“You don’t look your age.” Many would consider this a compliment. This is what Marie de Hennezel (psychologist, psychotherapist, special adviser to the French Government on palliative care, and author of The Warmth of the Heart Prevents your Body from Rusting) addresses. She says, “Our world presents us with a disastrous image of old age. We are afraid of dying badly, of ending our lives alone, unloved, perhaps dependent or suffering from dementia. …Instead of confronting this fear, we ward it off by clinging to our youth, in a rather pathetic state of denial. In so doing, we run the risk of missing out on what I call ‘the work of growing old’ — that is to say, cultivating a positive awareness of ageing.”
Old is gold Guy Robertson
This ethos is what Guy Robertson, founding director of Positive Ageing Associates and author of The Ten Steps to Positive Ageing (Bloomsbury), brings up frequently to convince people that the latter part of one’s life can be both happy and purposeful.
What is ageing?
“My personal definition of ageing is that it is important to recognise that it is a process… which, like all other stages in life, has great satisfaction and joy, as well as challenges and disappointments,” he says in an email interview.
Robertson’s new book explores the physiological and psychological aspects of ageing and offers exercises and questionnaires by which readers can question their own point of view. The focus is not on the external — diet or exercise — but on what’s going on in our heads.
The Ten Steps of Positive Ageing by Guy Robertson, published by Bloomsbury | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
Our attitude to growing old can affect our physical and mental well being, he says, citing Becca Levy’s research “that found that people who have more positive attitudes about ageing live on average 7.5 years longer than those who feel more negative about ageing.... It is a very powerful indication of the power of the mind in affecting our health and wellbeing.”
From personal experience
Another revelation came from Robertson himself undergoing sudden kidney failure. He had to be admitted for emergency dialysis. “One of the things I observed was that there were two kinds of kidney patients: those who had given in to their illness; they had become dominated by it and ended up very negative about their lives. Another group, equally ill, chose to focus on the positive aspects of life and made the most of what abilities they had and what aspects of life that they could still engage with. This group maintained a sense of well being and positivity in the face of quite challenging circumstances. I knew instinctively which one I wanted to join! My experience illustrated the old saying: ‘It’s not what happens to you in life but how you respond to it which determines your happiness’.”
- The ideal situation, according to Robertson, is that “it should be up to every individual to make their own decision about when to stop work.” He doesn’t think there is any justification to fix a retirement age. “Having a sense of purpose in life is one of the most important psychological factors associated with health and wellbeing in later life. For many, their work provides a lot of this sense of purpose, so stopping them working can be very damaging.”
- For those who say older people need to make space for the younger, Robertson has an answer: “Economic research shows this to be untrue. The more people that there are working in an economy, the bigger the economy is and that means there are more jobs available.”
The key factor here is “how you respond to it”. In the book, Robertson addresses socio-cultural attitudes to ageing and even to death. Focusing on death and mortality, he says, “can actually enliven and bring more joy and satisfaction to our lives.” He moves on to protecting ourselves from toxic ageism and harnessing the power of relationships and mindfulness to positive ageing.
Answering a query on the response of healthcare professionals, Robertson agrees that they “need to examine their own attitudes and make sure that they are not being ageist. By that I mean that they treat each older person as an individual person rather than just a ‘type’, by virtue of age. …Second I think they need to highlight that not every illness means tragedy.” Despite being on dialysis, he says he managed to “lead a full and active life with lots of joy and achievements.”
For support staff
For those who are professional carers, he advocates a “doing with” approach rather than “doing for”. “There is a lot of evidence to show that health and care staff can ‘disable’ and make matters worse for older people by attitudes which see every older person as frail and in need of having everything done for them. The starting point needs to be to approach the older person as an individual and to find out what their hopes, fears and worries are and what they do and don’t need help with.”
The key take-away from this book is that one needs to prepare to age. “Just as we had to learn to grow up, so we have to learn to grow old,” he says.