This Is The New 80: Aging Well

This week, feminist and activist Gloria Steinem turns eighty. She's still writing, traveling, and speaking. She gave an interview to the New York Times in which she explains her birthday celebration plans. They included a "This is What 80 Looks Like" benefit fundraiser for the Shalom Center of Philadelphia, followed by a trip to Botswana, including an elephant ride.

Steinem is honest about her age, and while she colors her hair, she hasn't succumbed to changing her face or wrinkles. She is still very actively involved in her causes. I wonder if it keeps her younger. It's wonderful that she feels such as sense of purpose at 80.

As more of us can expect to live longer, into our 80's and 90's, we have an opportunity to consider how we want to approach aging.

Here are some things to consider:

1.Your energy level changes, often by 50 and beyond. How can you learn to pace yourself, take rest breaks, and focus on the most important things to be spending your time on? One challenge is adjusting your physical activities as you age. As Michelle Obama turned 50 this year, she shifted from cardio work outs to more of a focus on flexibility, with activities like yoga. Having a social network that encourages movement is helpful, too.

2.What can you do to still stay active mentally? Use it or lose it is the key principle. Staying involved with other people is important, and not isolating. Steinem is a good role model in this way, by continuing to stay involved actively in issues and causes she cares about. I always want to explore with my patients who are considering retirement, "What are you retiring to do?"

3. The research team using the 8 decade study started by Dr. Lewis Terman from Stanford University and follow up studies by Dr. Howard Friedman and Dr. Leslie Martin, show that people who have a purpose, and a life path with an active pursuit of their goals live longer. A larger social network, giving to your community, and building and maintaining a close marriage and/or friendships can add both more years and more life satisfaction. These life decisions also help individuals bounce back sooner from disappointments and loss. Friedman and Martin term it creating a "persistent, consequential, and social life".

4. Establish social and emotional ties. In both men and women, having the ability to maintain close relationships helps you live longer.  While Steinem married once late in her life and is now widowed, in this Sunday's interview with Steinem in the New York Times, she mentions that she has a cherished network of friends around the world that she stays in frequent contact with. She has known many of them for many years since the Feminist movement began in the 1960's.

5. Developing your spirituality, faith, or religious beliefs can also increase life span. Friedman and Martin suppose that is has to do with the health benefits of prayer and meditation.

Developing multiple facets of ourselves, and a life that has several sources of meaning can help us transition more successfully as we move across the lifespan. If too much of our self-esteem is caught up in physical attractiveness or a high energy level, it puts us at risk for more difficulty with the aging process. Aging well is more than denying it, or botoxing out expression lines. Aging well means continuing to find our purpose and staying connected to others. Wrinkles and loss happen automatically as we age but wisdom, contribution, and connectedness are all choices.

(Note: The Longevity Project: Surprising Discoveries for Health and Long Life from the Landmark Eight Decade Study, by Friedman and Martin (Plume Books,2012) is an interesting read.)

Something to Look Forward To

We all need something to look forward to. Do you remember being a child, and the amazing feeling of anticipation and excitement you may have felt as summer got closer?

What are you currently looking forward to in your life? If you don't have something you are excited about coming up, maybe it's time to set a goal and make some plans.

Mental health and wellness depend upon having some hope, making plans, and working towards making your dreams happen. Whatever your budget, having a day trip, or a weekend away planned, or beginning to save for and research a trip a year or more in the future, helps you not to get stale or bored. There is something about the planning and anticipation that is good for our outlook. This forward action shows that you are taking responsibility for keeping yourself interesting and curious about life.

Everyday life can get repetitive and a bit boring unless we soul search and introspect on what some healthy goals might be for checking experiences off our bucket list, make plans to reconnect with people who matter, and find ways to challenge ourselves.

Perhaps you have always been curious about traveling to a foreign destination, or want to go back to school, change your career, try dating again, or set some other personal goals to develop yourself and keep your self growing and fully alive.

Many life changes, like overcoming a loss like divorce or a death of a parent, can become opportunities to reinvent yourself and grow some more. Some people dread the children leaving home, or impending retirement, when these can be chances to explore new aspects of yourself that you have not had a chance to develop. Even as we age, we need to keep setting goals and growing.

There is something exceedingly healthy about setting some plans and working to make them happen.
Setting your intention can be very powerful, and help you manifest some of your fondest wishes into happening. What are you excited about in your life? What are you looking forward to in the next few weeks and months? If you can't think of anything, that's the perfect time to begin planning an adventure or a goal you can get excited about. You'll be glad you did.

The Woman in the Mirror

There are aspects of growing up a woman in our society or of raising healthy daughters that are extremely difficult. A particular challenge is helping yourself, or your daughter, to have high self-esteem and feel comfortable and at ease with your/her own body. There are so many expectations for women to be thin, beautiful, and eternally youthful; meet the needs of children, partner, and parents; work, maintain the home front, and be fun while doing it. Most women are at war with their physical self for most of their lives, with a constant negative soundtrack playing in their heads that they are not enough. We compare ourselves to other women, to women who are air-brushed, and to runway models with eating disorder behaviors.

This week, I really enjoyed reading psychologist Cynthia Bulik's new book, The Woman in the Mirror: How to Stop Confusing What You Look Like With Who You Are (Walker and Company, 2012). Bulik is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, a Professor of Nutrition at the UNC's School of Public Health, and the Director of the UNC Eating Disorders Program.

This is a book I would recommend to all women, and to parents of girls. If we are going to help the next generation of women navigate these destructive forces, we need to be educated about what we role-model, and what we say to our daughters. It's powerful. Men count here, too.

What I especially liked about this book was the easy, approachable style of writing. I also appreciated that the author took a life span view of women, from infancy to grade school, middle school, high school, college, marriage, working, menopause, and the issues of aging. At each stage, Bulik illuminates the unique body image pressures and self-esteem hits common to women. Middle school is a particular time of great challenge for most girls in both the body image and self-esteem areas. The transition years beginning and ending college can be vulnerable times for women, as can the period in which they are engaged and planning a wedding, and adjusting to their new body after each pregnancy. Adjusting to menopause can be a time of vulnerability for women, too.

It's also really tough in our society to age. Older men get defined as charming or distinguished, while older women can feel invisible, ignored, and unappreciated. There is increasing media and marketing pressure on women not to show age, and to use cosmetic surgery to help retain a youthful appearance long after they are not youthful. Remember when grandma could just be grandma? She didn't have to do yoga and Pilates and own a business. Mine had wrinkles, baked cinnamon rolls, and was beloved by all. I can't remember her begrudging the aging process.

Throughout the book, Bulik offers worksheets that you can download from her website to help you identify the negative thoughts that may be running overtime in your head about your body. She has a worksheet on tracking how often you hear other people comment about people's weight, etc. It's so common that we can be oblivious to the negative messages that besiege us as women, from others and the internalized ones we beat ourselves up with.

She also suggests we track the number of times we say "I'm sorry" as women. Stop being the emotional shock absorber at home and at work. Be careful about all that apologizing for things you had nothing to do with. Men really do not do this. We need to do a better job of speaking up, advocating for ourselves in relationships and at work, and being direct about what we like and want. We need to stop the war on our own confidence and self-esteem.

While we want to be healthy, active, and vital, it's a problem to confuse our body image with the broader construct of who we are, our self-image. They are different and distinct. I highly recommend this book to women, the men who love them, and parents of girls. It's time for us to all do better at not devaluing ourselves, other women, or our daughters by confusing the woman in the mirror for the real woman of substance inside each of us.