Up: How Positive Outlook Can Transform Our Health and Aging - Hardcover

Tindle, Hilary (Hilary Tindle)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1594631212 ISBN 13: 9781594631214

Verlag: Penguin Putnam Inc, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

Why looking up matters

A positive attitude is important, but until now we didnt know how important. In Up, a practicing physician and NIH-funded researcher draws on her research and experience to show that our outlook on life our unique patterns of thinking and feeling about ourselves, others, and the worldmay be the key to how well and how fast we age.

From wrinkles to cognitive decline, our outlook affects our health at every level. Using the framework of outlook GPS, Up illustrates how we can gauge our current attitude latitude and move to healthier ground. Tindle brings a fresh eye to attitudinal traits such as optimism, noting that it has many faces, including the face of her own struggling optimism. Using the 7 Steps of Attitudinal Change that she applies to her own patients, Tindle offers us a path toward healthy aging.

Prescriptive and accessible, Up puts forward a paradigm shift in how we age and treat disease, giving even the most struggling optimists a chance for hope. It will appeal to readers ofThe Longevity Project by Howard S. Friedman and Leslie R. Martin as well asThe Blue Zones by Dan Buettner.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Hilary Tindle, MD, MPH is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Educated at the Harvard Medical School and the University of Chicago, her research on attitudes and behavior has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for the past decade. Dr. Tindle has received numerous awards for her research and has published numerous scientific articles on mind body medicine, psychological attitudes, smoking, and heart disease, which have gained media attention from Parade, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune and the BBC, among others. In addition to her roles as a researcher and a professor, she is also an active member of the American Heart Association, the Society for General Internal Medicine, the American Psychosomatic Society, and the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco.

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1

How Our Outlook Drives Our Health and Aging

“I wonder how many times you almost died?” my father asked me while we waited for our food at the Greek diner Salonica on Fifty-seventh Street, at the edge of the University of Chicago campus. In my third year of college, a previously undiagnosed congenital heart condition came crashing into my life and set me on a path to explore the attitudes that I now view as some of the most basic building blocks of health and disease. The gravity of my condition crystallized during the first week after successful cardiac surgery, and my father finally felt safe enough to pose this obvious question. There had been several times during my childhood when I had come close to collapsing, but every one of these mishaps had followed episodes of intense exertion, like running a three-hundred yard dash in grade school or climbing out of the Grand Canyon as a high school student. Consequently, I had always passed them off as “overdoing it,” and sometimes didn’t even mention them to anyone. My dad and I reflected on the events of the past few months: The previous summer, my energy level had inexplicably taken a dive. One Sunday morning while having dim sum with friends in Chinatown, I had dropped a full glass of water—completely forgetting that my hand was supposed to be holding it—sending it clanking over the porcelain dishes and dumplings and shattering on the floor. I had even fallen asleep during my medical school entrance exams, waking up drooling over the biology section.

Having scarcely completed adolescence, it did not even occur to me that there could be something really wrong. But after several weeks involving similar incidents, I thought I may have mononucleosis and finally made an appointment at the student health center. After hearing my story, the internist detected a loud heart murmur and immediately shipped me off to get a cardiac ultrasound. In the dark, quiet viewing rooms of the echocardiography suite, there were raised eyebrows as successively senior cardiologists were called in to help interpret the results. I looked at the shadowy pictures of my beating chambers with suspense and intrigue, as if they were part of an exciting movie. Not until years later would I realize that my state of general wonder throughout this process—peppered though it was with fear and doubt—would help preserve my sanity through the events that followed. I did not yet know how to read an echocardiogram, and could not discern the mass of tissue in the middle of the heart chamber called the left ventricle. The mass was partially attached to the mitral valve—the valve bisecting the left atrium (top chamber) and the left ventricle (bottom chamber). The walls of the left ventricle had become hypertrophied, or thickened, because of the very high pressure required to pump blood through the mass and out to the rest of my body. My heart had reached a point where it was simply no longer able to perform. I needed major surgery as soon as possible.

After the initial shock and uncertainty, I became “the little patient that could.” I put the surgery date on my calendar and told my relatives, friends, professors, and classmates. I met with my cardiac surgeon, the late Dr. Robert Karp, and asked him a list of twenty-two questions I had typed out on my PC, everything from how long the surgery would take (two to three hours) to the likelihood of dying on the table (5 percent or less). My final question—“Is there anything that I can do as a patient to make your job as a doctor easier?”—produced the first grin I’d seen on him yet. “You already have,” he told me. I didn’t catch his meaning then, but now as a practicing physician I know what it’s like to work with a genuinely motivated patient, and I understand why he smiled at me. My upbeat attitude made me an easier patient to treat, someone willing to adhere to his medical advice and to do my part to attain the best possible outcome. That didn’t mean I wasn’t afraid. In fact, my concern about dying on the table prompted a couple of urgent visits to student mental health services: I didn’t want to go to my grave with too much unfinished business. Within a couple of weeks I was on the operating table while Dr. Karp cut open my left atrium, reached across my mitral valve, and sliced away the offending blob.

After a brief ICU stay and four more days on the cardiac floor, I walked out of the hospital into a sharp Chicago December wind, leaning half of my body weight on each of my parents. Now on the mend, with a fresh scar traversing my chest, I basked in the warmth of my circumstances—hot Greek food, the love of my mom and dad, support of friends and professors, and the impeccable skill of my surgeon and his team, all culminating in the miracle of my being able to sit up without assistance. I had been given a second chance, and I was ecstatic to be alive.

The very experience of having felt so weak after surgery, in which it took real effort on some mornings to even hold my head up, allowed me a glimpse of frailty that most twenty-year-olds never get. Ironically, feeling close to my own mortality provided a rare and valuable reference point that only bolstered my hopefulness. During open heart surgery, my heart stopped beating for two hours on bypass, but I woke up—knowing that every day is a gift and that it is possible to overcome the most dire of situations. Looking back twenty years later from the vantage point of an NIH-funded academic physician, wife, and mother, I realize now it was the first time a serious situation had forced my “outlook” hand, and, instinctively, I played the hope card. This somewhat unconscious act, as well as the positive outcome itself—a 360-degree spin from healthy young woman to invalid and back again—began the evolution of the can-do attitude that often becomes my default. This outlook kicks in at two a.m., overriding all circadian rhythms, when I’m on call and paged to the bedside of a patient who has just gone into cardiac arrest. It helps me visualize an ill person becoming well again, even before he heals, because having witnessed the “other side,” I know what proper care and tending can do for the human body. Above all, it fans the voice inside my head that declares things will eventually change, often for the better, even when the specifics remain uncertain.

Our outlook—a term I have chosen to describe our unique patterns of thinking, feeling, and interacting with ourselves and with the world—fundamentally impacts our health and aging. Outlook encompasses our personality, character traits, general disposition, and attitudes, all of which are words used by researchers and clinicians to describe our psychological makeup. While I use many of these terms interchangeably, I decided on the umbrella term outlook for several reasons. First, we can relate to it on a gut level: Our outlook is the lens through which we view the world. Unlike other terms, which carry connotations of permanence, outlook allows for the possibility of something new—as in “gain a new outlook on life.” This is key, because Up is not an academic discussion of the psychological underpinnings of aging, although I do include as much of the research as I can fit in. Up invites you to take a personal inventory—and, if necessary, to make changes geared toward maximizing your health at any age.

When we deconstruct our outlook into its nuts and bolts—the unique patterns of thinking and feeling that drive so much of our lives—we begin to see it from a different perspective. We begin to see not only why our outlook may lead us to decisions and behaviors but also...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Putnam Inc
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1594631212
• ISBN 13: 9781594631214
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Harder; https://www.edel.com; ; Neum�hlen 17; Hamburg; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland