If you’re in your 60s or beyond, hopefully you’re focusing on improving the foundations of your health and longevity, including your exercise, nutrition, sleep habits, stress reduction, and mitigation of unhealthy habits.
However, there’s more you can do to improve your overall health and longevity. In order for all of your body’s systems to operate effectively and efficiently, you’ll want to make sure you’re addressing the aspects of health and longevity that people often overlook or defer.
Consciously Build Your Social Portfolio
One of the latest understandings from longevity research is the importance of social contacts and engagement. If you want to read a great summary of the research and helpful tips, check out the recent book Healthy to 100: How Social Ties Lead to Long Lives by Ken Stern.
Social contacts help you enjoy life and feel good about yourself, which can improve your physical and mental health. And as you age into your 70s and beyond, close family and friends can also provide logistical support, such as driving you to doctor’s appointments or acting as a medical advocate, or can lend a sympathetic ear.
One challenge for retirees is that during the years we were employed, our work often provided valuable social contacts and engagement. We just showed up to our jobs and didn’t need to do much else to get a daily dose of healthy social engagement. But we lose this automatic dose when we retire, so we’ll need to be more proactive and intentional about building our social portfolio.
Nurture Your Mental Health
Many retirees and elderly people experience upsetting life events, such as the deaths of close family and friends, divorce, or challenges with family members. These events can cause stress, which in turn can affect your physical and mental health. It makes sense to reduce your stress and get help with these events from people who can help, such as therapists, your church leaders, or close family or friends you can confide in.
You might also want to consider calming your mind and body and reducing stress through practices such as meditation, mindfulness, yoga, tai chi, chi gung, chanting, or meditative prayer. Even a quiet walk or spending time sitting in nature can be restoring. You’re not wasting your time—there’s plenty of research that supports the health benefits of meditative practices.
With more time on your hands, try exploring a meditative practice that you enjoy and can sustain.
Maintain Your Dental Health
In the past few decades, research has established a link between dental health and overall health and longevity for elderly people (yes, that’s us!). Here’s a quote from one study that identifies the risks to avoid and the habits to adopt:
“Toothbrushing at night before bed, using dental floss every day, and visiting the dentist were significant risk factors for longevity. Never brushing at night increased risk 20–35% compared with brushing every day. Never flossing increased risk 30% compared with flossing every day. Not seeing a dentist within the last 12 months increased risk 30–50% compared with seeing a dentist two or more times.”
By the way, the “risk” mentioned here is the risk of disease and mortality.
Treat Hearing Loss
Untreated hearing loss can double the odds of the risk of dementia, according to one study. The same study found that almost 27 million Americans age 50 and older have hearing loss, yet only one in seven uses a hearing aid.
It’s common for people to resist wearing hearing aids, thinking that their hearing isn’t that bad, that it makes them look old, or that they’re very expensive. Try to overcome these misconceptions and prioritize taking steps that can help you live a long healthy live. Good news: Recent developments in hearing aid technologies has drastically reduced the cost of many hearing aids. I recently accepted the fact that I need to wear hearing aids, and I’m glad I did.
It might seem overwhelming to pay attention to so many aspects of your health and longevity, but fortunately, you don’t need to do everything all at once. Prioritize the steps that you’ll take, and spread them out over the next year or so. By managing this little by little, you’ll eventually be able to build all the steps into your daily and monthly routines, and still have plenty of time to enjoy your retirement.
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