The right attitude
“Aging successfully is about having the right attitude.”
“The question now is, who will I be? I’m 83 years old, my mother died at 96 and I have all that time ahead of me. I get up in the morning and nothing hurts and I think, ‘Oh my God, miracles! What shall I do with my day?'”
You may be watching your diet, trying to stay physically active and seeing your doctor more regularly. These are all smart things to do at any age. Giving them a bit more emphasis after 60 doesn’t mean you expect some calamity is just around the corner. It simply helps ensure that you’re in the best possible position to get the most out of life, whether you’re strengthening your back so you can work in the garden or building up your stamina to get the most from a holiday abroad.
However successful you feel you are in maintaining your well-being, there’s one important point to keep in mind: Deciding whether to move into a senior community is not a verdict on how healthy you are now, or even how healthy you expect to be. Among the many myths dispelled by the MacArthur Foundation Study—the most comprehensive examination of aging ever undertaken in North America—one of the more persistent is the notion that growing older necessarily means becoming less well:
“In sum, decades of research clearly debunk the myth that to be old in America is to be sick and frail. Older Americans are generally healthy. Even in advanced old age, an overwhelming majority of the elderly population have little functional disability, and the proportion that is disabled is being whittled away over time. We are delighted to observe increasing momentum toward the emergence of a physically and cognitively fit, non-disabled, active elderly population. The combination of longer life and less illness is adding life to years as well as years to life.”
Whether you stay where you are or move into a senior community, this is how you can confidently approach the years to come—not as a retreat from life, but as an opportunity to live it as fully as ever, if not more so. In terms of physical fitness, that means having access to a pool or fitness center. Trying a yoga or dance-ercise class. Joining friends for a stroll in the park or an outing to a museum. In fact, walking is one of the simplest and best workouts you can choose, no matter what pace you set. At the same time, a wealth of new research has shown that older adults can benefit enormously from aerobics, weight training, spinning classes—the whole gamut of fitness activities, provided they’re properly taught and supervised.
Staying healthy, as we all know, is also about eating right. If you’re less keen on cooking than you used to be, are you sure the foods you eat have everything you need? Once again, there’s no end of compelling new research showing that many health issues we used to think were an inevitable part of aging can in fact be remedied by changes in diet. With the right choices on the menu, you can protect your heart, strengthen bones, reduce the risk of cancer and even improve brain performance.
The key ingredient in any healthy diet is information—timely, balanced and validated by reputable science. And the best way to ensure you’re getting it is by seeking expert advice, whether from your doctor or a nutritionist who can work with you to ensure you’re getting enough of the right kinds of foods. When you’re researching potential communities, see what they have to say about healthy eating—and who they’ve got on staff to help make it happen.
Connecting with other people
Staying socially engaged as you grow older is not just a pleasant way to spend your time; it’s also vital to your well-being. This is another critical area examined by the landmark MacArthur Foundation Study. In their groundbreaking book “Successful Aging,” renowned experts John Rowe and Robert Kahn make three key points about the links between social connections and health:
“First, isolation—a lack of social ties however measured—is a powerful risk factor for poor health. Second, social support in its many forms—emotional, actual physical assistance, and so on—has direct positive effects on health. Equally important, but less widely known, social support can buffer or reduce some of the health-related effects of aging.”
So if you’re living in your own home, and especially if it’s just you, be sure to keep up those vital social connections. Visit with friends and family, and invite them to visit you. Get to know your grandkids, or become a friend and mentor to someone else’s. Stay in touch with the neighbors. Get to know the people in your favorite shops and restaurants. Join a club, try a fitness activity, take a class—or teach one. Volunteer at your church or a community center.
The possibilities are endless. The key is to choose something that appeals to you and also gets you interacting with other people and, soon enough, making new friends. It will keep you healthier, more upbeat, more alive to sides of yourself that can go quiet when you’re on your own. And, as a recent AARP article notes, being with other people is great for keeping your mind nimble and alert:
“Social interaction not only helps brain development when we’re young; recent research shows it can also protect our brains from decline as we age. Having a large social network can cut the risk of dementia by 26 percent, a 2008 study of older California women found. Having daily contact with family and friends cut the risk by half.”
Being curious, creative and inspired
Why did Picasso keep on painting into his 90s? Not because he needed the practice—or the money. Art was his way of exploring his relationships and experiences and then expressing how he felt about them. It wasn’t just what he did, but who he was.
We’re not all creative geniuses like Picasso, of course. But that’s not the point. What his life illustrated so vividly was the capacity that all of us have to keep on being creative in countless ways. If you haven’t held a colored pencil since you were a kid, maybe it’s time to pick one up and see how you do. Take a class in painting, or pottery, or weaving, or photography. Learn how to enhance your photos on the computer, or how to edit family videos, or how to build your own website. Write a journal, your life story, an epic poem.
Revive an old hobby, or take up a new one: collecting stamps or antique cars, making stained-glass windows or a mushroom risotto, watching birds or the films of Ingmar Bergman. It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as it’s something that makes you feel engaged, intrigued, passionate, imaginative—and looking forward to your next chance to keep that feeling going.
Creativity isn’t about what you specifically make, arrange or collect. It’s how you approach your whole life—staying curious about the possibilities, open to trying new things, finding inspiration where you might easily have missed it if you were moving too fast.
Living creatively is also good for you in other ways. It keeps your mind agile and your brain healthy. It builds valuable connections with other people. And all the latest research confirms what most of us know instinctively: If you’re doing something you love, you feel better about life generally—more in touch with your feelings, proud of your accomplishments and hopeful about the future.
This gets to the heart of what be.group is all about. We take enormous satisfaction in seeing people thrive in our senior communities and enjoy all that they have to offer. But even more important to us is how we help enrich the many dimensions—physical, intellectual, emotional and social—of an exciting, often surprising time in people’s lives. We’re here to help you embrace the possibilities, to dig deeper into your current interests and passions, and at the same time to explore new sides of yourself.
Our communities aren’t just places to live, they’re places to be who you truly want to be: yourself.
