How can they not be? Would it be too obvious for me to state that positive emotions are good for your health at any age 😉
The notion that feeling good may be good for your health is not new, but is it really true?
We all age. It is how we age, however, that determines the quality of our lives
-says Anthony Ong of Cornell University author of a new article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The article reviews the existing research on how positive emotions can influence health outcomes in later adulthood. [continue reading…]
Johann Hariwrites an eloquent and impassioned summary of his grandmothers final years spent in care homes in Britain.
My grandmother did not believe in moaning about anything. So when I first visited her in that first home, and found her in a wheelchair staring into space, with a cold and foul pie in front of her, she said everything was fine. Although homes are supposed to lay on activities every day, I hardly ever saw any happening. There would be rows of people in metal chairs looking into the middle distance, and occasionally a surly member of staff would give them a balloon to pat to each other. Yet if you stopped and spoke to these people, they were lucid – and agonisingly bored
It gets worse:
She had been saying for months that it was far too painful, but the “carers” told her she wouldn’t get any food if she didn’t do it and it was “necessary”. “I’m not walking,” she said, crying. “It’s agony.” The staff were clucking and telling her she was “misbehaving”, as if she was a toddler.
This was so out of character that I immediately knew something was wrong, and I insisted they call a doctor. They hummed and hahed and only agreed when I got angry. She was finally taken to hospital and X-rayed. The doctors found that her legs could no longer support her weight – she was a big woman – and had suffered severe stress fractures and breakages that must have been there for months. They had been forcing her to walk on broken legs.
The shocking truth is that his grandmothers story is not unique.It terrifies me to think too much about the content of his article. What sort of society are we becoming when we treat our elderly so badly? Â Johann nails it when he says:
we are punishing the people who saved the world from the Nazis. Didn’t my grandmother – and yours – deserve a better ending to her story than this?
Jonny Bowden tells us to stop believing everything you’ve heard about aging. Like many other things in life, the way you think about aging has profound effects how it actually functions.
We live in a competitive culture. We’re people who keep score. From standardized tests to golf handicaps, we like to know how we measure up to others.
As we grow older, though, we begin to keep a different kind of tabulation. It’s not that we start forgetting where we left the reading glasses. It’s that we wonder whether others in our aging cohort also forget, and how we compare.
The Washington Post features some tests adapted from a variety of sources – physicians, professors, Web sites, research articles – to evaluate how you’re doing mentally and physically now that you’re over 50. This isn’t science; for that, you need a trained clinician to give you a battery of cognitive and physiological tests. But if you’re looking to keep tabs on how you measure up to others your age, have some fun with these. Curious? Link to read more More about cognitive tests
Source:Washington Post
