What’s the secret to happiness?
Not sure there are any secrets, but there appears to be a formula. By studying happy people, researchers have been able to find common traits and links between them. This is good news for us! It means we can take steps to actively increase our happiness. Who doesn’t want that?!
We can choose to age gracefully and happily by focusing on these six things:
Experts have been telling us for years that regular family dinners are one of the most effective ways for parents and children to reconnect and bond. Families who consistently sit down at the table together also reap many other benefits including healthier, smarter, more resilient kids.
But in many households—despite best intentions—the family dinner seems like an unattainable relic from another era—nice, but not likely to happen.
Maybe it’s time to set the bar a little lower, and focus on resurrecting another bygone tradition: the Sunday dinner.
Our need for sleep changes throughout our lifetimes, but maybe not as much as we once thought. Contrary to popular belief, adults 65 and older do not require less sleep than they did at 35 or 50. The National Sleep Foundation recommends 7-9 hours of sleep a night for adults of all ages.
Unfortunately, many adults over 65 do sleep less than the 7-9 recommended hours, which can be detrimental to overall health. Here’s what to know about sleep and how to improve sleeping habits.
What happens when you don’t sleep enough
Can you hear me now?
It’s an unkind stereotype—the aging person who is constantly saying, “Eh?” because they can’t hear what someone else is saying. While it might make for a funny bit on a TV show or in a movie, in real life, hearing loss is no joking matter. And of course, it’s not only older people who experience hearing loss, it can happen at any age.
Impaired hearing is not only inconvenient and a detriment to quality of life, it can also contribute to physical injury (the inner ear is critical to maintaining balance and avoiding falls) and depression (withdrawal from social situations due to embarrassment can lead to isolation).
Over the past year, the pandemic has definitively disproved the old adage, “you can’t go home again.”
For nearly 27 million young adults, going home again became the best survival option as colleges closed or transitioned to a remote model and employers laid off massive numbers of staff.
In fact, Pew Research reports that in July of last year 52% of young adults resided with one or both of their parents. (For comparison, that percentage is 4 points higher than the corresponding one recorded during the Great Depression.)
The movie opens on a shot of a woman walking through a quaint village of cobbled alleys and charming shops. As she makes her way along the street, she is greeted by passersby and greets them in return.
She pauses to exchange a friendly word with a shopkeep who knows her name, inquires after her mother, and asks if she’d like her usual order. Her path intersects with the postman, who digs into his satchel to pull out her letters. A small boy on a bicycle nearly runs over her toes in his haste to catch up with his friends. He shouts an apology over his shoulder as she calls after him in good-natured exasperation.
It sounds idyllic, doesn’t it?
Some people joke about hoarders, but those people haven’t lived with the pain, frustration, and very real physical dangers caused by this mental illness.
While hoarding usually presents when a person is still a child, it is a disorder that—like dementia—becomes more prevalent and severe with age. It is an illness that is very difficult to treat, and one that affects not only the hoarder, but everyone around them.
Sadly, like many other mental illnesses, hoarding is often very misunderstood and even maligned. People wrongly assume that hoarding is simply a matter of someone collecting too many things or being too lazy to keep their home tidy.
Aging isn’t easy, but we all have to do it. Contrary to the myth our culture tries to sell us, there is no escaping the march of time and the changes it brings to our bodies, minds, and lives. And these days, understanding how to age well is increasingly important since our golden years stretch out for much longer than they used to. In the last hundred years or so, the average life expectancy has increased by almost thirty years.
The key, as it turns out, to being happy during the latter part of life is to discover and embrace the concept of positive aging.
This can be tricky, especially in a country like the United States, where getting older is something most people either ignore or fight. But science is proving that while aging may not be a bed of roses, there are lots of things we can do to make the process more enjoyable and ensure greater happiness and better health along the way.
Once the holidays are behind us and winter proper has settled in, we will likely find ourselves with some extra time on our hands.
In years past, trips and getting together with friends and family helped to break up the long, dark season between New Year’s and springtime. But the travel and social restrictions that are necessary to keep us and our loved ones safe from COVID will make it necessary to find other ways to entertain ourselves.
In case you’ve already watched all of Netflix (or are just looking for something beyond the latest binge-worthy show), we’ve put together a starter list of fascinating lectures, talks, and podcasts.
Use it or lose is the old adage, and it applies to your brain as well as your body. In this post, we’re going to give you a long list of things you can do to use your brain and keep it healthy.
Consider the alternative – succumbing to Alzheimer’s. This may sound draconian, but here are the harsh realities:
Happily, we may be able to do something about it. Continue reading
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