Active Aging

Active aging is about optimising your opportunities to lead meaningful and fulfilling lives as you grow older, and not letting age impose artificial limits on how you live. We can make choices and take responsibility for our quality of life as we age.

Active aging enables us to achieve positive outcomes, enjoy a better quality of life and age with dignity as integral members of society.

You can be an active ager: you can work, volunteer, look after grandchildren, study or play. Simple or lavish, you pursue a lifestyle that gives you personal satisfaction.

An active ager adds life to his or her years.

How to be an active ager
Here are six areas of wellness you should look into to be an active ager.

 


Physical Wellness
Have adequate amounts of exercise, proper nutrition, enough sleep and avoid harmful habits to keep your body in tip-top condition. Respect your body's uniqueness and balance your physical needs with the rest of life's demands.

Taking part in activities that build up your physical wellness can also strengthen your social network and build healthier relationships. It can help to alleviate stress, increase intellectual awareness, and keep you more alert throughout the day.

Tips to achieving Physical Wellness:

  • Exercise regularly: Vary your exercise programme. It creates more fun in exercise and will also help you stick to the programme. Exercise like Yoga and Tai Chi can also help some people connect to their spiritual wellness.

  • Eat well: Eat a variety of foods and eat in moderation. Choose foods that are lower in fat, sugar and salt.

  • Maintain regular medical check-ups: It is also a good habit to learn self-examination techniques, and practice them on a regular basis.

  • Practice stress releasing breathing technique: Relax your muscles and take a deep breath in, hold it for a couple of seconds, then slowly exhale. Practice this ten times in a row – it will release tension in your body and combat stress.

Food for Thought
The wise man should consider that health is the greatest of human blessings. Let food be your medicine. - Hippocrates

Worry affects the circulation, the heart, the glands, the whole nervous system, and profoundly affects heart action. - Dr. Charles H. Mayo


Emotional Wellness
Emotional Wellness is about managing and expressing feelings; accepting how others feel; being realistic about your abilities and limitations, having a positive outlook on life and maintaining satisfying relationships with others.

How we manage our feelings can affect our health. Negative emotions such as anger and frustration increase heart rate and constrict the arteries, putting extra strain on the cardiovascular system. On the other hand, positive emotions such as happiness and hope stimulate the nervous system which protects the heart and reduces blood pressure.

Tips to achieving Emotional Wellness

  • Spend time with your loved ones: Connecting with others on a regular basis is important to emotional well being. Share your daily experiences with a loved one or call a friend and share a funny story.

  • Laugh everyday: Laughing has positive effects on both emotional and physical health.

  • Take a break: Give yourself a break from thinking about stress or all the work that you do. Find time to relax or do something fun.

  • Spend time alone: It is also important to have sometime by yourself to quietly reflect on the day's events, plan for the future and count your blessings.

  • Healing is within: Listen to your own mind, body and spirit so as to identify what you need.

Food for Thought
People are as happy as they make up their minds to be. - Abe Lincoln

“Those who laugh...last.” - Unknown

Every good thought you think is contributing its share to the ultimate result of your life. - Grenville Kleiser


Social Wellness
Social wellness refers to relationships and connections we have with others - our capability to build and maintain relationships, manage our feelings and emotions and develop intimacy with family and friends.

It involves developing and building close friendships and intimacy, practicing empathy and effective listening, caring for others and for the common good, and allowing others to care for you. It is also about recognising the need for leisure and recreation and planning time for these activities. Having a strong social network can create a good mood and enhance self-esteem.

Tips to achieving Social Wellness

  • Reach out: Offering your friendship to others is a first step to social wellness. Consider joining groups and clubs that focus on your interests. Explore other avenues that may present certain possibilities for you, such as taking up classes, hobbies, social clubs, volunteer work and travel.

  • Learn to communicate effectively: Being able to communicate is a vital component of social wellness because this is how you initiate relationships in the first place.

  • Choose your relationships: Some relationships take a toll on people - an abusive partner, an overbearing relative or an insincere friend. They can cause unnecessary strain on your emotional state and affect how you function socially. Learn to build and stay in healthy relationships, involving people you care about and who care about you and your well-being.

  • Know your needs: We all have different needs. Identify your needs so that you do not put unnecessary pressure on yourself to perform well in something that is not important to you.

  • Do not feel the pressure to conform: Everyone is different and we should learn to accept that. Although some form of conformity may be required in the society we live in, however meeting with standards and mores do not necessarily mean changing yourself and becoming a person you are not. The pressure to change yourself will affect you negatively in many ways.

Food for Thought
It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.
- Sir Edmund Hillary, first to reach the summit of Everest (1953)

We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.
- Winston Churchill

Life can be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.
- Soren Kierkegaard

 


Intellectual Wellness
Stimulate your mental facility - expand your knowledge, improve skills and increase your potential to think independently, creatively and critically.

Keep abreast of current issues and ideas and spend time pursuing personal interests. Value your experiences and staying stimulated with new ideas. Respond to challenges and opportunities to grow - make plans, develop strategies and find solutions to problems. You will begin to see problems and challenges not as stumbling blocks but as the building blocks of achievement, and in the process you enhance your overall sense of fulfillment in life.

Tips to achieving Intellectual Wellness

  • Read/watch/listen more: Buy or borrow books, subscribe to interesting newspapers or journals, watch documentaries and listen to news or talk-shows to get regular dose of intellectual information.

  • Explore something new: Take a course or workshop in a subject outside your field for example an art class or learn a foreign language. Children have a knack for being curious about everything around them. Try to regain this curiosity about the world. You may be amazed by what you learn.

  • Play games: Try intellectually stimulating games or puzzles like Sudoku, Scrabble, Chess or Mahjong.

  • Learn to appreciate the arts: Attend exhibitions, plays, musicals or concerts. Visit the library or a museum. Learn to appreciate art.

  • Listen and engage in constructive debate: Share your opinions and thoughts on any issue of interest with a diverse group of people. Try viewing issues from another perspective.

  • Take care of your body: Exercise regularly and adopt nutritional eating habits to maximise brain functioning as many nutrients are essential to good memory and concentration.

Food for Thought
It is not the years in your life but the life in your years that counts.
- Adlai Stevenson The Power of Positive Thinking

If you think you can do something, or you think you cannot, you are right.
- Henry Ford

Whoever cares to learn will always find a teacher. - German proverb

The world is endless, the universe inexhaustible, and the human brain will never be threatened with unemployment.
- Genrich Altshuller, The Innovation Algorithm (Technical Innovation Center)

 


Vocational Wellness
Vocational Wellness involves making the best use of your skills and experience to add purpose in your life. Your attitude about work is a large component of vocational wellness, and can result in satisfaction and pleasure in your work.

Vocational wellness can also extend to volunteerism. Everyone has a unique gift, talent, vocational skill or strength that can be used for the benefit of the community. Volunteering your time to a worthy cause which you believe in can be an enriching experience.

Tips to achieving Vocational Wellness

  • Finding the right job match: Match your core values with interests, hobbies, employment and volunteer work. As you uncover your talents and passion, you will find satisfaction in what you do.

Food for Thought
Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. - William Faulkner

It is amazing what can be accomplished when nobody cares about who gets the credit. - Robert Yates

You must be the change you wish to see in the world. - Gandhi


Spiritual Wellness
Spiritual wellness involves finding the meaning and purpose in life. Spirituality consists of the values by which you interpret your world view, organise your day to day living and assess your way of life. Spirituality is the way that you find meaning, hope, comfort and inner peace in your life.

Spiritual strength promotes positive thinking, positive ideals, positive habits, positive attitudes and positive efforts. These qualities, in turn, can have positive effects in your health. Growing spiritually will also help you find peaceful harmony between internal personal feelings and emotions and the rough patches you may face in life which are beyond your control.

Tips to achieving Spiritual Wellness

  • Listen to your inner voice: Pay attention to your feelings, emotions, and thoughts, and trust your intuition. Your inner voice will often help you find your direction, but you need to stop and listen.

  • Reflect on your religious beliefs: Whether or not you subscribe to any particular religious group, think about how you see and make sense of the world and events that happen.

  • Count your blessings: Share your values and be forgiving.

  • Calm yourself: Activities like, meditation, prayer, even gardening or exercise can help you achieve spiritual wellness.

Food for Thought
All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think, we become. - Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

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