[Neurons] 2023 Neurons #17 POSITIVELY FRAMING AGING

Sun Apr 9 14:49:08 EDT 2023

From: L. Michael Hall

2023 Neurons #17

April 10, 2023

Healthy Aging #2

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. 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

ISNS Executive Director

P.O. Box 8

Clifton Colorado 81520 USA

(970) 523-7877

drhall at acsol.net 

News:  the newest book The Meta Place is due to be delivered to the
Neuro-Semantic warehouse this week.  Look for a description of it soon!

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