There is one factor that increases the chances of reaching old age in good health. Our columnist Elena Pogrebizhskaya tells us about it.
I have a film about the secret to eternal youth. That’s what it’s called. The heroes of the film, as you can guess, are scientists and people aged about a hundred years. Surgeon Fyodor Uglov was 104 years old at the time of filming. And I was quite sincerely interested in what the secret was. I managed to find only one common criterion. Everyone had it, regardless of gender, character, fame and profession. Every centenarian turned out to be an optimist.
WHY IT’S ADVANTAGEOUS TO BE AN OPTIMIST
I wondered whether this was a fluke or not. Life deals the same setbacks and tragedies to the optimist as it does to the pessimist, but the optimist supposedly bears them better. He stands up beautifully after defeat and, despite the blows of fate, gathers his strength and begins his journey again. The pessimist, on the other hand, gives up and becomes depressed.
I was taught that a sane person, a normal and sane person (and it is good to be sane) is one who more or less objectively and even critically assesses the world around him and, most importantly, himself. That is, he understands perfectly well where he is good and clever, and where he is a liar, a weakling and a wimp.
And right now it turned out that being a realist is wrong and unprofitable
And it is very good to ‘photoshop’ reality internally, to engage in positive self-deception, to consider oneself the best, regardless of objective reality – in short, to be an optimist.
Researchers Joanna Starek and Caroline Keating studied the achievements of athletes – swimmers of the same age, in the same physical shape – and found a direct correlation between their success in competitions and the level of positive self-talk. Athletes who thought highly of themselves, their abilities and future performance swam much faster than others. Describing the experiment, Starek remarked, ‘What scientists used to call optimism, the belief in the best, the coach of a successful team would call the mindset of a champion.’
HOW OPTIMISTS DIFFER FROM PESSIMISTS
The main expert on optimism is the American psychologist Martin Seligman, the founder of the whole field of positive psychology. He conducted his first experiments to understand how to treat depression: his father was paralysed, and the once calm and balanced man quickly lost interest in life.
When faced with an unpleasant situation, some perceive it as inevitable and give up, while others – optimists – try to change it
A characteristic feature of pessimists is their belief that failures will last for a long time, no matter how hard they are fought, and that they are to blame for them. Optimists, on the other hand, treat the blows of fate in exactly the opposite way. They believe that any defeat is temporary. They perceive unfavourable situation as a challenge and fight it vigorously. Of course, they can sometimes panic, but I’m talking about the general principle here.
HOW THE WAY YOU LOOK AT THE WORLD AFFECTS YOUR HEALTH
It has been proven in a number of studies that optimists are in better health than pessimists. For example, psychologist Christopher Peterson tracked the health of 150 students for a year. He found that compared to optimists, pessimists were twice as likely to get infections and see doctors.
In the mid-1930s, the Grant Research Foundation organised surveillance of healthy adults. The researchers wanted to follow the fate of gifted people to identify the ingredients of their success and health. They selected two hundred men among Harvard freshmen. These men actively participated in the study for half a century. Every five years they were subjected to medical examinations and relentlessly forced to fill out questionnaires.
Years later, young researchers replaced the aging researchers and continued the work
And what did they find? It turned out that health at 60 is strongly correlated with the level of optimism at 25. In middle age, pessimists began to get sick earlier and more severely than optimists. By age 45, the difference was already quite significant.
Until the age of 45, optimism had almost no effect on health: it remained at about the same level as at 25. Around 45, however, the male body begins to age. How quickly and seriously, can be predicted based on whether a man was pessimistic or optimistic a quarter of a century ago. What’s more, the scientists took other factors – physical and mental health at 25 – into account by introducing them into the equation. It turned out that optimism plays a decisive role in health from the age of 45 and at least until the age of 65.