Careful--This Makes Growing Old Worse 😲

It's my birthday week.

It's my birthday.

There's no denying it, I'm officially elderly and have been for a while. 😬

"Elderly" has preconceived notions attached to it

Sigmund Freud, on turning 50 pronounced:

“About the age of fifty, the elasticity of the mental processes upon which treatment depends, is, as a rule lacking. Old people are no longer educable.”

Ironically, Freud wrote some of his most important books in his fifties and sixties!

Freud was wrong. If we continue using our mental and physical skills, we can maintain--maybe improve--them later in life.

Cardiovascular capacity (VO2 max) starts to sag in our twenties and drops dramatically after fifty. It was thought to be inevitable until marathoners, triathletes, and ultra-runners in their sixties, seventies, and eighties started racking up times that shouldn’t have been possible.

Researchers discovered that the right kind of training erased fifty years of decline. The VO2 max of athletic eighty-year-olds was equal to that of healthy thirty-five-year-olds!

Strength We start losing muscle fibers around the age of fifty, but with proper training, the remaining ones overdevelop and make up the difference.

Thinking skills Mental deficits associated with aging are often related to working memory, task switching, multitasking, and our ability to resist distraction.

Thanks to the lifelong plasticity of the brain, those changes can be prevented or reversed, through physical and cognitive training.

The brain learns to recruit regions underutilized in our earlier years, compensating for any cognitive decline that comes with age.

We think differently after the age of 50

1) We view things less as black-and-white and more shades of gray.

2) We become more empathetic, able to see both sides of an issue without judgement.

3) We become better at seeing the big picture--the forest rather than the trees.

An older mind has certain advantages over a younger one!

Those "senior moments" when you can't find the word you want? One theory is that your brain is so full of information it takes extra effort to find that word in its files!

Ageism is ingrained in our culture

Staying positive about aging can be challenging--82% of older Americans report encountering ageism regularly.

In a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, people who started believing negative stereotypes about aging in their 20s, 30s, and 40s had a 30% greater decline in memory in their 60s than controls.

Aging is as much mental as physical

If you doubt it, you haven't read Counterclockwise. Haven't read it? Stop right now and add it to your Amazon shopping basket. I'll wait....

It's one of the best books I've ever read.

If you think of yourself as old and decrepit, your actions and feelings will match your self-concept.

Having a positive mindset toward aging ("I believe my best days are ahead of me") resulted in people living 8 years longer than those with a negative mindset.

Every age has its struggles but the older we are, the more wisdom we have to deal with them, right?

One thing we know--believing in myths about aging ages us faster.

Let's be grateful for every year we get!