Embracing the inevitable journey of aging can be a joyful experience. Let's delve into the art of growing older with grace, positivity, and happiness, and discover how to transform this inevitable process into a celebration of life's rich tapestry.
Aging gracefully
The dominant discourse on aging, especially when it comes to women, revolves around “aging gracefully.”
- This generally involves looking at least three to five years younger than you actually are, while not appearing to do anything to get that way.
- It also means “acting your age,” by wearing age-appropriate clothes and doing age appropriate activities, but maybe doing one or two surprisingly youthful things that don’t seem like you’re trying too hard yet let people know you’re still in the game.
Refeather your nest
Reframe the phrase “empty nest” as a joyful process in the wake of children going off to start their own independent lives.
- The idea of an empty nest suggests that there’s nothing left, while refeathering takes a more ecological lens, imagining a kind of regeneration that happens as the home, and the family, transforms into something new.
Seek out awe
Taking an “awe walk,” a walk specifically focused on attending to vast or inspiring things in the environment, increased joy and prosocial emotions more than simply taking a stroll in nature
- Researchers found that “smile intensity,” a measure of how much the participants smiled, increased over the eight-week study.
Try a time warp
We can prime our minds to feel younger, which in turn can make our bodies follow suit.
- Even if you don’t turn back the clock, checking back in with your younger self can be a way to rediscover parts of yourself that you may have lost touch with and bring them with you as you age
Get a culture fix
Attending cultural events correlated with increased survival, while people who rarely attended cultural events had a higher risk of mortality
- Enriching your environment with color, art, plants and other sensorially stimulating elements may be a worthwhile investment not just for protecting your mind as you age but also your joy
Maximize mobility
Invest in your mobility now to help preserve range of motion and minimize repetitive stress injuries later.
- You have one body, and it has to last your whole life. The more you do now to care for it, the more freedom you’ll have to do the things you love late in life.
Stay up on tech
Technology shapes the world we live in, and those technologies that seem new and fringy in the moment often end up in the mainstream, influencing the ways we communicate, work and access even basic services.
- As we age, we have a choice: we can either cling to the world as we shaped it and refuse to engage in the new world our kids’ and grandkids’ generations are creating, or we can adapt to their world and remain curious, active participants in it.
Stimulate your senses
Just as our muscles atrophy if we don’t exercise them, our cognitive capacity diminishes if we do not stimulate our senses, enriching your environment with color, art, plants and other sensorially stimulating elements may be a worthwhile investment not just for protecting your mind as you age but also your joy.
Buy yourself flowers
Memory and mood improved when people were given a gift of flowers, which wasn’t the case when they were given another kind of gift.
- This may be linked to research on the attention restoration effect, which shows that the passive stimulation we find in looking at greenery helps to restore our ability to concentrate.
- Another possibility is that flowers are important because they eventually become fruit and our ancestors took an interest in them and remember their location.
