Silver lining

Not long ago I taught “Introduction to Psychology” to college undergraduates.  I had been looking forward to teaching the developmental psychology section of the course because I had enjoyed it, along with social and abnormal psychology when I had taken the class 30 years before.  But on reviewing the subject and what we know today, I started to find it quite depressing.  Here’s a quote from the text I used:

“By your early 20s, it’s unlikely that you will grow taller and your weight has typically stabilized for many years to come.  For the next several decades, changes in your body should be relatively minor.  True, you may come to need bifocals, and your hair may begin to gray or to thin.  But the basic bodily systems continue to function well.  However, after age 50 or so, noticeable changes in the body begin to occur.”

So true!  I was looking at pictures of me the other day and was surprised to see that I looked essentially the same from the time I graduated high school until I was in my early 40s, when got married.  But something has happened since then that surprises me every time I notice it.  I’m aging!  I see changes in my face and in my body.  I’ve lost weight.  The extra weight I had in my 30s doesn’t look healthy anymore, but losing it shows the lines more.

My hair is a lot thinner than it used to be, but I rationalize that by acknowledging that it was way too thick before and now it’s at least manageable.  And those grays?   Well, mostly I’m proud of them; but I’m always a little shocked when I notice they’ve spread or when I find them in unexpected places.

Here’s another quote, a little further down.

“Cognitive abilities remain stable through most of adulthood, but signs of decline in some abilities begin to appear by age 50.”

This is a tough one because the idea of my mental capacities declining, really scares me.  My mom has Alzheimer’s Disease and every cognitive glitch I stumble through feels like foreshadowing of things to come.

Here’s another:

“After age 50 or so, people have increased difficulty hearing high-frequency sounds … and the sense of smell does decline after the middle 50s.”

Thankfully I haven’t noticed any major changes here.

So what’s the good news? 

Wisdom.  The knowledge that comes from our years of experience, and our ability to reason, increase with age.  We make better use of strategies as we get older, so we’re more efficient.  Our emotions tend to be more stable.  We enjoy longer periods of positive emotions and enduring spells of negative emotions decrease over time.  And we’re better able to regulate or manage those emotions when we feel them, than when we were younger.

The rest of the news is mixed, but leaves room for hope:

“Aging has two aspects:  changes that are programed into the genes and changes that arise from environmental events.  Many changes that come with aging arise not from inevitable processes, but rather from lack of adequate nutrition (such as fragile bones that result from osteoporosis-related calcium deficiency), lack of exercise (resulting in obesity in some elderly people and frailty in others, or just plain sluggishness and poor health), or lack of meaningful activities (which can lead to feelings of helplessness or apathy).”

We can’t change what’s in our genes (yet) but there are things we can do to improve our chances of aging well.