Mental Savings Accounts

Action to take

Be sure you are making deposits in your mental savings account. Then be of good cheer that your mental savings account helps buffer you from dementia and Alzheimer’s–and even helps improve your cognitive functioning.

Why

Penn State researchers, Sherry Willis and K. Warner Schaie, report that between ages 46 and 60, 10-15% of people show cognitive declines, and 10-15% of people show cognitive gains. The biggest factors in improving minds are mental stimulation, education, and exercise. Your brain is like a muscle, use it and it grows stronger, don’t use it and it atrophies. Apparently, any kind of mental stimulation helps–taking a course, reading, artistic pursuits, music, and even playing games. (But please don’t tell my video-game-addict teenaged son I said games.)

Another validation for the dementia preventative effects of using your mind comes from David Snowdon’s study of nuns. A convent provides an ideal research environment as the nuns have the same environment, schedule, food, and even prayers–year after year for decades. In his book, Aging With Grace, Snowden reports that nuns with better education and nuns who had intellectual pursuits were less likely to develop dementia or Alzheimer’s. Results were verified by psychological testing, genetic testing, and brain autopsies.

Willis and Schaie found that the one common denominator in who lost cognitive functioning was hypertension. Thus, successful management of hypertension is vital important to future cognitive functioning. 

Another twist comes from Brandeis researcher Margie Lachman, who found a wide variation in cognitive change over time, and that decline is often reversible. She found that people who feel in control of their lives were likely to be happier,  have better health, and be sharper mentally. She speculates that not feeling in control leads to anxiety, distress, and not looking for solutions.

Envisioning a mental savings account encourages you to make sure you are making deposits and gives a more hopeful outlook that decline is not inevitable–rather your mind can get better with age.

Quotes

The life you are leading is simply a reflection of your thinking.
~Doug Firebaugh

Few minds wear out; more rust out.
~Christian Vovee

We should not only use the brains we have, but all that we can borrow.
~Woodrow Wilson

Humor

Men forget everything; women remember everything.
That’s why men need instant replays in sports.
They’ve already forgotten what happened.
~Rita Rudner

He has a first-rate mind until he makes it up.
~Lady Violet Bonham Carter

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Anti-Aging Psychologist Dr. Michael Brickey is keynote speaker and author of the Oprah-featured book, Defy Aging and 52 baby steps to Grow Young. The books and his Reverse Aging anti-aging hypnosis CDs comprise his anti-aging system.

Outsmarting Depression

Action to take

If you become depressed, vividly remind yourself of an upbeat, resourceful
memory before imagining the future. If a friend, co-worker, or family member
is depressed you can seamlessly use the same sequence to help him or her
feel more hopeful about the future.

Why

Depression is the common cold of mental health. When researchers have
depressed people imagine the future, it is usually bleak. If you’ve ever told
someone “Cheer up, tomorrow will be a better day,” you got that look that
says, “Yeah, right.”

Our minds are capable of logically understanding that the death, job loss, divorce,
etc., eventually will not sting as much and new positive events will occur.
But when we try to imagine the future, we almost invariably base emotions about
the future on the emotions we are feeling now. I.e., our minds are brilliant at imagining events
or even things we have never seen, but have great difficulty imagining emotions other
than our current feelings.

But there is a solution–a way to help your mind have more optimistic feelings
when thinking about the future. Think back to a time when you felt good and felt
hopeful and optimistic. Perhaps it was a time when you felt unstoppable.
Vividly remember what you saw, felt, and heard. Now while you are feeling these
positive emotions, imagine what will happen tomorrow, next week, or next year.
If you slip back into current depressed feelings, mentally take yourself back to
the resourceful time.

When a friend is talking gloomily about his future, slide in a
“Remember the time when we….” Revel in the fond memory.
Then you can ask what his plans are for next week.
With someone you don’t know as well you can ask about
better times or the best times of his life.

Certainly more severe cases of depression may need additional interventions
such as psychotherapy, exercise, better nutrition, addressing drug and alcohol
abuse, or anti-depressant medication. My analogy for anti-depressants is the
time when you left your car headlights on overnight and your car refused to start.
You got a jump start, drove it for awhile, fixed anything that was draining the battery,
and the car worked again. Of course, in some severe cases people need to stay on
anti-depressants permanently.

Depression is a miserable experience that impairs relationships, impairs
work performance, and makes us more vulnerable to illnesses.
The simple strategy of vividly experiencing positive memories before
contemplating tomorrow can prevent a lot of pain and get people more
hopeful and productive. Just as we all know we need to exercise and
eat healthily, the trick is having the presence of mind and discipline to do it.
This strategy is a lot easier than getting motivated to exercise or saying no
to that pastry. It’s free, it only takes a few minutes, and it works.

Quotes

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
Shakespeare; Hamlet Act II, scene ii

Depression is really just anger without enthusiasm.
~Flo & Friends cartoon by Campbell Bigel

Humor

Statisticians say one out of four people are mentally ill.
Check three friends. If they’re OK, you’re it.

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Anti-Aging Psychologist Dr. Michael Brickey is keynote speaker and author of the Oprah-featured book, Defy Aging and 52 baby steps to Grow Young. The books and his Reverse Aging anti-aging hypnosis CDs comprise his anti-aging system.

Brain WiFi

Action to take

When you need to get something done, remind yourself of the strengths
you have already shown.

Why

Our brains have a built in WiFi (wireless fidelity system) to read and imitate
others’ emotions in a matter of milliseconds. There is great adaptive value
to quickly recognizing danger and reacting to it before the conscious mind
even has time to figure things out. Our WiFi system also facilities rapport,
shared emotions, and emotional bonding.

When you see someone scratch, yawn, or smile, your premotor muscles
activate to do the same. What determines whether the movement it
executed is beyond the scope of this article. What is clear from
Daniel Goleman’s research on Social Intelligence is that you are programmed
to imitate other people. Two implications come to my mind for our goal of
thinking, feeling, looking, and being happier.

#1 You become like the people you are around. If you are around dour, sour
people, it drags your mood downwards. If you associate with upbeat people
who smile a lot, you will smile more as well. I’m not suggesting you get
a divorce because your spouse doesn’t smile enough. But it is worth considering
whether the friends you choose, the activities you go to, and your workplace pulls
you up or down. At the least, adopt a belief that you gravitate to upbeat people.
You may want to consider whether you want to make some changes in how you
spend your time or even whether your job could be structured differently or
is ultimately a job you want to stay with.

It is interesting to theorize what can go wrong with emotional WiFi. Religious fanatics
rigidly adhere to a belief system and pay little attention to WiFi input. Stereotypical
lab scientists who do great research but are inept with people also have a WiFi
system that pays little attention to input. Anti-social personalities may or may not
read others well but ignore empathy. Dependent personalities too readily absorb
and react to everyone else’s feelings.

#2 When one person is smiling and another frowning, which emotion is most
contagious? One influence is power, i.e., people are more likely to mirror the
bosses’ emotions than the boss it to mirror theirs. Power aside, it usually is
the person with the strongest personality. By strongest personality I mean
the person who has the clearest self-concept about who he or she is,
especially emotionally, and stays with that default program most of the time.
Thus a person who has a self-concept of being an upbeat, very resilient
person who rarely gets pulled down is likely to be emotionally dominant
with others. She is also likely to have what I would call an emotional
immunity to others’ negative emotions.

Make a statement about your emotional self-concept. Does it give you
the benefits I just described? If not, tweak it until it gives you the positive
strong personality you love to have.

Quotes

Emotions will either serve or master, depending on who is in charge.
~Jim Rohn
You have more to do than you can possibly do.
You just need to feel good about your choices.
~Time management/productivity guru David Allen

Humor

Mommy my feelings don’t feel good.
~Sonia Brickey at age 6 and not willing to settle for bad feelings

T-shirts from women who take crap from nobody:
~Guys have feelings too—but who cares
~Please don’t make me kill you
~I’m one of those bad things that happen to good people

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Anti-Aging Psychologist Dr. Michael Brickey is keynote speaker and author of the Oprah-featured book, Defy Aging and 52 baby steps to Grow Young. The books and his Reverse Aging anti-aging hypnosis CDs comprise his anti-aging system.

Aging Can Help Your EQ

Action to take

If you know more, have more savvy, and are more effective
than you were years ago, give yourself credit for having a higher EQ.

Why

Pat Nicolino, a corporate consultant friend, was catching me up on
what had happened since I saw her in September. In short, she is having
great success at turning around yet another company and has
never felt better or enjoyed herself more.

“I’m 56 now and I have 20 more EQ points than when I was 36,”
she said with exuberance. “At 36 I would have been clueless
about how to accomplish things that I now do with ease.”
Everyone knows what IQ is. EQ, she explained, is knowing how
to get things done and doing them.

I love it. As you get older your experiences and new learning build on each other.
Do you have more confidence than you did twenty years ago? Do you
know more about how organizations work and how to work with people?
Have you learned a lot of new skills in the last twenty years?
If so, give yourself credit for a higher EQ (Experience Quotient).

I would suggest that at 18 the average IQ and EQ is 100. If you are
continually learning and growing, give yourself credit for an additional
EQ point each year since age 18. If you have gone back to school,
learned a new career, or have had other intense learning experiences,
give yourself extra credit.

After the insight, I realized there is a lot of overlap between experience quotient
and Dr. Daniel Goleman’s emotional intelligence and his eventual use of
EQ for emotional intelligence. The broad skills he describes for emotional
intelligence have a lot of overlap with experience quotient. The difference is
an emphasis on having social intelligence vs. those skills getting better with experience.
Why is considering your EQ important? Psychology and medicine
have painted a negative picture of declining skills as we age.
Your EQ reminds you that you have grown, and are getting sharper with age.
No disrespect to my teenage children, but would you really want to go back
to the mind you had at 18? Neither would I. So what’s your EQ?

Quotes

Many people think you have to be very intelligent to be successful in life.
Exhaustive research shows that many self-made millionaires have only average intelligence.
~Brian Tracy

Continuous effort–not strength or intelligence–is the key to unlocking our potential.
~Winston Churchill

Humor

America is the only country where it takes more brains to
fill out the tax forms than it does to make the money.

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Anti-Aging Psychologist Dr. Michael Brickey is keynote speaker and author of the Oprah-featured book, Defy Aging and 52 baby steps to Grow Young. The books and his Reverse Aging anti-aging hypnosis CDs comprise his anti-aging system.

Coping with Dying

Action to take

Know what is helpful to talk about when someone is struggling with dying.

Why

The ideal is to be like to Energizer Bunny on Alkaline batteries.
He just keeps going and going and going at full power and then dies suddenly.

For many people, however, dying is a long drawn out process.
Cancer and many other chronic illnesses can raise a lot of why questions
and foster depression.

One of the key coping skills for living a long, healthy, happy life
is coping with loved ones dying. What can you say to comfort someone
who is having a tough time dying?

We all want to think that our lives mattered and we played our hands well.
Presidents worry about the legacy they will leave. For people who believe
there is place in heaven waiting for them, the task usually is easy.
For other people, emphasizing three points usually helps:

1. You helped a lot of people and touched a lot of lives.
Give specific examples. Rearing children is an obvious example,
but so is mentoring, great friendships, volunteer work, donating blood, etc.
When people are dying, they usually focus on family and relationships
as opposed to work. Consequently, contributions to the profession
usually don’t resonate except for professors, politicians, and founders.

2. You did honest, needed work. It helped a lot of people and
made the world a better place. While there are crooks and shysters,
most people’s work made the world a better place and they should take credit for it.

3. You went many places, did many things, and met fascinating people.
You heard a lot of music, saw a lot of beauty, and enjoyed life.
In short you lived a full life. (Note: How you word things can make
a big difference. If you talk about living fully, an unhelpful “yes-but”
inner voice often objects with things they didn’t get to do.)

If one of the points doesn’t fit, emphasize the other two.

Quotes

What we do for ourselves dies with us.
What we do for others and the world remains and is immortal.
~Albert Pine (a 19th-century English author)

To be what is called happy, one should have
(1) something to live on,
(2) something to live for,
(3) something to die for.
The lack of one of these results in drama.
The lack of two results in tragedy.
~ Cyprian Norwid (a 19th-century Polish poet)

Humor

On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done lying down.
~Woody Allen

For three days after death, hair and fingernails continue to grow,
but phone calls taper off.
~Johnny Carson

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Anti-Aging Psychologist Dr. Michael Brickey is keynote speaker and author of the Oprah-featured book, Defy Aging and 52 baby steps to Grow Young. The books and his Reverse Aging anti-aging hypnosis CDs comprise his anti-aging system.