How to STOP AGEING

WARNING

This is not about staying young forever, they are two very different things and should NOT be confused. Stopping ageing requires no medication, no plastic surgery and no consultation with a specialist.

The problem is that we are constantly being sold a message of good health but at such a superficial level that unless you have more money than brains it is a pointless exercise, and if you do then point made.

Ageing is not about getting saggy skin or lines around the eyes or even loosing our mobility it is something that happens at a much deeper level, it's about how we think. 

This post is happening because G&M commented on my last post with  "Let me know when you learn the answer to stopping the 'change of aging" so guys here it is.....

What is ageing 

Ageing can happen to us at any time of our lives and for a lot of people it happens before they have even had the opportunity to reach their potential. I have been constantly surprised throughout my life when catching up with past friends and acquaintance's how they so often talked about the good old days and what we did when we were young.

And that was it, they were already identifying their past as the best part of their lives and now they were just on some treadmill till divorce, death or retirement ended it for them. Wow how sad is that, now I don't mind admitting that my youthful past right up until I started growing up (around 40 years of age, maybe a little later) has been one of pure self indulgence. But even for me the thought that the best years of my life had gone was to dreadful to contemplate...


Looking to the Future 


has always been my goal, what I have succeeded or failed at has never been my focus I have always looked for the next opportunity, the next exciting adventure. I have faced criticism all my life about starting so many things and finishing so few, my point has always been the few I have finished has been more than most people start and besides I am not dead yet so there still is time for the others.


Which got me thinking about why people age differently, and I believe that how we view the world is critical to that ageing process. Some people just naturally look forward while most just look back and remember. The western society we now find ourselves in is constantly looking for new sales, and sales come from identifiable markets. So we now find industries targeting young children and encouraging them to have feelings and thoughts beyond their natural growth so they can sell shit to them.


Clothing, Music, cosmetics, you name it, the  pressure for kids to grow up fast is relentless and this robs them of their natural rhythm of growth. By the time they are twenty they already feel old, by thirty they are loosing steam and by forty you are past it. Hang on a minute don't you ....


Remember when you were very young


you know before you believed people who told you your wild ideas weren't possible, back at the time that everything was. Your energy was boundless challenges were overcome just by your imagination, if it got to hard you just had another thought. Well some people through luck or having the right supportive environment (or just bloody minded) never stopped thinking like that. For these people life is an adventure, you have all met them they are the ones with a twinkle in their eyes, who talk fast with excited animated gestures who always have some grandiose plan that may or may not ever get done.


All to often these people are ridiculed as flaky or worse UNREALISTIC, but guess what, these people aren't aging. And why not? because....


Ageing Requires energy  


that's right, ageing robs us of energy and the energy it feeds on is negative energy. Negativity is the aging energy. How many of you know people who just seem to sap the life out of everyone they meet. After time with them you actually feel drained, and guess what you are. And then you come across someone who exudes positive energy and you feel inspired, motivated, maybe even excited. And right at that point you stop aging, just while their spark energises you, then you go home and return to your normal behavior.


Motivational speakers are people who share the secret of slowing aging, but they tend to sell it as something else...


Hope


and with that hope comes the energy that can transform how we feel, enable us to look at life through different eyes even enable us to change our behavior, but best of all it stops us from aging. Once we get totally committed to doing something time stands still, just remember the times that you were so engrossed in doing something that  when you stopped to look up you went "where did the time go"?..... 


And right at that moment


ageing had stopped, we had replaced it with positive energy. So lets extrapolate that out into our actual daily lives, how would that work?


"I feel drained already" I can hear the words now as the thought of the energy needed to always being totally engrossed and always positive frightens you. And that is the point that holds so many of us back from actually doing things. "The thought of it" so in order to overcome this, we need to set some clear achievable goals....


Give yourself a treat 


That always works for me, find something that has always interested you that you have never found the time to do.


The problem with a lot of people is that their only interest is work, which is why there is a spike in the death rate of people who retire. They have nothing left to live for, they feel useless and unneeded. If you don't have something you always wanted to do (you know like taking up painting or pottery or building a rocket) you had better get one because the only thing that is going to stop you ageing is rewarding yourself.


The most selfish thing you can do is to help other people or animals because helping is hard wired into our brain and we get tremendous satisfaction from it ( positive energy) giving out positive energy gets back positive energy and before you know it.......


Your Smiling 


Smiling is a fantastic antidote to ageing and can come as much from somebody telling you something funny as something that happens when you look at something you have achieved. And smiling is infectious which is also a great thing as ... you've guessed it, it is positive energy.


But back to being serious


pick a time in your week that you can actually set aside from interruptions, no phone no pool no pets, just time for you. If you can't do this then Houston we have a problem, because if you can't find time for yourself WHO are you living for. 


Finding time for yourself is a cornerstone in the anti ageing process, its not about being selfish its about realising that we all need to invest time in ourselves, to top up the constant drain of our time and energy we spend on our jobs, family, friends, community, the list is endless.


Give this time a name


and put it into your diary for every week of the next year. This is not like going to the gym, this is a reward to yourself. Forget any guilt about not doing some chore that still needs to be done, there will always be chores. This is step one, the next step (oddly called step two) gets a bit harder....


Sticking to it


There will always be reasons in life not to do things, priorities change, unexpected events happen, new opportunities arise, work is pressuring you, whatever the reason you need to acknowledge YOUR TIME, it may change week to week but you must never not do it every week or you are on the slippery slope.


It's like writing a blog, I really enjoy it when I am doing it but I have to fit it in with my ever changing schedule. So how I do it is set a goal for the month, Two Blogs and if I manage to write one in the first day of the month then I am ahead of schedule but what usually happens is that I cram up against the end of the month to finish the last one, like this one.


The point is that I make sure I achieve my goal and at the end of the month I can rest on my laurels and feel good. But some things we are interested in have no end, like taking up a craft. the satisfaction we get is by increasing in confidence through practice and the better we get the more we love it, and the more we love it the more we make time to do it, until... 


We make it part of our lives



and at that point you are on the road to stop aging. And if you say to yourself, "well Nick that's fine for you but my life is way to busy for that" then you are right. But just remember the opposite to....


Where did the time go?, is where did my life go?


This is your life people make a choice it's never to late.

So they Expect YOU to CHANGE

Funny how this world is working out, you see we are born to change from the moment we are conceived. We spend our whole lives moving from one biological change to another until we die.

But we are not in charge of that biological change, we can effect it at a physical level (how we choose to live our lives) but so far we can't stop the change of aging. So why are we so resistant to being asked to change, by others or most importantly ourselves. This is no longer a rhetorical question, it is at the center of our very survival and to avoid change today will mean lack of opportunity tomorrow.

As usual there are many views on how we should go about this but they all start because of one thing, a ......


Motivating Factor


Mine was I became depressed and for a man who had woken up everyday disgustingly happy it came as a real shock. Now I don't know about other people but as I had never experienced depression before I didn't really  understand I was depressed until I started to come right, and at about that time I had this urge to change my personal behavior. My logic was that if I had ended up depressed then I must have been doing something wrong, so change I would. The first mistake I was to make was looking for help...

From an "Expert"


I am constantly blown away by the ever increasing mountain of self help books from personal change Guru's. People ask yourself the question " if just one of them was any good why do we need the rest?" and the answer is not because we are all different.... although we are, the reason is because you can't learn personal change from a book.

It is not like building a deck it is about changing how we think in order to change how we behave and I'm sorry but no well intentioned hype jockey is going to help me do that by reading their book. For me the first step was to...

 Ask people who I trusted

to give me a truthful answer on what they thought I needed to change. After I had done that.. I dismissed their answers as trivial and kept looking for that one great thing that would change my life. And sometimes that's the problem we believe there is one thing that will trigger this change and we go on a life journey to find it when in fact it is the cumulation of.....

Lots of small steps 


that actually get us there. Now I know that this is not news to you, but my point is that everything is made up of the sum of its parts and it is that insight we should focus on. So armed with this simple truth how can we turn ourselves into this new being. The first thing I found worked was to change the thought into an action.

Actions are a fantastic way for us to rewire our thoughts as physical things are reasonably easy to remember. The Martial Arts has known this forever, train repetitively until the body understands so the mind doesn't need to think. So I started with a list of things I wanted to change and I wrote them down and stuck them on the mirror in the bathroom. This is a good place as it is generally the first place we go when we get up.

Changing a Thought into and action


this is where it starts to get tricky as there are so many ways we can tell ourselves that this bit doesn't matter or we will do that bit later, so Its's best to agree with yourself just tackle the easiest one first. Sometimes people feel that if you overcome the hardest one first then the rest will be easy, logical... but bound to fail.

So now take that thought "learn to say NO" and practice it in the mirror ( like in the movie Taxi Driver) just a simple line, "thank's for the opportunity but I must decline". One of my problems was I always try to justify my response with a reason, so I always had to make up and excuse (not to offend) which usually led to me Lying. Sorry but I am busy that day because Bla Bla Bla.

So in order for me to say NO I had to learn just to say No and NOT add a story, hence  "thank's for the opportunity but I must decline". So I practiced that every morning standing at the mirror and every time I was offered something I really didn't want, or couldn't do....."thank's for the opportunity but I must decline" but as we all know...

Nothing is in isolation


so as we tackle these points we want to change other things come into play that are effected by them which means more change. It is often at this stage we tell ourselves it has all become to difficult and we stop, if you get to that point go back to where you feel you were succeeding and just do that.  Don't feel bad if you slip up occasionally as it will probably take months before your new behaviors are reinforced enough to be second nature (congratulations success).

Change effects us at all parts of our lives and  as we go through it we shed parts of our lives, friends being one of them and sometimes even partners. So when we start down a road of even small changes our lives can change dramatically and there is no turning back, you cannot unlearn something. But what if this change is being mandated to you by someone else, like where you work for instance.


It's the classic position where there is a change of management and now everything you used to do one way is no longer "the way we do it", which is where we came in...

So they expect you to change


And this is where I will leave you as unless you are happy to accommodate this new change, unless you absolutely agree with the new direction, unless you are given the time, support, encouragement and tools, this will only end in disaster.

Why

Because the people instigating the change are usually not the ones having to do it so for them it is business as usual, but for you, well thats a different matter.....