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June 28 - July 23, 2021
It’s not that we need less sleep as we get older—it’s that changes in the aging brain make it difficult for older adults to get the sleep they need. And the consequences are serious. Sleep deprivation in the aged is directly responsible for cognitive decline,
Among the chemical changes we see in the aging brain are a tendency toward understanding, forgiveness, tolerance, and acceptance.
we can change our personalities and our responses to the environment, while continually adapting to the random and unpredictable things life throws at us. This concept has five parts: Curiosity, Openness, Associations, Conscientiousness, and Healthy practices, what I call the COACH principle.
The Big Five dimensions are: Extraversion Agreeableness Conscientiousness Emotional Stability versus Neuroticism Openness to Experience + Intellect (also called Imagination)
Whenever genes, situations, or therapy changes our personalities, they must do so by changing the brain. In that sense, all personality differences are biological, regardless of whether they are influenced by genetics or not, because they must go through the brain. These neurobiological changes are accompanied by chemical changes in the brain.
Flexibility—your ability to easily adapt to changes in plans or to your environment—decreases steadily in every decade after twenty.
In addition, older adults are generally more concerned with making a good impression and with cooperating and getting along with others—Agreeableness increases substantially.
Conscientiousness, Openness, and Extraversion decreased during old age, whereas Agreeableness and Emotional Stability increased substantially.
Individuals appear to become more self-content in old age, an aspect of Emotional Stability called the La Dolce Vita effect: the sweet life. Older adults are more content with what they have, more self-contained and laid-back, less driven toward productivity. Mood disorders, anxiety, and behavioral problems decrease past age sixty, and onset of these problems after that age is very rare.
Curiosity, Openness, Associations (as in sociability), Conscientiousness, and Healthy practices are the five lifestyle choices that have the biggest impact on the rest of our lives.
Our memories are therefore associative. The events that constitute them link to one another in an associative network. It’s as though you have a giant index in the back of your head that lets you look up any possible thought or experience and then points to where to find it. Some memories are easier to retrieve because the cue we use—the index entry—is so unique that there’s only one memory with which it could be associated; think, for example, of your first kiss.
The key to remembering things is to get involved in them actively. Passively learning something, such as listening in a lecture, is a sure way to forget it. Actively using information, generating and regenerating it, engages more areas of the brain than merely listening, and this is a sure way to remember it.
there’s a growing body of research suggesting that if we need to remember something, we should draw it—drawing something forces you into the kind of deep processing that is required.
“Brain fitness as we age depends significantly on maintaining a healthy and active prefrontal cortex. The more we engage this brain region during daily activities, the better we will be able to control our thoughts and think flexibly.”
This helps explain why my 97 year old mother can recall detailed political arguments to the delight of her five children. She has always read The NY Times and done the crossword puzzle before breakfast. She reads a couple of books a week, has a personal trainer, and walks every day.
To meet the challenges of aging, older individuals increasingly need to resort to strategies of adjusting expectations and activities in order to pursue more attainable goals when the kinds of activities that characterized their youth become more difficult to do.
This is the hardest adjustment for me! Accustomed to 10 mile hikes, I’m learning that this may not be feasible forever. This is a source of frusta data sadness. But 2 to 5 mile hikes are the future and it’s time to get used to the idea.
Socioemotional selectivity theory states that as we age, we become increasingly aware of our shortening future time horizon. This awareness leads us to prioritize emotional meaning, emotion regulation, and well-being. There is also a developing positivity effect—older adults pay more attention to and remember more positive experiences than younger adults do.
Social engagement helps to maintain brain functions and protects against cognitive decline. Epidemiological studies find that having a large social network and more daily social contacts is significantly protective against dementia.
Volunteering in management or committee roles was related to greater positive emotions, but only for women. Why? We’re not sure. Maybe women developed better communication skills ten thousand years ago, keeping the campfire burning and taking care of the children while the men were out silently hunting.
So this is an odd finding until you think about gender roles. Men seem to spend a lot of time focused on their status in the hierarchy. On a committee or a management team, status seeking creates a certain amount of tension. The women in the room are often mentally eye rolling as men find ways of asserting themselves. On the other hand, women are more relationship oriented and appreciate social stimulation of group process. They’re often quite good at maintaining the emotional orientation of the group.
Many people assume that pain simply gets worse as we age, but this isn’t true—it peaks and then falls off. Chronic pain increases and peaks in our fifties and sixties, and then declines in our seventies and older.
Well here’s something to look forward to!
Pain also has an emotional, affective component; that is, we don’t consider it pain unless we experience it as unwanted and undesirable.
As the Buddhists always say, pain is inevitable but suffering is optional.
the hallucinogenic drug ketamine can reduce social anxiety, a condition that is influenced by glutamate levels in the brain. Administration of ketamine to people in pain has differential effects on cutaneous and visceral pain, with minimal side effects. For visceral pain, ketamine reduces both pain and unpleasantness. For cutaneous pain, ketamine reduces only unpleasantness. And really, this is what anxiety is: a feeling of unpleasantness and the apprehension that it will continue in the future. The
It turns out that the primary cause of confusion, disorientation, and delirium among older adults is not Alzheimer’s disease—it’s adverse effects from medications or from drug interactions.
I’ve seen this over and over in the elders I have loved—the drug prescribed for one symptom creates a new problem that is relieved by another drug that creates more problems. Pretty soon, drug interactions create additional complex problems. My husband spent months in the hospital after a near fatal drug interaction. The least drug intervention is the safest course for elders.
circadian cycles are advanced in older adults who tend to go to sleep earlier and wake earlier.
good circadian rhythm may be related to longevity.
The next most effective treatment, after light therapy and melatonin, is moderate late-afternoon or early-evening exercise, like going outside for a walk. The combination of all three is the best.
Oxidative stress is believed to underlie a wide range of diseases, including cancer, diabetes, and neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease, and to shorten life span. It causes high LDL levels (low density lipoprotein—the “bad” cholesterol) and the accumulation of plaques that can lead to heart disease. It even plays a role in the development of wrinkles. It’s been known since the 1960s that free radicals accelerate the aging process and that the reduction of free radicals can delay aging.
We already know that serotonin is an important neuroregulator of mood, memory, and anxiety. It turns out that 90 percent of the serotonin in the body resides in the gut, and it is manufactured there by bacteria such as Candida, Streptococcus, Escherichia, and Enterococcus.
Small-scale trials have shown that a single probiotic, Bifidobacterium infantis, can alleviate depression and anxiety, and a cocktail of Lactobacillus helveticus and Bifidobacterium longum can reduce cortisol levels—an indicator of stress.
Physical activity may be just as effective as pharmaceutical agents in improving and maintaining memory, as well as global cognition, and delaying the onset of dementia and other neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
A mounting body of evidence shows that physical activity increases the effectiveness of astrocytes and thereby enhances synaptic plasticity, memory, and overall cognition.
In addition to synaptic plasticity, cognition is maintained and enhanced by neurogenesis—the growing of new neurons.
Exercise is associated with increased telomere length and remediating the negative effects of stress. A diet of whole foods is associated with increased telomere length, whereas processed foods, especially hot dogs, smoked meats, and sweetened beverages, are associated with decreases in telomere length.
friendly human contact mitigates stress—even at the genetic level.
Mindfulness meditation (the kind favored by the Dalai Lama) increases the activity of telomerase and lengthens telomeres.
Meditation has become the new miracle drug. If I were not a meditator for the last 45 years, I’d find these claims questionable. However, as a caregiver for a spouse with Parkinson’s for over 28 years, I found meditation bring me to a tranquil place no matter how dire the circumstances (and there were many, many dire circumstances).
A handful of other pilot studies support the finding that meditation seems to have epigenetic effects.
What a tantalizing idea—that meditation would also instruct genes to produce different proteins.
As Anaïs Nin observed, “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” It’s true of brain volume as well.
“What we are rediscovering in the U.S. is that the best and most cost-effective medicine is what they practiced from 1910 to 1970: Patients had a relationship with their family doc.”
