Worry is a mental preoccupation. It is always not bad. Sometimes it works as a motivation or may help in making a potentially reasonable strategy to deal with stressful life situations. In other words, it helps an individual in the preparation for dealing with a future challenge or a threat. In this sense, worry can be adaptive. An elderly may indeed have a real-life event about which to worry. For example, the cause of worry may be one’s poor health, worry about the sickness of a family member or death of a close relative, financial insecurity, changes in one’s functional independence and dying. When an elderly adopt some strategy to overcome that situation then his worry is adaptive.
On the other hand, worry may consume your time and energy if it goes on excessively on the issues or things that are not worth worrying about. Such a situation is a negative psychological barrier affecting positive ageing. Excess worry over trivial issues will have depressive effects on your mental and physical health.
A person who has developed a worrying lifestyle becomes over-sensitive about the smallest things. The person may develop a physical illness or physical aches and pains which may result in narrowing focus on life challenges even when it is not possible to do much about them.
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