Use It or Lose It: 6 Tips to Maintain Your Competitive Edge As You Age

If you believe that accelerated loss of your mental acuity is
inevitable with age, and that the loss of your competitive edge is
certain to accompany that memory loss, you're not alone. But you
are wrong. Age does have some effect on memory, but it's not an
especially significant factor. Nonetheless, people tend to use their
age as an excuse for poor or weakened performance. In fact, the
opposite is true: For most people in business, the prime earning
years are their 40s and 50s because they have invaluable maturity
and experience. However, sometimes people in middle age enter a
very self-defeating cycle, doubting themselves and losing
confidence in their abilities.

Be Like Mike…With Your Brain

No matter what your age, developing or training the memory is, in
many ways, like playing a sport. Consider basketball: Although
certain individuals are undoubtedly genetically more gifted
ballplayers - they're 7 feet tall, extremely strong, very fast, and
have great hand-eye coordination - anyone can learn to play
basketball reasonably well, with training and a lot of practice, even
if you're 5'2" and not much of a jumper.

People commonly misperceive memory as a talent, not a skill. While
some people do possess the genetic gift of a brain wired for
superior recall, the truth is that everybody can make major
improvements in their memory function with training and practice
regardless of age, education, IQ, or any other factor. You're not
going to be a superstar professional athlete without some God-
given talent, but most people, when it comes to using their brains,
don't need to be superstars; they just want to lead productive
lives. And that is definitely achievable.

Older Really Can Mean Wiser

Age is a factor in training your physical body, and it's no different
when training your brain. Although few people can run a mile
faster at age 40 than they could at age 20, if you're motivated and
committed, you can still run a pretty darn fast mile at age 40. Your
results will be quicker and more dramatic when you're younger, but
a very inspiring key difference between athletic training and brain
training is that while you can't get stronger, faster, and more
coordinated as you get older, it's totally realistic to expect to
continue to grow wiser - more effective mentally - in later years.

Wiser is fine, but doesn't everyone inevitably get more forgetful
when they age? Yes, hormonal changes as we age do have some
impact on our memories, but people tend to blow this factor way
out of proportion and make it way more of an issue than it really is.
In most cases, you're actually not more forgetful than you ever
were; you just notice more when you are forgetful.

You know the phenomenon where you walk into a room and then
you can't remember what you walked into the room for? That's
known as 'walking into the hereafter.' Because you walk in and
you think, "Now what was I here after!?" You don't walk into the
hereafter any more now than you did when you were seventeen,
but you're more aware of it now when you do. Why? For one thing,
you hear doctors say, "Vigilantly watch for short term memory loss,
because if it starts happening more, you may need a check-up for
Alzheimer's." We're hyper-aware, therefore, of every time we have
a "hereafter" moment, and this fearful mindset about getting
Alzheimer's disease in turn makes us notice even more every time
it happens.

The other reason you may feel more forgetful, even though you're
not, comes from the power of negative thinking. Many people
create a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy in which they subconsciously
create their own forgetfulness, actually starting to forget more
because they believe aging will make them forget more often.

Six Steps to Sharpen Mental Function

As with sports, having a good memory is a matter of conditioning,
commitment, and positive thinking. When you realize that you
create the notions that your mental faculties decrease and you
grow less effective as you age, then you have the power to
change that idea. Once you've accepted that, you can keep your
brain in top shape as you age by taking the following steps:

1. Remember: forgetting is no big deal

Because the language you use has been proven to become your
reality, choose positive self-talk. You can convince yourself that
anything is possible just as easily as you can talk yourself into
believing that something is impossible when it's really not. Don't
use language that makes a catastrophe of something that's really
not a big deal. When you lose your keys for five minutes, for
example, don't tell yourself, "Oh my God! I obviously have
Alzheimer's!" when really you just lost your keys, a meaningless
and common phenomenon you'd not have thought twice about a
few years before.

2. Maintain a positive attitude…within reason

Zig Ziglar has famously said that a positive attitude will not help
you do anything that you want to do. A positive attitude will not
magically transform the talentless into superstars, nor will it make
basketball great Shaquille O'Neal into a good horse jockey. But a
positive attitude will help you do everything better than a negative
attitude will.

3. Make little changes for a big difference

Remove the words "forget" and "forgot" from your vocabulary.
Instead of saying, "I forgot her name," try saying, "I can't recall
her name right now." It may sound like a silly little change, but
you're actually re-training your brain. When you say, "I forgot,"
your brain processes, "Oh, I'm old and getting stupider by the
second." But when you say, "I can't recall," you cut yourself and
your brain some slack, making it much easier to recall the
information later. This perception change will have an immediate
effect on your ability to recall the information you're seeking.

4. Manage your stress in the moment

Stress is the number one killer of your recall. If you can't
immediately remember something, don't freak out. Just take a
deep breath and think positively that eventually you will
remember. Tell yourself, "I know this. It will come to me."

5. Exercise your brain and body

Research shows that a combination of mental and physical
activities can protect your memory and help keep you alert. Overall
physical health will translate into overall mental health, better
memory, and sharper mental faculties all around. Exercise
maintains heart health and opens blood vessels; in turn, brain cells
get the nutrients that ensure peak performance. Exercise your
brain, too, by doing crossword puzzles, solving brain teasers or
playing Sudoku. Mental games and exercises have been proven to
have a definite effect on mental agility as people age. Reading
good, challenging books that make you think is also an essential
mental exercise to stay sharp. Also get sufficient sleep and take a
vacation every once in awhile.

6. Train your brain

Exercising a muscle means you're using it, but not pushing it
beyond its limits. Training involves going beyond where you've
ever gone before. To train a bicep to be stronger, for example, you
have to lift a weight that's heavier than one you've lifted before, or
you lift it more times than you previously have. You must push it
beyond its current limits. It's the same with your brain; you must
continuously challenge your brain by learning new things. It
doesn't really matter what you learn: cooking, a foreign language,
history - anything so long as it's new.
With the Brain, It's No Pain, No Gain

While it may be uncomfortable at times - just as when you're
training your body to be stronger - you must choose the pain of
discipline over comfort if you want to maintain a competitive edge.
Growing pains aren't nearly as bad as losing out to your
competition or feelings of decrepitude, uselessness, or regret. If
you can endure a little bit of pain every day as you take the steps
necessary to add mental acuity to the wisdom and experience
you've acquired with age, you will find that old advertising slogan
is true: You're not getting older. You really are getting better!

 
 

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