By Faith Feuer . 4ucoaches.com – Coach

My daughter is a varsity cheerleader at her high school and one evening after a basketball game, I found myself chatting with a few other parents. They were lamenting “getting old”… how the bleachers were terrible for their joints, all of their various aches and pains and voicing a general complaint about how unfortunate the aging process really is. Well, I respectfully but wholeheartedly disagree. I fully embrace my ever-increasing age, and for so many reasons. First of all, growing old is a privilege denied to many. If our birthdays are piling up, it is because we are healthy enough to celebrate them and that is something to appreciate in and of itself. Secondly, in my own experience, maturity has brought with it many unforeseen blessings. I am more responsive than reactive, recognizing that if someone mistreats me, their behavior is most likely rooted in insecurity or feelings of inadequacy rather than in animosity toward me in particular. I have come to terms with the fact that not everyone is going like me and that not everyone has to. Similarly, I do not have to like every person whom I meet and can in fact afford to be choosy with my friends and associates. I am largely immune to others’ judgements of me – I like the person in the mirror and that is the only judgement that truly matters. I grow closer to my two daughters year over year, relating to them more as fellow women rather than as children. The list goes on, but I will leave it at that for the moment. 

So where does this idea of “positive brainwashing” fit into our attitude toward aging? No one has yet invented a time machine or a pause button for the progression of time. It inevitably marches on whether we approve or not. There are certain things that we can and cannot change regarding our maturing physical appearance. However, one thing that almost all of us do have control over is our mindset and our outlook. If we want to change (i.e improve) our outlook toward getting older, our best ally is closer than you think. Your brain is a super computer whose primary goals are to protect and to be efficient. As such, you have the awesome resources of the most powerful tool in the universe right at your fingertips – or rather between your ears –  and it is yours to program as you see fit. As we all know, input equals output. So, if you want to change your attitude toward the external world, simply change the information that you feed your brain. What makes this so easy is the fact that this shift in attitude will come about almost entirely without you even knowing that it is taking place. The key player in this transformation is a small bundle of nerves located in our brainstem called the Reticular Activating System, or R.A.S. This little hero is the brain’s chief filtration system, responsible for filtering out irrelevant data from the megamillions of information bytes that we are bombarded with every day. Thanks to the R.A.S, we consciously receive only the information that is immediately pertinent to us. This is why we can always pick out our name even from way across a room or immediately tune into the sound of our child’s voice calling for us in a crowd. The R.A.S presents the brain with the information that it needs and also with evidence of what it believes the brain wants to see. 

This is where the brainwashing part comes in. Let’s say that you constantly tell yourself that you are not intelligent. In doing so, you have unintentionally programmed your brain to seek evidence of this most likely untrue belief. Remember, one of the brain’s chief goals is efficiency, so if you have told yourself that you are not smart, the R.A.S and its coworkers inside your brain will work tirelessly to show you evidence to strengthen this belief. So, if brainwashing in this negative sense can be so destructively effective, why can’t positive brainwashing be just as effective? The answer is, it can! Therefore, if you are worried about getting older and losing your shine, here is a simple method for getting your brain on your side and shifting your mindset. Just repeat to yourself every night before you fall asleep and before you wake up (this is called the liminal period, halfway between sleep and wakefulness) that you are fabulous, smart, kind, compassionate…whatever admirable characteristics you seek to instill. Our subconscious mind cannot tell the difference between what is real and what is imagined, true or untrue. Whether you believe all these things about yourself yet is totally irrelevant. Much as in the case of negative brainwashing, repeat something to yourself enough times, you will end up believing it, whether it is objectively true or not. In the case of positive brainwashing, you have programmed this positive outlook into your brain and your R.A.S is going to be on the lookout for every bit of evidence to confirm that you are what you have told it you are: an amazing and talented individual whose best years are yet to come.