Similarly, a daily journaling practice supports mental health and well-being.Beginning to record or share these moments of appreciation and gratitude can significantly impact your outlook and mood. This can be as simple as “I am grateful for the beautiful flower that bloomed in my neighbor’s yard this week,” or “I had a delicious cookie, and it was amazing!” It can be a simple, small moment of your day. This can be simple – tell a friend, or your partner, or write down in a journal one thing you are grateful for each day.Meditation supports cultivation of an optimistic outlook.Just 20 minutes a day can significantly impact your mood and well-being.Exercise ranks high on the list here as an important way to regulate mood and emotions alongside its physical benefits.So how can you start? What if you don’t feel like an optimist? Luckily there are many straightforward ways to begin a practice that supports an optimistic outlook. And, as we began sharing the evidence for the power of optimism with these women, we saw their motivation to engage with an optimism practice grow dramatically. Interestingly, women who feel optimistic about aging are less likely to report physical changes in their skin such as wrinkles, fine lines and dark under eyes. and France to better understand their attitudes about aging and whether we could improve these sentiments to make a positive impact on women’s experience of aging. These findings prompted RoC Skincare and me to embark on a study of over 600 women in the U.S. Perhaps most importantly, optimism is modifiable, learnable, and able to be developed via relatively simple techniques or therapies. And, this effect is ‘dose dependent’ – meaning, the higher your optimism levels, the greater the positive impact tends to be on your health and lifespan. Optimism has been linked to 11-15% longer lifespan, suggesting that optimism is a powerful tool to improve health and well-being in humans. In fact, just earlier this month (June 2022) a study was published out of Harvard University which found that higher levels of optimism were associated with longer lifespans and living past 90 in women across racial and ethnic groups. What we know now is that optimism is a psychological asset, and one that promotes healthy and resilient aging. And a 2006 study found that healthy volunteers were less likely to develop viral symptoms when given a respiratory virus if they held a positive outlook – a striking result particularly resonant in this pandemic era we are all living through. Optimistic women have lower levels of two key markers of inflammation. It influences and is a significant predictor of health outcomes and markers relating toĪt the molecular level, optimism reduces stress, is linked to lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol, lower blood pressures, and promotes production of the neurotransmitter dopamine. Similarly, optimism has been linked to better outcomes on multiple measures of physical and mental function. are at decreased risk of premature death.are less likely to suffer from chronic disease, and.have higher levels of subjective well-being,.The findings were astounding: across scores of studies, research has demonstrated that individuals with a positive outlook on life – or those who hold an optimistic outlook – When the RoC team approached me in 2021 about partnering to investigate how optimism relates to health and aging, I began a meta-analysis of the literature covering optimism and how it relates to health, longevity, and well-being. In fact, we are aging in the womb even before we are born! And while so much about aging feels outside of our control, there are several practical tools available to every person – regardless of age, race, gender, social class, or background - that can improve your health and well-being and possibly even extend your life. With each passing day, month, year, our bodies are aging. And most interestingly, optimism is shown to have a significant impact on health and well-being. Optimists tend to attribute their achievements to internal, stable factors. They believe that they own their decisions. Optimists tend to direct their attention to positive aspects and deprioritize negative ones. Or, rather, believing that the future will likely be favorable because we are able to control important outcomes in our lives. It’s helpful to first define optimism, which can be thought of as a psychological attribute that is often defined as a general expectation that good things will happen.
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