POSITIVELY FRAMING AGING

The very first thing you will want to do in service of healthy aging is to frame aging as an experience that you can manage. Refuse to let society frame aging for you—if you do, you will be pretty much doomed to experiencing it as a highly debilitating experience. The ideas that we have all grown up with about aging are some of the most dysfunctional and toxic ideas around.

After 30 you are over the hill. When something slips your mind, you are becoming senile. As you get older, your memory will fail, your intelligence will falter, you will become useless and a burden to others.

Begin by clearly distinguishing age from aging. In the last article, I called that the first critical distinction that we need to make. When someone asks about your age, they are asking about a number. That’s all. And that number is not necessarily the same thing as your mental age, your emotional age, your bodily age, your fitness age, your creativity age, etc. Because aging is something that you do—it is dependent upon what you do and the quality of how you are doing things.

Let’s ask, “What are you doing?” The answer is growing. Well, at least I hope that is your answer and if it is, then the next question is even more critical: “How you are growing mentally, emotionally, behaviorally, in your attitude, etc.?” At the heart of healthy aging is the experience of continuing to grow. Growing does not end at 18 or 30 or 65. Growing is what every human being who is inwardly alive is doing.

You are still growing in your understandings, you are reading and studying, you are keeping your mind alive. You are exploring new areas and subjects. You are still growing emotionally in learning the fundamentals of emotional intelligence. You are becoming ever more aware of your emotions, monitoring your emotions, regulating them, and using them to relate to loved ones and friends. You are keeping your joy alive, your curiosity, your playfulness, your compassion, your passions, etc. You are still growing relationally as you keep yourself involved with people, extending yourself for the welfare of others, for mentoring, for caring. You are still growing physically as you keep your body alive with cardio-vascular exercise, muscular skeleton strength, stretching, etc. You may no longer be experiencing the exponential growth as you did in your teens and 20s, but you can still experience the endorphins that come from maintaining your fitness.

If aging is what you do, then the quality of your aging and the nature of it depends on developing healthy habits that sustain you in all of the dimensions of being human. This obviously requires taking responsibility for yourself, giving up any and all excuses, and using your creativity to find a way to keep yourself in the game of life.

If you have learned the opposite, that aging happens to you, that you have no choice, that your genetics control everything, that you can’t fight against getting old and decrepit, etc., if you have learned any of those toxic ideas about aging from your family, culture, or from the general society you live in—you can also unlearn those ideas.

It’s up to you to personally frame aging in a positive way. When you do that, you thereby transform the aging experience into an experience that you can manage. Does the idea of aging create any problems for you? Good. Take that idea and examine it. What are the assumptions that you are accepting about aging? What are the frames that you are allowing to influence your thinking and feeling? Whatever “problem” you find, here is the good news, you are not the problem. If there is a problem, then the frame is the problem. And that’s why addressing the frame is so crucial to your well-being.