Is it REALLY old age?

This weekend my daughter Eve walked into the living room, stopped dead, looked around with a confused expression and said, “What I am doing in here?”

A moment later she smacked her forehead and said, “Oh, now I remember,” and carried on with her day.

Here’s what I find interesting: at the age of nine, it never crosses Eve’s mind that a brief blank moment means that her memory might be going. For her, it’s normal to occasionally forget. Yet many of my many of my patients and friends (and myself for that matter) might treat a similar situation as the onset of Alzheimer’s.

I hear the echoes of this in other comments:

  • “I’m too sore after exercise—my old joints can’t handle it any more.”
  • “I can’t stay out late. I’m too tired the next day.”
  • “My body just can’t handle it like it used to.”

No one escapes time, but are you really getting that old or do you just think you are? There’s much research to suggest that the mind ages the body, not just the other way around.

I’ve been listening to my younger patients and reading their posts on Facebook. What I hear is interesting: “Wow, I was sore for days after that workout,“ or, “It took me ages to recover from that party.” Like Eve, they’re experiencing the same aches, pains and memory gaps as their parents and grandparents. The difference is that they blame it on what they did the day before, not on the age of their bodies.

Something worth considering the next time you decide you’re too old: Is it your body or your thinking that’s changed?