Ageing

norman-rockwell

We all have a story – it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. This Thanksgiving as we show gratitude for our beautiful life – take some time to reflect on a beautiful end, too. Know the answers to just these five questions for yourself, and for your loved ones. Commit to advocating for each other. Please share, pass this on. Let’s start a revolution.

5 questions

WHY IT MATTERS

MANY OF US DO NOT DIE IN THE WAY WE WOULD HAVE CHOSEN

73% of Americans would prefer to die at home

  • but anywhere between 20-50% of Americans die in hospital settings.
  • More than 80% of Californians say their loved ones “know exactly” or have a “good idea” of what their wishes would be if they were in a persistent coma, but only 50% say they’ve talked to them about their preferences
  • Eight out of ten people say it is “very” or “somewhat” important to write down EOL wishes, but only 36% actually have written instructions.
  • According a NY Times article,
  • Dr. John E. Wennberg of Dartmouth Medical School, the chief author of the study, said doctors and hospitals that provided more care, or more intensive care, did not necessarily achieve better results for patients. He stated, “Some chronically ill and dying Americans are receiving too much care — more than they and their families actually want or benefit from

  • AND IT COMES AT A GREAT COST A study by the California Healthcare Foundation compared patients who received palliative care services (i.e. reducing the severity of symptoms, not trying to cure the disease) versus those who did not over the last three days of life. The cost for patients who received palliative care services was $492 versus $2,671 for those who did not, creating a savings of $2,179 in the last three days of life.
  • People don’t talk about death, which means that often times, people aren’t able to die in the way that they lived — with intent. Some people die in a hospital when they would have preferred to be at home. Others are kept on life sustaining treatments way beyond the point they would have wanted. This comes at a high cost to us, our families and the healthcare system.
  •  
    Communicate your wishes. Engage with Grace.

    Learn more: Engage with Grace and the One Slide Project have one goal: To help ensure that all of us – and the people we care for – can end our lives in the same purposeful way we lived them. engagewithgrace.org

    By Paul Frijters, University of Queensland and Tony Beatton, Queensland University of Technology

    older happy overweight couple

    Image: istockphoto

    People are at their happiest at retirement age and their most miserable in their geriatric years, according to a study we published recently in the Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organisation. Our findings effectively debunk the myth of middle-aged blues and show how happiness levels vary widely over a person’s lifespan.

     

    We all strive towards happiness to achieve a sense of fulfilment in our lives. But there is also an economic reason to advocate this goal. Happier people tend to be healthier than those who are unhappy; and mentally unhealthy people are costly.

    According to the Department of Health and Ageing and beyondblue, depression treatment costs the Australian community more than $600 million each year. It’s expected depression will be second only to heart disease as the leading medical cause of death and disability within the next 20 years.

    Existing ideas of happiness

    The notion that happiness is U-shaped over a person’s lifetime has gained a lot of momentum over the past decade. The U-shape of the happiness myth goes something like this: we were happy in our youth, became more miserable in our mid-40s, only to have happiness return in our late-50s. We then confront an inevitable happiness decline as our health fails in our late-70s and beyond.

    Previous research supporting the U-shape model of happiness incorrectly assumed that life factors (such as level of income, education, marital status and health) remained constant over a lifetime. And rather than following an individual over many years to see how happy they are at different ages, researchers studied various groups of people at different stages of their lives whilst inappropriate presuming they shared the same characteristics.

    New research

    Our research interrogated the U-shape of happiness theory by examining how happiness levels changed in a sample of 60,000 people in Australia, Britain, and Germany, over many years.

    stooped old man

    Happiness levels drop quickly as death approaches for people between the ages of 80 and 90. Flickr/rubybgold

    We accounted for statistical limitations such as character traits and availability. This is important because being part of a study isn’t a random event: those who are busier (and perhaps happier in their middle-aged years) are less likely to take part in these studies. But happier (and therefore healthier) older people who have more time on their hands are more likely to be involved.

    Hence the previous economic studies over-estimated the misery in mid-life and under-estimated it for very old people who were too sick to respond.

    Unexpectedly, there was also the matter of increased honesty: Germans who were surveyed ten years in a row were significantly less happy than Germans interviewed at the beginning and end of the same period. The more a German talked, the unhappier she seemed to become; the dominant interpretation is that she became more honest about her true feelings and kept up a facade earlier on.

    A similar thing occurs in Britain, but to a lesser degree. Australians had no such tendency. Correcting for both selectivity and dishonest reporting, we arrived at the wave-like profile below (click on the magnifying glass to zoom).

    graph

    A comparison of happiness in relation to age in Australia, Germany and Britain.

    Our findings appear more in the line with the large body of psychological literature on the issue: there are no middle-age blues. Happiness is level through from about the age of 20 to retirement age (55 to 60), peaking at age 65 to 70 for Australians, then dropping increasingly fast as death approaches (80 to 90).

    The same was found in Britain and Germany, though the happiness wave among the retired was far more pronounced there than elsewhere.

    What’s next for happiness research?

    One of the frontiers is how to promote happy personalities, which turn out to be extroverted personalities. Extroverts cope better with life shocks and are thus less stressed.

    But how do we increase extroversion?

    The short answer is we don’t know. Though the Penn Resiliency Program (PRP) of Professor Martin Seligman and his team at the University of Pennsylvania have been experimenting with telling school children how great they are, stimulating them to be open and extroverted. There are no results yet from these studies, but the idea is to look at whether we can educate children to be extroverted, and therefore happier, by stimulating their creativity and willingness to speak out.

    Happiness policy is a relatively new concept in our society and we are only just getting used to the idea that it is something valid for our governments to worry about. We want our children to grow up as happy adults so we need to promote happy personality traits.

    Meanwhile it is comforting to know that the happiest years come after retirement! Something to look forward to rather than dread.

    Paul Frijters received ARC funding to do this work.

    Tony Beatton does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

    The Conversation

    creative commons license
    This article was originally published at The Conversation.
    Read the original article.

    old and young hands

    istockphoto

    Relationships between elder and younger members of a family can be strained and positive and negative in nature, even when affection is shared. A new study from the Journal of Marriage and Family finds that long-term caretaking duties puts further strain on adult parent-child relationships.

    Authors of the first international comparative study of its kind, analyzed levels of affection and conflict among more than 2,600 parents and children in six developed nations: England, Germany, Israel, Norway, Spain and the U.S. They found that certain nations have developed prevalent, acceptable ways of behaving towards their elders, but that long-term interdependence and heavy care-taking responsibility introduces a major challenge to the relationship. [continue reading…]