Healthy Aging Secrets From Scientific Research
Here are four excellent healthy aging secrets from scientific research, including how to stay young, how aging improves your personality traits, and how successful aging makes you feel happier. Plus, inspirational quotations from two strong women in history: Susan B. Anthony and Suze Orman.
“The older I get, the greater power I seem to have to help the world; I am like a snowball - the further I am rolled, the more I gain,” said Susan Anthony in The Life and World of Susan B. Anthony.
If you’re getting older, relax into it. You really are improving with age: you’re positively affecting more people and you’re getting happier! Here’s how to feel and stay young, along with recent discoveries about the aging process.
Healthy Aging Secrets From Scientific Research
Healthy Aging Secret #1: Personality traits improve with age. Being productive, having good interpersonal skills, and acting compassionately towards others are signs of good psychological heath. The good news is that these traits steadily increase after you hit age 30. Psychologists from the University of California at Berkeley studied the Big Five Personality Traits and overall life span trends; they found that personalities, like wine, improve over time. Conscientiousness and agreeableness (warmth, generosity, and helpfulness) are personality traits that also increase with age, making your life and relationships much more enjoyable. This discovery about healthy aging may help you feel, act, and stay young.
Healthy Secret #2: Divorce affects whether you’ll be cared for later. Divorces, widowhood and remarriage change the likelihood that your children will be involved in your twilight years. “It’s not the divorce itself that affects the quality of the parent-child relationship,” says Adam Davey, a gerontologist at Temple University in Philadelphia. “It’s what happens afterwards, such as geographical separation.” He found that marital disruptions earlier in a child’s life are less detrimental. Whether or not you’re divorced, staying geographically close to your kids may increase feelings of support and happiness as you get older. Though you may not have total control when it comes to this research about healthy aging, you can stay young by giving and getting support from close friends or other relatives.
Healthy Aging Secret #3: Well-being is U-shaped over a typical lifespan. “A typical individual’s happiness reaches its minimum - on both sides of the Atlantic and for both males and females - in middle age,” say University of Warwick researchers David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald. People are generally most happy towards the beginning and end of their lives; the probability of depression peeks at around age 40 for women and age 50 for men. Why? The exact reason is unknown, but these researchers speculate that people learn to accept their strengths and weaknesses as they get older. According to this recent discovery about successful aging, if you want to stay young you may want to focus on the natural happiness that approaches with age.
Healthy Aging Secret #4: Older people are happier and calmer. Sociology professors Catherine Ross and John Mirowsky (from the University of Texas at Austin) evaluated 1,450 responses to a General Social Survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center. Ross and Mirowsky found that successful aging is connected to passive, positive emotions - such as contentment and ease. “Emotions that are both active and negative, such as anxiety and anger, are especially unlikely among the elderly,” says Ross.
Starting at age 60, men report more positive, active emotions than women. Men and women of all ages who have higher income and education levels experience “significantly more positive emotions” than those with lower income and education levels. Here’s how to stay young: focus on your positive emotions, not the negative ones.
Healthy Aging Secrets From Scientific Research
This is an anonymous quotation that I picked up at ThinkExist.com. I don’t know if a strong woman in history said it, but I like it:
“At the age of 20, we don’t care what the world thinks of us; at 30, we worry about what it is thinking of us; at 40, we discover that it wasn’t thinking of us at all.”
We can relax in the knowledge that the world may not be thinking of us as much as we suspect…which leaves us free to be as real as we please! As we get older, we’re more liberated from the opinions and expectations of others, which keeps us young and vibrant.
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