Summer 2013 - Oregon State Library: State Employee Information ...

Beat the Clock
“Old age is no place for sissies,” quipped Bette Davis. Intrepid journalist Lauren Kessler, who heads the UO’s
graduate program in multimedia narrative journalism, bravely attacks the aging process head on in her
latest book, Counterclockwise: My Year of Hypnosis, Hormones, Dark Chocolate, and Other Adventures
in the World of Anti-Aging (Rodale, 2013), an account of her yearlong process of researching—and
experiencing—what makes us feel “old” and what we can do about it. From attending a Utah bootcamp
in 118-degree heat to taking a cold, hard look at a digitally aged image of her future self, Kessler confronts
both the science and the stereotypes of growing older, particularly as they relate to women “of a certain
age.” In this excerpt, Kessler describes her visit to a hypnotist in an effort to “think young.”
OLD OLDIE WAS WHAT EVERYone
called her. She was my
mother’s great grandmother.
Her bedroom was up in the attic of the big
house, and every morning for as long as
anyone would remember, she would wake
before dawn, braid her long white hair, coil
the braids around her head, and walk down
three flights of stairs to the kitchen where
she would bake biscuits or rolls or quick
bread for breakfast. That’s how the rest of
the family awakened, to that sweet, yeasty
smell. Then one morning, there was no
sweet, yeasty smell. Someone climbed the
three flights of stairs to her room to see
what was going on. She was there, in bed,
hair fanned out on the pillow, eyes closed.
She had died in her sleep. She was 97. Or
102. It depended on who was telling the
story.
This afternoon I am telling the story,
sprawled on an oversized, pillowy recliner
in Rosemarie Eisenberg’s cozy office.
Rosemarie is a certified hypnotist and
Guided Interactive Imagery practitioner
who uses deep relaxation, creative visualization,
and hypnosis to get people to stop
smoking or prepare to do battle with an
illness or conquer a fear. I am here to have
Rosemarie hypnotize me to “think young.”
I’d been doing a lot of reading in the
“you are what you think you are” literature,
and I wanted to explore the idea that mindset—that
is, what you think you are—might
exert a discernible influence on who you
are, or become, biologically. What, if anything,
would happen if Rosemarie planted
the suggestion—which is what she says
hypnotism really is—of a youthful mindset?
Would I feel younger? Would I be younger?
This isn’t as far-fetched as it may sound.
The idea that we can think ourselves
young, that our minds could instigate
changes in our bodies, is what Ellen Langer
calls “the psychology of the possible” and
what others have called the “biology of
hope” or the “biology of belief.” Langer is
my new hero, a brilliant Harvard psychologist
who, for the past 35 years, has been
designing ingenious social experiments to
test the general hypothesis that our beliefs
might be one of the most important determinants
of health and longevity. Over the
long course of that research, she has come
to believe what yogis have known for centuries,
what holistic and mind-body practitioners
have been saying for decades (but
without her good data): “If one’s mindset is
altered, one’s body will change accordingly.”
Now suppose what you think is Old is
Bad. Suppose, after years of hearing jokes
about being over the hill at 40 or 50 or 60,
after seeing thousands of commercials for
Depends and Ensure and cellphones with
three-inch-high numerals, after watching
hundreds of movies and television shows
with cranky, crabby, asexual older people,
suppose you begin to conflate “old” with
sick, debilitated, and diminished. With forgetful,
slow, weak, timid, and stodgy. Those
last five adjectives are the most common
negative, “unthinkingly accepted” stereotypes
of “old” in western cultures, according
to one group of researchers.
What’s even worse about stereotypes
and older people is that, to a much greater
extent than many other groups stigmatized
by negative stereotypes, older people internalize
and accept society’s view of them.
Researchers have found that older people
view their own group every bit as negatively
as they are viewed by others. And so
older people think of themselves—or we,
the not-yet-old, think of our future selves—
as unhappier, less likable, less useful, more
dependent. This is, researchers like Langer
believe, a self-fulfilling prophesy of decline.
The study that made me wish I could
have been one of Ellen Langer’s grad students
was her famous 1988 experiment
where she transported a group of old men
to a carefully designed and controlled
retreat where they were surrounded by
cues to their younger years: magazines,
newspapers, TV, radio, music. They
were instructed to talk only about “cur-
10 OREGON QUARTERLY | SUMMER 2013