I’ve noticed that some of my older friends tend to get a vacant look on their faces when they are with a group of new people or in an unfamiliar setting. Although they seem fine in their own homes, they can’t seem to keep up with the conversation when challenged with a new situation. They’ve spent so much time screening out any newness from their environment, digging themselves deeper into the safety of their day-to-day ruts, they’ve lost the ability to adapt to change. It’s tragic to witness what happens to the faces, bodies, and minds of these formerly vital people as they begin this downhill slide.
The famous brain researcher Marian Diamond, Ph.D., says, “There’s a very simple principle when it comes to the brain. Use it or lose it.” When our nervous system no longer receives new input, it atrophies, a phenomenon that has been demonstrated clearly in the laboratory. In one study of aging rats, Dr. Diamond added new toys and other novel items to enhance the environments of some rats, while leaving the other rats in their familiar surroundings. At the end of the study, the rats in the enriched environments had more cortical brain tissue than those with the standard environments. Interestingly, this change in brain structure occurred even in old rats that were 75 percent of the way through their life span.73
STEP THREE: Develop an optimistic attitude toward life. I was recently in Toronto at an “I Can Do It!” conference sponsored by Hay House. The conference was opened by Louise Hay herself, who at eighty-four looked more vibrant and alive than she had at her eightieth birthday. She said to the crowd, “At the age of eighty, I decided that this next decade was going to be the best decade of my life. And so far it is!” Talk about inspiring!
Optimism—the ability to perceive the glass as half full instead of half empty—is a natural protectant against depression. Also, an impressive body of research has documented that optimists are healthier and live longer. In one study of individuals with no risk factors for heart disease, for example, depressed people were four times more likely to suffer from heart attacks than their optimistic, nondepressed counterparts; since heart disease is also associated with dementia, you can see the connection between a healthy attitude and a healthy brain.
STEP FOUR: Actively work with your thoughts and behaviors to modify those personality traits—such as hostility, pessimistic thoughts, and the tendency to isolate yourself socially—that are known to be associated with premature death and disability. If necessary, seek help from a therapist. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can make you more aware of your negative, self-limiting thoughts and help you find ways to redirect them in a more positive, empowering direction. This does not mean denial of life’s difficulties. CBT teaches you how to accept your situation and validate it, but at the same time deal with it more constructively. As a result, you learn to worry less. To help you use your own power to change your thoughts, I recommend that you read I Can Do It! (Hay House, 2004) and Experience Your Good Now! (Hay House, 2010), both by Louise Hay, as well as The Amazing Power of Deliberate Intent (Hay House, 2006) by Esther and Jerry Hicks.
STEP FIVE: Develop and express a healthy sense of humor. Get “humor aids,” such as Loretta LaRoche’s video How Serious Is This? or her book Relax—You May Only Have a Few Minutes Left (Villard, 1998). Or watch reruns of comedy programs you loved years ago. I’ve recently started to watch old Steve Martin and Mel Brooks movies. Comic genius is always in style and never grows old!
STEP SIX: Eat healthfully and exercise regularly. As already mentioned, a large body of research has demonstrated that almost all dementia is due, in part, to small-blood-vessel disease in our brains. The number-one reason why so many of us get these blood vessel changes is because we eat poorly and avoid exercise. Get moving, every day. This includes walking, aerobics, sports, swimming, or lifting weights. Movement keeps the blood flowing to all your organs, including your brain, and brings more nutrients and oxygen to your tissues. If you want, you can get your movement and social needs met at the same time by taking up a sport with a group of people who are noncompetitive and just enjoy the fun of moving.
STEP SEVEN: Practice full emotional expression and heal your life as you go along. The emotional pattern associated with heart disease, including hardening of the arteries in the brain, is a tendency to avoid feeling your emotions fully—whether those emotions are positive or negative. One of my perimenopausal patients once told me:
I grew up in a household in which we were taught to be afraid of strong emotions. You weren’t allowed to feel too good—or too bad—about anything. If we needed to cry, we were told to go into the basement and bury our face in a pillow so that we wouldn’t disturb the rest of the family. If we shouted with joy about a good grade or winning a game, we were told not to “blow your own trumpet.” So I learned to distrust an entire range of feelings—basically anything except bland and boring pleasantness. Not surprisingly, dementia, depression, and heart disease run very strongly in my family on both sides. At midlife I feel as though I have to completely relearn how to feel. Often I have to tune in to symptoms in my body and just sit with them until I start to feel the emotion associated with them.
This falls right in line with anecdotal evidence suggesting that the tangles and pathology of Alzheimer’s tend to “attack” the area of the brain associated with memories that are painful. Likewise, a 2010 study showed that older veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with post-traumatic stress syndrome had twice the risk for dementia as those without the disorder.74 The researchers, who studied 181,093 veterans age fifty-five or older at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, noted that stress may damage the hippocampus or cause changes in neurotransmitter and hormone levels that could increase risk. The way I see it, it’s almost as if the bodies of people who are faced with extremely painful memories try to protect them by causing them to forget altogether.
A poignant example came from a patient I once had whose father was a convicted pedophile. But his wife (my patient’s mother) made sure he got out of jail early, which meant that she lived with him for many, many years in which she was fully aware of his deviant sexual behavior. She eventually got Alzheimer’s. When her husband died, she immediately called her daughter (my patient), who brought her home with her to live until other arrangements could be made. “The first thing Mother did was sleep for nearly two days straight,” she told me. “When she woke up, my mother was back—it was as if she’d never had Alzheimer’s. We sat and talked for about ten hours. She completely understood the implications of my dad’s behavior and her role in enabling him. Then she told me that she couldn’t stay and was going to ‘go away again.’ She took another nap and woke up with Alzheimer’s.” The mother suffered from progressive dementia from that moment on and eventually died. This story has stayed with me for years because it points to the role of the soul and the human will in disorders such as Alzheimer’s.
So whatever emotions you are feeling, it’s vital that you allow yourself the fullness of your feeling. What you will find is that it dissipates. But if you instead try to make yourself feel something else, and put yourself down for having an “unpleasant” emotion, then that emotion will get locked in your body and may be expressed later as a disease.
Hostility, on the other hand, is a stuck chronic emotional pattern. It can be self-destructive to loiter in this space for very long, and the best way to get out is to find something to appreciate about every situation you are in, no matter how small it is, until appreciation begins to replace hostility as a mental and emotional pattern.
STEP EIGHT: Never retire. Don’t allow yourself to start thinking about “retirement” at midlife, the way so many people do. Instead, do what Dolly Parton does: find out what you love to do for work, and you’ll never work a day in your life! You may wish to retire from working for a company or for another individual, but you need to have something that you’re interested in doing—for pay or not—every day of your life.
In conclusion, consider the following experiment: In a famous study at Boston’s
Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital, researchers Jeffrey Hausdorff, Ph.D., a gerontologist, and Harvard graduate student Becca Levy (now a Ph.D. and faculty member at the Yale School of Public Health) tested the effect of subconscious beliefs on walking speed. Walking speed often declines with age, and that in combination with balance and coordination problems as well as other factors, such as medication, produces the stereotypical elderly “shuffle.” The researchers tested healthy individuals ages sixty-three to eighty-two by first having them walk down a hall the length of a football field. They measured both speed and “swing time”—the time the foot spends off the ground. After that, the participants played a brief computer game. On half of the computers, upbeat words such as accomplished, wise, and astute flashed across the screen just long enough to register subconsciously. The other group had negative words such as senile, dependent, and diseased flashed across their screens. The participants then walked down the same hallway again. This time, the positively influenced group walked 9 percent faster and had much more “swing time” and much less shuffling. The negatively influenced group didn’t get any worse, perhaps because they, like most of us, had already been saturated by society’s negative aging stereotypes.75
This study is clearly a wake-up call for becoming conscious of our own beliefs about aging and the physical effects of those beliefs. I’ve seen far too many women talk themselves into physical deterioration starting as young as thirty! And who hasn’t witnessed the black balloons and jokes about being “over the hill” at birthday parties for friends turning forty?
Ellen Langer, Ph.D., a Harvard psychologist who wrote the classic book Mindfulness, observed: “The regular and ‘irreversible’ cycles of aging that we witness in the later stages of human life may be a product of certain assumptions about how one is supposed to grow old. If we didn’t feel compelled to carry out these limiting mindsets, we might have a greater chance of replacing years of decline with years of growth and purpose.”76
Amen.
11
From Rosebud to Rose Hip:
Cultivating Midlife Beauty
I’ll never forget the last time my former harp teacher, the late Miss Alice Chalifoux, came to borrow my harp for her students to use at the summer harp colony in Camden, Maine, where she taught for more than sixty years, and where I myself first took lessons when I was fourteen.
Though she never paid much attention to diet, exercise, or supplements, her skin was pink, fresh, and smooth, her eyes were bright, she was never sick, and her irreverent and earthy sense of humor was utterly delightful. With a twinkle in her eye, Miss Chalifoux told me that she had cut her schedule way back that summer. She only taught thirty-six hours a week—about half time by her standards. She was a perfect example of a woman who was beautifully attuned to the power of what I call the late rose hip stage of life, sowing her seeds of wisdom and inspiring others wherever she went. Her impish soul shone out through every pore, its youthful effects written all over her face. Miss Chalifoux was ninety-two years old then and lived until she was a hundred.
No one would deny that every season of the year is imbued with its own special beauty and wisdom. The same is true of the seasons of our lives. Most of us know or have seen at least one woman like Miss Alice Chalifoux, who is living proof that beauty is possible at every season of our lives, depending upon how we live them.
Perimenopausal women can be likened to the full-blown rose of late summer and fall as it begins to transform itself into a bright, juicy rose hip—the part of the rose that contains the seeds from which hundreds of other potential roses can grow. These juicy and tasty rose hips are in their glory on the coast of Maine every autumn. Until recently, our culture has worshipped only the rosebud stage of development, thereby rendering relatively invisible the beauty of the other stages. In fact, not so long ago, the dewy rosebud was often used as a prominent symbol for ads selling conventional hormone therapy drugs to women. The subliminal message was clear: if you used HT, you could stay at the rosebud stage of beauty for the rest of your life and never have to go through the process of maturing and ripening into the resilient and potent rose hip. But it’s not true.
Once you’re on the way to becoming a rose hip, you can’t go backward to being a rosebud, though our culture certainly entices us to try. Learning how to maximize the strength and resilience of the juicy rose hip stage is absolutely necessary if you are to look and feel your very best as a woman in the full bloom of midlife! Just remember that when you’re becoming a rose hip, any attempt to remain in the rosebud stage tends to look desperate and ridiculous. It’s like trying to reglue the autumn leaves back onto the tree and then paint them all green to simulate the spring. It simply doesn’t work. Instead, our task is to come to appreciate the beauty and power of the season we are in, instead of longing for what can no longer be.
This may be a particularly difficult task if, before menopause, you were the type of woman accustomed to using the power of your looks and body to attract the attention of men whenever you so much as walked into a room. If this has been true for you, then you’re viscerally familiar with the power of external feminine beauty and have, perhaps, capitalized on it since adolescence. If your looks have charmed people for years, it is quite likely that you will have a harder time with becoming a rose hip than someone who didn’t have this experience and therefore had to turn inward at an earlier age to find her sense of worth and beauty. I had an acquaintance like this once. When she turned forty-five, she bemoaned the fact that men no longer turned to look at her when she walked into a room. Since all of her influence and money had always come to her by virtue of her appearance and its effect on powerful men, becoming a rose hip was truly a harsh wake-up call, letting her know that her former wiles would no longer serve her in the second half of life. She’d spent her life swimming in the shallow end of the pool. Her challenge now was to go deeper. Those of you who’ve never experienced the power of great physical beauty in the first place will probably have a much easier time settling into the rose hip stage. In fact, if you’re anything like me—and I know many of you are—you may happily find yourself becoming interested in clothing, skin care, and makeup perhaps for the first time in your life. What’s more, you’ll also find that the self-confidence and self-esteem from all you’ve done in the first half of your life have built a solid foundation of self-acceptance that leaves you feeling more empowered than ever before.
But whether or not we were ever raving beauties, all of us want to look our best at every age. During perimenopause, as we heed the call to truly come home to ourselves, we find ourselves lit from within by an inner glow. We find that we may never be rosebuds again, but we can still remain as attractive as possible by paying attention to good skin and body care. And we may even want to avail ourselves of plastic surgery or other cosmetic procedures. More choices are available to budding rose hips than ever before.
MAKING PEACE WITH YOUR CHANGING SKIN
One of the most distressing parts of midlife for many women is watching our skin begin to sag and get “crepey.” I began to notice changes in my skin—a tendency toward more dryness and some fine wrinkles around my eyes—starting in my late thirties. When these first became noticeable, I decided to like them, since they reminded me of my father’s eyes, which were always surrounded by the crinkles of lots of laughter and smiles. But I also wanted to do everything possible to keep those lines from getting deeper and more unattractive as time went on.
One of my e-letter subscribers eloquently shared the common dilemma of midlife skin changes and their potential emotional impact:
I am forty-eight years old, at my ideal weight, and extremely fit. I work out on a regular basis and lift weights as part of my exercise program. I hike whenever I get the chance. However, it seems like almost overnight, the skin on my legs has become extremely slack. As I look down when I walk, I can see the skin on my thighs shake with each step. I’m sure it’s the result of cumulative sun damage along with many years of ga
ining and losing those stubborn ten pounds. Is there anything that can be done? I now use sunscreen whenever I am outdoors, never bake in the sun, and try to keep my weight stable. Must I resign myself to wearing long dresses? Are there any supplements I can take? Is there anything that would rebuild the collagen? Any surgery that would help? I’m in the process of a divorce after twenty-seven years of marriage and am, naturally, concerned about my appearance. I’d be very grateful for any suggestions.
Fortunately there’s a great deal that we can do to both preserve the health of our midlife skin and even heal some of the damage that has already been done. While we’re doing this, however, we still have to go through midlife with the courage to live our lives joyfully and fully, despite such things as aging skin and changing bodies. I know both from my practice and from my own life experience that this feels much harder when you’re going through a divorce or loss of a life partner.
Nevertheless, it’s important to remember that many women find love and happiness at midlife and beyond, regardless of a little sun damage or sagging here and there. This point was brought home to me rather dramatically during an event at which I spent time talking to two different women. One, a stunning woman in her late thirties with flawless skin and an almost perfect figure who was also a very successful businesswoman, was bemoaning the fact that there simply weren’t any good men around with whom she could find happiness.
The Wisdom of Menopause Page 49
