Phil Moeller: How a positive attitude towards aging may add years to your life

My spine reached its “sell by” date last fall. My ability to walk was compromised. I got some MRIs and scheduled an appointment with a highly recommended neurosurgeon.

At the appointment, the surgeon showed me side-by-side MRI scans, comparing the recent scan to one that was a few years old. He said that deterioration of my spinal column had reached a serious point and recommended surgery as soon as possible. Without the surgery, he said, I was headed for life in a wheelchair and loss of the ability to live independently.

My wife and I looked at each other and asked him to schedule the surgery as soon as possible.  

Barely three weeks later, I underwent a three-and-a-half-hour procedure to fuse no fewer than seven vertebrae. My surgeon cleaned out the damage in my spinal column and then inserted a series of metal structures to strengthen my spine.

I understood going in that the consequences of such extensive surgery are often profound. Roger that.

I woke up with little ability to move anything. I could wiggle my toes. My hands were frozen, and I couldn't move much else. A few days after the surgery I was transferred for inpatient rehabilitation to a superb facility located just 20 minutes from my home.

Dense bundles of nerve fibers are located between the seven vertebrae that were fused. Anything that disturbs these fibers can create serious neurological consequences. I later learned that the six bundles of nerve fibers involved in my surgery controlled virtually everything that happened between my waist and my neck. My brain had to begin learning how to communicate with my body. Things that had been automatic were no longer automatic. Things that used to work didn't work.

I worked with an extraordinary group of doctors, nurses, and therapists over the course of 30 days. I made tremendous headway and developed the confidence that I would be able to resume a normal life. It might take a year. It might take 18 months. But it will happen.

The positive attitude of the people at the rehabilitation facility has rubbed off on me. The relentless support of the caregivers and therapists there became infectious, and I went all in on trying to get better and developing a positive attitude not only about therapy, but also about a lot else in life, including aging.

It turns out that having a positive attitude toward aging is one of the best things a person can do in my situation and, more broadly speaking, one of the best things that older people can do to live healthier, happier, and longer lives according to Yale Professor of Epidemiology and Psychology Becca Levy.

Dr. Levy’s 2022 book, Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live presented her research showing that positive attitudes about aging, on both a societal and personal level, added years to a person’s lifespan. Negative attitudes about aging did the opposite.

“Age beliefs, it turns out, can steal or add nearly eight years to your life,” she wrote in her book.

People with positive age beliefs, her research found, “were more likely to recover from severe disability, they remembered better, they walked faster, and they even lived longer. I was also able to show that many of the cognitive and physiological challenges we think of as linked to growing old—things like hearing loss and cardiovascular disease—are also the products of age beliefs absorbed from our social surroundings. I found that age beliefs can even act as a buffer against developing dementia.”

Negative age beliefs, by contrast, “bring about detrimental health effects that are often, and misleadingly, characterized as the inevitable consequences of aging. . .. My research, on which I based these twin concepts, has been confirmed by over four hundred studies conducted by other scientists in five continents.”

The ability to add years to my life empowers me to treat my rehab as a necessary step to a better life and more years of it.

And in a recent study updating her work, Levy validated a program to successfully teach positive aging.¹

Your added years could be waiting for you too!