The Power of Positive Aging

David Lereah

Description

Discover the extraordinary power of Positive Aging to prepare you for the greatest challenge of your life—growing old.

Americans now live longer than ever—a full 30 years longer than they did in the early 20th century. Our forever-young culture and personal expectations have not yet adapted to that change. These extra years can be a burden or an adventure, depending on your mental attitude. You can't fight the inevitable changes to your aging body, but author David Lereah says these changes are at worst inconveniences that won't prevent living a fulfilling life.

The Power of Positive Aging offers a practical training guide to successfully cope with the physical and mental decline that accompanies aging. Based on life lessons learned during Lereah's successful battle against cancer, The Power of Positive Aging gives readers an easy-to-follow program of mental and spiritual exercises teaching mindfulness and acceptance, plus strategies for pursuing a balanced life and seeking and accepting social support.

The Power of Positive Aging shows how simple lifestyle modifications will transform your everyday life, helping you to live more joyously for the rest of your years. Growing older can be the best part of living when you embrace the power of positive aging.

Sujets

• Positive mental attitude
• Mindfulness (Buddhism)
• Longevity
• Quality of life
• Retirement
• Happiness

Informations

• Publié par: Linden Publishing
• Date de parution: 02 juin 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781610353724
• Langue: English

Extrait

Advance Praise for The Power of Positive Aging
David Lereah takes us on a personal journey for the ages; his battle against stage three cancer. Along the way he discovers the power of positive aging and presents his findings in this book. It is an inspiring story of how a positive mindset can overcome the physical and mental challenges of aging and disease. A must-read for anyone over 50 years old.
-Chip Conley , founder of Modern Elder Academy, New York Times best selling author, and Next Avenue s 2019 Top Ten Influencer in Aging
The Power of Positive Aging is an essential resource for anyone facing the prospect of older age. David Lereah adeptly shows how aging does not have to be the negative experience we ve been taught it is.
-Lawrence R. Samuel , author of Aging in America and Boomers 3.0 and Next Avenue s 2017 Top Ten Influencer in Aging
If you re a baby boomer, this indispensable guide needs to be in your personal library. Filled with spiritual insights, practical tools, and helpful resources, you will return to it time and again as you navigate the uncharted territory of your own unique journey into older age. Kudos to David Lereah for infusing each page with both extensive research and the wisdom of one who knows whereof he speaks.
-Mary Eileen Williams , host of the Feisty Side of Fifty podcast
A supportive and practical guide for positive aging. This brilliant and engaging book embodies wisdom, personal insights, as well as the tools we all need for facing life s greatest challenge. A true inspiration.
-Susan Landeis , author of Optimal Caregiving
The Power of Positive Aging takes us on a different path to aging that is profoundly productive for ourselves and others. Aging is the greatest education about life a person can have, and David Lereah has laid out all the study tools needed to graduate with high honors. David shows us a path that changes aging from a challenge to an experience. It is a masterful collection of tools-physical, mental and spiritual-that enable us to craft our own path through the aging process.
-Lee Mowatt , vlogger, senior fitness motivator, and host of The Aging Academy podcast
The Power of Positive Aging is not just another feel-good book about growing older. Driven by David Lereah s personal journey with cancer and its aftermath, this book is a guide for creating a positive framework for leading life as we age. He examines inner spirit, social networks, and emotional intelligence in a thoughtful way. Particularly insightful is his chapter Reclaim Your Life and his advice on creating a lifestyle plan for positive aging. An easy read and very insightful, this is a must-read as you embrace this stage of life and positive message that we need now more than ever due to the coronavirus pandemic.
-Lori Bitter , The Business of Aging, author of The Grandparent Economy , and Next Avenue s 2017 Top Influencer in Aging
David Lereah s book The Power of Positive Aging is an important contribution to help meet the challenges of aging. You will learn the mental and spiritual strategies that he used to personally overcome his big challenge to emerge healthier and happier as he ages positively. His concept that the challenges that come with aging are just inconveniences, is one we all should embrace.
-Rico Caveglia , author of Ageless Living and host of the Fearless Aging podcast
David Lereah s book The Power of Positive Aging provides a no-nonsense, fact-based approach to tackling the challenges of aging with grace and dignity. A cancer survivor himself, his reflections enhance the reader s understanding of how growing old comes with inconveniences. This informative how-to guide provides instructions and solutions for his vision of aging positively while at the same time fostering an age-friendly society that will benefit anyone who reads it.
-Angela G. Gentile , MSW, RSW
Full of hard-won wisdom. David Lereah has written a personal, practical and comprehensive book on how to accept the challenges of aging, while enjoying the richness of the present moment. The book is well researched and full of great examples of how to live your best life until the very last breath. I love the concept of the inconvenience of aging -it puts the process into real perspective.
-Nicole Christina , LCSW, psychotherapist, and host of the Zestful Aging podcast
The Power of Positive Aging
Successfully Coping with the Inconveniences of Aging
David Alan Lereah, PhD
The Power of Positive Aging
Copyright 2020 by David Alan Lereah. All rights reserved.
Published by Quill Driver Books
An imprint of Linden Publishing
2006 South Mary Street, Fresno, California 93721
[phone] / [phone]
QuillDriverBooks.com
Quill Driver Books and Colophon are trademarks of Linden Publishing, Inc.
cover design by Tanja Prokop, www.bookcoverworld.com interior design by Andrea Reider
ISBN 978-1-61035-360-1
135798642
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file.
Contents
Introduction
Growing Old Is a New Phenomenon
Chapter One
Why Positive Aging?
Chapter Two
We Are in This Together
Chapter Three
The Power of Me: Inner Spirit
Chapter Four
Mindfulness
Chapter Five
Positivity
Chapter Six
The Four A s
Chapter Seven
The Power of Us: Social Support
Chapter Eight
Balance
Chapter Nine
The Inconveniences of Aging
Chapter Ten
Aging to the Other Side
Chapter Eleven
Healthy Habits for Your Body
Chapter Twelve
Emotional Intelligence and Aging
Chapter Thirteen
Reclaim Your Life
Chapter Fourteen
A Lifestyle Plan for Positive Aging
Chapter Fifteen
Aging in America
Chapter Sixteen
United We Age
Appendix A
Highlights from Profile of Older Americans 2018
Appendix B
Guide to Key Concepts
Appendix C
Information Sources for Practicing Positive Aging
Appendix D
Anatomy of a Cancer Survivor
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.
-M ARK T WAIN
Introduction
Growing Old Is a New Phenomenon
I t may come as a surprise to many, but growing old is a relatively new phenomenon. We are living almost thirty years longer than the longevity numbers of just 100 years ago. People who lived only to age 49 or 50 died before their bodies experienced many of the marks of aging most of us face today, like hearing impairment, loss of mobility, and dementia.
For 99.9 percent of the time humans have inhabited the Earth, average life expectancy topped out at thirty to forty years. In 1900, the average life span in the United States was forty-seven years. Just over a century later, the average life span has skyrocketed to almost seventy-nine years. For older age groups, life spans are even longer. If you are 65, your life expectancy is eighty-four years.
A silver tsunami is sweeping America. More than 10,000 people per day in the United States are turning 65. The senior population-those 65 and older-is projected to reach 88.5 million by 2050. That is more than double the population of 39.6 million seniors in 2010. By 2050, at least 400,000 seniors will be 100 or older. 1
Aging Occurs Throughout Our Lifetimes
Aging doesn t just happen when we reach 65; it begins in our 20s. According to Robert Kail and John Cavanaugh, sensory abilities peak in your early 20s. Hearing begins to decline by your late 20s, while vision typically begins to deteriorate in middle age. The muscle strength in men and women peaks between 20 and 30, and resting metabolism, which accounts for a major part of daily energy consumption, peaks in early adulthood. According to Valerie Gladwell, your endurance peaks at age 22, while memory peaks at 28. 2
Suffice it to say that we are physically and mentally deteriorating for the majority of our lifetimes. But for most of us, aging doesn t begin to have a significant impact on the quality of our lives until after we pass 50.
Learning How to Age
Most of us begin life believing we are immortal and assuming that nothing bad will happen to us. As we grow old and encounter the physical and mental hallmarks of aging, the reality of our mortality and the concept of finality creeps into our thoughts. Time marches on; there is no slowing life.
Although all of us are aging, few of us are prepared to deal with its realities. No one teaches us how to deal with wrinkles, loss of mobility, or fading eyesight, and certainly no one prepares us to deal with life-threatening diseases. Moreover, trying to age gracefully and with dignity, feels like swimming against the tide of today s forever-young society, where the young are perceived as beautiful and energetic while the old are seen as stale and useless.
In this society, wrinkles are ugly, and wheelchairs represent helplessness. No wonder many seniors are ashamed or embarrassed to display marks of aging, and no wonder more than 6.5 million seniors in America are diagnosed with some form of depression. 3 Like golf-ball-sized hail coming at us with a reckless abandon, every mark of aging can chip away at our self-worth.
But we don t have to measure our self-worth by our youthful skin tone or our ability to run marathons. Aging-and its accompanying physical and mental challenges-may be inevitable, but our later years do not have to be miserable. How we effectively cope with serious physical and ment