HEALTHY AGING AND EXTENDING YOUR TIME-LINE

By distinguishing age from aging, I earlier asked about your age. “How old are you?” “How old are you mentally? How old are you emotionally? Behaviorally? Relationally? If you didn’t know your chronological age, how old would you be?” These questions imply that we are at different ages in different aspects of ourselves. This poses several possibilities. You could be young mentally and old chronologically. You could be young and youthful emotionally, but old mentally. You could be young in your activities and old emotionally. So, how old are you?

After learning NLP and after writing a book on time-lines, Adventures in Time (1997), in my forties, I decided to extend my time-line. Having worked with some people in therapy who had short time-lines which only extended into their 50s or 60s due to certain beliefs that they had picked up (“the men in our family die in their 50s”), I decided I would extend my time-line to 100. Shortly thereafter I read about 100-year old centurions finishing the New York marathon; four finished in 1997. So with that, I extended it to 120. Later while reading in the field of human anatomy and reading that “apart from disease or accidents, the human body should function healthily to 140," I extended my time-line to 140.

Crazy? Ridiculous? Probably! Especially since no one has ever lived that long. And especially since no one in my family heritage has ever lived beyond 92, let along to 100. But what the heck? I checked the ecology of the idea—would it do any harm? Would it mess anything up? When I figured that it would not be harmful in anyway, in my mind I imagined my time-line going out to 140.

Suddenly, I experienced some changes. First and foremost, the strongest change that I felt was, “I’m just a kid at 47.” If 140 is the length, that means middle age doesn’t begin until 70 so I still have more than two decades before I need to decide what I’ll do “when I grow up.” At some time someone asked me, “How old do you feel?” And for many years I said “30 to 35, somewhere in that range.” By the time I reached my 60s, I felt like I was approaching 40. The strange thing is that I never have felt my chronological age, always younger.

Another interesting facet about time also occurred. I never felt rushed for time. I always felt that I had plenty of time. This came from two sources, first from extending my time-line and also from experiencing and using “the genius state” of focus that we use in Neuro-Semantics. In the 1990s and beyond, I shifted the way I read, study, and write to working on one project at a time. I stopped reading two or more books at the same time. Oddly enough, my productivity actually doubled or tripled, and in spite of a busy traveling schedule, I never felt rushed.

By extending my time-line I also had another realization. If by any chance I happened to live to or beyond 100, I didn’t want to live in regret of not having done the things that I needed to do to age with energy and vitality. So even though I had always exercised, now I had another significant reason to be consistent and regular in my exercising. Somewhere I had learned about exercising the core via sit-ups, crunches, leg lifts, etc. so I began starting every morning with 200 crunches. Later I extended that to 300 or more. Today that is how I start every day.

Of course, none of us know how long we will live. Accidents happen all the time and given the unpredictability of things, none of us have a guarantee of even a single day; no guarantee of tomorrow. But if you and I are lucky, and we aren’t killed in a storm or car wreck or other accidents, and if we don’t happen to suffer from the hundreds of diseases that could be fatal —and we do keep living, what will be your inner experience? Will you age in a healthy way and still be young at heart when you hit 100?

Extending your time-line will influence your beliefs and values, it will readjust your intentions, and it will even affect your sense of self. To extend your time-line, you may have to give yourself permission to “outlive your parents and/or grandparents.” That often stops people. That was what I heard in the 1990s that made me realize that the length you encode about your life span on your time-line is a matter of belief. And given that, what would you like to believe? If you didn’t know your age, how old would you be?