Mind, Matter, Deepak

Conclusion
by Libby Znaimer
November 29, 2010
Zoomer Magazine

Thankfully, the corollary is also too simplistic. Chopra doesn't think a negative attitude will bring on illness, although I have noted in my own search for wellness that there is an element of blaming the victim in the holistic view of the emotional roots of illness. What Chopra talks about, however, is the role of "subtle intention" rather than entrenched attitude. His evidence for this is something widely recognized in Western medicine: the placebo effect. Sometimes people heal when they have been, unknowingly, given sugar pills to take because they think they're getting medicine and their expectation is that it will make them better. The opposite is the nocebo effect: If someone is expecting a negative outcome, that's what they get. This was the reason doctors used to withhold bad prognoses from their patients. "It's very mysterious how that happens," says Chopra on its viability. "No one really knows."

Chopra does have a prescription though. He says we can learn to change our attitudes, but it is a long process. The first step is to realize and recognize we have negative attitudes. Then we can start to work through them through self-reflection, cognitive therapy and meditation. Once again, East meets West is proven to work: studies show that meditation does have a positive impact on health. The other big change agent in our lives? Loving relationships. His include Rita, his wife of more than 30 years, and his children, daughter Mallika, founder and CEO of the lifestyle website www.intent.com, who works alongside her entrepreneurial brother Gotham, a published author in his own right. When we chatted, Chopra was at Mallika's house in California, which he had chosen as the first stop after a leg of his book tour so he could spend time with his grandchildren.

Chopra's prescription for reversing the signs of aging seems easier to follow --- at least it's more tangible. It's a version of everything we recognize as healthy but have such a hard time following: good nutrition, regular exercise, not smoking and getting quality sleep. The problem, he says, is that there's a general attitude that doing these things is going to be unpleasant and hard. We're motivated by short-term gains, he notes, so forget telling yourself or your spouse that changing could add 10 years to your life. According to Chopra, it will work better if you understand that the fresh, healthy meal will really taste better and make you feel full of energy immediately while the double cheeseburger will make you feel bloated and sluggish, which, according to nutritionists, is true. It's the same for exercise --- many people do it daily for the sheer pleasure of it, but it also has a positive biological and mental impact. Chopra advises it's best to do these things in groups, and recent research also bears him out on that. If your spouse and your friends are obese, chances are that you will be too. If your best friend leads a healthy lifestyle, it's much more likely that you will follow that example. Chopra goes so far as to say that all types of well-being --- physical, financial, career --- depend on group behaviour. "So always try to hang out with healthier people," he says.

There is a new guide, a sort of step-by-step program, attached to this. Chopra is involved with Alexander Tsiaris, a pioneer of futuristic 3-D medical visualizations and the website www.thevisualmd.com, in a plan he calls "The 9 Visual Rules of Wellness," which you and your physician can use to help you get started on your road to healthy aging. The idea is that people can be motivated by seeing animated graphic visualizations of how our lifestyle and nutritional choices affect the body. (Remember those pictures we were all shown as kids of blackened lungs after years of smoking? It's a bit like that.) Chopra says it takes four months to achieve great results. First, however, you have to figure out where you're at --- Chopra has a list of "biomarkers" that correlate with aging. These are the signs he says we can reverse, and they're all measurable by a doctor's tests: blood pressure, bone density, body temperature regulation, the way we metabolize sugar, hormone levels, fat content, cholesterol, audio and visual acuity, skin thickness. With that in mind, here are Chopra's nine rules for making healthy changes:

1. Have your physician define your current biomarkers with a simple blood test.

2. Define your wellness goals.

3. Develop and maintain nutritional balance.

4. Get aerobic and anaerobic exercise.

5. Never smoke. If you smoke now, quit.

6. Take a moderate approach.

7. Make sleep a priority.

8. Manage your stress.

9. Embrace joy.

"You can actually reverse the biological markers of aging by 10, 15, even 20 years," Chopra says. "Your chronological age does not need to correspond to your biological age." Of course, Chopra wouldn't be Chopra if he didn't believe the mind still has a lot to do with it. "In my view, the body is just the objective experience of our consciousness --- it's a process, it's not a structure," he explains. He sees the mind as the subjective experience of the same consciousness. "Your psychological attitude also determines your biological age to a great extent," he says. "When people have certain expectations of how we should grow old, then they fulfill those expectations." In other words, it's up to us. But, he says, for people to gear up for a better old age, we must first slow down. "People who are constantly in a hurry… speed up the biological clock. People who think they have all the time in the world, however, have a slower biological clock." And then there are the things that anyone at any age would want, he adds. "It's also whether you have peak moments in life of joy and ecstasy."

excerpt -- conclusion
Mind, Matter, Deepak

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