With age comes wisdom…………sort of!

Kindadukish's Blog - I am not a number, I am a free man (The Prisoner)

AS I AGE, I REALISE THAT:

1. I talk to myself, because sometimes I need expert advice.
2. Sometimes I roll my eyes out loud.
3. I don’t need anger management. I need people to stop pissing me off.
4. My people skills are just fine. It’s my tolerance of idiots that needs work.
5. The biggest lie I tell myself is : “I don’t need to write that down, I’ll remember it.”
6. When I was a child I thought nap time was punishment. Now it’s like a Mini Holiday – yippee.
7. The day the world runs out of wine is just too terrible to think about.
8. Even duct tape can’t fix stupid, but it can muffle the sound!
9. Wouldn’t it be great if we could put ourselves in the dryer for ten minutes; come out wrinkle-free and three sizes smaller.
10. If God wanted me to touch my toes, he would’ve put…

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Your face gives away your lifestyle and hides your real age

If you’re married, have fewer than four children, and come from a higher social class – you probably look younger than you actually are.

If you have lost a significant amount of weight, fallen down the social ladder, or are living as a lonely singleton – then you probably look older.

The combination of lifestyle, medical history and diet has a measurable impact on how your looks age.

Generally speaking a youthful face is an accurate indicator of good health (as is how energetically you walk).

Marriage is more beneficial for a woman knocking almost two years off her age (and if she moves up the social ladder she can look four years younger – and the same applies to men).

For men marriage generally only knocks off one year but having one to three children makes a man look a year younger while it makes no difference to a woman.

These benefits disappear in families with four children.

Looking chubbier as you get older helps men look younger as it smooths out the wrinkles. Adding 2 points to your body mass index (bmi) will take of a year whereas a woman would have to add 7 points to her bmi to get the same effect.

An affluent married man with no more than three children will took ten years younger than someone who is homeless, single and has lost weight (2 points off his bmi).

All the factors combined can lead to people in their 40s looking up to seven years younger than their contemporaries.

Public Health scientists at the Danish twin registry led the study to be published in the journal Age and Ageing.

They asked nurses to guess the ages of almost 2,000 identical and non-identical twins in their seventies. They then looked at environmental factors including marriage, parenthood and social class. Previous studies have shown that non-genetic factors account for 40% of the variation in perceived age.

The effects of heavy smoking are relatively  modest. You would have to smoke 20 a day for 20 years to gain extra wrinkles and tobacco smoke only causes half that damage to women’s skin.

However heavy drinking can add a year to both sexes as can diabetes, chronic asthma or the regular use of painkillers.

Excessive exposure to sunlight had no effect on the perception of men’s ages but added over a year to women’s faces by the time they reached seventy.

Depression makes women look a lot older than men. Almost 4 extra years compared with 2.4 for men.

One of the researchers, Dr Kaare Christensen, said “It is a lot more dangerous looking one year older than one year younger”. “If you are not depressed, not lonely, not a smoker, and not too skinny, you are basically doing well”.

Dr Chris Philipson, professor of social gerontology at Keele University says “diet and exercise are crucial factors. You can do an awful lot over the age of 40 to 50 to change the way you experience growing old“.

Simple tests to predict your life expectancy

With the government planning to tell future pensioners how long they are likely to live so they can better plan their finances this new research might be useful.

Research at University College London, and published in the BMJ, found that people in their early 50s who scored poorly on three simple tests of strength and co-ordination were nearly four times as likely to die in the next decade as those who did well.

The three tests were:

• grip strength
• chair rise speed
• standing balance time

You can do two of these tests at home.

The chair rise test is: see how quickly you can get up and down from a chair 10 times. 16.5 seconds puts you in top fifth and 26.5 seconds in the bottom fifth.

The balance test is to see how long you can stand on one leg with your eyes closed. More than 10 seconds puts you in top fifth and less than 2 seconds in bottom fifth.

The research was carried out using a cohort of people born in 1946 who had had their health monitored all their lives. They were tested at age 53. In the following 13 years there were 177 deaths in the group (of around 2,800), half from cancer and a quarter to coronary heart disease (CHD).

Those who had performed poorly on the tests were more likely to have died regardless of other factors such as wealth or exercise.

The few who couldn’t do any of the tests were 12 times more likely to have died than all those who performed the tasks. Those in the bottom 20% of scores on these tests were almost 4 times more likely to have died than the others.

Fitness levels drop off from age 45 on average but there are wide variations. Separate research, also published in the BMJ, found that walking or taking similar light exercise for an hour a day could stave off the onset of osteoarthritis.

In the UK the NHS has been accused of ageism in its reluctance to offer surgery to older patients. Now scientists at Seoul University in South Korea have developed a test to predict whether or not a patient will survive an operation to stop doctors using age alone to decide whether they can cope with treatment.

They found that patients with a high frailty score were more likely to die within a year of having an operation.

They assessed patients over 65 on their ability to walk, dress, wash and carry out other tasks as well as their performance on memory tests, their nutrition and the number of drugs they were taking. In the following year 9% of these patients died, 10% experienced complications, and 9% had to go into a nursing home. These were all patients who had scored highest on the frailty assessment.

The researchers found that post-operative one-year all-cause mortality rate, length of hospital stay, and discharge to a nursing facility, could all be predicted from their assessments.

Finally back to the grip test referred to above. Researchers at the International Institute for Applied Systems in Austria have found that the strength of a handshake is a good way to assess how fast people are ageing. Using grip strength as a marker of biological age people who did poorly at school age about 4 years faster than those who did well.

Reviewing 5o studies on grip strength they found that weakness in the hands is linked to high levels of disease and early death.

If you’re younger and relying on the body mass index (BMI) remember it’s no longer considered reliable.

How old do you choose to be today?

Act your age! Why??

Otrazhenie

from Acceptance

Age is a fascinating concept. When I was 17, I felt more like a 100 year old. However closer I get to a 100, more I feel like a 17 year old.

As psychologists note, chronologically, you may be 30, 40, 50,  60 or 70 years of age, based on when you were born. There is no arguing that unless you’ve embraced some new alternative way of doing math. The real question is how old do you feel – what is your psychological age?

Your psychological age is determined by you, not anyone or anything else, so you can actually feel as young as you want. You may think you should act a certain age, but that is more than likely your desire to fit into some conventional notion of how a person of your age should act. Regardless of how you feel right now, recognize that you have…

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Turning 30? Then you’re turning into your parents!

According to Mumsnet people turn into their parents when they reach 32 years of age.

Apparently it’s what young adults fear the most.

Any of us over that age will certainly recall, probably with horror, hearing ourselves say something to our kids our parents said to us.

At the very least we’ve probably called them by the wrong name – usually when we’re telling them off and our brain automatically recalls the name of the person we usually tell off.

Given that teenagers are supposed to rebel and that most people are settled in a relationship by their thirties (possibly one of several in their lives) it might not be  bad thing for people to distance themselves from their teenage kids if only in their attitudes.

Parents who attend music festivals with their kids to listen to the same music and even wear the same clothes worry me; generations are supposed to be different. Baby boomers didn’t rebel for nothing!

If kids want to listen to our music fine, as there’s not too much quality aimed at them with manufactured boy bands and female singers more interested in how different they can look. But parents getting down with the kids is a different matter.

I’m not saying I never buy modern music but I like a good tune and that’s pretty much what my parents said to me when they heard me playing Elvis or any of the 60s bands I followed.

Who cares for the carers?

Britain’s six million unpaid carers are in trouble, according to a report by the Carers Trust.

Six out of ten adult carers report having mental health problems due to the stress of juggling caring and their other responsibilities.

One in four experience both mental and physical health problems including insomnia, muscular strains, and exhaustion.

Six out of ten said caring responsibilities had damaged their careers.

It’s estimated that these carers save the government almost £120 billion a year and yet two thirds of them had never received any help including counselling and respite care.

Carers are twice as likely to suffer ill-health and almost 75% suffer financially. Furthermore a quarter of the carers are over 60 years of age and have to try and manage lifting, feeding and supporting infirm people.

The government has recognised the increasing problem but has done little or nothing about it. It will get worse as the population ages and the number of carers could increase to nine million over the next twenty-five years.

Source: i 08/05/2012

It’s no fun being 50

Grumpy at 50! This is no laughing matter.

The truth is the older you get – the less you laugh, and 52 seems to be the watershed.

Researchers at Glamorgan University found that children laugh 300 times a day.

This drops to 6 times a day when we become teenagers, and 4 times a day when we reach our twenties.

Having children means 30-somethings raise their laughter levels to 5 times a day but by age 50 we only laugh 3 times a day and by age 65 just 2.5 times a day.

And over-50s complain more writing twice as many letters of complaint than people in their 20s, and are more likely to row with their neighbours. They also worry more, typically about money and health.

And apparently we are useless at telling jokes with 1 in 7 saying they have never told a joke and a third of people saying they haven’t told a joke in the last year.

Part of post from MikethePsych’s blog

Old doesn’t mean stupid

It’s official. Twenty somethings aren’t at their peak mentally and the human brain can improve with advancing years.

The idea that it’s all down-hill from your mid-twenties is being re-appraised.

Short-term memory and reasoning may decline with old age but long-term memory, vocabulary, emotional intelligence and social skills, can all get better according to researchers at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and reported in The Sunday Times; “Silver set rides wave of greater brain power” (27/6/2010).

Older people are more efficient at problem-solving than the young as they can draw on previous experience and older people also make more rational decisions. Researchers at the University of California studied people aged between 60 and 100  and found that they were less dependent on dopamine, the feel-good hormone sometimes associated with addictive behaviour, and therefore were less influenced by emotions or impulsivity.

This may explain why leaders and senior people in many professions and organisations are in their 50s and 60s. Two-thirds of FTSE 100 CEOs are aged over 50 and judges want to be able to work until they are 70.

Last August the Ministry of Justice proposed that people over the age of 70 should be allowed to sit on juries, although perhaps with an opt-out clause for those who didn’t feel up to it. Judges, who like magistrates and tribunal members have to retire at 70, have strongly opposed the idea.

Although it might save money, as most elderly jurors won’t need compensation for lost earnings, judges say older jurors could be more susceptible to illness and disability which could disrupt proceedings (sounds a bit like sour grapes to me).

A report from the Department of Work & Pensions: “Attitudes to Age in Britain 2004-2008” found that 48% of people found age discrimination a serious issue and more common, with 1 in 4 experiencing it, than any other form of discrimination. Stereotypically older people are seen as warmer and more moral but less competent whereas younger people are seen as exactly the opposite. The survey also showed that older people welcome flexibility and are keen to learn as well as to contribute their skills and experience. However they are less optimistic than younger people and more realistic.

The physical demands on older workers need to be considered as well as health issues like impaired vision, muscle strength, balance  and flexibility, Research from America, where 25% of 65-74 year olds are still working, shows that employers want the brainpower, experience and knowledge of older workers but not the risk of injuries or sickness absence.

Workers need to exercise their mental and physical faculties to keep healthy and motivated. There is growing evidence that mental and physical exercise can boost brain power. Three 40 minute walks a week can improve memory and reasoning while mental stimulation can improve problem-solving and reaction times.

In Finland the Helsinki Times recently reported on a story in the Finnish financial newspaper Talous Sanomat which cast doubts on whether increased life expectancy automatically meant that people should work longer.

This debate has the Confederation of Finnish Industries arguing for a retirement age of 70 because of increasing life expectancy and the belief that people should work to that age. On the other hand the National Institute for Health and Welfare is urging caution because of the variations in health and the ability to work amongst older people.

Experts say only a small percentage of 70-year olds would be in good enough shape for paid employment as many 70-year olds suffer from memory lapses, muscle weakness, heart problems, and diabetes.

See also “Practice makes perfect, probably”