Carl Bourhenne's Fitness and Long Life Manual |
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Youthful and Attractive |
What you like to do, Expectations
Have a positive attitude toward life. Expect to live a long time. Find out what you like to do, and do it!
The first indication that a positive attitude toward life is a big asset toward a
healthy long life came from a forty year long study initiated in 1937, at Harvard University.
The study showed that the participants who were most pessimistic at age 25 had many more
serious illnesses in their sixties.
The newly emerging field in medicine of the discipline called, "psychoneuroimmunology" continues to impress researchers. Ever since cancer treatments began to successfully use "visioning" to encourage patients to mentally fight their cancer, the medical community's interest in a positive attitude for health has grown. The reason that having a positive attitude toward life promotes a healthy long life is that the immune system, our protector of life, is physically linked to the nervous system. In fact, our sympathetic nervous system (SNS) continually exercises control over the immune system.
When we are in an up, or positive frame of mind the immune system is stimulated by the SNS. But when we are down because of stress or depression the immune system is suppressed by the SNS. For example, negative personal situations such as loneliness have been shown to suppress cancer-fighting NK white blood cells.
And the body of data has been growing, so that this relatively new field of psychoneuroimmunology is being adopted into the medical schools.
Having a positive attitude toward life affects more than just the immune system, though. When we think positive thoughts we generate a shower of supportive hormones, endorphins, and other chemicals that stimulate our systems into activity, and thus health.
Having too many or prolonged negative thoughts and attitudes, however, generates showers of inhibitive hormones and chemicals into the system, slowing it down and impairing our functioning and our health. So it truly pays to have a positive attitude toward life.
Just as positive thinking stimulates our system, our expectations prepare our systems for what is to come. If we expect to live a long life, the expectation itself stimulates our system to generate health promoting hormones and other chemicals, just as our expectation of seeing a loved one stimulates all of the chemicals that cause our pulse to race and our attitude to soar.
If we expect to live a long life, we will tend more to internally prepare for and provide for a long, healthy life.
The directive to, "Find out what you like to do and do it" goes hand in hand with the reasons stated above for having a positive attitude toward life. Having to continually force ourselves to do what we don't particularly enjoy or despise can only slow our systems, including our immune system, and lead to poor health and a shorter lifespan. Doing something that we find enjoyable though, stimulates our entire system, enlivening and invigorates us, promoting a healthy long life.
There is also evidence that ambivalence about goals and directions is unhealthy. One who is ambivalent about what they want to do tends to analyze more and act less, and the results of such ambivalence and inactivity can be chest pains, dizziness, nausea, headaches, and depression.
For some of us, finding out what we like to do and doing it requires great effort. Just finding out what we like to do requires much thought and self-assessment, and is perhaps the most difficult task of all. Often a friend or counselor can help, and the process of discovery could take weeks, months, or even longer.
But once this discovery is made, life takes on new meaning, and everything seems possible.
Carl Bourhenne, MA
