AGEING GRACEFULLY – Page 4

Generally, elderly people raise a question-“how long will I live”?.

The right question which one should raise is – “ if I am going to live such a long time, how can I be happy in the process “?

The common worries of the elderly are- “I am losing my health”, “ I am losing the ability to take care of myself”. In late life person’s health declines, he loses youthful looks, feels functional loss and becomes physically vulnerable. There arises a gap between what he aspires to do and what he can do.

There are specific consequences of age-related declines, such as memory impairment (it can create a fear of loss of meaning as you get older), physical disability, etc. The age-related decline is different from decline due to disease. An age-related decline occurs gradually in stages such as by-function, disability, dependency and death. The pathway through these four stages of ageing is unavoidable. The decline will affect you and influence your life satisfaction and well-being.

This process of decline is termed frailty which is not connected to illness and disease. Being frail means you are declining, it does not mean that you are weak or unhealthy. Continue reading “POSITIVE AGEING: FIND MEANING IN OLD AGE”

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. mental preoccupation

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.
Continue reading “WORRY: BARRIERS TO POSITIVE AGEING”