending on how you treat it.
Yet your third age, psychological age, is even more flexible. Like biological age, psychological age is completely personal—no two people have exactly the same psychological age because no two people have exactly the same experiences. Listen to the voice of Anna Lundgren, age 101, who made a very important observation as a child that influenced how she aged for the next eighty or ninety years. “Back in Norway where I was a little girl, when people got to be 55 or 65, they just sat. I never felt that old. That’s old. I don’t feel that old today.” How old you feel you are has no boundaries and can reverse in a split second. An old woman recalling her first love can suddenly look and sound as if she has turned 18 again; a middle-aged man who hears that his beloved wife has died can wither into lonely senescence in a matter of weeks.
Instead of coming up with a fixed number to answer the question “How old are you?” we need to arrive at a sliding scale that shows how fast our three ages are moving in relation to one another. Take two 50-year-olds:
A, who was recently divorced, suffers from acute depression, with a history of heart disease and overweight; B, who is happily married, healthy, optimistic, and satisfied with his job.
Because of the various factors at work, the true age of A and B is best expressed by a three-tiered graph:
The arrows point in the direction of aging and their length indicates how fast the process is taking place. Although A and B are both chronologically 50, A is under so many negative influences that his body is 10 years older biologically and is aging quickly; in terms of psychological age he is about par with his calendar years, but he is aging fairly rapidly there, too. The picture is very different for B, who is younger on both the biological and psychological scales. His good physical and mental health indicate that he is aging slowly biologically and actually getting younger psychologically.
Overall, A is in much worse shape than B. Depending on how severe his depression and heart condition are, his composite age might be as high as 60, but this figure is artificial. It ignores the fact that all the factors that make him so much older than his chronological age are reversible. Ten years from now, he could be as happy, optimistic, and fit as B, in which case his composite age would decline.
When gerontologists try to predict longevity, all of the following psychosocial factors must be taken into account to accurately determine if the aging process is being accelerated or retarded.
Asterisk (*) denotes major factors
Inability to express emotions
Feeling helpless to change oneself and others
Living alone
Loneliness, absence of close friends
Having to work more than 40 hours per week
Financial burdens, being in debt
Habitual or excessive worry
Regret for sacrifices made in the past
Irritability, getting angry easily, or being unable to express anger
Criticism of self and others
Ability to laugh easily
Satisfactory sex life
Ability to make and keep close friends
Taking at least one week’s vacation every year
Feeling in control of personal life