268: Can Mindfulness Make You Younger?
Age Less / Live More
Lucas Rockwood
4.8 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 17 August 2017
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Your body responds to the stress of a busy morning with the same biochemical responses it would have if a tiger pounced on you in the jungle. Intellectually, these two events are completely different, but your body can't tell them apart. Genetically, we evolved to "survive," and our modern world feels very dangerous even though we actually live safe lives of luxury (relatively speaking).
Mindfulness is the conscious practice of focusing your awareness on the here and now (in all its comfort, pain, and wonder), and while the term is thrown around flippantly, the research behind it is fascinating. Your body and mind are not just connected, they are actually one interwoven system; and by returning to the present moment, you mental and physical health will improve measurably.
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Listen & Learn:
- How the simple act of paying attention and staying present could turn back the clock and physiologically make you younger
- How the mind-body connection is a misnomer—they are intrinsically intertwined
- Why we want to be responsive not reactive
- Why stress is the worry that something is going to happen (which may or may not be true) and that the result will be negative (which may or may not be true)
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Dr. Ellen Langer, Ph.D., is known as the mother of mindfulness. She is a social psychologist and the first female professor to gain tenure in the Psychology Department at Harvard. She is the author of 11 books and more than 200 research articles written for general and academic readers on mindfulness.
Her books include Mindfulness; The Power of Mindful Learning; On Becoming an Artist: Reinventing Yourself Through Mindful Creativity; Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility; and The Wiley Mindfulness Handbook.
Nutritional Tip of the Week:
- Stinging Nettle
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Sometimes you'll hear yoga teachers or yoga students talk about having tension, stress, |
| 0:05.0 | emotional stuff bundled up and locked up in their muscles. |
| 0:08.4 | We could argue about whether that is really emotions locked up in your muscles or if it's just a trigger for an emotional |
| 0:14.7 | response. |
| 0:15.7 | It doesn't really matter. |
| 0:16.7 | All of us have certainly experienced where you get a massage and your shoulders and suddenly |
| 0:20.5 | it's just blah, it just feels like the weight of the world is being |
| 0:23.4 | released and there's a principle called autogenic inhibition not agenic |
| 0:28.3 | inhibition this is where if you have a tense and overly tense part of your |
| 0:32.3 | body shoulders is a common area, your glutes, |
| 0:35.8 | your parapormous, when your deep six and your bum is another common area, your hamstrings, |
| 0:41.6 | your sowas muscle on the top front of your leg crosses your pelvis that's another area |
| 0:46.5 | when you get these overactive muscles it can either create or be in reaction to you stress in your life. |
| 0:54.0 | Autogenic inhibition is when we basically press on a muscle to make it release. |
| 0:59.5 | The analogy I always use is imagine you're going out to run a 5k and you're jogging along it's a |
| 1:05.3 | wonderful Saturday afternoon suddenly get a cramp in your calf what's the first |
| 1:09.3 | thing you do you bend over and you dig your fingers into that muscle as deep as you can. This is our |
| 1:15.8 | intrinsic knowledge of onogenic inhibition. We know if we grab that muscle we |
| 1:19.7 | squeeze really hard, it'll relax. And using Herzogne |
| 1:23.3 | massage balls, we're able to use this same principle on very |
| 1:26.2 | very targeted areas of our body, often referred to as |
| 1:29.1 | trigger points, these areas that get tight and tense |
... |
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