Ep. 12 - The Aging Belief That’s Quietly Changing Your Body

What if one of the most damaging things about aging… is what we’ve been taught to expect from it?

In this powerful episode of Tea With Sophie, we explore the emerging science behind aging, mindset, stress physiology, and the brain-body connection — and why researchers are beginning to understand that our beliefs about aging may shape our health more than we realize.

Sophie dives into:

• Psychologist Ellen Langer’s fascinating “Counterclockwise” study
• Yale researcher Becca Levy’s groundbreaking findings on aging beliefs and longevity
• How chronic stress and fear of decline impact the nervous system
• Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett’s predictive brain theory
• Why women over 50 have been conditioned to expect decline
• How the words we repeat may influence the way we experience aging

This episode is not about pretending aging isn’t real.
It’s about understanding that decline may not be nearly as fixed as we’ve been taught.

If you’ve ever felt afraid of getting older, discouraged about your body, or worried that your best years are behind you, this conversation will leave you feeling hopeful, empowered, and deeply seen.

Because your body is listening to the words you repeat most often.

And instead of rehearsing limitation every day…
what if you started rehearsing possibility?

Subscribe to Tea With Sophie for weekly conversations on healthy aging, women’s wellness, mindset, longevity, and vibrant living after 50.

To learn more about my work, listen to past episodes, and access a library of free resources, visit SophieUliano.com/podcast.

Transcript

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One of the most damaging things about aging is what we've been taught to expect from it. In this episode of Tea with Sophie, we're going to have a little bit of a conversation about our expectations of aging and how our expectations can directly affect how we're going to age, basically. And so get yourself a cup of tea or a nice glass of water and let's dive in. Because here's the thing by the time most women reach 50, and then I think 60, this whole thing just exacerbates. It gets gets even worse. Is we have spent decades and decades absorbing messages about aging. Now, it could be messages such as your metabolism slows, your body falls apart, you're going to lose muscle, you're going to have cognitive decline, you lose relevance, you're going to become invisible, things get much harder, aging sucks. I mean, I've heard it all. And I've heard it from people who I laugh. I've heard it from family members. And then that's what we might have absorbed from around us. But then there's our own internal beliefs and expectations, the meanings that we create based on the changes that are happening to us as we go into midlife and beyond. And what fascinates me is this what if these messages don't just affect how we feel emotionally, like, oh, I feel terrible about that, but also what if they affect how we age physically? And that's what I really want to take a look at. Because here's a wake-up call for all of you that are feeling a little bit sad or grumpy or scared or anxious about aging. This episode is for you. It is so important because there's an emerging body of research in psychology and neuroscience that is suggesting now that aging, excuse me, our expectations about aging may influence our actual biology more than we thought. And I want to be clear, this is not about positivity or polyanner or toxic positivity. It's not pretending that aging isn't real. It's not pretending that certain things aren't going on in your body. But decline may not be as fixed as we've been taught. Now, talking about fix, the first person I want to talk about who, uh researcher, who has brought so much research to this space is Dr. Ellen Langer, who's known to be the mother of mindset change. She's written a number of books. She has done hundreds of fascinating studies. And she was one of the first researchers and psychologists to distinguish the idea between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. And I believe she she first put this forth in one of her first books, Mindset. And I I love this uh idea, this concept, because the women who come to work with me when they start doing my program very often have a very fixed mindset and they don't even realize it in many different areas of their life, not just about aging, but about their identity, about really mainly about their identity, but about many other things as well. And so a lot of the really deep we do is to start loosening that tight fix, that tight grip on that mindset, and then entertaining the possibility of something different. So we become psychologically a lot more flexible and adopt a growth mindset, which is so exciting for women to do in their 50s and 60s and 70s, which is the age of the women that I work with. And it does change absolutely everything. So Dr. Ellen Langer is probably one of her most famous studies on aging, it's called the counterclockwise study. And she took a group of men, um, elderly men, and she took them, they were put in an environment, and the environment was created as if it was 20 years ago, basically. So if these men were, you know, 80, it was as if it was, they were in their 60s. And the house that they were in was filled with um magazines, uh, books, um, references, photographs, many cultural references from their younger years. Um, and they weren't just reminiscing. So this is really important to understand because a lot of older people reminisce. No, they were living it, they were engaged in it, they were being triggered by all, they were, they were in it. And they were encouraged to speak and behave. This is really interesting, um, as though they were living in that earlier time. To speak and behave as if they were in that earlier time. And according to the findings, many of them showed improvements in posture, mobility, uh grip strength, cognition, energy, perception, and that's just some of the markers. Um, fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. Because if you think, I often say we become an average of the five people that we spend the most time with, which again has come from very solid evidence-based research. And so, you know, that's why it breaks my heart when elderly people are sort of shoved together in a nursing home or something. I think that's why we need to be around, we need that influence, that young energy, you know, and to be around people who are kind of young and vibrant and all of that. But that's a whole nother thing. Um, that's for another episode. Um, so some parts of this study have been debated over the years, and and and I think some replications have done, uh have been done, and findings have been um, you know, debated. But it's the nuance that matters. And and I think what the study opened up was very important, the possibility that your body responds not only to chronological age, but also to expectation, to identity, to environment, and to perception. And it makes so much sense to me because if you are taken back in time and you're asked to, you've got all those visual cues and those auditory cues, and you're encouraged to behave and walk and be instead of the 80-year-old self, your six-year-old self, then you can just imagine you're walking differently, you're sitting differently, you're talking differently, your brain is lighting up differently. So it just makes complete sense to me. Um okay, so there is a fantastic researcher called Becca Levy. And this is where the research becomes really compelling to me in this space of our expectations about aging. Um, so she spent years studying how our beliefs about aging affect our health outcomes, which is what I'm really interested in. And one of her landmark studies found that people with more positive perceptions of aging lived 7.5 years longer. And that compared to the control group of those with negative perceptions. And the researchers did control for gender, um, uh, baseline health, loneliness, socioeconomic status. So it was a really compelling study. And that's seven and a half years. That is significant, seven and a half years longer. When you get to a certain age, who wouldn't want, if you're healthy, another seven and a half years? Um, so it wasn't just simply happy people live longer. It suggested that the way people viewed aging itself mattered. So if somebody believes my body is doomed, aging sucks, it's too late for me, everything falls apart over after name the age, 60, 65, whatever it is, uh, 70, you know, pick your age. Um, can you imagine how that might affect your stress levels, your motivation, your movement, your posture, your recovery, your confidence, your hope, your joy, your resilience, your willingness to care for yourself differently? Because if you're like, wow, it's just doomed to fail, kind of what's the point? Well, how is that person going to care for themselves compared to somebody who has a completely different expectation about what's possible? I see this again with the women that I work with all the time because they have this expectation. They see women who come into my program see women who've been working with me for over six years now, and they see, wow, that's possible. And often women who start working with me, they're considerably, they might be in their late 40s, early 50s, and they're seeing women who are in their early 70s and going, oh my gosh, that's possible. She is so alive and vibrant and healthy and can do all these incredible things with her body and her life. So we need to be around really inspiring people. Um, your body is listening. Eventually, your body is listening to all of those expectations. So just remember the story repeat becomes the environment that our nervous system lives inside. Really important. Now, stress physiology, let's talk about stress physiology because and how chronic stress, which I talk about so much in so many of my episodes, how it does affect your body. So when we're in a constant state of fear, defeat, hopelessness, overwhelm, hypervigilance, the nervous system will respond all the time. All the time. Stress hormones shift, inflammation uh can rise, sleep suffers, recovery suffers, energy suffers. And many women over 50 are unknowingly living under a constant layer of this psychological stress about aging itself, about aging itself, fear of decline, fear of irrelevance, fear of becoming invisible, fear that it's too late, fear of I just can't, no, doesn't happen to somebody like me or people like us. And I think we underestimate how much that stress impacts the body over time with all the other things that are stresses, outside stresses that we've got going on. So your body isn't just simply responding to age, it's responding to stress, nourishment, movement, environment, meaning, relationships, pretty much everything. And just remember the brain and the body are in conversation all the time. All the time. So neuroscience, there's an incredible neuroscientist in the space called Lisa Feldman-Barrett. And her work is about the predictive brain. And it's called predictive processing. And this is where the brain isn't simply reacting to reality moment by moment. Instead, the brain is constantly making predictions based on, I say, call it what's in your filing cabinet, your past filing cabinet. So predictions based on past experiences, beliefs, meaning, years and years and years of stressful thoughts, memories, condition, conditioning, and expectations. In other words, the brain is constantly trying to predict what comes next. And those predictions influence again your stress response, emotional states, bodily sensations, fatigue, threat perception, and how we experience pain and discomfort as well. So if you have spent decades hearing everything declines after 50, your body can't change anymore, your metabolism is broken. And I'm going to add to this because a lot of women I work with will start working with me, and then they'll have something like an injury or you know, recovering from a knee surgery, or now they've got to have another shoulder, or all sorts of things that happen. And that can then become a predictive processing of, oh, this is happening. So everything is falling apart now. So we have to be so vigilant about really understanding how our brain works and what we are predicting. Um, because the brain starts predicting limitation. I'll say that one more time. The brain is predicting limitation, right? Does this mean that your symptoms are imaginary? No. It means the brain and body are deeply interconnected, and it's super important to understand this. And expectation shapes physiology more than we have ever understood. Now, the good news, and this is the beautiful part, is the brain is adaptable, the body is adaptable. The brain is adaptable, which I have been fascinated with for 30 years of the work that I've done, is the idea of neuroplasticity, the idea that we have these neural pathways in our brain, and all of our conditioning and the beliefs that we've held, and the invisible stories and the meaning that we've made over and over and over forms these grooves. It's almost like grooves in an old vinyl record. You know, scientifically, they're they're neural pathways that become very, very strong. And I find it fascinating that the brain is basically adaptable, it's neuroplastic, that we can, and yes, it takes a lot of work and a lot of discipline to do this, but we can actually change, or we can create, excuse me, new neural pathways. And then once you've done that, by basically changing your belief, changing the meaning, changing your prediction, changing your expectation. And then when you do that, the work then is that you really have to be vigilant about conditioning that new pathway all the time, because otherwise it's not going to be strong enough. The old ones are really strong, and that is the work. It's certainly the work I do, and it's the work that I encourage my clients to do. Um, so now we know, and we actually know this. We have the research, the good news that women can build build muscle after 50. The brain remains neuroplastic, um, habits can change, emotional patterns can change, uh, personality can change, confidence can change, health trajectories can completely change. I've seen it time and time again. So, no, it's not about trying to be 25 again. That is not the point. The point is that it's not nearly as fixed as we have been conditioned to believe. So maybe one of the most radical things that any woman can do after 50 is to stop uh rehearsing decline. Just stop it. Stop rehearsing it. Because every time you have that thought and you think about it, you're mentally rehearsing decline. And that neural pathway becomes even stronger. So maybe the invitation here for you listening today or watching is not toxic positivity. Maybe it is awareness, awareness of the story that you have been repeating. Because your body is listening to the stories you repeat and the limitations that you keep telling yourself over and over. So instead of rehearsing those limitations every single day, what if you started rehearsing possibility? So this, oh, and well, this is what I'm I'm gonna leave you with a few possibilities. But first, little bit of homework. Grab a after this episode, grab a piece of paper or grab your journal and write down every single belief that you have about aging. And even if you think I'm a really positive person, I've got really positive expectations about aging, I'm gonna bet you if you're really brutally honest with yourself and you write down every single belief that you can think of and historically have had about aging, you're gonna come up with a lot on that page. And there it is, there's your mindset, there are the limitations, there are some of your expectations. I say write it down because when you write it down, it brings it into your pre-frontal cortex. And then seeing it in black and white, you can actually do something about it. You can go, hmm, I'm gonna cross that one out, I'm gonna scratch that one out, and I am gonna start rehearsing something different. So here are some of the things that you can rehearse, and you're welcome to close your eyes, take a breath, and repeat this after me. My body is capable of change. I can build strength at any age, I can create new habits, I can feel vibrant again. My health can dramatically improve. My best years are ahead of me. That is what I'm talking about. Because, yeah, aging is real. None of us get out of aging. It's gonna happen to the best of us, but decline is not nearly as fixed as we've been taught. So I hope you enjoyed this episode of Tea with Sophie. And um, drop me some comments if you're watching on YouTube. Love seeing your comments. Let me know once you've done your homework, what you uncovered. I've been doing this work for years, and I remember having, I remember talking to my bestie of 30 years, and I remember we would sit together and we would think about women who were 40. 40. I'm in my early 60s, but and we go, our belief was that is so old. A woman of 40, uh who's 40 or above is completely over the hill. So talk about having some of those. And over the years, you know, I've worked so hard on just changing absolutely every single belief and meaning. And we giggle about it now because we're both in our uh uh in our early 60s and feeling better than ever, uh, because we won't have it any other way. Um so um, yeah, so drop me some comments in in the if you're watching on YouTube, and um, you can always go to just remember sophieyuliano.com forward slash podcast, because on that page there's all my other episodes, and I do not want you to list miss anything. Please follow me. Please, if you like this podcast, leave me a review because that really helps me and gives me the energy and the motivation to I've got all these exciting episodes that I want to do, and it just gives me the the reinforcement of like, yes, I'm gonna keep creating these episodes. And um, have a beautiful week, and I'll see you next episode of Tea with Sophie. Until then, bye bye.