What’s your life going to look like 10 or 20 years from now? How will your body or relationships or income or capabilities change? Expecting lots of decline and disability? You might be surprised by how things could turn out. A Pew study found a significant difference between what adults expected life over 65 to be like and what people over …
People are living longer. It’s projected that half of children born today will live past 100. What about you? What can you do to boost your chances for greater health and longer life? There are many common prescriptions offered by the experts. They tell us that regular physical activity can add between 1 and 3 years to your life. So can …
You have a choice. It doesn’t matter where you are right now or what you’re going through, you can recreate the direction of your life. Those words come from a book I wrote years ago called The Power of Choice. Back then, I was trying to help people free themselves from the expectations of others and the rut they had grown …
How to you feel when you look in the mirror? Are you disgusted by some of the changes you see? Or do you get a sense of pride and gratitude? The way we feel about ourselves as we get older has a major effect on the way we age. More than you may have suspected. So watch those thoughts while gazing. …
I was just watching “Super Soul Sunday” on OWN. Today’s guest was Dr. Christiane Northrup, whom I’ve written about recently. Northrup shared with Oprah an idea from her new book about aging: once a person announces her age, people start putting her in a box and applying certain expectations and limitations based on the number. But as study after study is …
There are women in their 90s who dance, play sports, and laugh a lot. There are also women in their 50s who complain about constant pain and can barely make it down a few steps on their own. The number signifying your age doesn’t determine what your life should be like. It shouldn’t define or constrain what you can do. That …
What were you thinking about before you came to this page? What was on your mind? Thoughts running over and over again like a broken record almost without your awareness. It’s something you want to pay attention to, because your thoughts shape your reality. The thoughts that dominate your mind—more than anything around you—color the experiences you have. Science has repeatedly …
I want to know all I can about aging well. After all, if I’m going to get older, I may as well do it in the best possible way. To that end, I’ve been studying how to age successfully. For my dissertation research, I interviewed women in their 60s who were part of New Thought spirituality. New Thought includes such groups …
In my last post, I referred to a book by Harvard researcher Ellen Langer called Counterclockwise. In that book, she shares findings from a number of studies, including her infamous counterclockwise study on men in their 80s in which remarkable changes took place that seemed to turn back the hands of time. She took two groups of men on a week-long …
There is mounting evidence that our thoughts have an effect on how well or poorly we age. A study conducted in 1996 had two groups of people solving anagrams. In one group, the words were age-stereotype terms like “forgetful” and in the other group, the words were neutral and not age related. After the two groups solved the word puzzles, they …
