LONGEVITY, MINDSET and MINDFULNESS
Learned Helplessness and the Acceptance of Aging

Life is purely subjective… However, one thing that we can probably all agree on is that life is short. And it feels shorter the older you get. The more we experience and learn, the more we want to achieve and solve, and the less time we have to accomplish our list of expanding goals.

I doubt there is anyone who has left this earth who can honestly say, “I did every single thing I ever wanted to accomplish.” Humans always want more. Sure, we all have bucket lists, but we make those lists based on the parameters of our forecasted timeline and capabilities. What if we could expand that list based on our imaginations and creativity?

Yet today, there exists some people who take what is called a pro-aging trance. A very good example of this is the objection to inequality of access: this reasoning assumes that rejuvenation would not be available to everyone who needs it, for economic, political, or whatever reasons; understandably, this is perceived as a profound injustice, which pushes a fair number of people to make a leap and conclude that the best way to avoid this injustice is to never develop rejuvenation to begin with.

It’s hard to believe that they would still reason this way if “rejuvenation” were replaced by something else. Suppose I lost my mind and said, “Plumbing is not available everywhere in the world, and that’s unjust! They should never have developed it in the first place, and we should take it away from those who already have it to put an end to this injustice!”

The example becomes even more effective if we replace rejuvenation with human rights. Not all fundamental rights are respected, or even recognized, everywhere in the world, in spite of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the work of the UN, UNICEF, and so on. Even slavery, though theoretically abolished in all recognized countries, is still a thing. Who in their right mind would ever argue that human rights should be taken away from people who have them, or should never have been thought up in the first place, for the sake of equality? “Equal” is not the same as “just” or “desirable”, and being equally in trouble is a rather cold comfort.

We want to exist. We all popped into existence, in a sense out of nowhere, into a world full of marvels and pleasures as well as dangers and sorrow, but the former induce in us a desire to stay that, in most cases, is far stronger than the desire to leave that might be caused by the latter. Yet, at some point, all of us had to come to terms with the fact we can’t stay here forever. We will have to give up on everything and everyone we’ve come to know and love, our memories, our passions, and ourselves. Realizing that your own life is finite is terrible, especially if it happens during your childhood, when you’re likely to be very enthusiastic about everything in your life.

This seems unjust enough as it is, and it would hardly feel better if you were one of only some people who’re doomed to oblivion. We can get over, and even used to, really unjust things, but could we ever get over the fact that other people could go on living, maybe forever, but not ourselves? If, as some people fear, rejuvenation were really to become a privilege accorded only to people with a certain socioeconomic status, and you were left out, you would probably experience a crushing, absolutely understandable resentment for people who, unlike you, are entitled to keep existing; the thought of your own mortality would become more imposing and difficult to bear.

It may be that some people are so afraid to end up in that situation that they’d rather have rejuvenation never come to pass—even if it means giving up on whatever chance they’d have to benefit from it themselves. Maybe, in this particular case, being equally in trouble might be preferable to finding yourself in a position where your deepest desire is achievable in principle but not in practice. After all, as long as rejuvenation doesn’t exist, it’s easy to tell yourself that you don’t want it, because the object of your temptation simply isn’t there; if it was there, it would arguably be much more difficult to cope with your inability to get it.

When you’re repeatedly subjected to an unpleasant or painful situation over which you seem to have no control, there comes a point past which you simply give up on the very idea that you could possibly escape your predicament. Once you learn that you’re helpless in the face of circumstances beyond your control, you could end up simply accepting what is happening to you, even when the circumstances have changed enough to offer a way out.

Learned helplessness, is exactly what it sounds like—learning that you’re helpless to change a certain situation and therefore learning to accept it as it is, no matter how bad it might be and whether it is actually true that you can’t change it—humans experience it in a variety of circumstances and with a range of possible effects on their lives.

Martin Seligman ran an experiment to demonstrate learned helplessness in people. Test subjects were asked to perform mental tasks with an annoying background noise playing. Some subjects had the power to stop the noise, while others did not; the people who had control over the noise performed better than the ones who didn’t, even though they rarely took the trouble to actually turn off the noise—an indication that simply the knowledge that they could eliminate the disturbance if they wanted to was enough to positively affect their performance.

Learned helplessness plays a role in the pro-aging trance—or, at least, what happens in people’s minds because of the pro-aging trance is very much reminiscent of learned helplessness. The conviction that aging is a blessing in disguise and that the fact that people age to death is actually good,. (To be fair, there are also many misconceptions and concerns—often poorly if at all addressed—that contribute to this conviction.)

It’s not a coincidence that older people have far worse health than young people, and it’s also not a coincidence that it’s far more common to die at age 80 than at age 20—the frailty and ill-health of old age increase your vulnerability to death from all causes, and as if dying wasn’t bad enough, spending the last decade or two of your life powerlessly watching as your health problems, big or small, keep piling up isn’t any better; aging wreaks terrible emotional and financial costs on you and your loved ones, and society is having an increasingly difficult time with it.

Looking at how aging is different from other negative situations can be useful to see the connection between learned helplessness and the pro-aging trance. The human experiments were focused on an unpleasant situation that was happening at the time, while, for some of us, old age—may still be decades away and not necessarily something that affects our daily lives; aging begins pretty much since conception, the effects of aging don’t really become debilitating or life-threatening until very late in life.

However, even though you don’t spend your entire life with worsening eyesight, diabetes, cancer, or heart disease (to name but a few), you—like everyone else on the planet—were brought up with the notions that aging is inevitable and that one day it will kill you if nothing else does it first. You’re accustomed to the thought that, as you age, you will lose your health to at least some extent, and you have an idea of what you might be like in old age—weak, hunched over, easily fatigued, and with feeble senses and, if you’re unlucky, even more serious health problems. This idea is weaved into every fiber of our society, arts, and institutions; even if you’re not exposed directly to the ailments of aging for most of your life, you are exposed to the unpleasant thought that your clock is ticking—a clock that measures not just the time you have left but also your remaining health—and that there’s no way that you could ever stop the clock.

In other words, you spend your entire life with the knowledge that your health is slowly declining, a decidedly unpleasant thing that, ultimately, you have no power to prevent. Therefore, you learn to accept it and make your peace with it, perhaps whimpering about it every now and again. Once the effects of aging manifest themselves in your old age, the feeling of helplessness gets even more real, as your health problems are no longer hypothetical and your doctor can essentially only help you manage your symptoms. This overall situation has much in common with the definition of learned helplessness.

What’s interesting about learned helplessness is that, once you’ve learned that you’re helpless, you hold that conviction even when you’re no longer really helpless and could exercise control over whatever negative circumstances you’re facing; learned helplessness blinds you to any opportunity to improve your situation. With aging, the situation is different because, up until very recently, you were helpless. While tweaking your lifestyle and diet might yield some benefits, you cannot seem to stop or reverse aging; there were previously no options that you may be aware and therefore was nothing that you could do about it. In such a world, learned helplessness acted as a useful psychological defense mechanism that helped to keep the thought of aging out of your mind—there’s no point making yourself more miserable by dwelling on that which you cannot change.

This moment in history is somewhat awkward, because while it is still technically true that you can’t avoid aging, it is also true that our current scientific understanding of aging puts us in an unprecedented situation in which bona-fide rejuvenation therapy to reset our biological age is real. While it’s not yet set in stone that aging, disease and death will soon (or ever) be history, in the current circumstances, the notion that aging is inevitable, unchangeable, and cannot be fought is false.

Some people adopt a conviction that you can’t escape aging as an excuse to justify self-destructive behavior—say, smoking—which inevitably leads them to miss the rejuvenation train.

With a bit of a stretch, you could say that humanity as a whole suffers from learned helplessness about aging; over the course of millennia, it has learned that its fate is to be wiped out by aging if by nothing else, as nothing could be done about it. Worse still, humanity has learned to consider this belief a sign of wisdom, and now that an opportunity to turn the tables is finally in sight, a great many members of our species might miss the opportunity if we keep believing that we are helpless before aging.

It really doesn’t help that humanity has been fooled time and again by more-or-less honest attempts to achieve rejuvenation, which have always utterly failed (simply because they didn’t have access to the neuropsychological science that we have today). There’s also the fact that nobody wants to get their hopes up only to be hit by burning disappointment that they cannot control aging. It’s understandable if people still think that aging is an undeniable force.

We all fear the thought of losing our health and life. In the meanwhile, we would all benefit from keeping in mind how our own psychology might get in the way of our future.

SUMMARY
Just because you can’t understand the exact science does not mean you should dismiss the possibility that you can in fact extend your lifespan. This similiar scenario has happened many times in the past, where the general public does not understand a technology, resulting in the assumption that something is impossible. Here are some examples:

“The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.” – William Preece, British Post Office.

“The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty – a fad.” – President of the Michigan Savings Bank advising Henry Ford’s lawyer, Horace Rackham, not to invest in the Ford Motor Company.

“There is practically no chance communications space satellites will be used to provide better telephone, telegraph, television or radio service inside the United States.” – T.A.M. Craven, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) commissioner.

“A rocket will never be able to leave the Earth’s atmosphere.”  –  New York Times in 1936.

That last quote is of particular interest. Not only have we left the Earth’s atmosphere, but we’ve put a human on the moon and landed space craft on different planets within our solar system.

Can you imagine if we could travel back to the 1800’s and tell people that we have been into space? They would probably think we’re insane. Perhaps we’re now those people who can’t see beyond our personal atmosphere.

BOTTOM LINE
LONGEVITY, MINDSET and MINDFULNESS
The underlying factors that govern our health and longevity are positive versus the negative attitudes and emotions attached to beliefs,  contained in our mind-set.

What are we telling ourselves?
Are your clients telling themselves that they are young, smart, full of energy, and healthy?
Or do they find most of their self-talk about how awful they feel, how they are losing their memory, and how their body is not like it used to be.

The Anti-Aging International Academy uniquely provides its students the knowledge and tools how to help their clients repair, prevent and even reverse aging damage through harnessing the power of their mindset.

The Brain-Mind-Body Formula
Bottom Line:
1. The Brain has the power to regenerate itself and affect change in our body!

A) The Brain’s limbic system includes the amygdala, hippocampus and hypothalamus -areas of the brain which have now been proved to be capable of brain cell regrowth.

B) These groundbreaking new research findings provide the scientific basis of why our students learn how to focus on boosting (via our proprietary Neuro EXperiential EXercises™ ) the brain's endorphin levels that stimulate and balance their Immune system and promote the repair of cells and tissues to build a healthier, stronger younger version of their body and brain.

2. The second part of the Brain-Mind-Body Formula.
-The Mind-Body interface and Resetting its Operational Code!.
We now also have scientific proof from many randomized trials that our state of mind (see above research findings) affects the aging process, our well-being and health. By harnessing the power of the mind we can reset our biological clock via the subconscious using the Clinic's Neuro Change Methodology eg; intentional / guided imagery and perceptual awareness.
 

The key to success in any anti-aging initiative is the selection of the appropriate brain-mind-body Change Model to fit the client's specific mindset needs. Anti-Aging International Academies proven Therapist Coach Course meets the critical needs for practitioners to be trained in the use of a range of validated, reliable neurocoaching models, tools and techniques.

See: AAIA's invitational, fast-tracked Longevity Therapist course (Self-study / Distance Learning Format).


Terminology:

Longevity Therapists are engaged in the practice of Longevity Management.

Longevity Therapists work within the Operational Domain of the Brain-Mind-Body Network.

Our Brain’s capacity can be stimulated to upgrade itself to fit the applications it is running.

The Mind’s operating system (Mindset) contains a suite of programs eg; Emotions, Attitudes, Beliefs, Selves, the Stories we tell our self -that:
- affect our ability to repair and reverse aging of the Brain and Body which in turn -
- affects our well-being (the quality of our present state as expressed through our health, performance, happiness and life satisfaction).

Being successful in longevity management is about updating the Mindset to best generate the desired physical and mental states of being to fit evolving life circumstances and needs.

MINDBODY RESET CODE —your body's "operating instructions" for interpreting your world, creating your sense of self, and setting your future. The MindBody Reset Code is your key to safely and successfully release your potential for a healthier, more youthful, productive, happier life.

MINDBODY RESET CODE = Your Selves, Attitudes, Emotional Drives, Emotional Needs, Beliefs, THE STORIES YOU TELL YOURSELF that drive your MINDSET.

BRAIN-MIND-BODY TOOLS = Evidence-based, cognitive neuroplasticity therapy that provides us the vehicle to select the right MINDBODY RESET CODE / reset switch to stimulate neural re-growth and body change. The Toolkit consists of proven, proprietary Neuro Metacognition X-ercises ™ that generate measurable, sustainable mental and whole body change.


AAIA's Longevity Therapist Course and Registration Form