AGELESS MIND - KEEPING YOURSELF POWERFULLY POSITIVE

The Proven Power of your Mind
The single most important thing you can do to look and feel younger is to think positively about yourself. People who are more positive about life not only have a much happier one, but also have been found to live an average eight years longer than their more pessimistic friends and family.

This comes as no surprise when you consider how important our thoughts are. Your body responds to what you tell it, which means that if you think you are youthful, desirable or healthy, then your brain will look for evidence to support this. After all, it does not want to make a liar of you. The opposite is also true. If you constantly tell yourself that you are not as young as you used to be, your brain will prove it by finding examples of ageing aches, pains and wrinkles. But if you tell yourself you look and feel 10 years younger, your brain will show that to be true, too. Spoken affirmations may sound very 'self-help', but you are doing them anyway, it is just that you are saying negative ones ('Look at the state of my bottom in this dress!'). So you may as well hijack them and switch to something far more supportive.

Retrain your brain
Your brain is like a computer, storing your interpretation of events on its hard drive. And that is the point. What you think becomes your reality, which means you can always reprogramme your computer to start thinking younger. In one experiment, a group of people in their 70s and 80s were asked to think, behave and dress as they had 20 years ago, and within five days their biomarkers showed signs of age reversal.

Beliefs are extremely powerful. They are our explanations of how life is, and we collect them to help us get a sense of certainty in an unpredictable world. But we do not check whether they are still valid, and this means many are now no longer true (as a teenager, 40 probably really did seem ancient!). If you are not sure what you believe about your age, just notice how you look and feel every day. Are you stiff and sore first thing in the morning? Do you feel too old to exercise like you used to? Are your wrinkles the only thing you see in the mirror? Whatever you focus on, you will experience more of, whether that is joint pain or sagging skin.

Changing a belief can happen gradually (experts estimate it takes 21 days for a new habit to take hold), or as a flash of new insight (turn the page to find out how). Either way, be prepared to practise every day, as weakening old habits and building new ones is a little like muscle-strengthening exercises in the gym. It takes time and commitment, but the results are well worth it.