10 Ways Your Patients Can Reinvent Themselves During Healthy Aging Month
September is Healthy Aging Month, which is all about raising awareness about the positive aspects of growing older and drawing attention away from the myths and stigma of aging. Contrary to popular belief, it’s never too late for your patients to take control of their health, make lifestyle changes, or get started on something new.
That’s why BodySite is thrilled to celebrate Healthy Aging Month. BodySite together with sister organization American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine (A4M) share a goal of bringing healthcare providers and patients together through the use of education and technology to promote all aspects of healthy aging and optimization of healthspan.
As a healthcare provider, you have the tools to guide your patients through their healthy aging journey. You are qualified to give them advice and guidance that they likely won’t be able to find on their own.
With summer coming to an end later this month, it’s a great time to help your patients start new tasks or reinvent themselves in ways that will positively affect their physical, social, and mental wellness. Here are 10 ways that your patients can reinvent themselves with your help through lifestyle and mindset changes during Healthy Aging Month:
1. Regular Exercise
Getting regular physical activity is crucial as an older adult when it comes to healthy aging, as it can delay or even prevent many health issues that inevitably accompany the aging process. It can also help muscles grow stronger, which will allow your patients to continue their day-to-day activities without needing help from others well into their older years.
There are many benefits that regular exercise can provide for your patients while they age besides preventing disease, such as improving mental health due to endorphin production, decreasing risk of falls, improving cognitive function, and even increasing social engagement if done in a group setting. The CDC recommends incorporating aerobic activities, muscle strengthening activities, and balance activities in order to experience the most health benefits.
However, for patients who are not already getting the proper amount of physical activity, it may be hard for them to adjust. You can help your patients fit in their required exercise and receive those benefits through a wellness plan where they can easily follow your guidance and achieve their exercise goals. Fortunately, BodySite has 60+ customizable wellness plan templates ready for you to use to help your patients get their needed amount of exercise. From beginner programs like stretching to more advanced resistance training, BodySite can give you the tools to put patients on a plan that’s right for them.
2. Healthy Diet
Along with regular exercise, following a healthy, nutritious diet can be very important when it comes to the health of your patients as they age. It can prevent a variety of health problems such as diabetes, stroke, heart disease, and obesity as well as keeping them from getting worse if they are already present.
A diet that includes a healthy balance of carbohydrates, proteins, fats, vitamins, and minerals will help your patients to function properly. They should be regularly consuming fruits, vegetables, whole grains, protein, low-fat dairy, healthy oils, and water while limiting their consumption of added sugars, trans fats, saturated fats, and sodium.
Your patients may not be completely sure where to start when it comes to following a healthy diet in their everyday lives. This is where you come in. You can help make the process of adjusting to a new diet much easier for them by providing an easy-to-follow diet plan with daily tips and tasks for them to follow. There are many popular diet plans to choose from that may help patients with different needs, and you can help your patients through them without it feeling like a chore. Your guidance is essential so that patients follow a plan that suits their individualized and personalized needs.
3. Proper Sleep
No matter what age your patients are, getting proper sleep is crucial when it comes to healthy and successful aging. When we’re sleeping, our bodies and minds are resting and rejuvenating, and good quality sleep is a great indicator of overall health and wellbeing, especially for older adults. After all, we spend around 1/3 of our lives sleeping, so it’s important that we make it good quality.
The National Sleep Foundation says that those over age 65 should get at least 7-8 hours of sleep every night, since getting the rest you need can help you stay both physically and mentally well as you age. Getting the proper amount of quality sleep can provide many benefits for your patients, such as clearing harmful toxins from the brain, improving concentration and memory, supporting metabolism, lowering risk of diseases, and boosting mood.
In order to help your patients get the quality sleep they need for healthy aging, you can assist them in developing their own set of healthy sleep habits that will help them achieve their goal of proper sleep hygiene. Different methods work for different people, and following a sleep hygiene protocol will allow your patients to discover what works best for them.
4. Take Care of the Brain
The brains of your patients are going to change as they age; normal brain aging involves slower processing speeds and a bit more trouble with multitasking, but memory, skills, and knowledge tend to remain stable and might even improve with age. It’s typical for your patients to sometimes forget recent events such as the name of the person they just met or where they put your glasses.
However, Alzheimer’s disease along with related dementias are not an inevitable aspect of aging. According the the CDC, up to 40% of dementia cases may be prevented or delayed, so it’s important for your patients to understand what’s normal and what’s not when it comes to brain health along with taking measures that will help maintain their brain health.
It’s important to discuss brain health with your patients and help them make changes in their lifestyles that will help maintain and improve their brain health. One way that you might be able to help your patients take care of their brains is to put them on the MIND Diet Plan to guide them through a practical brain-healthy eating plan that will help reduce the risk of cognitive decline and/or dementia.
5. Mindfulness
Mindfulness is crucial to the healthy aging of your patients because if they are not in the present moment, they are likely caught up inside of their own minds and stressing about the future or regretting the past. When your patients are caught up like that, the stress hormone cortisol is released. Stress can be connected to almost all diseases and is a serious cause of death in the United States.
When your patients stress, it can trigger emotions such as fear and anxiety. When they regret, it triggers emotions such as sadness, anger, depression, frustration, guilt, and shame. The biggest issue is that they can’t go back to the past, and the future hasn’t been created yet. By spending time in their minds thinking about the future and/or the past, your patients will cause themselves to age faster. Numerous studies have found a link between chronic stress and accelerated aging, so it’s important that your patients practice mindfulness in order to avoid stress.
You can help your patients practice mindfulness and create their own peace (rather than create their own stress) by using practical mindfulness and emotional intelligence tools to manage stress and to become more clear, calm, centered, and balanced. One of these tools you can use is the 21 Days of Mindfulness plan to guide your patients on their mindfulness journey.
6. Staying Positive
Whether it’s throughout conversations or everyday actions, your patients should be working to remain positive in their everyday lives. Staying positive doesn’t necessarily mean completely disregarding the not so pleasant things in life; it just means approaching any negative situations in a more positive way.
If your patients typically have negative thoughts running through their head, it might be a struggle for them to change their way of thinking at first. The path to positive thinking often starts with self-talk, which is the flow of unspoken thoughts that run through the head, so this is what will be important for your patients to improve. Some self-talk comes from logic and reason, while others may come from created misconceptions.
By encouraging your patients to learn to control their self-talk and think positively throughout their everyday lives, you can help them to experience the many benefits that positive thinking may provide. Health benefits include lower rates of depression, distress, and pain, greater resistance to illnesses, better psychological and physical well-being, better cardiovascular health and reduced risk of death from cardiovascular disease and stroke, and more. Researchers are still exploring the effects of positive thinking and optimism on health.
7. Avoiding Negative People
Another big part that will affect the ability of your patients to stay positive is distancing themselves from negative people. While it may seem harsh for your patients to do, they should stay away from any of the negative people in their life. If they surround themselves with people who constantly complain and talk about how terrible everything is, their mind may start to take on those negative thoughts.
Encourage your patients to surround themselves with positive, energetic, and happy people in order to ensure their own positivity and wellbeing. Just as they should be replacing their negative self-talk with positive self-talk, they should replace their negative surroundings with positive surroundings. This is one of the best things they can do for themselves when it comes to getting the benefits that come from positivity.
8. Social Interaction
According to the CDC, loneliness and social isolation in older adults are serious public health risks affecting a significant number of people in the United States and putting them at risk for dementia and other serious medical conditions. Strong evidence has been found that many adults aged 50 and older are socially isolated or lonely in ways that put their health at risk.
Since these health risks drastically increase the speed of aging, it’s important that you encourage your patients to do something about their loneliness, if they’re feeling it. There’s many things they can do either with their friends and family or by themselves with the intent of meeting new people. They can volunteer, take a class, go to the gym, or call someone up to go out for a meal or any other activity. Even just going out by oneself and being around people can help fight feelings of loneliness.
9. New Hobbies
Repeating an inspiring part of Healthy Aging Month, it’s never too late for your patients to try something new. Finding new hobbies to enjoy can open patients up to many things they didn’t know they wanted to do, and participating in social and other activities they enjoy can also help support healthy aging. It can also help them to fight any feelings of loneliness that they might be experiencing.
There are several places that your patients can look for opportunities to engage in activities they enjoy, depending on their interests and ability. They can take a cooking, art, dance, language, or computer class, join or form a book/film club, learn to play a musical instrument, or visit local museums. These ideas are just a glimpse of what they could get involved in. Having a discussion with your patients about what they enjoy might help you to figure out what is best for them.
10. Scheduling Annual Appointments
While these are all changes that your patients can make in order to help with healthy aging, it’s important that they also take the time to schedule their annual physical and other health screenings. By checking up on their health, they get the opportunity to worry less about ailments for a while. And the less worries they have, the less likely they are to be affected by stress and other diseases which is greatly beneficial for their healthy aging journey.
SOURCES:
https://healthyaging.net/healthy-aging-month/september-is-healthy-aging-month/
https://www.cdc.gov/physicalactivity/basics/older_adults/index.htm
https://www.sleepfoundation.org/how-sleep-works/how-much-sleep-do-we-really-need
https://www.cdc.gov/aging/publications/features/dementia-not-normal-aging.html
https://www.cdc.gov/aging/publications/features/lonely-older-adults.html