The Art Of Aging Gracefully

Experts Say The Keys To Successful Aging Include Accepting Changes And Finding Meaningful Activities

(WebMD) 

Accepting Changes

Accept the inevitable changes of aging, rather than seeing them as aberrant crises.

During the course of his career, Illinois psychologist Mark Frazier, PsyD, has worked with thousands of older people "ages 65 to 105," he says.
Again and again, he's seen an important key to psychological health: accepting that your life won't stay the same. Aging changes everyone.

"If you live until you're 95 years old, you're probably not going to be living alone in a beautiful apartment and driving your car to the grocery store and picking up your dry cleaning and walking a mile to the park. But if you know that ahead of time, it's much easier to manage it," he says.

"To age gracefully, one needs to anticipate the changes that are inevitable," Frazier says. "People who think rigidly do not do that. As they encounter the natural changes and health status that are part of aging, these things are experienced as negative and adding a lot of stress and strain to their life. Rigid thinkers tend to get overwhelmed. They can't manage it, and they get depressed."

"Other people anticipate what's going to happen," he says. "It's more of a 'Yes, I knew this was coming and I know that I'll negotiate my way through it.'"

Avoiding Stereotypes

Get over your own stereotypes about growing older.

Sue Ellen Cooper, 62, understands Ephron's dirge about "compensatory dressing" and obligatory hair dye. "It's not disgraceful to mourn the loss of your beauty," Cooper says.

"But it's going. So you may as well do what you can and then forget it because there's so much more to life than how you look and what other people think of you."

Almost a decade ago, Cooper started the Red Hat Society to celebrate women 50 and over. Red Hat now boasts 40,000 chapters in the U.S. and abroad. Most members wear red hats and purple dresses to the group's social outings.

But Cooper admits that when she was younger, she harbored prejudice against older people. "When I would meet people, I'd think, "She probably wouldn't be a potential friend for me because she's 20 years older — just these things where we make a split-second judgment on appearance."

Having met thousands of older women through the Red Hat Society, she has replaced the stereotypical thinking with a positive view of aging gracefully. "First impression doesn't tell you a thing. Some of these people have had incredible lives and careers and still have a great sense of humor and a lot of intellect, and the culture will write them off: 'Oh, she's an old lady and she's overweight.'"

"OK, world, here we are: 'old women,'" Cooper says defiantly. "We're about gathering women together as they get older and having that companionship and friendship that makes it less scary for women in this culture. We're still cool."

Finding Meaningful Activities

Continue to find meaning later in life.

"Retirement has always been a time when we see people withdraw from their roles," says Pauline Abbott, EdD, director of gerontology at the Institute of Gerontology, California State University, Fullerton. During this risky time, some older people succumb to depression and a sense of meaninglessness.

"Part of the challenge of aging gracefully is that you have to continue to find things that are important to you," Frazier says.
That can include travel, spiritual pursuits, hobbies, new social groups, lifelong learning, or recapturing time with family if one lacked the chance during the career years, experts say.

Plan for purposeful activities before you retire, Abbott says. "It should be a transition. It shouldn't be, 'Stop work one day and fall off a cliff.' It's time to follow where your passions lie."

Without meaningful goals, "You get into this whole attitude of 'Oh, my gosh – woe’s me. My memory's going, I'm slow, all I do is go to wakes and funerals,'" Frazier says. "If you don't have important things out in front of you, there's enough about the aging process that is not positive and you can get caught up in what you don't like about it."