Senior Living LIVE! Active Aging

Video Transcription

Hello, everybody, and welcome into Senior Living Live. My name is Melissa.

As always, thank you so much for being with us. Today, our webinar is all about aging gracefully. Who doesn't want to do that? I think we all do.

Diane Lang is with us today to share her strategies for maintaining vitality, enhancing well-being, and making the most of every single day. I think we can all benefit from this presentation no matter what age you happen to be. You will have a chance to talk to die Diane at the end of the webinar. You'll be able to ask her some questions. In order to do that, you can utilize the q and a button at the bottom of your screen. Just type your questions there to be a part of the conversation.

Diane, as always, we love having you here. Thank you so much for taking the time to be with us. The webinar is all yours.

Thank you so much for having us, for having me, and thank you everybody for joining us today. So a little bit about me before I put up the PowerPoint. My name is Diane Lang, and I am a counselor. I've been a counselor for over twenty years.

I've been teaching college in the undergrad psych department for over twelve years. So I've been in the field for a long time, and my specialty is positive psychology. And underneath positive psychology is the science of positive aging, which is my favorite aspect now that I am in midlife. I'm really happy to be learning all about aging and how to age gracefully as Melissa said.

So I'm just gonna take a second to share the PowerPoint, and we will get moving.

And let me just get a full screen.

Okay. So, hopefully, you're not having any problems seeing or hearing. You should see, an adult hand with a baby hand, and it says active aging on there. If anybody's having any problems seeing or hearing anything, just let us know. If you have any questions, I'm gonna leave the last ten minutes or so for q and a.

So please feel free to, you know, ask any questions.

Or, again, you can just do the q and q and a button. And as soon as I see it, I will answer. Alright. Gonna get started.

Alright.

So just to start off, a few things about how to age gracefully or healthy aging.

So what I hear so many times from clients is I don't have any control on how I age. It's all genetics.

And I I used to feel like that twenty, thirty years ago as well. But the newer science tells us differently, which is what I love.

Only twenty five percent of aging is genetics.

Yeah. Twenty five percent of aging is genetics. The other seventy five percent is environmental and lifestyle.

So what that means is you get to play a huge role in how you age. So, yes, you know, some of your genetics will play a role, but the rest of it is up to you. So if you were feeling like you didn't have any control of how you age, you now know that you actually do. And I know for me that was so empowering to realize that I had some control because environmental and lifestyle is in our control, and we'll get more into that as we go.

The other thing about aging is aging is a gift, and here's the part that I love about aging.

The older we get, the happier we get.

And we didn't know that for a while because positive psychology and positive aging is a newer science. It was coined in nineteen ninety eight by doctor Martin Seligman who is the father of positive psychology. So a lot of this is newer research. And what we have learned is in our fifties, we start feeling more confident.

And being in my fifties, I realized how true that is. When I first started in the field back in graduated grad school in ninety eight, so I guess nineteen ninety nine, two thousand. I was working with clients, and they would come in and say, you know, all of a sudden, I would hit, like, fifty one, fifty two, and I just didn't give a crap what people thought of me anymore. And at twenty nine, thirty years old, I couldn't even imagine it.

But now that I am in my fifties, there's so much truth to that. When we hit our late forties, early fifties, we start feeling more confident about ourselves. We're more comfortable in our skin.

We are not looking for acceptance and approval from others anymore. And that's what my clients were saying. They weren't looking for it anymore. And when we're not looking for that acceptance and approval, get the sense of peace and freedom, because we don't need other people telling us that we're good because we are now more confident, we have all this experience and wisdom, and we are more comfortable in our own skin so our self esteem rises, and that's huge. So in your fifties, you'll notice you start feeling a little bit more confident, a little bit wiser, more experienced, but our peak of happiness starts at sixty plus.

So we have a lot to look forward to because we are living a lot longer.

Most of us will live to mid to late eighties healthy and happy. Now women tend to live a few years longer than men, but in general, we are all living much longer. And they're saying the newer generation, which is the alpha generation and gen z, they have a chance to live up to a hundred and twenty. I'm not sure if I wanna live that long, and it depends what that looks like, but we are living longer, and we're living in a more healthy environment. We are taking better care of ourselves, and we have more knowledge of what to do. So remember that sixty plus is where we get our happiness levels, and it goes up from there. Now here's the thing with sixty plus, because a few people will ask me this, is there any change with physical illness or injury?

So what happens is if you do have an illness or an injury and we are more prone to that as we age, we still stay happy. But what happens is we have to go through a healing process.

And that healing process has to be both physically and emotionally and mentally. And that can take a few years. We can never give an exact year because everybody heals individually, and it depends on, you know, your situation in general, how many other stressors are in your life, what else are you going through, do you have a support system, do you have mental illness? All of that plays a role, but it usually takes people a few years.

And then once they have healed from the injury or illness or even if they're learning to live with it, it's part of who they are now, it's part of their identity, they will go back to their genetic set point of happiness that they had pre injury or illness, but you need do need to give yourself a few years. And I work with, traumatic brain injury and spinal injuries. My clientele, what I've noticed from them, it usually takes about year and a half to three years to really heal, and during that time, it could be very tough. You're grieving your old life, your pre injury, pre illness life, then you gotta go through the healing process both not professionally.

Sorry. Gotta go through both physically and emotionally and mentally. But when you get to the other side, you feel good, and you get to that place where your happiness comes back. And you can also have at the end of that what we call post traumatic growth, where you've gone through something traumatic and tough in your life, but when you get to the other side, you have this post traumatic growth where you grow and shift and become a little bit of a different person because you have different purpose and values, but you grow and expand your life, and you are happy in that new role that you're in.

So even injury and illness, yes, you need some time to heal, but you can go right back to your happiness that you are pre illness or injury. And the same with loss. So if you do lose your spouse, which of course, again, we're grieving. And just so you know for any loss or grieving.

So even if we have an illness or injury that shifts us, still going through a loss, and any loss causes healing, grieving, and it might even include forgiveness if there's anger involved in it.

But when we get through the process and we heal, we get to the other side, we can go back to our happiness levels that we had before the loss. So either way, even if you're going through something tough or traumatic, we do have the ability to go back to that happiness level. In sixty plus, we're really at our happiest for majority. Remember, statistics are always the majority, so there's always, you know, small percent that it doesn't go for, but the majority is happier, sixty plus.

Also, as we age, especially midlife and early late adulthood, so midlife is forty to sixty five, late adulthood to sixty five plus. And between middle adulthood and early late adulthood, we are more open to taking risks. And the reason being is we're more confident.

We have the experience, and we also have more resources to take those risks. So go for it. I have my clients, and I tell them to ask themselves this question.

How can I challenge myself today?

Or you can ask it, how can I step outside my comfort zone?

How can I take a healthy risk? So we're not saying if you're afraid of heights, jumping out of a plane, but what we're saying is you could take those small baby steps, those little risks that get you to where you want to go. So it could be going towards a goal personally or professionally, or it could be taking risks like trying a new restaurant, trying a new drink, wearing a different type of clothes, trying a different sport or a different class or meeting new people, whatever it is that works for you, but you wanna challenge yourself, which is also great for your cognitive skills.

So as we age, we get happier, more confident. We're not looking for acceptance and approval. There's a lot to look forward to as we age. Now the one thing we do have to remember as we age, and this is something really important, we need to heal, grieve, and forgive.

We need support. And I know a lot of us feel like, nope. I can do everything alone. I don't need to ask for help.

I don't wanna be a burden. But the truth is for us to age positively, we do have to realize that that we do need some support. So as we get older and we do change, and we start getting a little bit weaker in some areas or a little bit more vulnerable with falls because of our bones or osteoporosis or any illness and injury, we wanna be able to depend on just a few people. So making sure that you do have that support system that you can rely on, whether it is family, friends, or your staff at where you're living in senior living or, you know, assisted living.

So making sure that you are aware of that, and that changes for everybody with different ages because, again, we all age differently.

So what is important in aging? What do you need to age healthy, gracefully, and happy?

So the first one up here on the top of the PowerPoint is, are you spending enough time with people you love and enjoy?

And the other question is, are your relationships positive? Now this is a big piece. For us to be happy, no matter your age, across the board, socialization is the top factor of a of of happiness. It's also a top factor in aging.

So what that looks like is socialization is an umbrella term. So what's underneath it is, one, unconditional support as we just talked about. But remember, unconditional is the keyword. We're always gonna have people in our lives that give us conditions.

Right? We feel like everything's fine as long as we, you know, don't say anything. We do what they wanna do. But we need people in our lives that are unconditional.

It only has to be one or two people. And what unconditional looks like is those are the people who you could go to when things are tough or going bad because they'll be there and supportive. They're also your fan club and your cheerleading squad when things are going good. They're not getting jealous about it.

They're happy for you. The relationship is reciprocal. It's balanced.

And, also, these are the people who'll be very truthful with you, but they won't abandon you, reject you, or judge you, which is really important because that's what you need. You need to open up and you're going through a loss or something tough and you're going to be vulnerable.

You need people that you can have that self disclosure with that you trust hundred percent. So for that unconditional support, it might just be one or two people. Again, that could be your family, your friends, your neighbors, could be people in your senior living community. It can be even staff at a senior living. You know, any of your staff could be it. It could be your medical team or medical specialist.

It could be a professional, a therapist, a psychologist, a social worker, a life coach, or it could even be religious or spiritual, a priest, a rabbi, a minister, any of that, but who's your unconditional support?

The next one is fun. Are you having fun? And we need to have fun. And the question to ask yourself is, how do you cultivate happiness?

Because what makes me happy might not make you happy. It's completely different for all of us. Right? We all have different interests.

But for a lot of people, they don't even take the time to think about what is fun, what cultivates happiness for them. So if you're not sure what is fun for you, you wanna try different things, absolutely. But also maybe sit down and really reflect and go, what makes you happy? Now you can even look in the past and go, what made you happy in the past?

But remembering this, we're always growing and changing. So what made you happy or was fun two or three years ago might not longer be the case anymore because you've changed and grown. So you can look, and then just also think about what is of interest to you. What looks fun and try those new things.

But fun is definitely very important.

The last one under that umbrella is community. And community is so important because it's a place where we feel a sense of belonging and acceptance. And those are our two basic emotional needs. We need to feel acceptance.

We need to feel a sense of belonging. And when we have that community where people are similar to us and we have the same interest, we feel that. And that community, again, can be at your senior living. It could be at a club, maybe a book club or playing cards.

It could be a sport that you're part of, like pickleball or a yoga class. It could be your neighborhood. It could be work. It doesn't matter what it is, but we need the community.

And the last piece there is do you have positive relationships?

Now as we get older, the one thing we wanna do is reduce our stress.

Right? Because stress if we have stress consistently, we're always in that fight or flight mode, that can easily turn into anxiety or depression or just burning out. And the other reason why we wanna reduce our stress is because when we're stressed out constantly, it lowers our immune system, which is where we catch every cold and flu that comes our way. Right? So some of our biggest stressors in life are people.

So I want you to look at the handful of people you spend the most time with, again family, friends, coworkers, neighbors, whoever that is, and ask yourself are these positive relationships?

Do they lift me up? Do they make me feel good? Now if you have one or two people in your life that are, you know, pessimists, and pessimists now call themselves realists just to put that out there, but if you have just one or two negative people, the negative Nancy's, the Debbie Downers, the miserable Mike's, not a big deal. But if your whole circle of people you spend time with is negative, that could be an issue, and you wanna ask yourself some questions. So the first one is, why am I surrounded by all negativity?

Is it that I am negative? I am a pessimist? And again, there's no judgment, it just might be you see the glass half empty And if that's the case, then that might be why your circle's like that. Or it could be you're in a negative spot at the moment.

Right? Life's a roller coaster ride with a bunch of ups and downs. Right? And when we're down and we're going through a tough time, sometimes we feel more comfortable with the people who are going through the same thing.

And we find ourselves in that situation, but it's temporary, and we're aware of that.

Or are we the people pleaser? The person who puts everybody in front of them, puts everybody up on a pedestal, makes sure everybody else is happy and okay, but puts themselves in the bottom of the priority list, or as one of my clients said to me a few months ago, she asked me if she should even be on the priority list. She said, should I put myself on there? Is that selfish? Am I being self absorbed?

And here's the the case here. If you are a people pleaser, and usually as a recovering people pleaser, I can admit this, we usually don't have boundaries or limitations.

We can't say no. We don't ask for help, and we end up in situations where we're in relationships that are not reciprocal, not balanced, and we're feeling taken advantage of because we are, and then we start feeling angry and stressed and resentful.

And if that's the case, then you wanna work on the people pleasing and think why do you have that?

Why do you feel the need to people please? Now, again, as we get older, we tend to do that less.

But, again, if we're going through a tough time and our self esteem is low, our self worth is low, any, you know, traumatic change that changes us in illness or injury where we need help or loss can put us in that cycle, especially if you were a people pleaser. So just working through that, but being aware. And if you have toxic people in your life, which is completely different than negative. Right?

Negative is just the see the glass half empty. Toxic person is somebody who actually makes us physically sick. Now what's toxic for me might not be toxic for you. So you wanna pay attention because we all have different triggers and stressors, but you will know someone is toxic for you because you will feel it on your body when you're around them, when you know you have to see them, when they text you or call you, email you, you feel it on your body.

Because we hold all of our negative emotions on our body. Right? It's called the mind body connection, so you'll feel it. But what a toxic person looks like if you're not sure, and again, here's some generalizations, but usually they have a few.

First one is they are selfish and self absorbed, which means they only think of themselves.

They don't think about anybody else. They don't care if their decisions or choices affects anybody else. They don't ask about it. They're not concerned.

They don't have remorse, and they don't have empathy.

They're also the person who's always just surrounded by chaos and drama everywhere they go. When you first meet them, if there's somebody new in your life, whether it's a new friendship, new person you're working with, new dating, they're gonna be extremely charming. They come up so charming.

And then as soon as they suck you in and you have fallen in love or you become close friends or close coworkers, they slowly start to change. They start to become controlling.

They get very jealous, very judgmental.

They're rude, critical, harsh, judgmental, and they stay that way.

And the last one is they're always the victim. And here's the thing with the victim. When somebody's always the victim, that means that they don't take accountability or responsibility for their actions because to do that, you would have to take accountability and responsibility and identify what you have done wrong and how you want to change it, but a victim won't do that. So if you're looking for an apology, a genuine apology, you're probably not gonna get one. You'll get one of those, like, I'm sorry you feel like that, but I have nothing to do with it. It's never genuine.

So if you have toxic people in your life that you can break up with, I suggest you do. If you can't, then you wanna set up as much healthy boundaries and limitations for you because we wanna keep our stress levels down, our cortisol levels down as much as possible. So that's your first question. Do you have enough socialization? Are you spending enough time with people being social? Do you have a good community? And are your relationships positive?

The next question number two up here is, what does positive aging mean to you? What does active aging, healthy aging mean to you? There's so many different words. Right? Graceful aging, positive, active, whichever one you like.

What does that mean to you? Because positive aging or healthy aging or active aging is me taking a role in my aging process and how I age. And, again, now that we know genetics only plays twenty five percent a role in how you age, you have a lot that you can do with your environment and lifestyle. And the first one is having more socialization, trying to remove or limit the really toxic or negative relationships that bring you down, and then making a definition of what aging looks like for you.

Because, again, what we think becomes what we are. So we really believe that aging and retirement means that we're not having any purpose, that life is over. We're gonna feel that way. I have a client that her husband was always a positive, happy person.

And in his late sixties, because he still wanted to work, they kind of pushed him out and had him retire. Even though he was of retirement age, I think he was, like, sixty eight, but he wanted to keep working. He loved what he did. He was in good shape physically, mentally, emotionally.

It kinda pushed him out, which really upset him. Ever since he is retired, he's become very different, as my client says, and seems a little bit depressed. I haven't met him, but he doesn't leave the house hardly. He won't go out and socialize with friends.

He doesn't go out with his kids or grandkids. He'll hang out with them if they come to the house and spend time with him, but he's completely changed. And for him, it seems like and from what I can tell from my client, his wife, is that the minute he retired, he felt like he had no purpose. He didn't know what he was gonna do.

It was his whole identity, and his identity now is gone because he associated his identity with being a provider, having this title, working for this company, and it's all gone.

So you have to really redefine what your life looks like in later adulthood or midlife, and you also have to make sure you have a healthy really healthy definition of what aging means to you. Because, again, what you think is what it will look like.

Number three is can you accept the physical changes of aging? So here's the thing. Even if you don't like change, which most people don't, it's remembering this. Change is the only constant.

We're always gonna have change. We've been changing since birth. And if we think about change in that capacity, you'll notice that you have thrived, survived throughout your whole life. Think about this.

You learned how to talk, how to walk. You went to elementary school, then middle school or junior high, then high school, then maybe a junior college or a college, or you went straight to work. You've had different jobs, you had different relationships, different friendships, you moved. You've been changing consistently.

So if you don't like change, remember it. Think of it like that because, obviously, change can scare people and rightly so because it brings up that anticipatory anxiety where we don't know what could happen or what might happen. But if we look at change as something we've been consistently doing, we'll realize that we have survived and thrived this. So aging is change because we are aging, and there will be physical changes, right, in our body.

There'll be physical changes in our looks with sagging skin, you know, wrinkles, gray hair, but it's how you feel about them. And it's also, are you fighting the aging process or accepting it? When we embrace and accept change in general, it goes a lot smoother. And we can't stop aging, and here is the gift.

It's aging or not aging. We don't have any other option in between.

So thinking of aging as a gift that you have each day is another new day, a new opportunity to be with the people you love, to do the things you love. It's a really important way of looking at things and then remembering that we get happier with age is really the bonus. So and when we go through the aging process and maybe things change, I went to the doctor the other day as the first time I've had arthritis my whole life and kinda shocked me.

Even though I'm in my mid fifties, I I still was like, what do you mean I have arthritis? And it's only in my foot, but it really upset me. Then it was like, okay. Instead of beating myself up about aging, it's more about what can I do to make it more bearable to prevent any more arthritis, and can I show myself some self compassion?

If a friend came to me and said she was having pain in her foot or anywhere else and that it was arthritis, I wouldn't beat her up or be mean about it. Right? I would give her compassion. I would be kind, but we don't always do that to ourselves.

So think about, is what you're saying to yourself compassionate and kind? Would you talk to a friend saying the same things? If you wouldn't talk to someone you love or care in the same tone, with the same compassion, then you're not treating yourself right. And we want to embrace and accept change because aging is change.

And this is the other thing, even if we try to avoid change at all costs, everything around us is changing. We just can't avoid it, so the more we accept it and embrace it, the easier it is.

The next one, number four, which is a really important one, is do you think of food and exercise as medicine?

And this is something we should have always been doing, but we're recently knowing how important it is.

When we think of our diet and exercise as a form of medicine, it literally shifts how we view things. Because we know the healthier we eat and the more we move, the healthier we are no matter what our age is.

So ask yourself if you're viewing food and exercise as medicine, and if not, wanna think about it that way. And we'll get a little more into that as we go. The next one is number five, are you still curious about life?

We wanna have that curiosity factor where we're interested.

And again, being that we might be going from a professional, maybe you are retired or semi retired, Doesn't matter your age. People are working into their seventies where they shifted what retirement looks like. But a lot of times when we do retire and we don't have to do something, we don't do any more professional development, we still wanna do personal development where we're consistency consistently learning.

And here's the thing, you wanna think of your brain as a muscle.

If we don't use it, we lose it. So you wanna do things that are really good for your cognitive skills. And every time we learn something new, we're using our brain, we're giving variety and creativity into our lives, and every time we've learned something new, we feel that happiness.

One of the factors of lifelong aging, well, is lifelong learning. So making sure you're consistently learning, whether it's through a YouTube video, a TED talk, a class like this, or a webinar, or going in person, reading something new, but keeps our brain active, keeps our cognitive skills fresh, which is our attention span, our focus, our concentration, and our memory. Keeps it fresh and moving in the right direction. And we know we can prevent dementia and Alzheimer's.

We could be preventative with it. So the more we do cognitive work, the better off it is. So do you look at life with a sense of curiosity? What are some things you've always wanted to try?

And, again, that goes back to taking a risk, doing something new, trying something new. You know, one of my clients the other day started taekwondo.

She's never done any type of taekwondo or karate. She's used to swimming, and she wanted to give it a shot. And she came back, and she's like, alright. That was a little tough.

And now she's been doing it a few months, and she's like, wow. I feel like I have a new community. I feel like it's added to my positivity. I'm forming all these new friendships, and I'm learning.

She goes, I'm actually looking forward to it. So trying something new, and it should be something you love and enjoy. And if you try it and you don't love it, then you try something else, and that's what's good. You can take different risks at different times.

Next one here, number six.

Here's a big one.

The happiest people and for positive aging have a strong sense of religion or spirituality.

Now they are different. You could be religious and spiritual. They could go hand in hand, or you could be spiritual without any kind of religious, you know, background.

It's up to you. There is no right or wrong. But here's the thing, when we have a sense of religion, whatever religion that is, doesn't matter, or spiritual sense, you know, we we feel very spiritual, we feel that there's something bigger than us, whether you call it god, the universe, the source, energy, be all, doesn't matter what you call it, but we feel like there's something bigger than us, and that makes us want to be kinder.

It also gives us this sense of comfort. So whether we're sick or have an injury or people around us are or, you know, we're having loss in our lives, unfortunately, it allows us to know they're going someplace. Wherever you believe they're going, whether it's heaven or, you know, reincarnation, whatever your beliefs are, it gives us a sense of comfort, and it also gives us our sense of comfort as we get to a point where we start thinking about death and passing on and what's next, what the next chapter is.

Now the other part about religion and spirituality is it also gives you a community. So whether it's a church or a temple, or you're going to nature with a group, or you're going to a meditation, you know, studio, whatever it is, gives you that sense of community.

And here's the other thing with this, prayer, and again, it doesn't matter whether you're religious or spiritual, prayer is a form of mindfulness, and the only natural way to de stress is mindfulness.

So adding a spiritual practice to your routine really can make a difference. And a lot of my clients who would consider themselves both religious and spiritual will say they pray in the morning, which is their version of talking to God or higher power, and then when they meditate, they feel like they're listening.

So and again, meditation as well as prayer or guided meditation or sitting in nature or taking a yoga class are all forms of mindfulness. They are intentional practices of being mindful.

So any of that works.

And I noticed a lot of my clients who are in midlife or early, early later adulthood would say they feel like that's missing in their lives, whether they had a religious background growing up but they no longer do or because they just feel like there's a void. And, again, religion is usually going to a church or a temple following a book, following rules of the religion.

Spirituality is felt that it's more within, and they're still believing there's something bigger, but it could look different because spirituality is individually defined. So it's whatever works for you. There's no right or wrong.

Oh, my tea is still hot. Wow. That never happens. Sorry. And the last one here, awareness is thinking about what do you want the next chapter of your life to look like?

So if you're in middle adulthood, maybe it's what does later adulthood look like? Later adulthood, again, is sixty five plus, but that splits up. What do you want the next chapter to look like? That could be the next year, the next five years, however you wanna do it.

But what do you want it to look like? Really spending some time, especially if you're thinking of retirement or going from semi retired to fully retired. What does that look like if you're going from a house into downsizing or going from a condo or townhome into assisted living or nursing home? What would that look like?

What is it that you want out of your next chapter?

Because it's really important for us to look ahead, and then we can look at where we are currently or look at our past chapter and go, what do we wanna bring with us? What part of our life now works for us? What part doesn't work? So there might be friendships you don't wanna take with you that are not working, unhealthy habits, routines, patterns. It might be a shift in what you're doing for work or for your purpose that's changing, but you get to really look at it and doing some self reflecting.

Because, again, what's important to us, what's a priority, and what we value, what makes us happy is consistently changing because we're always changing and growing. So when we do that self reflecting work where we ask those ask ourselves those questions, can kinda shift what we want our next chapter to look like, and that is all up to you what it does look like.

So positive emotions is a huge factor in aging. So we have negative emotions and positive emotions. Right? So negative emotions would be stress, anxiety, anger, fear, worry, overwhelm.

We keep calling them negative because the truth is they're natural, they're normal, but they're more intense.

On the other side and the less talked about side is positive emotions.

Joy or happiness, love, gratitude, awe, wonderment, kindness.

And here is the science behind this. When you have a daily dose or a daily diet of positive emotions, you can live up to seven years longer, healthier, and happier just by having this. Now what happens is we're always gonna have some negative emotions. Right?

You could just watch the news and get negative emotions. You didn't sleep well. You don't feel good. Right?

Maybe you got stuck in traffic. The weather is bad. Whatever it is, we're always gonna have some negativity.

But we can balance it out, but negativity is stronger than positivity.

That's because we all have a negative bias. Everybody has it. It's genetic. We're born with it. It tends us to lean towards the negative, notice the negative, and get stuck in it. But to balance that out, we need positive emotions. Now because negativity is stronger, we need three positive emotions to balance out one negative.

That's how much stronger. Three positive emotions to balance out one negative. So the more positive emotions we get, the happier we are and the more we balance out the negative emotions.

So you can get positive emotions by giving them and receiving them. So you wanna just get as many as you can during the day. So a few things you can do, and I put up some positive emotions, but there's more, but these are some of the easy ones and the common ones. Right?

So the first one is love, And we can all do love. We can show love. Right? Give a hug, a kiss, hold hands, spoon, cuddle.

We can give it or receive it. We can tell somebody we love them. Here's the bonus. Every time you hug, cuddle, spoon, you touch, you mold hands, you give a kiss, you produce endorphins, which is that happy chemical that makes us feel good while reducing pain. So give as much love and receive it. And if you don't have other people at the moment, can your animals do it? Cat, dog, you can receive love the same way unconditionally.

So even if you don't, but you have an animal, go give them a hug. My dog is snoring behind me, but as soon as we're done, I'm gonna go give him a hug. And he's gonna be thirteen. I have a thirteen year old golden retriever, which I think is, like, ninety years old in people's age. So, I hug him as much as I can, and I always feel love from him. So right there, if you have an animal or if you're at assisted living or nursing home, a lot of times they have a a pet therapy day when they bring them. Go hang out with the animals.

The next one is kindness.

Now kindness is great because kindness does a few things. Every time you do a random act of kindness, you pay it forward, you get a boost of happiness that lasts twenty four to seventy two hours. The person you do it for, the people you do it for get the same boost of happiness, and the other thing it does is it raises your self esteem.

So every time you just do a random act of kindness, it's a win win for everybody involved, boost of happiness, and it raises your self esteem. And it could be so simple. Here's a positive psychology intervention. If you can smile at ten people a day, I mean, you could do more than ten. Be strangers, good people you know, it doesn't matter.

You wanna add to it, you could say hi, say how are you. But just smiling at ten people a day literally is an act of kindness, and you will feel a difference. Now smiling is contagious.

So you'll notice once you smile, people will smile back, and it makes them feel good instantly, and again, smiling, just like hugging, cuddling, spooning produces endorphins.

So smile away.

You You can also give a compliment, hold the door open, ask somebody how they're doing, check-in on someone.

All of that are acts of kindness. It doesn't matter how you do it. And today is, I don't know if anybody knows this. This is International Day of Happiness, and kindness is a is a happiness habit. So it adds to our happiness. And when we do both one random act of kindness a day or more and we do gratitude, we boost our happiness by about thirty percent in a little over a month, and they're both free and easy to do. So the next one is gratitude, and gratitude is such a superpower because every time you feel grateful, you get that positive emotion, that boost of happiness, but it's also a form of mindfulness.

So every time you feel gratitude, you're getting happier and reducing your stress.

Now I have my clients do it this way, but you can do whatever you want. Some people love a gratitude journal. But I have my clients at night, right before bed, ask themselves what are two to three things they are grateful for that happened today, and I put this up here on the PowerPoint. And why is this?

Right before we go to bed, right, you know, we're shut the TV off, we're sitting in the dark, we say goodnight to everybody, that's when our brain starts ruminating. And we think about what happened during the day, what we should have done, what we could have done, then we think about what we have to do tomorrow, will we remember, and we have to do this and return these calls, whatever we have to do, and the rumination starts with any negativity.

So what happens is we go to bed with all those negative thoughts. We can have stressed out dreams. It can interrupt our sleep. It might take us a longer time to fall asleep.

We can wake up in a bad mood. So think about this. Whatever you're thinking about twenty to thirty minutes before you go to bed affects if you sleep, how you sleep, how you dream, and what mood you wake up in. So if you're doing gratitude before you go to bed, you're getting that positivity.

Now being that gratitude's a form of mindfulness, mindfulness helps you sleep, so it can help in the sleep.

So at night, you can write it, what are two to three things you're grateful for, you could say it out loud, say it in your head, but really put that effort in to feel grateful.

And you will notice this too. It starts retraining your brain to notice the positive instead of the negative, which is very important because happiness is a perspective. Do I choose to look at the negative or the positive?

And even even like bad things can still we can find the good in a bad situation. So when we start shifting what we look at and what we notice, we become more resilient. We start seeing the good and the bad. We start seeing purpose and pain.

So kindness and gratitude, two great ones. Accomplishment and pride, the easiest way to get this is just make your bed every morning. That's it. And which most of you are probably doing, you make your bed just by making it. You get pride and accomplishment, very simply.

Awe and wonderment. Just spending some time in nature. And as the weather gets nicer, which it has been slowly here in the New York City tristate area, We can go outside. We can really appreciate nature.

Very easy way to do this is just sit outside and just use your senses. What do you see around you? Noticing the clouds, the flowers, the trees. What do you hear?

The birds chirping. Do you hear the bees, the dog barking?

Just use your senses and really notice it. And nature, again, is a form of mindfulness, just sitting in nature. And here's the thing, that all reduces stress naturally, and that's what we want. There's no side effect.

Joy, what cultivates happiness for you as we talked about, interest and curiosity as we talked about, hope and inspiration, which we can get from other people. We can get it from inspirational videos, looking at your past experiences and how much you've survived and thrived, talking to a friend who's been through something and watching how they've come out of it. All of that's inspirational.

And if you want to, on YouTube for free, there is what we call TED Talks, t e d, and they have, like, ten to twenty minute talks on every subject that are very inspirational, or if you just Google inspirational talks, you'd be surprised what comes up, and you can just watch even short two to three minute clips if you need it, and of course love as we talked about, so get a daily dose of positive emotions.

Now one of the last things I wanna talk about before we run out of time is right here is number well, I don't have a number there, but right here, what is your caring?

Now why I bring that up is even when we retire or or semi retired, we still need to have a purpose.

Now your purpose might change. Right? Because maybe your purpose is not what you've been doing for a career. Now it might still be.

A lot of my clients will say that what they did for a career they loved, they just don't wanna do full time, so they become a consultant, or they freelance, or they go down to part time. Some teach it. A lot of people actually do go into teaching it. For others, they'll say, you know what?

I'm kinda done with that. I really don't wanna do that anymore. And that's okay. But it's still knowing this that you still need to have purpose and meaning in your life.

So I want you to think about what you're carrying.

And that's different because now as we get older, we're not looking for money or title or status. From a lot of us, what happens from midlife and up is we wanna look at how do we make the world a better place.

How can we use our gifts to help other people?

So you really wanna think about is your caring something that you can use to help the people around you, make the world a better place, even if it's just your local family and friends or community, or helping others to feel good. Or it could just be something you've always cared about but was never your full time job or you didn't have any, you know, time to do it because of family and job, but what is it? So a lot of times instead of saying what's your purpose or what's your meaning, go what do you care about? What piques your interest?

What is something you think about? What is something you could be an activist for or talk about even if you aren't getting paid just because it meant so much to you? Because we still need to have that. We still need to have that purpose and meaning in our lives.

Now a few just tips before we go.

Are your basic needs met?

Really important. Our basic needs are our foundation of everything. Without our basic needs met, you don't feel balanced, you don't feel healthy, we don't feel happy. So make sure you have them, and all your basic needs are preventative daily self care tips.

So first one is are you getting enough sleep? Now the normal American only gets four to six hours, and I am one of those six hours. It's pretty good. Menopause has taken away, the ability to sleep really well.

And as we get older, women go through perimenopause and menopause. Men go through andropause where we just are losing our hormones. Right? Men's testosterone drops.

For women, their estrogen and progesterone drop. So sleep can be a little difficult, so making sure you have a good sleep routine, good sleep hygiene. Right? Whatever you're thinking about, twenty to thirty minutes before bed is positive, making sure you have a good evening routine where you wind down before.

Try to go to sleep and wake up around the same time each day, even if it's a holiday or a weekend.

And, also, your room be as dark and cold as possible.

Diet is the next one. And now this is a big one. So we're talking about is, yeah, looking at food as medicine. Couldn't say that.

Here's what we mean by that. If you noticed you're depressed or going through a tough time, watch your alcohol. It's a natural depressant.

If you're feeling nervous or worried or you're an anxious person, watch your caffeine and sugar because it can make us more jittery and more nervous.

Now, again, we're saying be mindful of these things. You can't have them just be mindful of it. The other thing with caffeine and sugar is when we kinda live off of that, which a lot of people do, it does this. It brings you up.

Right? You have your caffeine or sugar and lifts you up and you get all this energy, and then you crash and you're exhausted, and you can do that all day and it can cause headaches, low energy. So just being mindful of that and how it makes you feel. I would never say not to have a cup of coffee or a piece of chocolate.

It's what works for you.

And the other thing here is having a clean diet. What we've learned is this, especially as we age. We want the diet high in fast food, junk food, genetically modified food, processed food, white sugar, white flour, causes inflammation throughout our whole body. And that inflammation cause a lot of joint pain, arthritis.

Right? So we don't want that. But the other part we don't really talk about is it causes inflammation in the brain. And when our brain is like that, it's inflamed from the food, it can cause depression and brain fog.

What we've noticed when we put people on a clean diet where they ate clean seventy five or eighty percent of the time, you know, you can have some times where, you know, you're just gonna eat fun food, and that's fine. But if you can eat clean most of the time, we reduce depression by fifty percent. So not only will it clear your head, it'll help with all your arthritis, joint pain, muscle pain, aches. So looking at your diet.

Next one is water. I hope all of you have water right next to you.

Water is needed for your energy levels. It's also needed for your cognitive skills and your clarity. We should be drinking about half of our water weight, which is usually about seven to eight full water bottles or water glasses a day.

And here's the thing with water, not coffee or tea or any kind of caffeinated beverage. The only thing that counts as water is broth, herbal decaf caffeinated tea. I have chamomile, which is one, lemon, ginger, vanilla, those teas, or water that's flavored, but not with sugar or fake sugar. So maybe you put your own fruit in it or, you you know, like raspberries or cucumbers, whatever you like.

But we need that water, making sure you get enough water. And, again, lastly, exercise. Again, are you thinking of exercise as a form of, medicine? Here's the thing with exercise. Every time you exercise, whether it is walking, running, going to a a gym, doing a yoga class, chair yoga, swimming, pickleball, whatever it is, even walking.

Scientifically, the best way to get mindfulness is walking.

All of that, every time you exercise, you produce endorphins, which again is that happy chemical that makes you feel good and reduces your pain, and exercise cultivates mindfulness.

And, again, remember, mindfulness is the only natural way to de stress. It puts you back into the here and now. You're in the moment when you're mindful, which means you're your most productive and creative. And every time you're mindful, it reduces your stress hormone cortisol. It lowers blood pressure, reduces chronic pain, self soothes, calms, and helps you sleep.

So you want to make sure you're getting some exercise every day. And, again, our body is called the pee body. Right? We hold all of those negative emotions on our body. The only way through that is movement.

And just so you know, stretching is also another form of mindfulness just like prayer. So just stretching relieves the tension out of your body and gives you that mindfulness. So making sure your basic needs are met, sleep, diet, water, and exercise.

Alright. I just realized, we're at our last ten minutes, so I'm going to just go quickly to the end. If you have any questions or thoughts, please feel free to reach out to me. That's my email. I'm Diane again.

It's Diane at Diane Lyne dot org, and you can reach out with any questions, thoughts, or comments. If you think about something later or you wanna ask it privately, please feel free to email me. And I'm going stop sharing to see if anybody has any questions or thoughts. You can use the q and a button, and Melissa will get to it. But thank you guys so much for being here and for joining us today. Alright. Let me stop sharing.

Okay. Thanks. Nice to meet you, Diane.

Yeah. It was, you know and and you are the type of person you've been doing this for so long. And as you mentioned with your clients, you've seen things that, you know, you could pass along to our audience. And, I mean, it is just a wealth of knowledge that we are so grateful to tap into. Excuse me. And, you know, this is a good time for all of you out there to tap into it even more if you like to.

Again, head down to the q and a button at the bottom of your screen. If you're interested in asking Diane a question, this is a really good time to get that in. And, so let's talk about that a little bit. You know, you have the experience based on clients and based on maybe perhaps your own family history, your own personal history.

When we talk about this wellness and you you sort of, it was all encompassing, what things are you, trends maybe are you noticing now? You know, people are you you talk about taking away stress, and it's kind of hard to do that when people open up in the TV or look at the newspaper every day. Right. You know, what what are sort of the trends that you're seeing at this time as it relates to that, and how can we mitigate, being stressed out about things that are so far outside of our control?

So a few things to think about with reducing stress is, one, watch your intake of news. Absolutely. We all wanna be informed, but we don't wanna be inundated.

And please don't watch it at night because it does promote fear and anxiety, which will affect our sleep. So really important. The other part, and we're seeing this no matter what your age is, is social media.

Being really mindful in doing a digital detox because we don't realize the TV, our smartphones, our tablets, our laptops, we're on our computers all the time. My client said this to me last night. She just turned seventy five, and she's like, you know, my my iPad told me I've been on the computer over two and a half hours a day. And I was like, yeah.

She's like, and now I wonder why I'm always comparing myself to others because she has been. And a lot of it is when we're on social media, we are comparing ourselves. And remember this, you're not just getting news from the TV or your daily newspaper. The minute you put on your phone or computer or you're watching TV in a main room with other people, it's scrolling underneath, so we're getting the news a lot more.

So if you can, do a little bit of a digital detox where you little literally just kinda detox from the computer, your tablets, your smartphones, the news, and do something that's more fun, whether it's going for a walk, spending time outside, playing an old fashioned game. You know, one of the things for cognitive skills to keep our brains fresh and moving is doing cognitive work. And the easiest way to do cognitive work is playing a board game, going back old school. Alright.

Maybe not candy land. That could get a little frustrating with our grandkids. But outside of that, board games are really great. Not only do they work your cognitive skills, they work your fine motor skills.

For anybody who's having any, you know, problems with their fingers or arthritis, it'll work that as well.

Fun. Or playing an old fashioned game of cards.

So really be mindful. That's the key here, being mindful. And another way to reduce your stress is meditation.

You know, I know a lot of places offer yoga, chair yoga, which again is another form, but meditation is great too. And if you wanna try meditation, a very easy one, so just sit in nature and breathe. Just do deep breathing. Take a deep breath in through your nose, hold, exhale through your mouth, and literally just breathe for a few minutes or do the grounding exercise where you just use your senses.

What do you see? What do you hear? What do you touch? What do you taste?

What do you smell? And really just connect because, again, that just brings us back to the present moment.

Yeah. And as an aside or sort of a in continuing that conversation, is there a happy medium, maybe a time limit?

I know people say, well, I turn on the television to stay connected. I am on the Internet to stay connected, to stave off loneliness, you know, which is one of the the key things we're trying to prevent here, you know, because that that's a whole other topic and can lead to other issues. Where what is the happy medium in terms of giving yourself that time to stay connected, so to speak, and then shut it off?

Your best thing to really be was is to use the mind body connection. Not for me to give you an amount of time, but for you to realize how it's making you feel. If you're on the computer or you're watching the news or TV and you start feeling stressed out, whether you're getting a headache or a migraine, your stomach is, you know, kind of feels like someone's in there wringing a washcloth, you're feeling the tension in your neck, your back, you're noticing your jaw hurts from grinding it, wherever tension shows up for you, once you start feeling that, that is a sign that you're getting too much stress.

That is a sign to take a break, that you've had enough. And it doesn't matter if it's five minutes or a half hour, everybody's different, but be mindful of how you feel on your body physically because then you'll know when it's time to take that break. So pay attention to how it makes you feel, and just know where you hold that stress on your body because it will show up. But, again, also some of the emotional signs.

If you're noticing you're comparing yourself to others, if you notice you're getting kind of an addiction component because there is where you're feeling like keep going on the computer, but you're not getting any enjoyment, out of it. You wanna make sure you kind of notice those things to make a change as well.

Awesome. And we did have a couple of comments that came in here as you were talking.

Ellen just, wrote in, hi, Diane. I'm thrilled to see you again for another wonderful presentation as we all are. Totally agree with you, Ellen. After two cancer diagnosis, I found joy and support by joining the YMCA.

I now volunteer there with the live strong program. Not only am I getting exercise, but I'm helping others and making friends. Yes. Community is everything, especially for someone like me who lives alone and has no family.

Thanks, Diane, Ellen. And, Ellen, congratulations getting through two cancer diagnosis. I know that that probably was absolutely not easy for you, but kudos to you for coming out on the other side and for finding your community. And that really is what this is all about, isn't it?

It really is. And I love that you are volunteering and being part of the YMCA. Whatever is in your community, we don't have to go far, and there's a great website called volunteer match dot org. I I think I'm getting that right.

It might be dot com. But they will actually put you with volunteer opportunities. You go on, you put your ZIP code in, and then you also can put in, like, what you're interested in, animals, kids, nature, and you can participate that way because volunteering really gives you a community and it gives a sense of giving back. It's that random act of kindness.

So whatever works for you best is what you should do. And thank you, Ellen, for joining us, and thank you, Linda. I saw your comment too. So thank you so much for joining us today and for your why can't I talk now?

For your positive feedback. And, again, if anybody has any more questions, you can always email me at any time. I always respond. Because if you're like me, I think about it later, and then I'm like, oh, wait.

So if there's anything I can help you with, please or, of course, go through Arbor, and they can send me anything as well.

Yep. And we were gonna close with Linda's comment. Thank you for an excellent webinar, and, I agree. You know, excellent tips as always.

You, always have the answers. Gives us a little hope that even just the small things and small changes that we can make no matter, what, where we happen to be in our life, no matter what age we are, can have a huge impact on our health and wellness.

And it's always a great reminder that we have a little bit more control over things than we think. Diane, thank you so much for being with us.

Thank you so much, Melissa and Arbor, for having me, and I hope everybody enjoys springs. Today is spring. So happy happy spring, everybody.

Yes. Happy spring, everyone. And, if you're inside, it's a little chilly, for your spring as it is for me and Diane today.

You can, head on over to our website. Check out more webinars just like this one with Diane. We've got videos all about senior living. They are all demand on demand.

They are also all free and available anytime you'd like to watch them. Thank you so much for being a part of Senior Living Live. Have a great day, everybody. Happy spring.

Everybody. Have a great day. Happy spring.